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1.

The dilapidated sign marking the Tarot Town’s boundary precariously leaned.

Siwoo pushed through the chaotic, distorted space. His body was already drenched in sweat.

“This is driving me nuts.”

Around him, circular distortion fields buzzed faintly, forming hazy rings in the air.

When two different types of ‘distortion’ met, they layered like oil and water.

The Red Branch’s distortion field, usually invisible, became vividly clear in this warped, unnatural space.

-Creak... Creak...

But, the problem here was that the distortion field was screeching ominously, reminiscent of a submarine that was being pushed beyond its depth limit.

The moment he crossed the boundary, Siwoo’s body adapted to it, and he sprinted toward the center.

Without any functional clocks here, the only way for him to estimate time was through his internal clock.

He guessed that about five minutes had passed.

Getting halfway to his destination in just five minutes wasn’t bad.

But, if he were to look at it from another perspective...

Considering that the interference hadn’t reached critical levels yet...

It had taken him a sixth of the total time limit just to walk this far, even though he was fully armored—it wasn’t something to feel relieved at.

In the distance, a storm of particles raged violently, like the eye of a hurricane about to reach the land.

It looked more like a natural disaster, akin to a volcano or earthquake, rather than a magical phenomenon.

He stepped closer and closer, but he still couldn’t fathom what dangers lay ahead.

“...”

Glancing back, he could see the path he had walked.

He had deliberately avoided the overly twisted spaces, leaving a winding trail of footprints in safer areas.

As long as he followed those footprints, he could get out of the place easily.

At that moment, various possibilities crossed his mind.

Maybe Amelia could stop her rampage on her own.

Perhaps advancing through this randomized space was a fool’s errand from the start.

Even if he somehow reached her, he could still end up struck down by Duchess Erelim’s bombardment.

He wasn’t immortal, nor was he someone like Super Mario who had extra lives.

Trying to save Amelia was reckless and overambitious, a burden he wasn’t ready to carry.

Even the so-called grand witches actively avoided crawling into this disaster, it just made no sense that he decided to do this.

Besides, ever since they parted ways, he and Amelia hadn’t crossed paths again.

At first, it felt like half of him had been ripped away, but time slowly covered the grief he felt, allowing him to move forward.

‘All meetings end in separation.’

Maybe, just maybe, losing someone precious and becoming strangers wasn’t so unusual.

Every meeting was just a prelude to an eventual farewell, after all.

The world would keep on spinning without Amelia, and so would his daily life.

If he were to give up now, he could return to his cozy home, where his master, Sharon, and the twins were waiting for him.

He could return to that peaceful daily life. This comfortable and tempting choice was still on the table.

“No.”

He shook his head.

Immediately, all his hesitation fell off.

He had been through similar experiences before.

People who knew him often asked him.

Why did he always risk his life for others? How could he be so reckless?

He had received plenty of worried scoldings from those he cared about.

Some had even praised his outward bravery and selflessness.

But every time, Siwoo would just scratch his head awkwardly.

After all, his actions weren’t driven by altruism or a sense of justice, nor were they acts of self-sacrifice.

Shin Siwoo wasn’t some hero who could turn the tide of impossible battles, nor a saint destined to lead others by transcending worldly truths.

He simply had one thing in mind.

If he let fear of danger make him run away, his future would definitely change.

Even if it seemed flawless on the surface, it would leave out a fatal flaw somewhere deep inside him.

He’d be plagued by regret every now and then, even in peaceful moments.

At times, he’d catch himself muttering, ‘I should’ve been braver back then’.

And that wasn’t the kind of life Siwoo could bear.

Rather than living with regret and a bitter smile in an imperfect future, if there was a hand he could reach out and save, he’d do it.

Indeed. The reason why he had tried so hard was just sheer selfishness.

-Creak! Creak! Creak!

“Cooperate with me just this once, okay? I’ll give you a nice tune-up if we make it back in one piece.”

The moment he took a step forward to avoid being swept away by the randomized space, the Red Branch that he was controlling, which had been glowing ominously from a while ago, began to glow even more intensely.

Siwoo could feel the shifting air graze his body.

