Chapter 3: The Man in the Dream
Life, Kaito once believed, was nothing more than a slow erosion of meaning—an endless carousel of gray days stacked like copy paper, predictable in their emptiness, suffocating in their sameness. He used to say the world was boring, but it wasn't a complaint. It was a resigned truth. Each morning bled into the next without distinction, a sleepwalk through routines that led nowhere. Conversations were hollow, connections shallow, and he had learned, long ago, to stop expecting anything real from people who only ever asked questions out of habit. If life was a game, he had decided he wasn't a player—he was just there to carry the background.
And yet, standing now on the other side of that so-called boredom, in a reality stitched together by nightmare logic and populated by creatures that moved like errors in nature, he would have given anything—absolutely anything—to return to that dull, colorless world he once dismissed.
For two days, Kaito didn't open the door.
He didn't leave the house, not because he was planning or recovering or gaining strength, but because something inside him refused to test the line between fear and confirmation. He knew that the moment he stepped outside, everything would be undeniable.
The monsters.
The death.
The memory of pain that still lived in his muscles like a haunting.
As long as the door remained shut, he could pretend—barely—that this place was just some fever-dream simulation, a cruel prank, or maybe a hallucination brought on by a breakdown he hadn't realized he was having.
The house, disturbingly untouched since its displacement, felt like it had been removed from time, pulled from his old world and dropped into this one without consent. It smelled right. Looked right. The couch still held the dent where he usually sat. The kitchen tile still had that one crack near the sink. But none of it offered comfort.
It was like standing in a wax replica of his life—close enough to trigger memory, distant enough to suffocate it.
He spent his hours in silence, often curled on the floor, knees drawn tightly to his chest, breathing in shallow rhythms. Other times he would press himself into corners, his back to the walls as if that might make him invisible to the world pressing in outside.
He stared at the lifeless rectangle of his phone, long dead and cold, willing it to turn on, to tether him back to something familiar.
He whispered to himself just to break the silence, fragments of denial that grew more desperate the more he repeated them.
"This isn't real," he murmured into the stale air. "It can't be real. This has to be a dream. It has to be."
But no dream had ever felt like that.
No dream had left him with such vivid, nauseating clarity—the heat of his blood gushing across his stomach, the sharp snap of his shoulder dislocating as the wolves tore into him, the taste of dirt and iron filling his mouth, the unbearable moment when pain stopped meaning anything and became something deeper, more existential.
That wasn't imagination.
That wasn't the abstract threat of death.
That was experience—and it had settled into his bones like ash.
Eventually, unable to bear the silence, he started searching the house—not because he believed he'd find answers, but because stillness had become its own kind of agony. His movements were slow, methodical, the way one searches a crime scene they're both witness and suspect to.
Every drawer he opened was too clean.
Every cabinet too empty.
The fridge was cold but dead.
The food inside either fake or expired in ways that made no biological sense.
Even the light switches didn't work.
When he looked into the bathroom mirror, it reflected his face correctly, but the shadows didn't fall where they should.
And then, behind a row of coats he didn't recognize in the front closet, he found something that didn't belong.
A backpack.
Thick black canvas. Reinforced straps. Brass buckles dulled with age but solid. It was the first thing he touched that felt real in this new world.
When he unzipped it, a faint ripple of light shimmered along the inner lining, and then words—glowing and crisp—materialized just above the fabric:
> [Item Slot Backpack – Capacity: 10 Items]
He stared at the text, not blinking, afraid it might vanish if he looked away. It didn't.
His breath caught, and for the first time in days, something flickered through him that wasn't dread. Maybe not hope, but proximity to it.
He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to summon anything else. A menu. A stat sheet. A HUD. He tried words like "Status," "Inventory," "Magic," "Health bar"—each one spoken with increasing urgency.
Nothing answered.
No screen appeared.
No ding.
No numbers.
Just the soft creak of the house settling around him.
And that was when the laugh escaped him. Dry. Bitter. More of a bark than a sound of amusement.
"No skills. No magic. No stat screen. Not even a goddamn health bar," he muttered, slinging the backpack over his shoulder. It felt oddly weightless, like it didn't actually want to carry anything. "Just me and this bag. Guess I'm not the main character, huh?"
