Soren stayed where he was even after the overseer called the match, his gaze fixed on the central ring as if looking away would make the scene crawl under his skin in a different way.
The duel replayed behind his eyes with the stubborn persistence of something his mind refused to file away, and the more he tried to force it into a neat category, strong, skilled, rankone, the more it slipped out of his grip.
He kept seeing how Yvette controlled the space.
How she used spirits so efficiently it felt unfair, not because of raw power, but because every movement had purpose.
How she landed shot after shot without taking a single hit in return.
That part made sense.
"Strong" had rules.
"Strong" could be studied, compared, and measured.
It was the other moments that didn't sit right, the ones that didn't belong to the clean story of a dominant win.
Her eyes looked hollow from exhaustion.
Her face twisted with disgust whenever the man closed in, and it wasn't the shallow disgust of arrogance; it looked instinctive, involuntary, ugly in a way that didn't care who was watching.
Then the heat came, only a line of scorched stone and a smell in the air, and Yvette went pale so fast it made Soren's stomach tighten.
He finally exhaled, realising he had been holding his breath long enough for his chest to ache.
"I can't tell if it's a good thing that I came here or not," he muttered, voice quiet enough to stay private.
He had planned to go back to the clubroom and collapse immediately, letting sleep wash the day out of his muscles.
That plan had been simple in the way exhaustion demanded simplicity: lie down, close his eyes, stop thinking, pretend his limbs didn't feel heavy and his bones didn't feel hollow.
Something still pulled him here.
Curiosity, boredom, an itch to see what second-years looked like up close, he couldn't tell which one won.
It didn't matter anymore, because the moment he stepped into this arena and watched Yvette's match, he saw something he didn't want to touch.
Not forbidden.
Not something the academy would punish.
Something worse, because it didn't belong to "now."
It belonged to "back then".
To Isaac.
His mind slipped backwards without permission, years peeling away until he was no longer standing in a real arena with real dust in the air; he was sitting in front of a monitor with a keyboard and mouse in his hands, safe and untouched, moving through ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱ at his own pace.
He remembered Yvette's first appearance.
It was in Alex's second year, right after the first mock duels concluded, and she caused an incident that almost killed her opponent.
The game framed it as an explosive event, dramatic enough that the whole academy talked about it, and because she was the most famous second-year while Alex was the most famous first-year, the story shoved Alex toward her with the blunt inevitability of game logic.
Protagonists always ended up in front of the loudest problem.
Alex assumed it was an accident, exhaustion tipping into a mistake.
The rumours in-game always described Yvette the same way: tired, half-lidded, posture held together by habit, as if sleep was a concept rather than a thing she was allowed to experience.
Alex was wrong.
When Alex went to greet her, to see if she was alright, Yvette tried to kill him, no matter what choices the player made, and if the player picked poorly, the game didn't hesitate to throw a [Game Over] in their face.
It didn't feel like a narrative flourish.
It felt like the gamewas warning you: approach her wrong and you die.
When ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱ first released, a lot of fans hated Yvette.
Not because she wasn't interesting, but because her story was brutal in a way that felt intentionally punishing.
Her route was packed with [Game Over]s and [Bad Ending]s, and the worst part was how little your intent mattered.
Even if you showed her nothing but goodwill, she still looked at you like you were trash, disgusted by your very existence.
— Why… Why is someone like you the hero… I don't get it…
Only after months of in-game time did her shell begin to crack, and even then, it was never the kind of crack that turned into warmth.
She didn't become affectionate.
She didn't start trusting you in any obvious way.
She stayed sharp, wary, and half-feral, always teetering on the edge of something worse.
On the surface, she looked like a wounded wildcat, hard to approach, never fully tame, always ready to lash out, and that was exactly why people became obsessed.
They wanted to know what kind of life could twist someone into that shape.
They wanted to find what lay at the end of her story, because the game made it feel like there had to be something there.
Isaac wasn't exempt from that pull.
Among all the characters in ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱, Yvette was his favourite.
That was what made the rest of it so bitter.
Because she was also a false heroine, a character propped up by the developers to look as important as the real heroines, paraded in promotional material, framed as if her story mattered in the same way.
Then the game killed her anyway.
No matter what you did, no matter how you played, she ended up dead, and if you forced her to survive, the story punished you for it simply because her continued existence became a trigger for catastrophe.
