The deafening roar of the explosion still echoed in my ears, the searing heat of the flames a phantom pain on my skin. Airi's final scream, her terrified face engulfed by the inferno in my own home—it was burned into my mind, a permanent scar across the fabric of every timeline. I had fought. I had tried everything. And death, this relentless, adaptive force, had simply found a new, horrifying, utterly inescapable way.
It was around 7:00 PM when my house exploded. My hand, trembling, found my burner phone. The E.R.I.S icon glowed, a malevolent eye in the chaos.
Tap. CONFIRM.
The WHUMMMM was no longer just a sound; it was a physical tearing, a ripping sensation through my very being. The blazing inferno around me warped and twisted, collapsing back into itself, pixels dissolving and reforming. The acrid smell of gas vanished, replaced by the stale air of my messy bedroom. I blinked, my eyes gritty, my body aching as if I'd been through a physical grinder. I was here. Back in my room, exactly 24 hours earlier: 7:00 PM yesterday. The familiar clutter, the towering monitors, the half-eaten ramen – all untouched, perfectly as they were before the future I'd just experienced.
I collapsed into my gaming chair, not bothering to move the scattered cans. My mind was a maelstrom of terror, grief, and a cold, surgical fury. The external battle was over. Diverting her, protecting her, hiding her – it was all pointless. E.R.I.S wasn't just a tool; it was an enforcement mechanism. And if I couldn't fight it from the outside, I had to crack it from the inside. The system. The core.
My vision narrowed, the world beyond my monitors fading into an irrelevant blur. School. Tanaka. Food. Sleep. All non-essential variables. My fingers, though still shaking, flew across the keyboard, a blur of motion as I initiated the most aggressive, most invasive hack I had ever attempted. I bypassed every firewall, every safeguard, every encrypted layer. I wasn't looking for a backdoor to the app; I was looking for the server, the source code, the very heart of the quantum AI itself.
Lines of complex algorithms cascaded across my multiple screens, a dizzying dance of binary and hexadecimal. I was brute-forcing E.R.I.S's own architecture, searching for its prime directives, its core protocols, its weaknesses. The hum of my high-end graphics cards strained under the load, a low, guttural moan that vibrated through the floorboards.
And then, it started. Subtle at first, like static on the edge of my perception.
The air in my room shimmered faintly, a barely visible ripple, as if the very atoms were momentarily out of alignment. An empty energy drink can on my desk briefly flickered, its metallic gleam momentarily replaced by a transparent void, then snapped back into solid form. I blinked, rubbing my eyes. Sleep deprivation, I told myself, my voice a hoarse whisper. Just seeing things.
But then, my reflection in the darkened monitor to my left stretched, a distorted, elongated face that was too thin, too angular, for a split second, before snapping back to normal. The ambient hum of my computers, usually a soothing drone, gained a discordant note, like a single violin string plucked slightly off-key. A sharp, piercing migraine lanced through my skull, making me wince, clutching my temples. This wasn't just my mind breaking; this was feedback. Direct, terrifying feedback from E.R.I.S's core as I attempted to breach it.
Hours passed, indistinguishable. Day turned to night, though the blinds remained drawn, the only light the phosphorescent glow of my screens. Tanaka probably called, probably texted, but my phone was dead, forgotten somewhere under a pile of energy drink cans. My world had shrunk to the glowing lines of code, the frantic whir of my machines, and the increasingly disturbing distortions manifesting around me.
Suddenly, a news alert flashed across a small window in my browser, a local headline. I barely registered it, my focus on a particularly stubborn encryption key. It was about a traffic accident on a quiet, residential street. A pedestrian. Female. Class 1-A. Airi Kuze. A slip-and-fall into the path of a slow-moving delivery truck, a mundane, almost unnoticeable death.
I didn't even flinch. My eyes remained glued to the lines of code. The "fixed point" didn't need my active interference anymore. It was happening in the background, a silent, relentless counter-protocol, ensuring Airi's demise, freeing me to continue my mad, desperate hack.
I just needed to go deeper. Past the glitches. Past the horror. Into the truth.