Chapter 35: The Architecture of a Broken World
The digital clock on Kaguro's bedside table glowed a relentless 3:17 AM. The number was a mockery. Time had become a fluid, untrustworthy concept, its rigid structure in this world a flimsy facade over the temporal chaos he had experienced. He wasn't sleeping. Sleep was a treacherous gateway where the sterile smell of his room would dissolve into the ozone-and-blood scent of the battlefield, where the soft hum of his computer fan would warp into Entity 404's distorted, chanting voice.
His phone, a cold rectangle of light in the darkness, was his only tether. The Telegram group chat, once a vibrant artery of their friendship, had been reduced to a nocturnal sanatorium, a ward for the psychologically convalescent. The messages that appeared were not conversations; they were vital signs, proof that other hearts were still beating in the same isolating silence.
Kashimo: The ceiling. I keep counting the stitches in the textured plaster. 144. I first counted them during the third match of the tournament, in the lull between Nagumo's failed lunge and my counter-strike. The 144th stitch has a small crack that branches like a lightning bolt. When the warrior with the Momo grin charged, my eyes were locked on that crack. Its concrete reality felt more solid, more true, than the blade coming for my face. The doctors say hyper-fixation on mundane details is a common trauma response. They don't understand. It's not a response. It's an anchor. It's the only thing in this world that has a 1:1 correlation with a point in that one.
The response from Bachi was immediate, a ghost replying to a ghost.
Bachi: They showed me the X-ray of my ribs today. The doctor pointed to a faint, white line on the film. 'A well-healed fracture from a past fall,' he said. He used a laser pointer. It was so clean, so sterile. But I remember the exact, wet-crunch sensation of the bone giving way when Jamie tackled me in the eleventh minute. I remember the specific, searing heat that flooded my side, a heat that had nothing to do with inflammation and everything to do with survival. You can't hallucinate a somatic memory like that. You can't phantom a sound your own body makes when it breaks. The X-ray is the lie. The memory is the fact.
Kamiko: Alan's screams just woke the neighbors again. 3:04 AM. A new record. He said Michelle was standing at the foot of his bed, not with a knife, but with the hydrochloric acid bottle, just pouring it slowly onto the floor, the sizzling burn creeping towards him. It was his overturned glass of water, soaking into the carpet. I had to hold him for twenty minutes before the shaking stopped. The people in the apartment below pounded on their ceiling. A complaint for noise. A complaint against a nightmare. How do you file a noise complaint against a ghost? How do you explain that the real disturbance isn't the sound, but the silence that follows, when he looks at me and I see the unspoken question: 'Did you see her too?'
Kaguro: My hands. They won't stop. I tried to drink a glass of water and the tumbler chattered against my teeth so hard I thought they'd crack. My reflection in the black window looks like a stranger being electrocuted. It's not 'lingering shock' or 'anxiety.' It's the ghost of the knife. After I stabbed Ryosei the final, thirty-sixth time, the handle was vibrating in my grip with a life of its own, a resonant frequency of death. My neuromuscular system remembers that frequency. My body is an instrument that was played by a demon, and now it can't forget the tune. This tremor is the echo.
A long, digital silence stretched out, a void in the chat. Then, Alan's message appeared, each word a fragile, trembling thing.
Alan: What if they're right? What if Johnson was just a bad man and our brains, together, built a cathedral of demons and realms to explain it? A shared sanctuary of madness. What if this… this quiet street, this normal food, this boring, predictable world… is the real one, and we are just five broken things, too shattered to fit back into the mold? What if we are, finally, just… ill?
The silence that followed was heavier than any that had come before. It was the silence of a foundation cracking. Alan had given voice to the most insidious terror, the one that didn't come with claws and teeth, but with a doctor's soothing tone and a prescription pad. The terror that the cage was not around them, but inside them.
Kaguro: No. The architecture is wrong. A traumatized brain simplifies. It creates monsters from shadows, it anthropomorphizes fear. It does not invent Entity 404's chant. I've analyzed the phonetic structure. It follows a recursive Fibonacci sequence woven into a base-7 syntactic framework, with a cadence that mirrors cosmic background radiation patterns. A brain under duress does not fabricate complex, non-human mathematical linguistics. It doesn't design a coherent, alternative physics. It screams. We weren't given a nightmare, Alan. We were given a user manual to a reality we weren't supposed to see. We were shown the source code.
Bachi: The bear. The courtroom. Johnson's broadcast. The feel of his jaw breaking under my fist. They were all real. They happened here, in this world, before the realms. This is the continuum. We are the constant. We are the only real things in a universe that has collectively decided to pretend it's all a dream. The misconception is not our experience. The misconception is their reality.
The chat died after that. Words had failed. They were five separate event horizons, collapsing in on themselves in the same vast, empty space, their gravitational pull only felt by each other, unable to prevent the inevitable crush.