[Bad Ending — 28: The Corrupted World Tree]
Yvette survives, but something in her finally slips.
When Minerva's blessing floods her to keep her standing, it doesn't feel like comfort; it feels like roots crawling into her chest, waiting for a command, and her broken mind gives one: "keep everything away."
The air turns cold and heavy.
Pale lines spread underfoot like living veins as the World Tree answers, vines erupting through stone, barriers forming where none existed, anyone who steps toward her halted mid-motion as if the world itself refuses them.
By the time the player realises something is wrong, Yggdrasil has become a growing cage of white-green wood and blooming rot, and Yvette stands at its centre with half-lidded, empty eyes.
Depressing didn't even cover it.
A character so beaten and broken by her unfortunate life finally manages to end everything.
But in the aftermath, she either sacrificed herself because she lacked the will to live, or she lived and ruined an entire country because her mind finally snapped, and the world responded to her fear like it was an order.
Isaac had played through it again and again, searching for a loophole that didn't exist.
He had tried to stop her death from being necessary, tried to find a happy ending the developers had hidden, tried to prove the wall wasn't real.
He never found it.
Yvette was doomed to die.
She didn't get a happy ending.
If the game let her live, it punished the world for it.
Soren dragged his palms down his face, the motion rougher than it needed to be, because his thoughts felt too loud.
'She's already that far gone,' he thought, and the idea landed in his gut like something cold.
The last time he had seen her, back in the first semester, she had looked tired, but that was all.
Today, she looked close to the edge, close enough that his brain kept trying to overlay her onto the in-game version, and the resemblance made his heart ache in a way he couldn't explain away.
He didn't know Yvette, not really.
He had only seen her through a screen.
Yet the problem wasn't ignorance.
The problem was that he had just watched her flinch in real life, and his mind refused to treat it as fiction.
Soren already knew reality didn't obey game rules.
He had learned it through blood that didn't vanish after a scene change, through fear that didn't politely fade because a protagonist's speech happened, through consequences that kept happening even after you wished they wouldn't.
His mind still stalled anyway.
Too many thoughts hit at once, colliding until he couldn't tell which part of him was reacting: the boy who had studied a tragedy for years, or the boy who had crawled through his own and come out breathing.
In the game, Yvette's route was a wall.
You could run into it a hundred times and the ending didn't change, and the world punished you for trying until the lesson sank in.
But this wasn't a game.
The proof sat in small, physical details his body noticed before his brain could argue.
The arena smelled of sweat and dust and scorched stone, not a scripted background.
The crowd shifted with real weight, murmuring and adjusting posture in ways that weren't timed reactions.
Even the silence had texture, broken by the scrape of boots and the low voice of staff calling the next match.
Most of all, Yvette's flinch stayed in his head because it was wrong in a way an animation could never be wrong.
It wasn't performed.
It wasn't controlled.
It was involuntary, and that made it feel painfully intimate, even though he had no right to intimacy with her.
He forced himself to breathe, slow in and slow out, the way he had been taught the last time his chest tightened and he had thought he couldn't get air.
Around him, second-years had already moved on.
Their quiet voices floated over the arena noise, calm and practical.
— Her spacing was perfect.
— She's still using low-ranks like blades.
— His pressure didn't land.
— That human-form spirit… suppression type, right?
They sounded normal.
That was what made Soren feel slightly insane, because they had watched someone get pushed toward the edge of something ugly and were discussing it like footwork.
He didn't blame them.
They didn't have the context he did.
They didn't have the knowledge of a dead end sitting behind their eyes, waiting to bite.
Soren did.
That was the problem, because the moment his thoughts began moving again, his mind did what it always did when it felt threatened: it tried to protect itself by shrinking.
By retreating into a familiar rule.
His hands tightened against his knees.
'Don't,' he thought automatically.
Don't get involved.
Don't touch it.
Don't reach toward someone else's tragedy as if you have any right.
It wasn't self-hatred in the old sense.
It didn't come with a sharp desire to punish himself.
It came as caution, and that made it more dangerous, because it sounded reasonable.
Soren swallowed and stared at the ring again, eyes catching on the scorched mark still faintly visible on the stone.
Heat.
Just a line.
Just a smell.
