The hospital was quiet. Too quiet.
Machines hummed steadily. Curtains swayed with the soft buzz of air conditioning. Outside the window, trees danced in the wind like nothing had changed. But Kaito knew better.
He hadn't spoken since waking up.
He smiled when his parents entered. Answered questions. Played the part. But deep down, something wasn't right.
He remembered everything.
The simulation. The Proxy. Misaki's broken smile. The reboot. The final override.
And then… the message.
[System: NOT FOUND]
He couldn't shake it.
What if it didn't end?
What if the system just… changed?
His doctors called it "intensive neural feedback." They said his brain had fabricated an elaborate dream to cope with trauma. But they couldn't explain why his vitals had spiked seconds before waking. Or how he'd spoken binary code in his sleep.
Kaito hadn't told anyone.
Not yet.
But every night, he checked the monitor beside his bed. And every night, for a fraction of a second, the status bar blinked.
Searching…
It was on the fifth night that everything changed.
He woke up gasping, sweat-soaked, heart pounding. The room was dark, lit only by the faint green of the heart monitor.
And then he heard it.
Static.
Soft at first—like a whisper through a broken radio.
Then clearer.
"…Kaito…"
His eyes widened. "Echo-Nine?"
Nothing.
He stood up, ignoring the needle in his arm, and stumbled toward the cabinet where his belongings were stored. Clothes, phone, tablet—everything reset. But when he powered the tablet on, the screen flashed white. No logo. No boot sequence.
Only one message:
SIGNAL DETECTED
[ERROR: SYSTEM RECONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS]
A loading bar crawled across the bottom.
15%… 28%… 37%…
His breath caught.
This wasn't over.
The system was rebuilding.
He wasn't free.
He was still inside.
In the hallway, alarms began to flash—low, not panicked. Controlled.
A nurse walked past his door and paused. She turned, smiled politely through the glass, and held up a clipboard.
Only… her shadow lagged behind her.
By half a second.
And when she turned, for a brief flicker of light—
Her eyes glitched.
Exactly like the Proxy.
Kaito stepped back.
He wasn't in a hospital.
Or maybe he was.
But not one built for recovery.
This was a containment zone.
And the system?
It had never stopped watching.
It had just started playing a new game.