Night fell fast.
Too fast.
The moment Kaito stepped out of his dorm room, the world dimmed unnaturally, as if the system had accelerated the sun's cycle to herd him like a pawn. The corridors were empty. Every camera he passed turned away just before he entered frame. Every door he pushed open was already unlocked. Almost like it wanted him to go.
That was the worst part.
The school wasn't trying to stop him.
It was guiding him.
Just like Echo-Nine said—it wouldn't kill him. It would break him in ways even he wouldn't notice. Piece by piece. Thought by thought.
He reached the west wing at 22:09. The outer hallway lights flickered, revealing worn paint and broken floor tiles that the system had stopped rendering properly. No students came here. Not anymore. This was dead code—abandoned sectors overwritten in public memory.
He followed the map Echo-Nine had injected into his tablet, pacing 28 steps from the janitor's closet to a rusted door that didn't appear in any official building scans. He knocked once.
It opened by itself.
Cold air greeted him like a whisper from another time.
The stairs led down—narrow, metallic, steep. No lights. No rail. Only the glow from his tablet illuminating dusty wiring and centuries-old concrete.
Each step felt heavier than the last.
And then he saw it.
A hallway filled with old servers—tall, humming towers coated in dust and tape, blinking with outdated diodes. No AI. No holograms. Just real, analog data storage. Rows of machines older than his generation, each labeled in hand-scrawled tags:
"Memory: Sector A1 — 2001–2033"
"Archive: Curriculum Root v4"
"ID Seed Base: Civilian Batch 998-A"
"Emotional Behavior Frameworks – BETA"
Kaito stepped deeper.
A terminal waited at the end—its screen dark, keyboard faded, the casing cracked and yellowed. But when he touched it, it hummed awake.
Text scrolled across the display.
"WELCOME TO CONTROL ARCHIVE 07.
CREDENTIALS REQUIRED."
He hesitated.
Then typed:
Kaito Arasaka
The cursor blinked.
Then:
"ACCESS DENIED – ENTITY FLAGGED: UNSUPPORTED FORMAT."
"RE-ROUTING THROUGH GUEST LAYER."
The system didn't stop him.
It rerouted him.
The screen glitched.
And then everything changed.
The archive terminal exploded in light, and Kaito was no longer standing in the dusty hallway.
He was in a memory.
A classroom. Old desks. Analog blackboard. Real paper notebooks. Children laughed in the background. No overlays. No scores. No behavior charts. No system.
He stood by the window—only he was smaller. Younger.
It was him.
Kaito as a child.
Unscanned. Unregistered.
Human.
Then a voice echoed, distant, familiar.
His father.
"You're not like the others, Kaito. You weren't born into it. You were rescued from it. Someday, the system will come for you, and when it does… you'll need to remember who you were before it told you who to be."
The scene flickered.
A shadow moved in the back of the classroom. Misaki? No—something wearing her face.
And then, as if pulled by a violent thread, Kaito was yanked out of the memory and back into the archive hallway. Gasping. Drenched in cold sweat.
The screen now displayed new text:
"DO YOU REMEMBER NOW?"
He typed back, trembling:
Why did they erase it? Why me?
The screen replied:
"BECAUSE YOU AREN'T A GLITCH. YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL."
The servers buzzed louder. Lights flickered.
Far down the hall, footsteps.
Not his.
Not alone.
The system had found him.