"Hmm...?"

Lena slowed her steps.

Her thoughts had felt strangely blurred for a while now, as if a thin fog had settled over her mind. At first, she had assumed it was nothing more than exhaustion from days of overwork, but the sensation lingered in an unsettling way.

This didn’t feel like ordinary fatigue.

She should have gone straight home after leaving the academy. That had been the plan. A warm shower, a proper meal, then sleep.

And yet—

"...Just for a moment."

Without really understanding why, she found herself changing direction.

"Oh..."

When she finally came to her senses, she was standing in a familiar park.

The soft glow of the streetlamps illuminated the empty benches and gently swaying trees, and the quiet atmosphere felt oddly detached from reality. It was a place she had visited countless times before, both alone and with others, yet tonight it felt distant, almost dreamlike.

Ah.

Her gaze stopped.

There, beneath one of the lamps, stood a boy.

A boy with a face she knew all too well.

Her breath caught.

"...No way."

The resemblance was overwhelming. Too precise to dismiss as coincidence. The shape of his eyes, the angle of his jaw, even the way he stood—so natural, so familiar.

For a fleeting moment, Lena genuinely believed it.

That if someone told her her younger brother had returned, standing there as if nothing had happened, she wouldn’t question it at all.

Her heart thumped painfully in her chest.

"...This is ridiculous."

She knew it couldn’t be him.

She knew that better than anyone.

And yet, her feet refused to move, her gaze locked onto the boy as memories she thought she had long buried began to stir, quietly but insistently, beneath the haze clouding her mind.

----

[The main quest has started early due to the Author intervention.]

"...What?"

The notification appeared right as I was finishing up, cleaning after a group of drunk kids who had made a mess of the place.

The message itself wasn’t new to me. I’d seen system notifications often enough that they barely surprised me anymore. What did catch me off guard was the timing.

Now?

Midterms had literally just ended.

I frowned and wiped my hands, replaying the situation in my head.

By this point in the timeline, nothing major was supposed to happen. I had already dealt with every villain who was meant to be active around now. Clean. Efficient. No loose ends.

The only exception was the head of the Twelve Signs.

But even he shouldn’t be able to move yet.

I had already dismantled all of his potential subordinates—Kai Foster, that perverted elf, and the rest of the small fry who were supposed to pave the way for him. Without them, he was effectively crippled.

So what the hell triggered this?

No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t recall any incident that was scheduled for this period.

My friend—the so-called Creator—did have a sadistic streak. He loved putting his characters through hell. But he wasn’t the type to completely derail his own plot for no reason. He liked suffering, sure, but he liked structure more. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

I exhaled slowly and went over the list again, one name at a time.

"...Did I miss someone?"

I retraced my steps, mentally checking off every enemy I’d already handled.

In the end, only one name remained.

UndyingWill.

The idiot who was supposed to steal the Pure Tears.

But even that didn’t make sense. In the original timeline, he barely escaped and only caused trouble later on. With everything I’d changed, he should’ve been caught long before he could even reach the dungeon.

"There’s no way it’s him..."

No matter how much I thought about it, there were only two possibilities that made any sense.

Either it was the head of the Twelve Signs—

—or that guy.

Plenty of villains were supposed to appear later in the story, but none of them should have been active yet. Not at this point. Not now.

And this wasn’t even the first time I’d felt something was off.

I’d felt it when Kai appeared.

I’d felt it again when Ethan started moving nearly a month earlier than he was supposed to.

At first, I brushed it off. I told myself it was because the academy had opened a month early. Or that it was just a butterfly effect caused by my existence—someone who was never meant to be part of this world in the first place.

That explanation had been convenient.

Too convenient.

Because when I started investigating the relics of Avi Valks—that perverted idiot elf—the doubts only grew stronger.

Why did he act so early?

In the original timeline, he wasn’t supposed to make a move until the beginning of the third year, when he would attempt to seize the chairman’s position. Yet here he was, stirring things up far ahead of schedule.

And more importantly—

How did he get his hands on the brainwashing relic so quickly?

That relic wasn’t something you could just stumble across. It required connections, timing, and information. If I hadn’t intervened when I did, reversing the damage would have been nearly impossible.

Thinking back on the original events, the timing was all wrong.

I had known from the beginning that this world would inevitably change because of my interference. That the future I remembered would gradually lose its reliability.

But even taking that into account—

This was still too strange.

It felt less like random deviation and more like guidance.

As if someone who knew the future was actively nudging things along from behind the scenes.

"...The Author’s intervention."

The thought slipped out before I could stop it.

If there was anyone else, aside from me, who truly knew how this world was supposed to unfold, then there was only one answer that fit.

And if that was the case—

I had a feeling I’d be meeting a very familiar face again soon.

---

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