A radiant smile graced her lips the moment her name left his. "You're finally awake, brother."
A wave of profound relief washed over him.
She appeared older, not dramatically so, yet undeniably matured. The fragile gauntness he remembered had softened from her face, and her hair, now longer, cascaded in soft, dark strands about her shoulders.
She wore his old clothes: an oversized black hoodie that all but swallowed her, its sleeves extending past her wrists, revealing a stretched sleeveless shirt beneath, paired with a simple skirt and comfortable white shoes. Nothing coordinated; nothing seemed deliberate. And yet, this disarray amplified the pain of the sight, lending it an unsettling authenticity.
She looked healthy.
Somehow he clung to that thought.
She crossed the room and settled gently beside him. The instant her hand clasped his, every lingering doubt dissolved beneath an overwhelming surge of relief. Warm. Real. Alive.
His gaze unconsciously drifted to their intertwined hands. A fleeting sense of oddness pricked him. Her hands felt larger than he recalled—not disproportionately so, but subtly wrong, a sensation his body registered before his mind could fully process it. Those hands were meant to be smaller. The thought flickered, but he immediately shook his head and pushed it away.
"You scared everyone," she murmured softly.
He offered a weak, apologetic laugh. "Sorry."
But even as the word left him, unease continued pressing faintly at the edges of his thoughts.
What happened? Why can't i...
The question died unfinished as Sera's expression softened further.
"You were in an accident," she said gently. "The plane crash."
His chest tightened faintly.
Right.
"You were unconscious for weeks."
The words settled slowly through him.
Weeks.
That explained the heaviness in his body. The drifting feeling in his thoughts. The strange distance between one moment and the next.
Even the hospital itself suddenly seemed to lock more firmly into place around him, reality filling in its own missing edges.
A coma.
Of course.
He exhaled slowly. That made sense. He tried to remember the flight again. Turbulence. Screaming. The violent shaking of the cabin—
Then something else pushed through it.
Orario. Dungeon. Babel.
Pain lanced suddenly behind his eyes. He grabbed his head instinctively, fingers tightening against his temple as the fragments crashed over each other without fitting together properly.
"Hey—" Sera shifted closer immediately. "Easy."
The pressure vanished almost as quickly as it came, leaving only a dull ache behind. He lowered his hand slowly, breathing unevenly.
"What the hell was that...?"
Sera watched him for a second too long before her expression brightened with deliberate exaggeration.
"You were mumbling nonstop while you were unconscious."
He blinked.
"Oh god, seriously?"
"Mhm." A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "A lot of weird names."
A flush of heat instantly spread across his face. "Please tell me I didn't say anime stuff out loud."
"You absolutely did."
He groaned, covering his eyes with his free hand while she chuckled softly beside him. "That's so embarrassing..."
Her smile softened into quiet curiosity. "What even happened in your dream?"
He slowly lowered his hand, struggling to piece together the fragments. "It was weird." His voice wavered. "There was this giant city... Orario, I think? And a dungeon beneath it." He frowned faintly. "There was this white-haired kid named Bell... and this supporter girl, Lili... a blacksmith named Welf..." The names felt elusive, dissolving like mist as he spoke them.
"And there was..." He hesitated. A vivid image flashed through his mind: grey fur, amber eyes, a wall-slam, sharp teeth mere inches from his face. "...Raska?" The name sounded alien spoken aloud. His brow furrowed. "Was she... a character?"
Sera gently traced circles on the back of his hand with her thumb. "The doctors said that happens sometimes."
"Hm?"
"When someone stays unconscious for a long time." Her voice remained soft and calm. "The brain constructs narratives from things you already cherish. Memories. Emotions." She tilted her head slightly. "You were apparently talking about dungeons and monsters in your sleep for weeks."
He stared at her, then an embarrassed laugh escaped him. "So my brain literally trapped me in anime fanfiction while I was in a coma."
"Looks that way."
