Noticing Trizha abruptly seizing up, Wyne's momentum died instantly.
She abandoned her playful pursuit of Zackier, her chest tightening as she turned back to her friend.
The Trizha standing before her was unrecognizable.
A cold, oily sweat had broken out across Trizha's forehead, matting her blonde hair to her skin.
Her pupils were blown wide, vibrating with a rhythmic tremor, and she was panting—short, jagged gasps that sounded like someone drowning on dry land.
She clutched at her chest, her fingers digging into her shirt over her heart as if trying to physically hold her ribcage together.
It wasn't just panic.
To Wyne, it looked as though Trizha had just been struck by the weight of a generational trauma, a mental collapse so sudden and violent it had bypassed all her natural defenses.
"What was that... who was that...?!"
Trizha's internal monologue was a screaming static.
"Why is my heart thrashing like a caged animal? Why can't I stop shaking?"
Wyne scrambled back to her, reaching out but hesitating to touch her, afraid she might shatter.
She had known Trizha since they were children—she knew every mood, every dramatic flare-up, and every genuine fear.
But she had never seen this.
This was an anomaly.
Deep in her gut, Wyne felt a chill; she felt as though the "fate" they were currently walking was never supposed to include this moment.
It was as if Trizha had peered through a crack in the universe and seen something forbidden.
"Trizha? Trizha, look at me!" Wyne's voice was frantic as she moved into Trizha's line of sight. "You're okay. You're right here. Come on, take a deep breath with me. In and out... just breathe!"
「I've been with her my entire life, Wyne thought, her mind racing through years of memories to find a precedent for this. She's never had a seizure, never had a heart condition... there wasn't even a time she acted like this! This is too severe!」
Wyne began patting Trizha's back with increasing urgency, terrified that her friend was actually choking on the very air she was gasping for.
Slowly—agonizingly so—the storm began to recede.
Trizha's breathing leveled out, the frantic heaving of her chest subsiding into a shaky rhythm.
She stood up straight by degrees, her gaze darting around the alley with a hollow, disoriented look. It took several long seconds before her eyes finally locked onto Wyne's face.
Then, the strangest thing happened.
That sharp, jagged glimpse of the "person" from the black-out began to dissolve.
It didn't just fade; it was as if an eraser was moving through her mind, scrubbing the data clean.
As the memory vanished, the terror vanished with it. A forced, slightly wobbly smile stretched across Trizha's face.
"Are... are you actually okay?" Wyne asked, her voice hushed, her hands still hovering near Trizha's shoulders. "Like, for real?"
"Yeah… Y-yeah!" Trizha chirped, though her voice was still a bit thin. She wiped the sweat from her brow with a sleeve. "I'm just... whew! I think I'm a little more exhausted than I realized after all that running and goldfish-scooping."
"Trizha, stop," Wyne said, her eyes narrowing in disbelief. "I know what exhaustion looks like. People don't look like they're having a heart attack because they ran fifty yards. That was something else."
Trizha reached out and patted Wyne's shoulder, letting out a small, breezy chuckle that sounded a bit too practiced.
"Oh, don't worry about it!" Trizha insisted, her confidence returning as the mental erasure completed its work. "That was just my way of being dramatic! I was just exaggerating so I could get your attention... you know, to make the day more 'memorable' and get a reaction out of you. You know how I am!"
"You... you were faking it?" Wyne asked. She wanted to be angry, but mostly she felt a bizarre sense of relief. "I hate to admit it, but damn, you're getting too good at that. I actually thought you were dying! Those were some Oscar-level acting skills just now."
Those words.
As fake as Trizha is.
"Haha, right?" Trizha said, her smile becoming more natural as she successfully convinced herself of her own lie. "Anyway, let's not waste time. We need to find Zack. Margaret is probably already chewing him out for disappearing."
Wyne nodded, offering a small, tired smile.
She turned around to lead the way, following the path Margaret had taken. Part of her didn't want to believe Trizha's "acting" excuse, but the alternative—that Trizha was losing her mind—was too scary to entertain.
