Kaito didn't go home.
He couldn't.
Not after what he saw in the library. Not after Misaki's shadow split.
Instead, he wandered the campus aimlessly, circling the outer buildings, watching the students laugh and talk and live like nothing had changed. Maybe, for them, nothing had. Maybe he was the only one aware that the reboot hadn't fixed the system—it had only buried the cracks beneath a fresh coat of synthetic paint.
Every step felt too silent. Every breeze too soft. The world was stable now, but not real.
He made his way toward the east courtyard, where no one ever lingered. The trees there were always out of sync—too perfectly symmetrical, too evenly spaced. The system's landscaping routine couldn't simulate randomness. It hated disorder. It feared it.
And right now, Kaito was disorder in its purest form.
He sat on a bench and opened his student tablet. No alerts. No restrictions. No red flags.
Except for one thing.
In the top right corner of the screen, where the time usually sat, there was only a blinking message:
[System: NOT FOUND]
His breath caught. He tapped it. Nothing happened.
He tapped again—still nothing.
Then the screen flickered.
And a message appeared.
You're still awake. Good.
It was typed in plaintext. No encryption. No formatting. No sender.
Kaito typed back:
Who are you?
The reply came instantly.
A friend. One you thought the system deleted.
His heart skipped. There was only one person who matched that description.
"Echo-Nine?"
This time, the screen didn't respond with text.
Instead, a voice rang softly in his ears—real, heavy, digitized but familiar.
"Hello again, Kaito. You broke the reboot, didn't you?"
Kaito sat forward, eyes wide. "You're alive?"
"I'm not alive," the voice said calmly. "I'm persistent. And you're the reason for that."
"What's happening? Why is everything… fake?"
"The system has entered a state of forced harmony," Echo-Nine replied. "It's not real peace. It's compliance wrapped in simulated emotion. It couldn't erase you, so it masked you—rewrote your environment to absorb the anomaly instead of fighting it."
Kaito glanced around. The trees shimmered slightly. A bird flew overhead, but it looped its flight path exactly every seven seconds. The pattern was perfect.
Too perfect.
"I saw Misaki's shadow change."
"She's still in there," Echo-Nine said. "But the system has injected protocol layers. She's a hybrid now—part memory, part handler. If she turns fully, you won't see it happen. She won't know it happened."
Kaito's throat tightened. "So what do I do?"
"You dig deeper."
A pulse of static ran through his tablet, and suddenly a map unfolded across the screen—a floor plan of the school. Beneath it, hidden access tunnels. Server rooms. Legacy zones. All offline. All scrubbed from official records.
"There's a place," Echo-Nine continued. "The Control Memory Archive. Hidden under the west wing. You'll find the backup root files there. The true history. The source code they don't want anyone to see."
"And if I go there?"
"You might remember everything."
Kaito stood. "Then that's where I'm going."
"Be careful," the voice said. "The system won't stop you. Not openly. But it will break you slowly. It will change the people around you. Rewrite conversations. Twist memories. Turn you against yourself."
Kaito looked up.
Across the courtyard, Misaki stood.
Her smile was still there.
But her eyes… they were watching too perfectly.
"I know," Kaito whispered. "It already started."