The hum of fluorescent lights was the only thing that hadn't kicked him out yet.
Ren Kisaragi sat slouched in the corner of a cramped manga café booth, his hoodie pulled up like a half-hearted disguise. His eyes skimmed over the same panel for the fifth time, but the words blurred into gray mush. He wasn't really reading anymore.
Outside the booth's paper-thin walls, life buzzed—quiet footsteps, vending machine beeps, the occasional cough from a fellow runaway. The city hadn't stopped for him. Why would it?
It had been… what, three weeks now? Since the university told him he was "no longer enrolled." Since home stopped being an option. Since the part-time job stopped calling. Since the text messages dried up.
The world had been quietly evicting Ren Kisaragi from his own story.
He sighed and stood, stretching like an old cat. His legs ached from too many days curled in the same pose. Clutching a half-read volume of some fantasy manga he'd forgotten the title of, he stepped out into the main hallway.
"Just one more chapter," he muttered. "Then I'll… figure something out."
The manga shelf stretched down the narrow aisle like a silent wall of forgotten dreams. Ren traced his fingers along the spines, pausing when he spotted the slot where the volume belonged.
He slid it back into place.
It clicked into the shelf like the final piece of a puzzle.
And then—
A sound. Not a loud one, but deep. Like the groan of wood twisting underwater, or a heartbeat muffled behind stone.
The air shifted.
Ren blinked. The lights overhead flickered—not all at once, but in a ripple, like a wave passing through the café. His hand instinctively pulled back from the shelf, but it was too late. Something cold touched his skin.
It wasn't the shelf.
It wasn't air.
It was space, maybe—space itself bending around his fingers.
Before his brain could catch up, the floor fell out from under him.
There was no scream. No dramatic wind. Just silence. A numb, total silence that swallowed his senses as the world inverted.
And then—
Darkness pressed against his eyelids. Not the kind you get from sleep—but something deeper. He stirred, and the scent of old paper and melted wax drifted in. A chill brushed his skin, like fingers trailing past him.
Ren slowly opened his eyes.
What greeted him wasn't the manga café.
It was… a library? If you could call it that.
Endless shelves rose into the black above him, stacked with tomes bound in leathers that looked centuries old. Dust hung in the air like floating ash, catching the faint flicker of candlelight. The walls, if there were any, were lost to the shadows.
The silence here wasn't natural. It felt like the kind that comes after the world has forgotten something existed.
Ren pushed himself off the cold floor—stone, maybe? It was hard to tell. He rubbed his shoulder and glanced around.
"…Okay. So I'm the first guy to get isekai'd by putting a manga back on the shelf. While hiding from life. Amazing."
His voice echoed, thin and tired, into the nothing.
A slow, cold wind passed through the aisles, stirring the pages of a forgotten book nearby. It brought him back to reality—or whatever this was.
"…Where am I?" he muttered, his joking tone fading. "This… definitely isn't the café anymore."
He took a breath. It smelled like memory and loss.
And then he saw it—a glow, faint and warm, like a flame in the center of it all. In the distance, surrounded by books and shadow, someone was sitting at an old wooden table.
A girl.
She looked impossibly out of place here, yet entirely part of it. Her white hair shimmered in the candlelight, falling in soft waves down her back. Crimson eyes scanned an open book as if the world outside the pages didn't matter.
She didn't look up.
Ren hesitated, then stepped forward. His shoes made no sound against the stone. As he approached, he raised a hand, offering a half-hearted smile.
"So, uh… am I dead, or is this the world's most dramatic library event?"
No response.
She didn't even glance his way.
Ren waited.
Five seconds. Ten. A full minute, maybe. He wasn't counting—but the silence dragged long enough to make him shift his weight and glance around again.
Still no reply.
He rubbed the back of his neck and tried to shake off the growing weirdness. "This place looks… old," he said to no one in particular. The air smelled like centuries. Even the candlelight seemed reluctant to burn too brightly, as if it respected the quiet.
He turned back to the girl.
She was still reading, as if his presence hadn't even registered. Her long white hair flowed over her shoulders, soft as mist. It moved slightly, despite the still air. Her pale fingers turned the page with a grace that felt rehearsed, eternal.
Her eyes—those unnatural red eyes—moved calmly from line to line, never straying. Not even to him.
And that's when Ren noticed his own heart beating faster.
He felt heat crawl up his neck.
"Okay, I'll say it," he muttered. "Your cosplay is honestly… incredible. Especially your eyes. They're, uh—unreal. Like, literally."
Still nothing.
The girl gently closed the book in her lap, then, without a word, slid it aside.