Unknown to Wyne, Trizha truly believed her own words now.
Because the memory of the black-out was gone, Trizha's mind had filled the gap with the only logical explanation it could find: she was just being herself.
She was just being extra.
The two emerged from the narrow alleyway, their faces scrubbed clean of the previous tension.
As they stepped out into the wider clearing, Wyne spotted Margaret standing a short distance away.
She wasn't with Zackier.
She was standing perfectly still, her arms crossed over her chest, staring back at them with her usual neutral gaze.
"What took you two so long?" Margaret asked, her voice flat as ever.
"Sorry," Wyne groaned, throwing an annoyed glare over her shoulder. "I just had to check on this 'idiot' who decided to waste my time with a fake health crisis."
Trizha rubbed the back of her head, offering a nervously playful grin and a sheepish snicker. "Hehe, sorry about that..."
Wyne let out a long, theatrical sigh before turning her full attention back to Margaret. "Also, did you find him? Did you find Zackier?"
"I'm not entirely sure," Margaret replied, her eyes drifting toward a structure in the distance. "But I'm fairly certain he entered the Mirror Maze house."
Margaret pointed her finger toward a massive, shimmering building at the end of the promenade.
The most striking thing about it wasn't the architecture, but the space around it.
For thirty meters in every direction, there was absolutely nothing—no stalls, no benches, no trees.
Just a vast, empty expanse of flat ground leading to the entrance.
"Huh, that's weird," Wyne said, squinting as she studied the layout. "I know they wanted this to be the center of the park, but this is some intense world-building. Why did they clear out so much space around it?"
Wyne put her hands on her hips, trying to rationalize the design.
She eventually shrugged, assuming Yuri Calypso had probably ordered the "dead zone" just to make the building look more imposing.
Meanwhile, Trizha was standing a few feet away, her attention caught by a pair of students nearby who were also staring at the empty plaza with baffled expressions.
"Nah, man, I'm telling you," the first student whispered, shaking his head. "There were definitely buildings and snack stands around this area earlier. I remember a takoyaki stand right there."
"What are you talking about?" the second student replied, sounding genuinely concerned for his friend. "It's been an empty plaza all day. Are you becoming delusional from the heat?"
"Maybe?" the first student muttered. "But it feels wrong. I could've sworn... I think it was that weird black, split-second thing that happened. Maybe it did something to the area? I'm just speaking hypothetically or theoretically something, of course."
"Black split-second what?" the second student asked, laughing it off.
Trizha listened, her body tensing instinctively.
The phrase black split-second sent a jolt through her, a phantom echo of the terror she had just felt.
But as she tried to connect the feeling to a memory, she found nothing.
"What is he talking about?"
Trizha thought, shrugging off the sensation as if it were nothing more than a sudden cold breeze.
She turned her gaze back to where her friends had been standing, but her heart skipped a beat.
The spot was empty.
In the few seconds she had spent eavesdropping, Wyne and Margaret had vanished. She looked left, then right, her expression shifting to one of indescribable lostness.
"Wha—! Where did they go?!" she whispered to herself.
Trizha began to call out their names, her voice rising into a shout as she started to run. She crossed the invisible boundary of the thirty-meter "nothing" zone, heading toward the shimmering glass of the Mirror Maze.
She was so focused on her own panic that she didn't notice the other students.
From every alleyway and connecting path, more and more visitors were emerging into the empty zone.
They weren't following her; they were being drawn toward the structure by a force none of them understood.
In the grand design of the world, some changes happen naturally, some for the better. But others... were never meant to happen.
Unprecedented occurrences.
"Interruptions" that should have never existed.
And if anything-they're rather disturbing.
And in this instance, the "Mirror" was already beginning to crack.
Multiple major events were bleeding into the present, occurring far earlier than the story intended.
These were climactic forces, arriving before their time.
In other words; major events supposedly only happening during a near-climax are already making their way in.