Logic was a shackle. Arata threw it off.
He ran, pulling the impossible girl behind him. The world was a strobing nightmare. One second, the pavement was solid beneath his feet; the next, it was a grid of glowing lines over a bottomless pit. The Eidolons' hum was a predator drone in his ears, a sound that eroded his sense of direction, his sense of self.
"Left here!" the girl gasped, her voice a broken compass.
He didn't question it. He swerved into a narrower alley, the walls bleeding pixelated rust. A trash can flickered, momentarily becoming a marble statue weeping black tears before resolving back into grimy plastic.
"Their perception is based on predictive algorithms," she stammered, her words cutting through the static in his mind. "Unpredictable movement... creates blind spots."
Arata's archivist mind, even in its panic, latched onto the terminology. Predictive algorithms. Blind spots. This wasn't the rambling of a traumatized victim. This was a systems diagnostic.
He risked a glance back. The two grey coats were gliding after them, untouched by the storm's chaos. The rain parted around them. One raised a hand again, and the fire escape above them rippled, its metal structure softening like wet clay before snapping back. A warning. A display of power that warped local reality.
He needed an advantage. A place the storm had scrambled beyond easy recognition. He needed a place he knew.
"The old cinema," he grunted, changing course, hauling her across a street where the traffic lights cycled through colors that didn't exist.
The Orpheum was a relic, its grand facade a ghost of itself. It had been scheduled for deletion a year ago, but its data-ghost was persistent, a strong echo. Tonight, with the Storm raging, it was more solid than it had been in a decade. The posters flickered between forgotten black-and-white films and screaming, glitched-out faces.
He shoved through a side door that was both rotting wood and solid light, pulling her into the cavernous, dark hall. The air was thick with the smell of dust and ozone. On the giant screen, a silent, distorted figure danced to a melody only it could hear.
"Get down," Arata whispered, pushing her behind a row of plush, crumbling seats.
He crouched, his heart hammering against his ribs. The hum was at the entrance. He could see their silhouettes in the doorway, backlit by the city's epileptic glow.
"Target acquisition unstable," one voice stated, flat and synthetic. "Local reality corruption: 34%. Recommend sensory purge."
"Authorization granted. Purge radius: 50 meters."
Arata's blood went cold. A sensory purge. They weren't just going to erase the memory of the girl. They were going to wipe the entire area from the Noosphere. Anyone and anything caught in it would become a non-event, a blank space in the world's memory.
He had seconds. His eyes darted around the cinema—the dusty projector, the frayed velvet ropes, the lingering echo of a thousand audiences. It was all data. And he was an Archivist.
He focused on a single, powerful memory-echo of this place: the collective gasp of an audience at a plot twist, the shared shock and delight. He pushed his will against the fabric of the simulation, not to rewrite it, but to amplify it. He was Error-0. A core instability. A glitch that could propagate.
The Eidolons stepped into the hall.
And the entire cinema screamed.
It wasn't a sound of terror, but of collective, vintage surprise. A wave of pure, emotional data erupted from the seats, the screen, the very dust motes in the air. It was a memory made weapon.
The lead Eidolon staggered, its grey coat flickering. The purge command faltered. For a moment, they were not hunters, but confused patrons in a crowded theater.
"Now!" Arata grabbed the girl's hand and ran for the emergency exit at the back of the stage, not looking back.
They burst out into a back alley, the cacophony of the Storm a welcome chaos compared to the haunted silence of the Orpheum. He didn't stop running until they were three blocks away, sheltered under the groaning supports of a mag-lev train track.
He leaned against a concrete pillar, chest heaving, his mind reeling. He had just attacked NOKRA agents. He had used an echo as a weapon. He was a dead man.
The girl slumped against the opposite pillar, watching him. Her fractal eyes were wide, the swirling colors within them slower now, like a storm settling.
"Who are you?" Arata finally managed, his voice raw.
"They call me Yuiri," she said softly. "And you... you are the one who remembers the cracks." She looked down at his hands, then back to his face. "You can see the code, can't you? Just a little."
Arata stared at her. He thought of the phantom photograph in his apartment, the one that haunted the edge of his vision. He thought of the scanner's final message. ERROR-0.
"You said they were going to delete you," he said, the word tasting like ash. "Why?"
Yuiri hugged her knees to her chest, a gesture of profound vulnerability. "Because I remember the world before the last rewrite. I remember the sun that was yellow, not this sickly orange. I remember a song my mother sang." Her voice broke. "And according to the world they have built, my mother never existed."
She looked at him, and her gaze was a bottomless well of truth in a ocean of lies.
"They aren't just erasing me, Arata Kurogane. They are erasing the truth. And you... you are the only archive that hasn't been corrupted."
The weight of her words crushed the air from his lungs. The hunter had just become the repository. The archivist had become the most important file in the world.
And the system had just flagged him for deletion.
To be continued...