Craving the alpha soldier のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 111 - チャプター 120

Tyla povI don’t know how long I’ve been gone.Time doesn’t announce itself where I am. It drifts. It pools. It moves when something inside me moves, and stalls when I do. I’ve learned not to measure it by anything external. There are no days here. No nights. Just sequences of attention.I wake—not from sleep, exactly, but from stillness—and the first thing I notice is that I am not required anywhere.That absence of requirement still startles me.Once, every moment carried weight. Every breath was a calculation. Every choice threatened consequences. I was useful because I was necessary, and I was necessary because the world refused to function without intervention. Or so it seemed. It took leaving to understand how much of that was assumption.Here, nothing is asking me to decide.I exist without urgency. Without oversight. Without consequence beyond myself. It is not peace. Peace implies resolution. This is something looser. An open condition.I move through a landscape that resists

Arthur povI used to believe that endings were a form of mercy.A clean stop. A final accounting. The relief of knowing that no further decisions would be required. That belief shaped more of my thinking than I realized. I pursued conclusions the way others pursued shelter—instinctively, defensively, convinced that exposure was the real danger.What I understand now is that endings are only merciful to those who don’t have to live with what follows.Here, there is no follow.There is continuation without sequence, experience without culmination. Not stasis—nothing here is frozen—but movement without destination. It would have unnerved the earlier version of me. I was uncomfortable unless I could trace a line from cause to effect, from intention to outcome.That line rarely exists.I think back to the moment we decided to leave. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no pronouncement, no sense of crossing a threshold. The decision emerged the way fatigue does—quietly, after being ignored too lo

What Remains OpenNo one remembers the moment when the world almost became complete.That kind of thing only shows itself in retrospect, and even then, only partially. Completion does not arrive with spectacle. It arrives quietly, through accumulation—rules that stop being questioned, answers that stop being provisional, power that stops apologizing for itself. By the time people realize what has happened, the doors have already narrowed.This time, the narrowing does not finish.Not everywhere. Not entirely.The world moves forward the way it always has: unevenly, unjustly, propelled by habit as much as intention. There are wars. There are treaties that pretend to end them. There are technologies that promise clarity and deliver dependency instead. There are leaders who mistake momentum for mandate and citizens who mistake exhaustion for consent.Nothing here is ideal.What is different is subtle enough to be deniable.When systems overreach, they are no longer universally admired. W

Residual MotionThere is a moment after force is withdrawn when its effects are still visible.The shape remains impressive . The direction lingers. Momentum carries forward without instruction. This is the most deceptive interval—the one that convinces observers that nothing has changed, that removal made no difference, that the system is stable on its own.It is only later, when the motion begins to diverge, that absence reveals itself as influence.The world enters that phase unevenly.In some regions, institutions function for years on inherited momentum. Procedures are followed. Roles are filled. Authority is respected out of habit rather than belief. On paper, nothing is wrong. Reports look normal. Outputs meet expectations.Underneath, the logic that once justified those structures has thinned.People comply because they know how, not because they are convinced they should.That distinction matters when stress arrives.In one such system, a crisis exposes the difference. The ru

Tyla POVThe air smelled of damp stone and old wood. I traced my fingers along the edge of the railing, letting the grain press against my skin, letting it anchor me to something physical while the rest of the world swirled in uncertainty. There was a rhythm to this place that existed outside of time, outside of expectation. I had arrived here not knowing why I felt drawn, and perhaps I would leave still unaware. That, somehow, felt sufficient.I moved through the corridors slowly, each step measured. My eyes caught on the small details: a crack in the plaster, a stubborn vine growing along the windowpane, a single candle that refused to die. These things did not matter, and yet they mattered. They were the proof that life continued. Life did not always require explanation. It required attention.I paused at a doorway and listened. There was nothing but the sound of my own breath and the distant, irregular hum of the world beyond. The hum that never ceased. I let it settle inside me,