---
The official end of their old lives was announced not with a sympathetic phone call or a visit from a caring adult, but through the cold, impersonal medium of a midday news bulletin.
Kaguro had left the TV on for the noise, a buffer against the silence in his head. He was on the floor, the components of a dismantled digital alarm clock spread around him like the entrails of a mechanical bird. Wires, resistors, the tiny quartz crystal heart of the device. He was tracing circuits, not to fix it, but to confirm a hypothesis—that the order he found there was just a surface-level lie.
On the screen, Chief Inspector Kojiro sat at a press conference table, his face a mask of practiced gravitas. Flanking him were the school principal, Mr. Yamada, who looked profoundly uncomfortable, and a woman from the district health authority with a stern, unyielding expression.
"After a thorough and exhaustive investigation," Kojiro read from a prepared statement, his voice a dull, bureaucratic drone, "this department, in consultation with child psychologists and the district health authority, has concluded its active inquiry into the disappearance of the five minors."
Kaguro's fingers, holding a tiny screwdriver, stilled.
"The evidence, including their own consistent testimony, the complete lack of any physical evidence of abduction or travel, and the psychological evaluations, points overwhelmingly to a severe, shared dissociative episode."
The word hung in the air. Dissociative. It sounded so clean, so clinical. It stripped the blood and the screaming and the feeling of Kashimo's lifeless body being resurrected into a neat, diagnostic box.
"The case of the unidentified male, Tarameki, remains open, though his testimony is considered unreliable due to his own compromised and unstable mental state."
He's the proof, Kaguro thought, a cold fury beginning to burn through the numbness. And they're calling him crazy to invalidate him. It's a logical fallacy. A circular argument.
The inspector looked up, his gaze scanning the room without seeing anyone. "Therefore, the district has decided to reclassify this matter. It is no longer a criminal investigation, but a public health issue. The relevant files will be sealed to protect the privacy of the children and their families. Our focus, and the focus of the community, must now be on ensuring these young men receive the long-term, specialized care and support they require to recover from this profound trauma."
The press conference ended. The channel cut back to the news desk, where a commentator began speculating on the pressures faced by modern youth. Kaguro reached for the remote and turned the TV off. The silence that rushed back in was absolute.
He looked at the disemboweled clock on his floor. The case was closed. They had been diagnosed, categorized, and filed away. The system's verdict was final: they were not witnesses to the extraordinary; they were victims of their own broken minds. The greatest magic trick the world had ever pulled was convincing itself that magic didn't exist, and that those who saw it were insane.
In a sterile office across the city, Dr. Akagi switched off the small TV on his bookshelf. He felt a sense of closure. Folie à Cinq. A shared psychotic disorder. It was a rare diagnosis, but it fit the facts. It was elegant. It explained the identical, fantastical stories, the lack of evidence, the trauma they had undoubtedly suffered at the hands of Johnson and the bear attack. Their minds, in a magnificent and tragic act of self-preservation, had built a collaborative fortress of delusion. He had said as much in his report. The press release had all but quoted him. The case was closed. A tragedy, not a mystery.
For the five of them, the closure of the case was not an end to their ordeal. It was the beginning of a new, more insidious one. It was a life sentence passed down not by a judge, but by consensus reality. They were now officially, irrevocably, mad.
---
The verdict of the world acted like a chemical agent, reacting differently with the unique composition of each of their minds, catalyzing a personalized form of collapse.
Kaguro: The Simulation Theorist
For Kaguro, the press conference was the final, irrefutable proof that logic and evidence were worthless currencies in this world. If a coherent, witnessed truth could be so easily dismissed and rewritten, then the framework of this reality was not based on truth at all. It was based on agreement. And he was no longer a party to that agreement.
His room became a laboratory for his despair. He didn't just take apart his clock. He dismantled everything he could—a radio, a laptop, a digital thermometer. He wasn't looking for how they worked; he was looking for the seams. He was convinced he would find a glitch, a line of code, a signature of the programmer.
"It's just a server," he would mutter to the empty room, his eyes wide and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. "A very stable, very boring server. The entities… they're the system administrators. The 'real world' is the default user interface. We… we saw the backend. We accessed the debug menu."
His perception began to warp. The flicker of a fluorescent light wasn't a faulty ballast; it was a rendering error. The way a bird outside his window would sometimes stutter in its flight path was a dropped frame. The white noise from his air conditioner was the hum of the server banks. He started speaking in low, frantic monologues about base realities and perceptual firewalls.
He tried to explain it to Bachi over the phone, his voice a rushed, desperate whisper. "Don't you see? They didn't 'cure' us. They patched the glitch! They forced a client-side update that overwrote our admin privileges. We're back in user mode, Bachi! We're trapped in the simulation, and we're the only ones who know it's a simulation!"
