The walls rippled like liquid code, folding in on themselves as Kaito grabbed Misaki's hand tighter. The room was disintegrating, pixel by pixel, revealing not wires and plaster—but raw system architecture. White grids. Floating numbers. Flickering memory shards.
The illusion of the hospital was dying.
And the system's true face was showing.
"Move!" Kaito shouted, yanking Misaki toward the diagnostics console.
She stumbled, still glitching slightly, her left eye cycling between blue, green, and red. Her body was resisting something—like two systems fighting for control inside her.
"We can't just run," she said, her voice straining. "They'll find us anywhere. They already marked us."
Kaito spun the manual port around and shoved his tablet cable into the side panel. The screen lit up again—this time jagged and slow.
[ERROR: ZONE COLLAPSE IN PROGRESS]
[SECTOR: 307-E]
[STATUS: PURGE INITIATED]
A countdown appeared.
00:04:59
"Of course there's a damn timer," Kaito muttered. "Alright—come on, come on…"
He started typing.
Manual override sequence.
Legacy escape route subroutine.
Emergency user fork path.
But the interface resisted. Parts of it folded away. Buttons flickered and warped. Some weren't even real anymore.
Misaki gritted her teeth. "You can't out-hack the system anymore. It's adapting."
"No," Kaito said. "But I'm not hacking it."
He slammed the Enter key.
"I'm opening the old version."
The tablet screen fractured—and a second interface appeared beneath it.
Dusty.
Yellowed.
Primitive.
And completely untouched by the new system's logic.
[ARCHIVE ROUTE 9-BETA FOUND]
[LOCAL BACKUP ACCESS – LOCKED]
[NEURAL EJECTION PATH – ACTIVE]
"Kaito, what are you—" Misaki began, but he was already dragging her toward the corner of the room, where the floor was splitting apart like cracked glass. Underneath the fake tiles was nothing but open blackness.
Not darkness.
Absence.
"Trust me!" he yelled. "This way leads out—I saw it in the old root files!"
Behind them, the door burst inward.
Two Proxies entered—tall, humanoid, faceless. Their skin was like polished chrome, reflecting broken versions of the room as they moved without sound.
They didn't speak.
They didn't hesitate.
They advanced.
"Jump!" Kaito shouted, grabbing Misaki and throwing them both into the hole.
They fell.
Not down—but through.
Through static.
Through code.
Through memory.
They landed hard in a place that wasn't a place.
No walls.
No ceiling.
Only floating blocks of light.
Old classrooms, distorted playgrounds, fragments of street corners and school rooftops—all suspended in a void.
Misaki groaned, sitting up slowly. "Where… are we?"
Kaito stood, brushing broken code from his jacket. "Legacy Zone 9-Beta. A failed backup from before the last system-wide update. The Proxies can't reach us here."
"And the system?"
"Still watching. Always watching. But slower. Less stable."
Misaki touched her temple, wincing. "Something's wrong with me, Kaito. I can't… I can't separate what's real anymore. I hear things. I remember you from two different timelines."
"You're still you," Kaito said gently. "But the system's inside your code now. We'll fix that. We'll pull you out."
Misaki looked at him, searching his eyes. "And what about you?"
Kaito hesitated.
He glanced up at the floating fragments.
One showed the real world—his hospital bed, his parents pacing outside the room.
Another showed him, sitting alone in a classroom that never existed.
"I'm not sure," he said.
"But if this is where I have to stay to fight it—then I stay."