He stood there for a while, holding the weight of that sentence like it was a diagnosis. Then he sank back into the couch and let sleep drag him down—not as rest, not even as surrender, but like being pulled under cold water.
There was no beginning. There was only sound. Not music. Not voices. Just raw frequency. Static with shape. Screams without source. Noise that pulsed like a migraine through the marrow of his bones. He floated in it, no gravity, no time, no body—only awareness caught in something bigger and colder than anything he had ever known.
Shadows twisted at the edge of vision. Not figures, but suggestions. They didn't walk or move—they glitched, appearing where they hadn't been, bending in ways that weren't possible. And within that shifting unreality, he appeared.
The man. Or the shape of one.
Tall. Cloaked in fabric that moved like fire under glass. His features obscured, always slightly turned away, never offering a full look.
The first time, he said nothing.
The second night, he spoke. The words weren't loud, but they echoed inside Kaito like truth given form.
> "If you want to see your family again… reach the Gate."
The sentence hung in the air not like speech, but like a scar opening in memory.
> "Reach the Gate."
He said nothing else. He didn't need to.
Each night the dream returned, unchanged. Each morning, Kaito woke with the taste of steel in his mouth, his chest heaving, his hands clenched so tight they left bruises in his palms.
At first, he told himself it was just stress. A side effect of trauma. A subconscious fantasy trying to impose order on madness.
But deep inside, beyond logic, something in him wanted to believe.
Maybe his mother was here. Maybe his father. Maybe Aiko.
Maybe this nightmare had a thread worth following, and maybe—just maybe—it ended with something that resembled salvation.
On the third morning, he stood at the door.
The handle was cold in his grip. His heart didn't race. It just beat. Dully. Reluctantly.
He didn't feel ready.
He didn't feel anything.
But something inside whispered: Move.
And so he did.
The door opened with the sound of breath held too long. Mist slithered across the ground like spilled ink, curling around his ankles, soaking into his shoes. The trees rose above him in strange silence, their branches interlocked like a canopy made from bones. The light above was a dull, silver-gray filtered through ash. He walked with the caution of someone who knew he didn't belong, not here, not now, not ever.
He passed birds with eyeless sockets. Squirrels with two tails that didn't flinch when he came near. A mossy stone pillar that vibrated softly when he passed, like it was registering his presence.
Still—no wolves.
A fragile breath of hope formed in his chest.
Then—click.
A dry, rhythmic tapping. Click-click. From behind. Then beside. Then ahead.
He froze.
It crawled into view—limbs too long, too many joints, skin pale and stretched like plastic wrap over a skeleton that hadn't finished forming. It moved like it had never learned how to use a body.
Then it screamed.
The noise was unbearable. Piercing. A siren of flesh.
Kaito dropped, hands over his ears, body shuddering.
"STOP—please, stop!"
But it didn't.
It lunged.
He rolled, grabbed what looked like a branch—and swung.
The impact cracked through his arms.
He struck again.
And again.
Until it stopped moving.
And then the branch twitched in his grip.
Not a branch.
Another creature.
Curled.
Waiting.
He dropped it with a cry.
Then the system responded:
> [Strength +1]
But there was no time to think.
Because the forest screamed back.
Dozens of voices.
Dozens of them coming.
He ran.
Through roots and fog and tearing branches.
They caught him in the clearing.
Dragged him down.
Bit.
Clawed.
Shredded.
He screamed.
Begged.
Cried.
"I DON'T WANT TO DIE AGAIN!"
But no one came.
Not his mother.
Not Aiko.
No one.
And as the world faded, he remembered the feeling of being erased.
Then—nothing.
A gasp ripped him back.
He was in the house.
Whole.
Clean.
But broken.
He crawled to the wall and pressed his forehead against it.
Didn't cry.
Didn't speak.
Until the chime came:
> [Stats Reset – Strength: 0]
He laughed. One dry breath.
"No skills. No inventory. No magic. No health bar."
A pause.
Then quietly, bitterly:
"…Guess I'm not the main character."
And somewhere deep in the trees, the clicking began again.