"That is... genuinely horrifying."
"Is that so?" Sera tilted her head slightly. "It seemed funny to me."
Her smile widened just a little. "Besides, you seemed pretty invested in it."
A hollow laugh escaped him, his thoughts still chewing slowly through the scattered pieces of memory.
"I fought monsters," he muttered. "And with what? A severed monster limb used as a scythe."
Sera looked genuinely impressed. "That's actually kind of cool."
He stared at her in disbelief. "That's peak cringe."
She laughed again, and this time he laughed with her.
The conversation drifted after that. Small things. Pointless things. She talked about shows she'd been watching while he was unconscious. Complained about hospital coffee with surprising seriousness. Rolled her eyes at one of the nurses hovering over him too much. He answered without thinking, and somewhere along the way the tightness that had been sitting inside his chest since he woke up began to loosen piece by piece.
The room slowly stopped feeling like a hospital room. It became just a place where Sera was.
The rain kept tapping softly against the window while time slipped past unnoticed.
At some point she adjusted the blanket around him without interrupting her sentence, the motion absent and familiar enough that something inside him ached quietly for reasons he didn't fully understand.
He realized, distantly, that he had stopped waiting for something to go wrong.
Stopped listening to the silence between sounds.
Stopped expecting the dread to come back.
For the first time since waking up, he simply existed there beside her, warm and exhausted and overwhelmingly relieved to not be alone.
Visiting hours concluded shortly after. He felt steady enough to walk, so Sera helped him from the bed as he pushed the IV pole alongside them through the hushed hallway. Rain tapped gently against distant windows. A nurse passed without a glance.
For several minutes, they walked in silence.
The rhythm of it settled into him strangely easily.
The soft squeak of the IV wheels every few steps. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. Sera walking beside him close enough that her sleeve brushed his arm once when they turned a corner.
Normal.
So normal that the dread he'd been carrying since waking up slowly began slipping from his grasp without him noticing.
His eyes drifted absently toward his hand curled around the IV pole.
And something shifted.
Not the pole.
Small fingers tangled tightly in hospital blankets.
The image surfaced with no warning.
He slowed slightly.
Another fragment followed immediately after.
Paper cups of water balanced carefully in his hands because he was afraid of spilling them. Plastic waiting room chairs that were always too cold. Him sitting outside treatment rooms with a backpack at his feet while doctors spoke in low voices nearby, using careful words he was too young and too angry to fully understand.
Not his hospital room.
Hers.
The realization moved through him slowly enough to hurt.
He looked at his hands again.
Too small.
He remembered them being smaller.
He slowed. Sera looked back at him. "What's wrong?"
"You're..." He swallowed. "You're okay?"
She blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Your heart." The words spilled out before he fully grasped why they instilled such fear. "Your condition."
Confusion creased her face. "What condition?"
He stared at her. "You..." His chest slowly tightened. "You were sick."
"No, I wasn't."
The hallway suddenly felt colder. "No," he said quietly. His heart began to hammer against his ribs.
"You probably mixed things up from your dream."
The answer should have reassured him.
Instead, something inside him recoiled instinctively.
"Are you... really..."
The words stalled in his throat. He didn't know what he had been about to ask. Whether it was are you really alright or something else entirely — something his heart refused to reach for no matter how close it drifted.
Sera offered a gentle smile, but something about it no longer quite reached her eyes.
"Come on, brother! Isn't that what you always wanted?"
His heart refused to cease its frantic assault against his ribs. His head began to throb.
"No..."
The denial came too quickly to be rational.
Thump- thump- thump.
Sera's smile remained unchanged. Somehow, that only made the silence worse.
His pulse refused to slow.
For a brief moment, the world seemed to pause around him, as though waiting for something he could no longer hold back.
Then—
Tick. Tick. Tick.
A wet clicking sound echoed faintly from somewhere behind him. His body reacted before his thoughts could catch up, every muscle locking instinctively against a terror he recognized too quickly.