It was as if the air itself had changed, transmitting a crushing pressure from the distortion field in an instant.

He only took a single step forward, but the entire world seemed to shift.

Siwoo was sure he was still looking at the same spot as just a moment ago.

But with that single step, Tarot Town had completely transformed.

It was as if he was facing a glitched reality, just like a game that was being run on a graphic card that had been rolled around in the sand a couple times.

2.

The first time he had seen the bird’s eye view from Albireo and decided on what he had to do, Siwoo had been secretly.

Tarot Town wasn’t some ordinary village or some tiny spot on the map.

It was THE second-largest town in Gehenna.

He had to look for Amelia in that big town, searching through the randomized space while he was at it—the amount of effort required would naturally be humongous to say the least.

But it turned out that he was worrying for nothing.

Because the world itself made it abundantly clear where she was.

-Boom!

The scene before him resembled a painting by a surrealist artist high on hallucinogens.

Stone houses floated in the air.

Overturned carriages, jagged earth jutting skyward, and a twisted bell tower bent like a tree with a crooked spine.

All these distortions didn’t stop at objects.

It even reached the sky.

The sky gleamed an eerie green like a tattered quilt stitched together. There were parts shimmering with the pale light of down, others with the brightness of noon, some burned crimson like twilight, and others flickered faintly with starlight.

It was an unsettling blend of mismatched fragments sewn together.

Of course, the ground wasn’t normal either.

If someone were to ask him, ‘What happened there?’ Siwoo might have been able to give a rough description.

But if they followed up with, ‘What happened to the ground?’ he wouldn’t know what to say.

From what it looked like, it was a flat land.

Yet, his mind kept telling him that it was a deep crater.

If he blinked, it would suddenly seem flat again, as if the illusion had never existed.

It was as if there was a disconnect between what his eyes saw and what his mind perceived.

Not even the sight granted by his left eye, capable of seeing mana flow, could make sense of this space.

The only thing that was clear in this place was that Amelia was at the heart of it all; right in the middle of the sunken crater, where a silent storm of black particles raged.

He tried shouting, raising his voice as loud as he could, hoping for a reply.

“Ms. Amelia!”

But only silence greeted him.

Indeed, the wretched place swallowed even the echoes of his voice.

The storm of particles churned like a colony of toxic mushrooms spreading their spores, expanding ominously.

“...”

Now, the real battle began.

Siwoo took a deep breath and briefly shut his eyes, bracing himself.

He couldn’t afford to waste another moment.

Cautiously, he moved forward, mindful of keeping the distortion field intact.

-Gik! Gik! Giik!

If this place were a radioactive zone, the sounds coming from the distortion field might as well have been the warning beeps of a Geiger counter1.

Not that he needed that warning; his head already felt like it was boiling.

Maintaining the distorted field, which was about to collapse like a can crushed in the deep sea, required immense finesse.

“Huh?”

But, at that moment, something crossed his sight and left him bewildered.

It really was something that he had never expected in the slightest.

“Is that...a girl...?”

A small figure, glowing in golden light like a fairy, came into view.

Since even his perception was strangely distorted, he couldn’t see it clearly, but a child barely tall enough to reach Siwoo’s waist, was running

And within a blink or two, she vanished completely.

As if she was an illusion.

It made him think that the stress was getting to him, making him hallucinate.

After all, there was no way that a girl would wander around in a place like this.

Still, there was no time to second-guess himself.

Because, he...

Had finally reached the edge of the crater.

Seeing it up close made it even more unreal.

It was a gaping void, as if the ground had consumed an entire village.

Around him, tiny particles whirled and clung to the distortion field like metallic dust caught in a hurricane.

-Ziiing! Ziiing! Ziiing!

At first glance, they resembled volcanic ashfall, but these things were obviously far more sinister.

Each time the countless microscopic particles collided with the distortion field, sharp sparks crackled ominously, as if the concept of calculation itself had failed to align.

And this much chaos happened due to a few scattered fragments brushing against it.

Every step he took added to the pressure; his head throbbed as he forced himself forward.

He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but the sheer intensity was still beyond anything he had ever anticipated.