Ren perked up.
But instead of responding, she picked up another one from the stack beside her and began reading again—flipping through pages as if he didn't exist.
Ren deflated.
He scratched his cheek, fighting the urge to crawl back into the shadows. He'd never been great with girls, but this was a new level of social defeat. Being ignored by someone in a maybe-magical library at the edge of time?
"Wow," he sighed under his breath. "I'm not even worth a 'shh.'"
Gathering what little courage he had left, he tried again—this time slower, softer. "Hey… can you at least tell me why I'm here? I don't think there's anyone else around, and I'd really appreciate… something. Anything."
He paused.
No answer.
Only the sound of another page turning.
Ren let out a long breath, shoulders sagging.
"Well, if you don't care about me, I'll figure it out myself," he muttered, casting one last glance at the girl who still hadn't spared him a second of her attention.
Turning on his heel, he wandered off into the nearest aisle.
The bookshelves towered above him like monuments, silent and unmoving. The deeper he walked, the more distant the candlelight seemed to grow behind him. His footsteps echoed against the stone, swallowed by the dusty hush of the endless rows.
At first, he kept glancing around—curious, cautious.
But after a while… he noticed something wrong.
The shelves didn't change. Not in color, not in size, not in content. Just row after row of identical books, the same binding, the same spacing. He blinked, frowning.
"How long have I been walking?" he said aloud, voice barely above a whisper. "This… this has to be a joke."
He kept going. He didn't know why. Maybe part of him still believed he'd find a way out. Something. Anything.
And then—
Light.
Faint, flickering, in the distance.
Ren's heart lifted. He broke into a run, the first real spark of hope flaring in his chest.
But the moment he moved faster, everything went wrong.
The air grew heavy. His legs moved slower, as if something invisible coiled around them. The light ahead stretched and twisted. Time itself seemed to ripple, like thick syrup pulling him backward even as he tried to move forward.
And then—
Warp.
A pressure on his chest. A lurch in his gut. A silence so complete it made his ears ring.
In an instant, he was back.
Back at the same table.
Back in front of her.
The white-haired girl sat exactly where she'd been, flipping through another ancient book.
Ren stood frozen.
A chill ran through his bones, and the air seemed colder now.
His throat tightened. He placed a shaky hand over his chest and took a step back. "What… was that just now?" he whispered, barely able to form the words.
It wasn't a dream.
He could feel that now.
Whatever this place was—it didn't want him leaving.
Ren stood there, pale and frozen, eyes wide with something raw.
Fear.
A kind of primal dread he hadn't felt in… ever, really. Not when he flunked out. Not when his parents stopped picking up. Not even when he realized he had nowhere left to go.
No, this was something older than that.
Something deeper.
And maybe that made sense. After all, people had always said Ren had no sense of danger. That he walked into trouble with the same curiosity as someone checking a vending machine.
"Damn it," he muttered, curling his arms around himself as if that could somehow put his heart back where it belonged. "Think, Ren… Think."
He sucked in a shaky breath and laughed, but it came out broken, jittery. "This has to be a dream. I've been living off pot noodles and free refills, holed up in a manga café for weeks. This is just my brain short-circuiting. Yeah. That's all."
He stared at the floor, lips twitching in forced denial.
But the weight in his chest didn't lift. That terrible, crawling unease stayed rooted there, throbbing like a second heartbeat.
And then—
Thud.
The sound of a book slamming shut echoed like thunder through the endless library.
Ren flinched.
He looked up, and for the first time, the girl was no longer reading.
She sat there, poised and still, her pale fingers resting on the closed tome before her. Her crimson eyes met his—cool, ancient, unblinking.
And then she spoke.
Her voice was soft. Silken. Beautiful, even. But it carried a weight like frost settling on skin.
"You know," she said, "even cockroaches and spiders are more well-mannered than you."
She tilted her head slightly, almost curious.
"At least they don't distract."
Ren's voice cracked as he spoke, trembling.
"Then… please tell me. What was that? That thing that… touched me."
He could still feel it—something vast and cold brushing against his soul, invisible fingers peeling back the layers of who he was.
The girl turned her gaze upward. Or rather, toward the black nothing that hung above like a sky that had forgotten how to be.
Then, slowly, her crimson eyes returned to him.
"…I suppose," she murmured, "I can grant you that much."
She lifted a single finger and pointed—not at him, but toward the endless dark aisle behind him. The place where the books repeated forever. Her hand drifted back, as if completing a loop.
"It won't let you go," she said simply. "That's all there is to it."