It had been enough to drain Yvette's face, enough to tighten her breathing, enough to make her movements look strained.
His fingers curled.
A few months ago, he would've stopped here, leaned back, and told himself it was better not to get involved.
He didn't stop.
Yvette had walked away earlier without looking victorious, without looking relieved, without even looking angry.
She had looked routine, as if she had finished a duty and was already bracing for the next thing to hit her.
That recognition put something unpleasant in his chest, because he knew what that felt like, and he hated that he knew.
His mind reached for explanation, because explanation was safer than emotion.
Trauma response.
Fear of heat.
Disgust response to proximity.
Chronic exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and probably worse.
The labels stacked in his head like a report, but the moment he pictured her half-lidded eyes again, the report stopped helping.
It felt personal.
He pressed his palms to his face, harder, because he wanted to push his thoughts back into tidy boxes.
Part of him wanted to chase her out of the building and say something stupid.
Ask if she was okay.
Tell her to rest.
Tell her she didn't have to keep doing this.
Yet he stayed seated, because he knew that wasn't how you approached someone like her.
The game had taught him that, and real life had taught him too.
'Aria.'
The name surfaced once, a painful flare in the back of his mind, and he shoved it away before it could unravel him.
If he let that thread loose, he wouldn't be able to stop pulling.
People like Yvette didn't accept comfort from strangers.
They didn't accept closeness.
They didn't accept help the way healthy people did.
And besides… he didn't actually know her.
Not as a person.
His devotion hadn't been to "Yvette, the girl standing in the arena."
It had been to Yvette the character, the story, the suffering he had watched from a distance, and admitting that felt ugly in his mouth.
It was one thing to care about someone you knew.
It was another thing to care about a tragedy because the tragedy fascinated you.
Soren hated that thought.
He tried to push it away, yet it stuck anyway, because it was true, and being honest about it made his chest feel tight.
Then the next thought came, the one that always followed when his mind brushed against something it wanted.
The remnant.
The last thorn of survivor's guilt that still clung to him.
'If I get involved, I'll ruin it.'
It wasn't phrased as "I'll ruin her."
It was broader and more superstitious, as if the universe had written a rule: anything you touch dies, and wanting something good is enough to curse it.
Soren hated how familiar that felt.
He had lived with it long enough that he barely heard it, because it wore the mask of humility, prudence and "knowing your place," and people praised those things, so it rooted itself deeper.
Looking at Yvette's story made the lie obvious.
In the game, he couldn't save her, no matter what he did, and his brain had learned the wrong lesson.
It learned to stay away, to stop reaching, not because trying was painful, but because failing felt like proof he deserved to lose.
He sat there while the arena cycled through more matches, names called and steel lifted and spells cast, yet the noise blurred because his focus wasn't on the fights anymore.
It was on the shape of his hesitation.
He had already come far.
He wasn't the person who lay in bed shaking and convinced he should've died instead.
He wasn't the person who laughed at his own reflection because laughing was safer than crying.
He wasn't the person who treated being alive as a mistake he had to repay forever.
He had friends now.
He had people who didn't let him rot alone.
He had learned, slowly, that being cared about didn't mean he was stealing something he didn't deserve.
And yet this one remnant remained, quiet and persistent.
'Don't.'
Soren looked down at his hands.
Those hands had kept moving anyway.
They had pulled friends out of danger.
They had stood between people and blades.
They had walked into a dungeon and come back.
They had fought things that should have killed him and stayed standing long enough to reach the next day.
Even recently, he had hosted a party, of all ridiculous things, a clumsy attempt at normalcy that still mattered.
Not because it fixed everything, but because it proved something simple: he could act, and the world didn't crack in half just because he existed and wanted it to be better.
He breathed in.
Then out.
Slow.
The air moving through his lungs gave him something steady to hold, because if he let his thoughts run unchecked, they would spiral again, and he was tired of spiralling.
His gaze drifted to the corridor Yvette had taken.
He imagined her walking away with that controlled slowness, face too still, breaths too shallow, moving on routine rather than will.
That image did something in him that analysis couldn't soften.
It wasn't pity, because pity always felt like looking down.
It wasn't worship either, not the shallow kind aimed at strength.
It was plain.
He wanted her to live.
