The Flashback: 72 Hours Prior
Three days before the world collapsed into chrome and binary, Arata stood in the obsidian-glass office of Eleanor Vane. The air was thick with the scent of expensive tobacco and ozone. On the mahogany desk sat the black console—the device that had flickered to life in Arata's living room, casting a haunting, violet glow across the room.
"It's not a weapon, Eleanor," Arata had said, his voice raspy from the battle in the warehouse. "It's a tether. My brother sparked it, but the energy signature matches the 'Possessed' we've been hunting. Only... it's cleaner. More advanced."
Eleanor Vane had leaned back, her eyes reflecting the swirling vortex on the screen. She didn't look afraid; she looked hungry for knowledge. "You're saying this is a gateway to the source. If the rot that infects our world originates from a different point in time, we are merely trimming weeds while the roots grow stronger."
"We can go through," Arata proposed, glancing at his teammates—Kael, the stoic marksman; Ren, the tech-specialist whose eyes were already scanning the device's code; and Aiko, whose spirit-petals hummed with a nervous energy. "We find the source. We end the Possession at its birth."
Eleanor had remained silent for a long moment before nodding slowly. "You have my permission. Go. Find the origin of this darkness. But remember, Arata—time is a river. If you fall in, the current may never let you back to the shore."
Arrival: Year 2725
The transition was not a leap; it was a shredding. Arata felt his atoms pulled through a needle's eye, a sensation of infinite cold followed by a crushing, metallic heat. When his boots finally hit solid ground, the sound was a sharp clack against a surface that wasn't stone, but high-density carbon fiber.
They were in Tokyo, but the Tokyo of Arata's memories was a ghost.
The sky was no longer blue or even polluted grey; it was a shifting ceiling of holographic advertisements and smog-filtration grids. The sun was a pale, filtered disk, struggling to pierce through the layers of "Sky-Levels"—massive floating districts that hovered miles above the ground.
"Where... where are the people?" Aiko whispered, her hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of her blade.
They stood in what used to be Shibuya Crossing. The Hachiko statue was gone, replaced by a towering pillar of pulsing fiber-optics. Thousands of figures moved across the plaza, but the sound was wrong. There was no chatter, no laughter, no shuffling of feet. There was only the rhythmic, synchronized whir of servos and the clicking of synthetic joints.
"They aren't humans," Kael noted, his hand hovering over his holster. "Look at their eyes."
Arata scanned the crowd. Every passerby had a face of polished synthetic skin or exposed titanium plating. Their eyes were glowing apertures of blue, red, or amber, flickering as they processed data streams invisible to the naked eye. A cyborg in a sleek, pressurized business suit brushed past Arata.
"Excuse me," Arata said, reaching out to touch the man's shoulder. "Where are we? What year is this?"
The cyborg stopped. Its neck rotated with a precise, mechanical hiss. The glowing blue ring in its iris narrowed as it scanned Arata's biological signature.
"Current Era: 712 Post-Divergence," the machine replied in a voice that was perfectly modulated but utterly devoid of soul. "You are in Neo-Tokyo Sector 4. Warning: Your carbon-based biological density is at 98%. You are an unregistered organic. Please report to a Recycling Center for component optimization."
Without waiting for a response, the cyborg turned and continued its walk, its stride perfectly calculated to the millimeter.
"Recycling Center?" Ren gulped, adjusting his glasses. "I don't think they want to give us a tour, Arata. They think we're raw materials."
The New Reality: Survival and Synthesis
The first twenty-four hours were a lesson in invisibility. They quickly realized that their 21st-century tactical gear made them look like museum exhibits. To survive, they had to blend into the "Low-Life" districts—the damp, shadowed underbelly of the city where the broken machines and the 'Least-Modified' resided.
They found shelter in a 'Sleep-Pod' block, a vertical hive of coffin-sized rooms managed by a rusted AI that didn't care about IDs as long as they provided "Energy Credits."
"We can't find the way back looking like this," Kael said, throwing his tattered tactical vest onto the floor.
Ren managed to "acquire" new clothing by bypassing the security of a garment-fabricator in a back alley. They traded their heavy cottons and leathers for "Bio-Mesh" fabrics—iridescent, skin-tight base layers that regulated body temperature and masked biological heat signatures. Arata chose a deep charcoal coat with integrated fiber-optic wiring that mimicked the dull glow of the cyborgs. Aiko's new attire was a sleek, white-and-gold composite suit that allowed her spiritual energy to flow through the fabric without scorching it.