It made him wonder, ‘What the hell is she thinking, doing something like this?’.

-Bam!

Suddenly, a lone particle slipped through the distortion field, barely grazing his fingers.

Technically, it hadn’t made direct contact with his fingers, but....

“Ugh!”

Though it merely touched the gauntlet of his shadow armor, the entire suit quaked violently.

He could barely hold the writhing shadows in check as they threatened to spiral out of his control.

If it weren’t for Sharon’s enhancement, he would definitely have lost control of it, and it’d shatter in an instant.

I can’t go on like this...

Entering now would be a death sentence.

I need to think of something quickly!

“Alright. Calm down...”

Calming his anxious thoughts, Siwoo deliberately created a tiny opening in the distorted field.

Then, he intentionally absorbed a few particles and immediately deflected them with his armor.

-Screeeeeeech!

What happened next was like an inoculation; his armor groaned as if it was being crushed with immense pressure.

But, he had no leniency to think or speak about it.

Because he had to put all of his focus in analyzing how the particles affected his armor, all while piecing together their properties.

This was his only shot at diving into that deadly crater and coming out alive.

-Screeeeeeech!

He stabilized the structure of his armor as if he was calming a wild horse and calculated the influence of the particles.

“This is...”

From that, he managed to discover one thing.

The particles resembled an autonomous defense system.

To be exact, a deformed autonomous defense system that confined oneself without allowing anyone to approach.

In other words, she was trying to repel everything in this world away.

But why?

He momentarily set aside the soaring questions.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated and made contact with the circuits that spread throughout his armor.

Sparks erupted.

His armor struggled desperately, trying to maintain control as the black particles tried to invade it like a spreading cancer.

The flames before him flickered so intensely they almost seemed to create a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of endless geometric patterns.

At first, it appeared chaotic, but he noticed an underlying pattern hidden within.

With burning nerves extending lengthily like a trail of fire in his brain, Siwoo followed that pattern.

Using everything he had learned, every experience, and the sudden inspirations that came to him, Siwoo tried to create a new solution.

In his mind, it was like standing before a massive blackboard stretching across acres of space.

He discarded, wrote, verified, discarded, wrote, and discarded magic formulas and equations faster than a printer could print.

“Agh...”

After pushing his brain to its limits with those calculations, finally, Siwoo understood.

What he was trying to do was no different from trying to accurately draw the shape of a crystal glass three seconds after it fell to the ground.

Not just one glass, but dozens of them at once, with only a few seconds to do it.

Unless one had the intellect of Laplace’s Demon2, it was something impossible to achieve.

When he opened his eyes, the overwhelming mental strain faded, and his vision, which had been narrowing, cleared up.

But just as that happened, the storm of particles had already reached Siwoo.

A thick metallic scent filled the air, coming from his numb nose.

Then, he realized.

He couldn’t stop it.

With his current abilities, he couldn’t deflect nor tank it.

-Screech! Screech!

Those particles, now darkening everything in their path, began to tear into the distortion field with savage force.

The Red Branch vibrated wildly, stretching its barrier and distortion field in every direction, but it was pointless.

Soon, Siwoo would be consumed by the particles.

What he needed to do now was to get out of here.

Going further would be pretty much a death sentence.

He had to finish his calculations or find another way before trying again.

After making that decision, he pushed off the ground, trying to escape.

-Kuuuuung!

But then, a violent tremor shook everything, as if the very earth itself was trembling.

“What the...?

Somehow, the ground beneath him began to tilt.

The pit expanded in an instant, as if a sinkhole had been created, taking away his footing.

In this situation, his only option was to maintain his armor and distortion field while trying to run.

He couldn’t use his ribbons, Dimension Shift, or even spread his wings.

“Oh, fuck.”

A curse slipped out of his mouth, one that came from his very core.

Then, he was sucked into the endless abyss, with no end in sight.

Footnotes

1. A device to detect and measure radiation. If it beeps that means it detects radiation.2. A hypothetical being conceived by Pierre-Simon Laplace that knows the precise state of the universe at a given moment. Because of that it could predict the future perfectly.