That sound. No. No, that wasn't—
The clicking came again. Closer this time. Slow. Wet. His pulse spiked violently. The hospital lights flickered once. And suddenly, ash grated beneath his boots. The hallway vanished. The floor changed.
He was back in the depot. Bell swimming through the horde of monsters, Welf poised to jump but his body frozen. Lily screaming with every fiber of her being.
And... Raska—
Bleeding against shattered stone.
The Irregular lunging forward—
"Watch out!" Someone's voice he could't recognise screamed from somewhere behind him.
The monster charged. Its red slits burned through the dark. Something inside him snapped.
"You were supposed to be dead!"
The words tore out of him raw, and the moment they did, fear flooded through him.
Not because of the monster in front of him. Because for a single horrifying instant, the words didn't belong to it.
His vision wavered. The Irregular lunging through the depot blurred at the edges as something else tried to force itself into the space behind his eyes—
Black hair.
Hospital lights.
Sera smiling at him across white sheets.
You were supposed to be dead.
His pulse slammed violently against his ribs, the dread sharpening into something far more certain.
Then sudden weight crashed into both his hands.
The Obsidian Scythe.
He didn't remember reaching for it. One moment his hands were empty — the next the black weapon rested there naturally, pulsing with dim purple light as though it had been waiting for him to hold it again.
He swung. Hard and desperate.
"Die, you monster!"
The blade cut cleanly through the neck. The head spun across the stone floor. Rolled once. Twice. Stopped.
The head twitched and its slits locked onto him. Then a voice.
"Monster."
The voice twisted strangely through the wet clicking, human words dragging themselves through something that wasn't human at all.
His stomach dropped before his mind understood why.
Then recognition hit him like a knife through the ribs.
Sera.
His breathing ceased. Slowly, mechanically, he turned around. And Sera had been standing behind him the entire time. Except her arms were wrong now. Long obsidian scythes extending from empty sleeves, black joints clicking wetly against themselves with every tiny movement.
Her face held no expression at all. Yet when her mouth moved, dread hit him before the words ever came.
"Monster."
Reality fractured within his vision.
The word echoed through the depot. Through the hospital. Through both at once. The fluorescent lights overhead bled into green-purple. The walls cracked apart into dungeon stone. The IV line wrapped around his arm tightened like obsidian wire cutting into flesh.
Click. Click. Clickclickclick—
He stumbled backward violently, falling onto his hands as the world twisted around him. The scythe slipped from his fingers somewhere nearby, but the clicking kept coming, she moved. Closer and closer and closer—
"Monster."
He crawled backward instinctively, unable to look away from her. Green-purple light exploded across his vision. The clicking became deafening.
"Monster. Monster. Monster."
The word repeated until the sounds inside it began coming apart. Consonants dissolved into wet clicking noises, syllables dragging against each other unnaturally until his mind stopped hearing it as human speech at all.
The depot fractured apart in flashes of green-purple light. Hospital walls bled through shattered stone. Sera's unmoving face lingered between both realities, refusing to disappear no matter which world he tried to cling to.
He woke up screaming. The sound tore itself raw from his throat as he lurched upright violently in bed, breathing so hard his chest ached. His vision filled with dark wooden walls. Magic lamp. Reality crashed into him all at once.
Raska lurched awake with the chair slipping dangerously beneath her, catching herself awkwardly against the bedside table before it could topple completely.
"What the h—"
The words caught in her throat as she finally got a good look at him.
His eyes locked onto the table behind her. He flinched backward immediately. The obsidian scythe lay there beside the massive dark-purple magic stone. Real. Both of them real.
Raska's ears twitched uneasily.
"…You okay?"
His breath caught painfully in his throat as he shoved himself backward until his spine hit the wall.
Monster.
The word still echoed inside his skull.
Raska stared at him, fully awake now, confusion and alarm mingling in her eyes as rain continued tapping faintly against the window behind them.
***