Something was wrong with the world.
Not in the way things sometimes feel slightly off—the wrong color in a dream, or a sound that doesn't echo quite right—but in a deeper, more visceral sense. Reality was degrading.
It started small. Reflections that didn't match his movements. A delay between thought and breath. But soon, the distortions grew louder. He tried to speak someone's name and forgot the sound halfway through. Entire minutes went missing, then entire hours. At night, he'd wake up with phantom bruises, unsure if he had even slept.
Rin was glitching.
He felt it in his skin—like a second version of himself was trying to overwrite the first. People didn't see him unless he made them. Even then, it was like being remembered through a fog. His voice would trail off mid-sentence. His own memories came out scrambled, rearranged. He would close his eyes and see scenes that never happened. People he had never met. Languages he shouldn't know.
But Sera's pendant—warm against his chest, unchanging—remained a fixed point. A tether. He clung to it like a dying man to breath.
Kuro was gone. No warning, no farewell. Just the echo of betrayal lingering in the hallways where they'd planned rebellion. The silence screamed louder than any fight.
Left alone, Rin followed instinct. Not logic, not hope. Just a pull deep in his spine that said: go back.
Back to where it began.
The old library.
It should have been empty. But the second he stepped inside, he knew it wasn't. The air was dense, pressurized. Dust hovered mid-fall. Lights flickered in slow motion. Sound refused to bounce off the walls.
Something was watching him—but not from outside. From inside.
He ascended the staircase without counting steps, feet moving of their own accord. The space stretched unnaturally, like the library had become a living memory reacting to his presence.
At the top—he found the mirror.
It had cracked further since last time. Thin fractures spiderwebbed across its surface like a frozen scream. But what disturbed Rin more was the silence around it. It was the same kind of silence that preceded collapse.
He stared at his reflection.
And it didn't stare back.
Instead, her face began to emerge—behind the silver glass, through layers of flickering static. Not fully formed, not whole, but unmistakable.
Sera.
Her eyes found his.
She looked as if she was screaming without sound. Her mouth moved but no voice came through. Then, in the condensation creeping up the edges of the glass, words began to form—not written, but remembered:
"YOU'RE GLITCHING."
Her voice flooded his ears—not aloud, but inside, like someone whispering into the core of his brain.
"AND SO AM I."
His hand lifted. Pressed to the mirror. Her palm met his.
The glass rippled.
And then—
It broke.
Not shattered. Opened.
And pulled him in.
Not like stepping through a door. More like being dismantled. Like every cell in his body was being scanned, split, and archived before being allowed through.
Inside—
There was no light. No sound. Just a sea of suspended memories, drifting like jellyfish in an endless night.
He was falling. Not down—but inward.
Toward her.