For the past few hours, Aiken had remained fixated on his status window, relentlessly clicking the 'Log Out' button as if sheer persistence might bend the system to his will. But the result never changed. The distorted glitch still marred the interface, the exit forever out of reach.
Frustration settled like frost in his chest.
Eventually, he turned to Althea.
If anyone—or anything—could explain what was happening, it had to be her.
He broke the silence. "What exactly are you?"
His voice wasn't sharp, but there was an edge of calculation behind it. He needed answers, not more rehearsed lines.
Althea fluttered in the air beside him, radiant wings catching the dim light as she tilted her head with practiced grace. "I already told you!" she said, her tone lilting with mock offense. "I'm your fairy companion. The Fairy of the Three Lights—'Sun,' 'Moon,' and 'Stars'." She said it like a child reciting a title she was proud of, complete with a tiny flourish of light behind her.
Aiken gave a slow nod, absorbing the words. Then, more pointedly: "So… are you an AI? Or a player?"
The question hung in the air like a challenge.
Althea blinked, her expression unreadable for a moment. Her usual cheer softened, and a curious stillness fell over her features.
"Ohhh," she said slowly, drawing out the syllable. "That's what you're trying to figure out."
Aiken kept his gaze steady, trying to read the subtle shifts in her tone, her posture—anything.
"I'm not a player," she finally answered, a hint of something cryptic in her smile. "And I'm not just an AI."
That ambiguity made Aiken's fingers twitch.
"So… what are you then?"
Althea hovered closer, her eyes glowing faintly. "Let's just say I'm here because you are. And I'll be with you… until the end of your journey."
However, Althea remained silent.
Her glow dimmed slightly, and her expression flattened into something unreadable—neither concern nor amusement, just a vacant stillness that unsettled Aiken more than any answer could have.
He blinked, caught off guard by her sudden shift in demeanor. The usual liveliness in her eyes was gone.
"…Right," Aiken muttered, letting the silence stretch. "Forget it."
He backed off the topic, sighing as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "I just wanted to calmly understand what's going on. Maybe even form a theory. But all I've got is…" He let the words trail off, his lips tightening into a grim line. "A ridiculous idea."
He turned away and resumed pacing, footsteps crunching against the snow-dusted ground of the empty field around them. The questions he tried to suppress clawed their way back into his mind.
Why am I still here?
I remember getting hit. A truck, headlights—then nothing. Just this.
Am I dead?
Unconscious and still logged in? A coma?
The thoughts tangled and swirled, pulling him deeper into a vortex of uncertainty.
Then Althea spoke. Her voice was light, but her words landed like a blade against stone.
"If you don't stop being careless… you'll be permanently deleted."
Aiken froze.
He turned to her slowly, searching her eyes for any hint of humor or exaggeration.
But she wasn't smiling.
In that moment, something clicked—not fully, but just enough. A sliver of insight pierced the fog clouding his mind, a shard of uncomfortable truth slicing through the haze. It wasn't a glitch. It wasn't a dream. Whatever this was, it was real. At least, more real than anything he'd dared to admit until now.
It was real.
And it was dangerous.
"So… I'm not just a bunch of binary code in some server. I'm… separated. From my actual life. My soul."
Aiken voiced the thought aloud, though the words felt foreign on his tongue—too vast, too strange to fully accept. The notion clung to him like a thick fog: impossible to grasp, yet undeniably present.
There was an old saying: a game character is a player's second life.
But now… that second life was his only life.
He raised a hand to his chest, fingers brushing the bandages wound tightly around his torso. A sharp flicker of pain from the bruises beneath made him wince. So this body felt pain. It wasn't just a visual effect.
Althea, now in her teenage form, stood calmly beside him. Her presence caught him off guard. He wasn't used to girls—especially ones who stood so close without a hint of disgust or boredom. Usually, he was the guy nobody picked for parties, in-game or in real life.
Uncertain, he remained still, allowing her to do… whatever magic fairy girls were supposed to do.
The snow around them sparkled as a sudden shaft of sunlight broke through the cloudy skies above. The golden light bathed them in an almost romantic glow, soft and surreal. Althea's lips moved in quiet incantation, and a warm aura of healing enveloped him.
