The lights in the ceiling flickered like breathless gasps. Rei stood in the center of a silent corridor that seemed to stretch forever in every direction. The floor beneath him pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat. He wasn't sure how long he'd been walking—only that his footsteps echoed in a way that made him feel hollow.
He touched the wall. It shimmered—just slightly—as if it didn't want to be touched.
"Am I real…?" he muttered.
His voice didn't even echo back.
Rei had always assumed he was just like everyone else. Maybe quieter. Maybe faster. Maybe haunted by more dreams than usual. But now? Now his memories were suspect. His emotions felt… generated. He couldn't tell if his grief over Aya was truly his, or just part of a synthetic script some technician baked into his brain.
His vision warped. Lines of the hallway bent, reshaping themselves like waves on a glass surface. A hiss of white noise bled through his skull. He grabbed his head and gritted his teeth.
"Get a grip. You're fine. You're… fine…"
But he wasn't.
Around him, pieces of dream fragments began to leak—a butterfly with a broken clock face for wings hovered past him, ticking. A bicycle with no rider rolled uphill. A tear in the wall revealed stars that were too close, spinning violently, whispering his name in static.
"Stop it," he whispered.
The wall blinked.
Meanwhile.
Nao slammed her fists against the control panel, scattering cables and knocking over a half-filled mug that read:
"Reality is Optional ☕️"
Kuro didn't flinch.
"You were going to lie to him forever, weren't you?" she hissed. "Just let him keep running while we all watched like it was some kind of game?"
Kuro's eyes were shadowed, his expression unreadable. "He was supposed to run. That's the entire point. You knew that."
"He's not some training bot. He's not a simulation. He felt everything. He lost someone."
Kuro leaned back against the console. "Rei was engineered for this environment. To stabilize the Rift. To survive it. He's not human—he's more than that. But he wasn't built to suffer. That part was… unexpected."
Nao's eyes burned.
"Unexpected?" she repeated. "You dropped him into this storm of a world without a tether and you act like this is a lab result gone wrong?"
Kuro didn't answer. He stared at the monitor—at Rei, pacing a reality that was starting to crumble under his feet.
"You think he's the first," Kuro said softly. "He's the last."
Rei stood beneath a collapsing sky.
Stars dripped like ink, and the ground beneath him twisted into a carousel of past places—his childhood bedroom, the subway tunnel from that first dream, the field where Aya had once laughed.
He dropped to his knees.
"This is what I am…" he whispered. "Just… echoes."
"You're more than echoes."
Nao's voice cut through the static. Real. Grounded. Here.
He turned, wide-eyed, trembling.
She approached slowly, cautiously, like approaching someone on the edge of a rooftop.
"I know you don't trust anything right now," she said. "Not even yourself. But if everything in you is fake… then how do you explain this?"
She pointed to her chest.
"You made me care. That wasn't programmed. That wasn't some line of code. That was you choosing to be human."
Rei stood slowly, tears streaking down his cheeks—but they shimmered like digital rain.
"I don't know how to be anything else…"
"You don't have to be," she said. "Just keep running. Not because you were told to. But because it's your decision."
He stared at her. His breath steadied. His form flickered less. The dream fragments slowly dissolved.
Alarms screamed.
Red lights filled the chamber. Kuro cursed under his breath.
"What is it?!" Nao demanded.
Kuro's fingers danced over the console. "We've got a breach in the Echo Core. One of the scrapped prototypes—Runner-09—just came back online."
Nao's eyes widened. "That's impossible. They were erased."
"Tell the Rift that," Kuro muttered.
Back in the corridor, Rei turned his head.
Down the hallway, a second figure stood—half-formed, glitching between shadows and static. Not a Runner. Not a ghost.
It looked like him.
A warped version.
A prototype that didn't survive… but somehow still moved.
"The Rift wants you back," it said.
"You never left."