So. I died again.
I know how that sounds. Bear with me.
I woke up gasping, soaked in sweat, my heart going like it wanted out of my chest — and for one stupid second I could still feel the teeth in my shoulder. Then it faded, the way it always does, and I just lay there staring at the crack in my ceiling, waiting for my hands to stop shaking.
"...Alive again, huh."
Yeah. Alive again. Because here's the thing nobody knows about me: I die in my dreams. A lot. And every single time, I don't die alone — the whole world goes down with me.
First it was earthquakes. Cities folding up like cardboard, the ground just opening under my feet. Then a tsunami — and I don't mean a big wave, I mean a black wall of water taller than the skyline, and me running uphill the whole time knowing it wasn't going to be enough. After that, nuclear winter, which is exactly as fun as it sounds: radiation, starvation, dying slow. And last night? Zombies. Classic. I almost respected it.
You'd think you'd get used to dying. You don't.
I dragged myself up and went to the mirror, mostly to remind myself who I was.
Young guy, early twenties. A little too skinny. Eyes that have clearly given up on the whole concept of sleep.
"Kim Junha," I told the mirror. "Twenty-one. Studying medicine and mechanical engineering."
Both, yeah. People always go, how? And honestly? It's kind of cheating.
See, everything I learn in those dreams — it sticks. Like glue. I've done surgery in a field hospital that doesn't exist. I've rebuilt engines out of scrap in a world that already ended. So when a professor stands up and starts explaining something, I'm not really learning it.
I'm just... remembering it.
Great for my grades. Terrible for my sleep schedule.
I didn't go back to bed. I never do.
Instead I hit the floor — push-ups, then pull-ups on the bar I bolted into my doorframe — counting under my breath until the dream finally burned out of my arms. People who see me do this think I'm just disciplined.
I'm not disciplined. I'm scared.
Because somewhere along the way I stopped thinking the dreams were random. They're not. They're a warning. One day this world ends for real, and when it does, I am not going to be the guy who skipped leg day.
Showered, dressed, headed out.
I almost made it to the gate before it happened.
"Hey! Junha — do you remember me?"
I shut my eyes. Please. Not her. Not this early. Every. Single. Morning.
I turned around anyway. "...Hi, Lisa."
She was already walking next to me like she'd been there the whole time — way too cheerful, way too good-looking for, what, barely 8 a.m. That's Lisa. Childhood friend. Lives next door. Followed me from nursery all the way through high school and then, somehow, into the same university and the same exact major.
"How do you always find me first?" I said. Didn't even try to sound nice. "Seriously. Do you not have anywhere else to be?"
"Aw, come on." And there it was — that little grin. The one that always makes me feel like she knows something I don't and is having a great time about it. "Is that any way to talk to your only childhood friend?"
Only is the whole problem, I thought. How am I supposed to ever get a girlfriend with you welded to my side twenty-four hours a day?
I didn't say it. I figured that out around age twelve: say anything to Lisa, and she just doubles down.
We split off at the hallway, each to our own lecture.
I'd barely stepped through the door when —
"Yo! Rolling in with Lisa again? Lucky bastard."
Lee Seojin. Sprawled across the back row like he paid rent on it — which, knowing his family, he basically could. Good-looking, just buff enough to be smug about it, surrounded as usual by a little fan club hanging on his every word.
I dropped into the seat next to him. "I'm not the one with a fan club, Seojin. That's a you thing."
He grabbed his chest like I'd shot him. The girls laughed.
Tycoon's kid. Old money. The kind of guy doors open for before he even knocks. We've been friends since high school — the broke scholarship kid and the heir. Makes zero sense on paper. Works anyway.
I was about to fire back when the class monitor stood up and clapped for everyone's attention.
"Listen up — full campus assembly in thirty minutes. Mandatory. Everyone down to the main grounds."
Groaning. Chairs scraping. A mandatory assembly meant standing around in the sun while the administration talked at us. I grabbed my bag, annoyed, figuring the worst thing about my day was going to be a wasted morning.
Yeah. About that.
The grounds filled up slow — hundreds of us spreading across the square, the dean and the senior faculty up on the platform at the front. A mic squealed. Somewhere a professor cleared his throat to start.
He didn't get a single word out.
The light hit first.
It just... appeared. Up over the crowd, out of nowhere — this huge screen of pure gold light, hanging in the air where nothing should be able to hang, so bright I flinched and threw a hand up. It wasn't projected on anything. It was just there, floating over thousands of faces, and I swear I could feel it humming in my teeth.
Then the words burned across it. Letters of molten gold, branded straight into the morning sky:
[ World damnation begins in the following few days. ]
For one second, the whole campus went dead quiet.
And me? I went cold.
Because I knew that feeling. I knew it the way you know a smell from when you were a kid — instant, total, no arguing with it. It was the exact same dread that hit at the start of every dream. Right before the ground split. Right before the water came. Right before the first scream.
I turned my head, slow.
Lisa was staring up at the screen, grin gone, face white as paper. Seojin was halfway out of his seat, mouth open, every drop of that cocky energy just... gone. The three of us looked at each other — and in that one look was a question none of us wanted to be the first one to say.
Then the screaming started.
All at once. Hundreds of voices cracking into panic, people shoving in every direction, the whole square coming apart underneath that calm, glowing, golden sentence that would not go away.
And I just stood there in the middle of it, heart pounding, one thought going off in my head louder than all of it.
It wasn't a dream.
It was never just a dream.
— To be continued.