The world outside his window, with its cars and pedestrians and perfectly scheduled days, was no longer a society. It was non-player characters following a script. The terrifying beauty of it was its consistency. It was a prison so perfect, it looked like freedom. His mind, the very tool he had always relied on, had become a curse, showing him the bars on the cage that no one else could see.
Kashimo: The Corporeal Ghost
For Kashimo, the world's verdict was a physical annulment. Every punch he'd thrown, every blow he'd endured, every ounce of strength that had defined him—it was all rendered meaningless. The official story had declared his body a liar. The trembling in his hands was no longer a testament to survived battles; it was a symptom sheet in a medical file.
The anger was a live wire inside him, short-circuiting against the walls of his apartment. He would punch his mattress until his knuckles were raw, trying to feel a pain that was real, that was his. But the pain felt distant, muffled, as if he were feeling it through layers of padding. He was a phantom limb of his former self, aching with a sensation that, according to every authority, did not exist.
He found himself on his balcony more and more. Eleven stories up. The city sprawled below him, a tapestry of lights and lives that had already forgotten him, already rewritten his history. The wind at this height was a constant, pulling force. It whispered a simple, logical solution.
They say nothing happened, the wind seemed to whisper. They say the pain isn't real. Prove them wrong. Make a mark they can't ignore. Make a sound that can't be diagnosed.
He would grip the cold railing, his trembling hands making the metal vibrate. He'd lean forward, testing the balance. The drop was a siren's call, a final, definitive act that would bridge the gap between the truth in his bones and the lie of the world. It would be the most real thing he had ever done.
What held him back was not hope, or love, or fear of death. It was a memory. Not of a friend's voice, but of a physical sensation so vivid it overrode the present. The feeling of his knife sinking into the bear's matted fur, the jarring impact against bone, the hot spray of blood across his face. A memory so brutally, primally authentic that it anchored him to an existence this world denied. He was caught between the lie of living and the truth of dying, and the only thing keeping him in the lie was the ghost of a kill that never officially happened.
Alan: The Fading Echo
For Alan, the public diagnosis was a final confirmation of a lifelong sentence. He had always been a victim. Michelle had branded that truth into his skin. Johnson had tried to seal it with his own death. Now, the entire world was gathered around him, not to save him, but to gently, pityingly, confirm his role: the broken one. The fragile one. The one who needed to be protected from his own mind.
He stopped trying. The energy required to pretend, to perform wellness for the social workers who did home check-ins, to formulate answers for the kind, condescending voices on the telehealth therapy calls—it was more than he could muster. He retreated into a silence so deep it was a physical presence in Kamiko's house.
He spent days in his room, curled on his bed or sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He would stare for hours at the plastic mask he no longer had to wear. The surgeons had given him a new face, unblemished and ordinary. But he knew it was a lie. The real Alan, the one who had been burned by acid and betrayal, was the true face. This new one was the mask. He was a ghost haunting his own life, wearing the prosthetic skin of a boy who had died in another dimension.
Kamiko would bring him food, would sit with him in silence, would try to talk about mundane things—a new video game, a funny meme. Alan would nod, sometimes even offer a thin, ghost of a smile. But his eyes were empty. He was a radio receiver tuned to a frequency of static and memory, unable to pick up the signal of the present.
The world's disbelief had become a cocoon, and inside it, he was quietly dissolving. The fight was gone. The will to make them see, to make them believe, had evaporated. He was accepting the world's verdict because it was easier than fighting a war on two fronts—one against the monsters of his past, and another against the benevolent, smiling faces of his present who insisted the monsters were only in his head.
They were utterly surrounded. Not by the dramatic siege of reporters, which had thankfully faded, but by the gentle, smothering, absolute certainty of everyone—neighbors, teachers, doctors, the voice on the TV—that they were broken. The physical wounds from the tournaments and the realms had been healed by Entity 404's power. But the wounds inflicted by returning home, by this systematic invalidation, were septic, festering in the dark, quiet places of their minds.
The narrative had been set in immutable stone, broadcast on public airwaves and stamped on official documents: they were mad. The misconception, through sheer, overwhelming repetition, had successfully overwritten the truth.
And in the crushing, silent weight of that new reality, their minds turned in the only directions left to them. Kaguro towards a thing which takes away lives of people, kamiko towards a world , which was created by aliens and saw humans as a game , a hallucination , a simulation, Kashimo towards the gravitational pull of the abyss, and Alan towards a quiet, internal surrender. They were the sole curators of a truth that was too vast, too terrible, for their world to hold. And the weight of that solitary knowledge was breaking them down, atom by atom, into nothing more than the diagnosis they had been given. The consequences of the surreal world were no longer a memory. They were the terrible, unfolding present, a slow-motion collapse of five souls who had seen the architecture of creation and were now being gaslit by the wallpaper.