Aiken blinked. The pain ebbed away. The bruises faded.
He stared down at himself, momentarily speechless.
"Thanks," he finally muttered.
Althea smiled—gently, knowingly—but said nothing.
"I suppose fairy magic can still affect villagers like you," Althea quipped, shrinking back to her diminutive size with a flutter of her wings.
Aiken let out a small sigh and began peeling away the remaining bandages from his chest. But the relief from his healing was short-lived. His eyes locked onto the skin over his heart—a jagged scar, raw and unnerving, stretched across his left chest.
"Wh-What the—!"
The words tumbled out of him, thick with disbelief.
"How could this happen?" he shouted, his voice edged with panic.
His breath quickened as another memory surfaced—his wrist. Quickly, he pulled up his sleeve. The burn mark was still there, faint but unmistakable.
"This doesn't make any sense!" he snapped, thrusting his wrist toward Althea. "This… This was from before. Before I woke up in Letheon!"
Althea floated silently, her expression unreadable.
Aiken's mind reeled. He knew Letheon was hyper-realistic, designed to reflect players' physical characteristics—height, weight, posture—fine-tuned through biometric scans. But injuries? Scars? Burn marks carried over from outside the game?
"That's impossible," he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "This place... It's not supposed to go that far."
And yet, his body bore the truth like an open journal—scars of the past etched into this virtual flesh.
In response, Althea equipped Aiken with a Dragonskin Coat +15—its surface sleek and textured, layered with protective enchantments—along with a black robe stitched with subtle runes. The robe shimmered faintly under the light, its enchantment tailored for one purpose: to obscure. To conceal.
"To keep prying eyes away," Althea said with a knowing smirk, adjusting the hem. "We can't have Cziell walking around looking like... well, Cziell. Not yet."
Aiken said nothing, accepting the items without protest. His mind was still reeling—questions unanswered, memories fragmented, and that scar burning at the edge of his awareness. The robe's hood fell comfortably over his brow, casting his face in shadows. With a deep breath, he stepped into the crowd of Beginner's Town.
He moved with a quiet presence, but the Dragonskin's subtle gleam drew wandering eyes. Its stats were far beyond what any Level 1 Villager should be wearing. Whispers trailed him like shadows.
"Look at that gear... Is that pay-to-win junk?"
"No way, that's legendary ranked... what's a villager doing with that?"
"Wait—hold up. That coat. That walk... isn't that—?"
"Could it be? No one else moves like that around here."
"Maybe he's some kind of undercover top player."
"Or worse—someone exploiting a bug to cheat."
A sudden gust caught Aiken's hood, pulling it back just enough to reveal his face.
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
"Isn't that Cziell?!"
"No way! He vanished with the other Top 15!"
"Why is he here—in Beginner's Town?!"
"Didn't they say he quit the game?"
"Maybe he got reset... or worse, banned!"
"Or this is some kind of weird resurrection event."
"Someone call the guild leaders—this could change everything."
"Streamers, get your cameras ready! This is huge!"
Aiken kept walking, unaware of the chaos he was leaving in his wake. He didn't hear the whispers multiplying, didn't see the guild recruiters sprinting to message their leaders, or the streamers scrambling to capture his image.
To him, it was just another step forward—through the quiet snow, toward a truth only he could unravel.
"I must find the truth. I must discover the reason for my existence here..." Aiken murmured, his voice low but resolute. The crowd's whispers faded behind him like white noise, drowned beneath the pounding of a single thought.
"And if I don't have one..." He clenched his fist, his eyes burning with purpose, "...then I'll create my own."
Each step forward pressed deeper into the unknown, but also further into something that felt undeniable—destiny, perhaps, or something far less forgiving. The Dragonskin Coat swayed with his stride, its dark fabric whispering like the pages of an unwritten tale.
He would find the others. The vanished Top 15—Ram, Myrpho, the Hummingbirds' elite. They were more than just players; they were pieces of a puzzle only he now held.
And if this world—this twisted echo of Letheon—refused to give him answers, then he would carve the truth from its very walls.
No longer just Aiken.
Not yet fully Cziell.
But something awakening in between.
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───