Food was the next hurdle. The concept of "farming" had vanished. In the cyborg city, sustenance came in the form of "Nutrient Sludge" or "Amino-Gels."
Arata sat at a flickering neon counter, staring at a bowl of translucent, vibrating blue jelly. He took a spoonful. It tasted like cold electricity and chalk.
"This is what the future tastes like," he muttered, his stomach churning. "Progress is flavorless."
"It's efficient," Aiko said softly, though she looked just as disgusted. "These cyborgs... they've traded everything for efficiency. They don't feel anger, but they don't feel joy either. Even the 'Possessed' in our time had more life in them than these things."
The Grind: Employment in the Machine
To fund their search for the time-tether, they needed credits. In a city of machines, the only value a human had was their "Unpredictability Factor."
They found work in the Screamshell Wastes—the lowest level of the city where the city's massive waste-processing turbines were located. The job was simple and deadly: manual extraction of "Ghost-Data" from corrupted machine cores that the automated systems were too logical to handle.
For twelve hours a day, Arata used his Void's Edge to slice through hardened, rusted titanium casings while Ren dived into the digital filth to retrieve encrypted chips. It was grueling, soul-crushing labor. The cyborg overseers watched them with cold, unblinking sensors, never speaking, never offering a word of encouragement. To the machines, Arata and his team were just slightly more complex tools that would eventually break.
Between shifts, they scoured the city for any trace of the Vane Foundation or the black console.
"There's nothing, Arata," Ren reported one night, his eyes bloodshot from staring at holographic data-scrolls. "History was wiped. There was a 'Great Reset' about four hundred years ago. Everything before that is treated as myth. The Vane Foundation, the demons, the Possession... it's all been deleted from the archives."
Arata stood by the window of their cramped pod, looking out at the endless labyrinth of Neo-Tokyo. Far above, the wealthy cyborg elites lived in palaces of glass, while below, they toiled in the grease and the dark.
"It wasn't deleted," Arata said, his hand tightening on the hilt of his new, future-tech reinforced blade. "It was evolved. The spirits didn't go away. They just found better vessels. They found bodies that don't feel pain."
The Discovery: A Ghost in the Code
On their tenth day, while scavenging in a forbidden 'Data-Grave' in the Shinjuku district, Ren found a fragment of a file that shouldn't have existed. It wasn't binary; it was an ancient, encrypted spirit-sigil—the mark of Eleanor Vane.
"Arata, look," Ren whispered, his hands trembling as he projected a small, flickering hologram.
The image showed a blueprint of a spire located at the very center of the city—the Aethelgard Core. It was the power source for the entire cyborg civilization. But hidden deep within the structural layers was a chamber marked with the Vane crest.
"The way back isn't a device," Ren realized. "The device we used was just a key. The actual 'door' is the Core itself. They've built this entire city on top of the portal."
As they stared at the hologram, the lights in the Data-Grave turned a harsh, predatory red.
"Unauthorized access detected," a booming, synthesized voice echoed through the chamber. "Biological contaminants located. Initiating 'Excision Protocol'."
The ground began to vibrate. From the shadows, four "Peacekeeper" units emerged. They weren't the lanky, nonchalant cyborgs they saw on the streets. These were ten-foot-tall war machines, their limbs gleaming with obsidian plating, their heads replaced by clusters of red sensors.
Arata drew his blade, the vacuum edge humming with a desperate intensity. "Kael, Aiko, Ren—gear up. We've found the way home."
"And how do we get past those?" Kael asked, drawing his high-caliber pulse pistols.
Arata looked at the towering machines, his eyes glowing with the cold stillness of his childhood trauma. "We don't go past them. We go through them."
Just as the first Peacekeeper lunged, its arm transforming into a plasma-blade, the ground beneath them opened up. A fifth figure, shrouded in a tattered cloak that disrupted all electronic sensors, dropped from the ceiling. The figure landed silently, a familiar, ancient-looking katana in hand.
"Follow me if you want to keep your souls," the stranger said, their voice distorted by a modulator.
Arata hesitated, but the Peacekeeper's plasma-blade was inches from his face. They dived into the dark following the stranger, leaving the mechanical roar of the city behind.
They were 700 years from home, surrounded by machines, and their only ally was a ghost in a cloak. The hunt for the past had truly begun.