The sky above UFO Park was painfully clean today.
Too blue.
Too perfect.

I didn’t trust perfect skies anymore.

The moment my shoes touched the inner path,
the Source point inside my chest tightened—
not a pulse,
but a slow, steady pull
as if something deeper had noticed me first.

Patch stopped walking.
His tail rose straight up,
fur lifting one ripple at a time.

“Again…?”

I whispered it without meaning to.

Because the delay was back.

Not the small 0.1 seconds from the first days.
Not the unstable 0.15 from yesterday.

Today it hovered between 0.18 and 0.2—
the threshold Emilia once warned me about.

The air thickened.
A single leaf drifted sideways…
against the wind.

My fingertips went cold.

Something was pushing through the park again.

Up ahead, two joggers froze mid-stride.
Not literally frozen—
their movements just hesitated,
a single missing frame in the middle of reality.

Patch hissed softly.

He wasn’t looking at the joggers.
He was looking past them.

I followed his gaze.

A distortion shimmered over the middle grass field.
Small.
Weak.
Like someone folding a shadow the wrong way.

“Not again…”

But this time, it didn’t open.
It pressed inward
then snapped back like elastic.

The Source point inside me jumped,
forcing a breath out of my lungs.

Then—

“Jeff!”

Emilia’s voice cut across the field.

She rushed toward me,
eyes sharp,
expression darker than I’d ever seen.

“You felt that,” she said.
Not a question.

I nodded.

Her gaze shifted to the middle of the park.
Even if nothing was visible now,
she clearly read something in the air.

“The structure here is weakening,” she said quietly.
“Not collapsing…
not yet.
But close to the threshold.”

She crouched, brushed her fingers over the ground—
and a faint ripple spread from her touch.

Patch instantly hid behind my leg.

Emilia exhaled once.

“Jeff…
your readings are spiking with the park’s fluctuations.”

I blinked.
“…Is that bad?”

She didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, she looked at my chest—
right where the Source point flickered under my skin.

“Your delay is stabilizing at 0.2,” she murmured.
“That’s not normal for someone who hasn’t awakened.”

My heart jumped.

“…Awakened?”

Her brow tightened.

“Don’t force anything.
Not here.
This place reacts to you.”

To me?
That didn’t make sense.
This whole city had been tearing at its seams long before I arrived.

But Emilia kept staring at the empty air
as if reading something I couldn’t see.

“Whatever is coming next,” she said softly,
“UFO Park will be the first place to show it.”

Patch pressed against my ankle, trembling.

I realized then—
he wasn’t scared of the distortion.

He was scared of me.

Or rather—
the thing inside me that was finally waking up.

Far away, in a dim ARC monitoring room,
a dozen screens flickered at once.

Two readings pulsed in sync:

B-87 (Reawakened – Bratislava Sector)
B-39 (Unclassified Source – Instability Rising)

A silver-framed man leaned closer, whispering:

“…B-39 is responding to spatial stressors earlier than projected.”

He tapped a command.

A new director’s note appeared:

Observation only.
No contact.
Maintain 300-meter distance.

The man pushed his glasses higher.

“Your timing is changing, B-39…
and the park is changing with you.”

The screens hummed.

The Bratislava map glowed.

Something was approaching the threshold.

And Jeff—
whether he realized it or not—
was already standing at the center of it.