He wanted her to be happy, and he didn't want that happiness for a reward, or a confession, or a smile aimed at him.
He didn't care if she stayed distant forever, if she never looked at him twice, if she never gave him anything.
He just didn't want her story to end the way it was "supposed" to end.
His thoughts tried to bite back.
'You're arrogant.'
'You're delusional.'
'You're not the protagonist.'
The tone sounded like an old version of him, the one who kept himself small because smallness felt safer.
Recent months had taught him something else, though, something he couldn't unlearn: the world didn't reward passivity, and it didn't care who the protagonist was.
The world moved.
You either moved with it or you got dragged.
His chest tightened again, not with panic, but with the pressure of a decision finally settling into place.
He would not be a spectator again.
Not here.
Not with this.
He wouldn't sit back and watch the ending happen and then call it inevitable.
He didn't know how to stop it, and he didn't know what the real causes were, or what strings needed cutting, or which events needed interrupting.
He didn't even know if he could succeed.
But he could see the lie clearly now.
"Don't" wasn't reason.
It was fear, dressed up as morality.
It was fear pretending to be humility.
Soren let himself think the next sentence without flinching away from it.
'I'm allowed to want this.'
It felt strange, not because it was false, but because his mind wasn't used to giving itself permission.
The whisper returned immediately, survivor's guilt waking like an animal that never truly slept.
'What if you fail?'
Soren exhaled through his nose, and the answer arrived without confidence, blunt and honest.
'Then I fail.'
Trying didn't guarantee success.
Hesitating didn't guarantee safety.
Hesitating guaranteed one thing only: when the ending happened, he would be able to tell himself he was innocent because he never reached out.
He hated that kind of innocence.
It tasted like cowardice, and he'd had enough of cowardice, not the kind that made you run, the kind that made you freeze.
Then the last whisper came, the one his guilt always saved for the end.
'What makes you think you deserve to want her happiness?'
Soren closed his eyes briefly.
That question used to dig under his ribs and twist until he couldn't breathe.
Because he lived.
Because other people bled.
Because names sat in his head like stones.
Sitting here, hearing second-years talk in calm voices about timing and mana efficiency as if the world hadn't just brushed against something ugly, something clicked into place slowly, painfully, and finally.
Deserving had never been part of it.
Deserving didn't decide who lived and who died.
Deserving didn't bring anyone back.
Deserving was a word his guilt used to keep him chained, righteous-sounding while it stole his ability to act.
When his eyes opened again, his gaze felt steady.
Not brave.
Not fearless.
Just steady.
The remnant didn't vanish, because scars didn't vanish on command, but it loosened, and the loosening mattered.
It felt like a knot that had finally stopped tightening every time he breathed.
Soren sat another minute, letting the feeling settle, because rushing would make him reject it out of sheer embarrassment.
He needed it to feel normal, like something that had been building for months and finally reached a point where staying the same wasn't possible.
Three slow breaths later, he leaned forward and pushed himself up, joints complaining, exhaustion clinging stubbornly.
The arena noise hit him again: an overseer calling names, a brief laugh from somewhere nearby, the scrape of boots on stone.
Nothing was solved.
Yvette wasn't saved because he decided he wouldn't be passive.
The day didn't become easier.
Still, something in him had shifted into alignment, as if his mind and body had stopped arguing about whether he was allowed to move.
His eyes flicked to the corridor one last time, and his chest tightened faintly, not from fear, but from want.
'Live,' he thought, quiet and plain, not a plea to the universe, just a statement of what he wanted.
Then he turned away.
His steps carried him toward the exit at a steady pace, weaving past clusters of second-years without drawing attention.
Habit kept his head slightly lowered, and he didn't fight that habit today.
At the doors, his palm pressed against the cold wood for half a second, feeling the muffled vibration of the arena through it, the building alive with routine.
He exhaled.
Then he pushed the door open.
Cool air spilt over him, cleaner than dust and heat, and the sounds behind him dulled immediately, swallowed by distance.
Outside, the campus walkways stretched ahead under softly glowing lanterns, and the wind brushed the hem of his cloak as he started walking.
He didn't know how he would do it.
He didn't know what the price would be.
He didn't know when the moment would come.
But for the first time in a long time, the thought of acting didn't come with that automatic poisonous flinch.
————「❤︎」————