BREW

Elsewhere, in the Alter World...

Valen yawned as he pushed his cart down a cracked, glowing path. The sky here swirled in colors that didn't exist in the real world, and the air was thick with drifting motes. Not a single customer in sight.

He muttered under his breath, swiping dust off the "FREE SAMPLE" sign. "Where'd everyone go?" meeting Lenlen and Tuesday made him think that he would meet other people easier but he was wrong.

Looking into a paper cup, he sighed. "Can't believe I brewed a special mix today too. Salted honey-dark roast (it was just the left over salted brew he made earlier and added some honey in it), and not a soul to judge me."

He paused beside an overgrown lamppost, eyeing the small burlap pouch on his cart. Inside were raw coffee beans—strangely warm, faintly pulsing.

"To plant coffee beans, I just need anomaly residue and it'll sprout automatically… that's what the knowledge said," he mumbled, squinting at the cracked soil. "Then I drop a bit of blood, or it turns to ash."

He scratched his head. "Knowledge I got from that weird dream is definitely out of this world. But where would I even find an anomaly now?"

He kicked a pebble, glanced around the deserted landscape, then leaned against the cart and added flatly:

"Honestly, how's a guy supposed to start a coffee farm with no customers and no monsters?"

Somewhere in the distance, the ground made a soft cracking sound.

Valen didn't notice.

—Back in Reality

Silence followed the vanishing of the Janitor. Not peace—just absence. A hollow where something immense had been scrubbed from existence. No echo. No wind. No residual energy. Just stillness that pressed on the skin and dulled the senses.

Then came the aftermath.

The town felt thinner, as if reality itself had worn through in places. Half-remembered buildings flickered like fragments of dreams trying to retain form. Several Lucid agents staggered in the open streets, faces slack with confusion. Some tried to speak but forgot the words mid-sentence. Others stood in place, haunted by an emptiness they couldn't name.

Ran stood unmoving, fingers tightening around a sealing talisman that no longer glowed. His barrier array was still intact—barely. Beside him, Merry dropped to one knee, sweat and blood mixing as she gripped her twitching scissors. They vibrated faintly, as though still resisting whatever they had cut.

"It's gone," she muttered. Her voice was hoarse, distant. "But it doesn't feel like victory."

Ran's gaze stayed locked on the terrain. The black roots hadn't died. They had slithered back into the soil, like worms returning to their nest. Waiting.

From the edge of the battle-scarred town, Echo operatives began regrouping. Most were intact, but shaken. The once 15 elites was now 12 and yet they don't remember who left them.

One woman sat on the curb, holding an empty dog tag with both hands. "He was right here," she whispered. "He gave me backup. I—I don't even know what rank he was anymore. Or his name."

Nearby, a scout examined his own uniform, confusion dawning. "I… I had patches. And a nameplate. It's all gone. Even my comm logs are blank."

The support commander of Echo Unit-3 approached Ran and Merry. "We've lost track of casualties. We can't even verify how many civilians were in the radius. All traces—erased."

Ran inhaled sharply, then raised a new set of wards. Sigils burned briefly in the air before forming a dome around the main battleground. "This will keep the dream-contamination in check, but only for a day. Maybe less."

"The vines—" Merry pointed at the cracks in the concrete. Faint, almost invisible green tendrils flexed in the dark. "They weren't part of the Janitor. That's something else."

Ran's eyes narrowed. "They grew from inside it. Like it was a vessel. But for what?"

No one answered.

"We'll mark this zone as a Type-V anomaly breach," Echo-3's leader said. "Scramble a memory restoration crew. And prepare containment for long-term resonance collapse."

Merry stood fully, breathing hard. "Is that going to be enough?"

Ran didn't speak for a moment. Then: "If it starts growing again, we evacuate. There's no holding back something we can't name."

For now, the Janitor was gone.

But erasure always leaves a cost.