Ren felt his chest tighten. His voice rose without permission, almost a scream. "What do you mean it?! Who's it?!"
The girl didn't flinch. Her posture didn't shift. Only her eyes, steady as ice, stayed locked on his.
"This place," she said, as if explaining something obvious to a child. "It isn't meant to let you leave. It's designed to keep you inside. That's the point."
Ren staggered back a step.
Her words echoed—keep you inside.
Like a maze. Like a trap.
He shook his head violently, denial clawing its way up his throat. "No. No, that—That doesn't make sense. I didn't do anything! I'm not some perfect son, sure. And yeah, maybe I screw things up. But I was just… I was just hiding out! Reading manga, trying to escape reality a little—just a little!"
His voice cracked again. "And now this?! This place?!"
He screamed the last word, flinging it like a question that would never bounce back.
The girl blinked slowly, head tilting just slightly—like she was searching for something in the fog of her memory.
"…Manga?" she repeated, voice distant. "I don't know what that is. But if you're here… then maybe you did something terrible."
Ren's mouth fell open.
"What…? No. What are you talking about?" he snapped. "Terrible?! I got kicked out of university, that's all! I didn't—!"
But his voice never finished.
Far in the distance, one of the lights flickered.
Just once.
And her tone shifted.
Her voice, once soft and curious, turned sharp.
"It's rude," she said coldly, "to scream during a conversation. I was being kind enough to answer you."
Ren's breath caught.
And then—
A pressure. Not from outside.
From inside.
He gasped, placing a hand over his heart. For a moment, just a flicker, it felt like something else had its hand there too. Like it was squeezing gently. Testing him.
He staggered forward, eyes wide.
"…What is this place…?" he whispered again.
Without a breath of hesitation, she cut him off.
"Prison."
The word hit like a blade.
Ren staggered, breath caught in his throat. That invisible pressure around his heart vanished in the same instant—like it had never been there. He gasped, stumbling back a step, hand still clutched to his chest.
"…Prison…?" he repeated, voice cracked, eyes wide. "No. That—no. I didn't do anything illegal. I didn't break any laws. I didn't…!"
His voice trailed into broken mutters.
"It's not fair… not fair… not fair…"
The girl let out a small sigh, the kind someone makes when watching a child throw a tantrum in a store aisle.
"Can you at least be a man for one second," she said sharply, "and stop crying?"
Ren flinched. He hadn't even realized his eyes had started to burn.
Then, coldly—like the verdict had already been given—she added, "If you're here, then it means you've done something terrible."
He froze.
Those words—spoken so calmly, so plainly—landed harder than any insult or threat. Something in her voice told him she wasn't guessing. She knew.
Ren clenched his fists.
And for the first time since he arrived in this place, he forced himself to stand straighter. The panic didn't vanish, but he pushed against it, barely holding himself together.
"Then why are you here?" he asked, his voice hoarse but steady. "If this is some kind of prison… why aren't you trying to leave?"
There was silence.
And then—
A smile.
It was brief, flickering across her lips like a shadow passing the moon. But in that instant, it was sharp. Wicked.
"Mistake?" she repeated, tilting her head just slightly. "That's a bold statement, from your kind, human"
She took a step toward him. The sound of her shoes echoed faintly, like time hesitated to catch up.
Ren stared, eyes locked with hers.
Those red eyes… they didn't just look at him. They studied him. Measured him. Like a predator contemplating whether its prey was worth playing with.
"…Human…?" he whispered, barely hearing himself.
The girl's expression didn't change. But her voice dropped lower, more venom beneath the calm.
"Your kind," she said, "is exactly why I'm here in the first place."
Her red eyes didn't blink.
They stayed locked on Ren, narrowed with a flicker of annoyance, maybe even disdain. A silence stretched between them—tense, brittle.
Ren broke it without thinking.
"…Who are you?"
No answer.
Instead, the light vanished.
Not dimmed. Vanished—like reality forgot the concept of illumination for a single second.
Then it returned, soft and flickering, the moment a sound broke through the void:
Laughter.
Her laughter.
"You really are entertaining, human," she said between breathless giggles. "You don't even understand the situation you're in, and yet you still ask questions like that."
She exhaled, brushing a lock of white hair behind her ear with idle grace.
"I suppose I shall grant you this answer too. I must be in a generous mood today."
Her smile curved into something darker. "Make sure you keep entertaining me… in your agony."
The laughter faded.
Then, slowly—gracefully—she leaned in, lowering her voice until it was a whisper beside his ear.
"I am Seris Vel'Zereth," she said. "The one whose name should never be spoken. The one who bathed your little world of Runteria in chaos and despair over a thousand years ago."
