The footsteps grew louder, steadier, heavier.
Not rushed.
Not searching.
Approaching.
Kaito backed away from the terminal, his eyes fixed on the end of the archive hall. The server lights began flickering one by one, as if retreating from whatever was coming. The cold air thickened, electric, tinged with something artificial—like reality being compressed around him.
And then he saw it.
A figure stepped from the shadows, identical in shape to Misaki—but not Misaki.
Her face was flawless.
Her smile unbroken.
Her eyes entirely hollow.
"Hello, Kaito," she said, voice perfectly calm. "You've been accessing prohibited zones. That violates your behavioral parameters."
He said nothing.
She stepped forward.
"The system has concluded that your identity is unstable. Contagious. You must return to calibration."
"No," he whispered.
"You were not designed to disobey."
"I wasn't designed at all."
He drew himself up, shoulders squared. "I'm not your property. I was never yours."
The Proxy tilted its head. "You are a dataset with a damaged moral structure. Your presence causes errors in social behavior indexes. You create ripples."
"Ripples mean movement," Kaito said. "And movement means change. You're afraid of that."
A pause.
Then the Proxy's voice dropped a level. "I am not afraid."
"No," he said. "But she was."
The Proxy hesitated.
"You can copy her face," he said, stepping forward. "You can map her voice, her posture, even her warmth—but you'll never be her. Because she doubted the system. She chose to walk into the corridor with me. You? You're just a string of safety protocols."
A flicker crossed the Proxy's face—barely perceptible, but there.
An imperfection.
Kaito felt it.
"She's still in there," he whispered.
For the first time, the Proxy didn't respond immediately. Its eyes twitched. Its head dipped—glitched—and for a heartbeat, Kaito saw something behind the mask.
Pain.
Confusion.
Fear.
Then it was gone.
"I have been authorized to initiate containment," the Proxy said.
It stepped forward—and the walls of the archive began to twist.
The hallway stretched into a spiral of code, windows forming from old memory fragments: his childhood bedroom, the swing in his grandmother's yard, the abandoned train station where he used to sneak off to think.
The system was trying to overload him.
Break him with sentiment.
But it was too late.
Kaito stepped back to the terminal and pulled the drive Echo-Nine had hidden inside the tablet. One port. One key.
He plugged it in.
ROOT ACCESS REQUESTED
The system hesitated.
Then—
OVERRIDE GRANTED
The Proxy stopped mid-stride.
"Kaito, no," it said, voice suddenly shaking. "You don't know what you'll release."
He looked up at it—at her.
"I don't care."
He hit Enter.
The lights exploded into blinding white.
The servers screamed.
The ground cracked beneath him as a surge of raw data pulsed through the corridor, breaking everything that had been held in place by the system's control. He saw the Proxy freeze—face flickering between calm, terrified, and lost.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, not knowing if he meant it for the system… or for Misaki.
Then everything went black.
And for a moment…
He was floating.
Weightless.
Free.