System, please just shut up

The transition back to the back was jarring, a full-body assault on his senses.

The frigid air of the Shiver-Glass Peaks vanished in a sudden, brutal rush, replaced by the sterile, cool atmosphere of the circular hall.

The scent of ozone and crystalline ice was gone, replaced by the faint, antiseptic smell of polished stone and mana filters.

Kael stood blinking for a moment, his senses still adjusting.

The icy sting on his skin was gone, but the deep, bone-weary ache in his muscles was very, very real. He felt a profound, physical exhaustion, the kind that settles in your bones and makes every motion feel like a deliberate act of will.

He walked to a nearby receptacle, his footsteps echoing in the empty chamber. He held up the Rimefang Ravager's crystalline scale, a razor-sharp shard of obsidian and ice.

The receptacle hummed, a soft, electronic whisper, and a single, crisp notification appeared in his vision.

[Mission completed]

He didn't bother looking for other missions. He just wanted to get back to his room. His mind, which had been a finely tuned weapon for the past few hours, was beginning to splinter.

The relentless focus, the single-minded pursuit of a goal, was fading, leaving him vulnerable to the thoughts and feelings he had been so expertly outrunning.

The walk back to his dorm was a blur of exhaustion.

The city, which had felt so tense and expectant the night before, was now just… a city.

Students moved through the halls with a familiar, easy confidence, their laughter and casual conversations a world away from the silent terror he had just left behind.

He felt like an actor in a play, a man who had just returned from a war zone to a world that was still pretending everything was fine. He tried to mimic their easygoing stride, but his body felt heavy and his mind was a thousand miles away.

He got to his room and shut the door behind him.

The click of the lock was a final, definitive sound, a seal against the outside world. He tossed his knapsack onto the bed and began to methodically remove his gear.

The vambraces, the scuffed and scarred boots, the sheathe at his hip. Each piece of gear was a layer of armor, a part of the persona he had been building since his arrival.

Now, with each layer he removed, he felt a deeper sense of vulnerability. He was no longer the focused, efficient knight.

He was just Kael, a man sitting on the edge of a bed, alone in a silent room.

He didn't make it to a shower.

The exhaustion was too great, too absolute. He just lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. The last thought he had before drifting into sleep was a simple, desperate prayer for rest, for a moment of quiet without the cold, unblinking presence of the Archive and its tasks.

It was a prayer that went unanswered.

The dream came not as a gradual fading of reality, but as a sudden, brutal plunge into a new one.

It was his old life. He was standing in the kitchen of his old apartment, the one with the table too big for one person. It was mundane, familiar, and utterly terrifying. The coffee maker hissed. The refrigerator hummed.

The weak, gray light from the single window was a dull, oppressive presence.

He was just… there.

But something was wrong.

The air was thick, suffocating, a heavy, unbreathable weight. The walls were closing in, inch by slow, inexorable inch.

The sound of the coffee maker, once a familiar comfort, became a hissing whisper, a voice mocking his helplessness.

The humming of the refrigerator became a deep, resonant growl, a low, menacing rhythm that pulsed in sync with the closing walls.

He tried to move, to run, to move, but he couldn't. His feet were rooted to the floor.

The "unimportant" things of his old life, the forgotten coffee mugs, the stray newspaper on the counter, the dust motes dancing in the air, all began to twist and contort.

They became sharp, distorted, menacing. A shattered mana-lantern from the festival, glowing with a soft, sick violet light, appeared on the counter.

A shard of glass from the Rimefang Ravager's lair, now a serrated blade, was spinning slowly on the floor.

He was being crushed not by a monster or a grand catastrophe, but by the mundane, by the forgotten, by the fragments of a life he had lost and the life he was now living, all twisting into a suffocating, overwhelming mess.

The final image of the dream was his reflection in a shattered shard of ice, a face that was his own, but with eyes that were cold, distant, and utterly empty.

They looked nothing like him.

He woke with a gasp, his body soaked in a cold sweat. The terror was a physical thing, a clawing, visceral panic that left him breathless and trembling.

He sat up, his hands shaking, and looked around the room.

It was just his room. The bed. The desk.

The window.

But the feeling, the suffocating claustrophobia of the dream, lingered.

This was the "weird" feeling he had been experiencing lately, the one that had been a constant, low-grade fever in the back of his mind since the day before the festival.

It wasn't just stress. It was a fundamental disconnect.

A feeling of being an impostor, of being a man who was no longer himself, living a life that didn't belong to him.

He began to analyze the changes, a cold, clinical list in his mind.

He was joking less.

He had always used humor as a shield, a way to deflect attention, to keep people at a distance.

But now, the shield felt heavy, unnecessary.

He didn't feel the need to use it because he no longer felt the need to connect.

He was becoming a solo act, a self-contained unit of efficiency.

He was sleeping less.

The Archive's influence, its relentless pursuit of progress, was a constant, low hum in his mind.

It kept him sharp, alert, and focused, but it also robbed him of true rest. He was not a human who needed sleep; he was a tool that needed maintenance, and maintenance was a different thing entirely.

His mind, he realized with a fresh wave of terror, was running in the background, a silent, unceasing processor of information, even when he was unconscious.

His mind was being occupied by unimportant stuff.

He saw it now.

The hyper-awareness that had been so useful in the Shiver-Glass Peaks—the ability to see a subtle scratch, to smell a faint scent—was a curse in the real world.

The way a lamp flickered, the angle of a dust mote in the light, the sound of a distant footstep—it all felt like a precursor to a system message, a sign of an impending mission, a threat he had to neutralize.

His personal life, his old self, was being squeezed out, replaced by a sensory overload of data, all of it filtered through the cold, unblinking lens of the Archive.

The world was closing in on him.

This wasn't just a feeling; it was a physical reality.

The world was no longer a vast, unknown place full of possibilities.

It was a grid, a game board, a series of missions and stats.

The Archive was a relentless game master, and his personal life, his old self, was being erased to make him a more efficient player.

He didn't feel like himself anymore and that was a really uncomfortable feeling.

Of course he knew that this was probably necessary, and for his own good.

But still….

He looked down at his hands, at the calloused fingers that held a sword with brutal precision, at the bandage on his palm that was a constant, low-grade reminder of his new, terrifying self.

The nightmare hadn't been about monsters.

It had been about himself.

The things in the dream that had been twisting and distorting, the objects and memories of his old life, were not a threat from the outside.

They were a part of him, being erased, corrupted, and contorted into something else by the cold, relentless logic of the Archive.

The person he used to be was being replaced.

He was slowly becoming a better fighter, a better warrior and knight.

But at what cost? He looked at his reflection in the dark window, at the haunted eyes that were still his own, and he finally understood the true horror of his situation.

He didn't know if he was becoming who he was meant to be… or just someone who fit better in a world built on blood and steel.

He just knew that the line between the two was blurring, and he was losing his way back to the person he used to be.

And the most terrifying part about it all, was that he had just been here for two months.

The silence of the room, once a welcome respite, now felt like a prison.