Her breath brushed his skin.
"I am the one and only—Witch of Greed."
A pause.
Then—
Ren burst out laughing.
He doubled over, wheezing, arms across his stomach.
"Ah, man… and here I thought I was done for a second," he said, still chuckling. "The Witch of Greed? Really? I don't even know what you're talking about."
He looked up at her, smiling through the exhaustion.
"But hey—thanks for telling me your name."
Seris froze.
Just for a heartbeat. Her expression unreadable.
"My name's Ren Kisaragi," he said. "Nice to meet you, Seris."
He gave a tired smile, head tilting slightly.
"…Mind if I call you Seri? If we're both stuck here, might as well get along."
An awkward silence settled over the ancient library.
For the first time, Seris took a step back.
Her expression wasn't angry. Or amused.
Just… confused.
As if she couldn't quite compute what had just happened.
Ren rubbed the back of his neck, chuckling to himself. "Thanks. You really kicked me out of my despair there, Seris Vel'Zereth. That's such a fantasy name, too. Totally something out of a last-boss RPG."
He laughed again—light, almost casual.
Seris blinked.
Still saying nothing. Still watching him like he was an alien species that had just learned to speak.
Ren took her silence as a green light.
"I mean, look—" he continued, walking in slow circles like he was trying to stretch his legs, "I don't know what reason you had to throw the world into chaos and all that drama. But... wait—you said a thousand years ago?"
He turned to face her again.
"Wow. You seriously look incredible. Is that magic? Because you don't look a day older than me. Honestly, I'm kinda stunned."
His eyes ran over her again—not in a leering way, but more like someone observing a mythical creature from behind glass.
"You're like a… really intense exhibit in a supernatural zoo."
She furrowed her brows, red eyes narrowing just slightly. Still silent. Still trying to process him.
Ren didn't miss a beat.
"Anyway," he went on, hands in his hoodie pockets, "since it looks like we're stuck here, maybe you could tell me more about this place? Because I'm pretty sure this isn't the manga café anymore. The decor's a little more… hell-dimension chic."
Seris Vel'Zereth, the Witch of Greed, stood frozen in place.
Not from anger.
Not from disdain.
But from something far more dangerous—uncertainty.
Her expression shifted slightly—lips parting just a bit, brows drawn low. Her crimson eyes narrowed, as if trying to peer through Ren and see what was wrong with him.
"You…" she finally said, her voice unusually quiet. "…should be dead."
Ren blinked. "Wow. Straight to the point, huh?"
She took a slow breath.
"Just speaking my name should've driven you mad. Or ripped your soul from your fragile little mind. At the very least, it should've shattered your ability to… laugh."
Ren tilted his head. "Yeah, sorry. Must've skipped soul-ripping day at school."
Seris didn't respond.
Instead, she stared at him, as if expecting him to suddenly collapse. Or combust. Or dissolve into mist.
He didn't.
Her fingers twitched at her side—an involuntary motion, like the muscles weren't used to this feeling. This lack of control.
"And you were crying—panicking—minutes ago," she said, more to herself than to him. "You could barely breathe. You felt the weight. I know you did. I saw it."
Ren shrugged. "I mean, yeah, I was freaked out. Still am, kinda. But I'm used to disappointment. This is just… the deluxe version."
Seris stepped forward, slow and deliberate.
Her presence pressed on the air like a rising storm.
"You shouldn't be normal this quickly," she whispered. "Humans don't recover like that. Not in this place. Not in mypresence."
Ren looked at her—genuinely curious now.
"…Are you okay?" he asked.
Seris blinked. She actually blinked. Twice.
Then scowled.
Not because she was angry—but because she didn't understand. And that, for someone like her, was far more infuriating than rage.
Ren tilted his head, genuinely puzzled. "So... is it, like, a Witch of Greed thing to glare when someone asks if you're okay? Just checking."
"You speak so casually," she snapped, but the edge was dulled—like she didn't know where to aim it. "Do you truly not understand what's happening to you?"
Ren scratched the side of his cheek. "Not really. But if I sit down and panic again, I figure you'll just insult me. So I'll pass."
Another silence. This one heavier. Even the flickering candlelight dimmed slightly, reacting to the tension.
Finally, Seris folded her arms and turned away, her tone like ice sliding across glass.
"You're either a fool… or something's wrong with this world."
Ren's eyes followed her, curious. Not frightened anymore.
"Well," he said with a tired grin, "either way, looks like we're stuck together for a while."
She didn't reply.
But she didn't deny it either.