The city unfolded around them in layers of quiet devastation as they moved inland from the ruined bay.
Karl kept his pace steady, boots crunching softly over broken glass and powdered concrete. The Drive Regulator sat inert at his waist, Trinity Node Core cycling at a low, quiet RPM that matched his breathing. Nanites stayed dormant under his skin, ready but restrained. For once, nothing was trying to kill him. The silence felt… fragile.
Agnes hovered at his shoulder, her hologram slightly translucent in the gray morning light. The digital compass projected faintly between them, its concentric rings rotating with slow, patient precision. At its center, the pulsing point remained steady.
"Heading is stable," she said. "Bearing east-southeast. Estimated distance to the Erevos Prototype: twenty-three point six kilometers."
Karl nodded. "Got it."
They walked.
Tokyo was not dead.
Not fully.
It was… paused.
Skyscrapers still stood like steel skeletons against a low, bruised sky. Digital billboards were frozen mid-advertisement, their last bright images long since burned into blank panels. Convenience stores sat open and empty, shelves half-looted, doors creaking gently in the breeze. A subway entrance yawned like a dark mouth in the sidewalk, its escalators motionless.
The wind threaded through the avenues, carrying dust, ash, and the distant cry of something feral that had once been a domestic animal.
Karl's eyes kept moving. Not scanning for enemies—just absorbing.
He hadn't been here in years.
Not since before everything broke.
Agnes noticed the shift immediately.
His posture was still alert, but his gaze kept drifting away from the compass projection. Lingering on street signs. On storefront kanji. On a faded mural of a pop idol peeling off the side of a building.
"You're deviating," she noted gently.
Karl blinked. "Am I?"
"By two degrees," she said. "Which is not tactically relevant. Which means it is emotionally relevant."
He huffed quietly. "You always do that."
"Correct," Agnes replied. "It is literally my job."
They continued forward. The compass adjusted subtly as he unconsciously corrected his path. Agnes's glow reflected faintly in puddles left behind by last night's rain, her form wavering like a ghost stitched out of light.
Then—
Karl slowed.
Not stopped. Just… slowed.
His steps lost their mechanical rhythm. His head tilted slightly, eyes narrowing, not in threat assessment, but in recognition.
"…No way," he murmured.
Agnes's attention sharpened instantly. "Define 'no way.'"
He didn't answer.
He veered left.
Not sharply. Not suddenly. Just a soft, deliberate change in direction that had absolutely nothing to do with the compass.
Agnes sighed.
"Karl."
"Hold on," he said, already drifting toward a wider boulevard. "I just—"
"Karl," she repeated, a little firmer now. "Our objective is not in that direction."
"I know, I know, it's just—"
He stopped dead.
The road opened up.
And there it was.
The Rainbow Bridge.
Or what used to be.
It arched across Tokyo Bay like a massive ribcage of steel and cable, its elegant suspension lines slicing the gray sky into long, parallel scars. The iconic lighting that once bathed it in shifting colors was gone, leaving the structure stripped down to bare metal and shadow. No rainbow. No glow. Just cold, industrial silence.
The bridge stood empty.
No traffic.
No lights.
Wind threaded through its steel cables, producing a low, mournful hum that rolled across the bay like the last note of a dying organ.
Cars were abandoned mid-lane.
Some angled awkwardly as if their drivers had swerved to avoid something that never quite materialized. Doors hung open. One had a suitcase spilled out beside it, clothes half-dragged across the asphalt. A delivery truck sat jackknifed near the on-ramp, its back doors blown outward, empty crates scattered like bones.
Below, the water was wrong.
Too dark.
Too still.
It absorbed light instead of reflecting it, a vast, oil-slick mirror that looked far deeper than Tokyo Bay had any right to be.
Karl stared.
For a long time.
"…I used to come here with my mom," he said quietly. "When I was little."
Agnes's glow softened almost imperceptibly.
"You did not mention that in your personal memory archive."
He shrugged. "Didn't think it mattered."
"It matters now."
He took a step forward.
Agnes immediately facepalmed.
Not figuratively.
Her holographic hand went straight through her own glowing face with a soft shimmer of frustrated light.
"Oh, of course," she muttered. "We survive an abyssal kaiju, a sacrificial hydrodynamic god-thing, and a city-yeeting ascent event, and now you want to play tourist."
Karl grinned, just a little. The first real one since the trench.
"Come on. It's the Rainbow Bridge."
"It is currently the Not-Rainbow Bridge," Agnes shot back. "And it is not on the path to the Erevos Prototype."
"I know," he said again, already walking. "Five minutes. Ten, max."
"You said that about the Shinjuku vending machine graveyard."
"And it was totally worth it."
"You spent twelve minutes trying to get a canned coffee out of a machine that had no power."
"It was a cool machine."
"You are being derailed by a bridge."
"A very cool bridge."
She stared at him.
He didn't stop.
"…I cherish you," Agnes said flatly. "But I am also deeply questioning my life choices."
"You are a walking liability," Agnes deadpanned. "Do you know that?"
He stepped onto the bridge's access ramp. The asphalt was cracked but intact, painted lane lines faded to ghosts. A car sat abandoned ten meters in, angled slightly as if the driver had stopped mid-turn and never come back. One door hung open, creaking gently in the wind.
Karl's breath caught, just a little.
"…I haven't been here in two hundred years," he murmured.
Agnes's irritation softened instantly.
She floated closer, her glow dimming, her voice gentler. "I know."
They walked deeper onto the bridge.
No traffic.
No lights.
No voices.
Just wind, steel, and water.
Karl lifted his head, eyes tracing the massive cables, the distant towers, the skyline barely visible through mist. "It looks… smaller than I remember."
"That's because you're taller now," Agnes said.
He snorted quietly. "Wow. Thank you. I feel ancient and emotionally vulnerable. Great combo."
"You are emotionally vulnerable all the time," she replied. "You just hide it behind engines and catastrophic engineering decisions."
Karl stepped onto the on-ramp.
The metal groaned faintly under his weight.
Wind picked up, tugging at his jacket, whispering through the cables overhead. The hum deepened, vibrating faintly through the soles of his boots.
He walked slowly, hands in his pockets, eyes moving over every detail.
The chipped paint on the guardrails.
The faded emergency phones mounted at regular intervals.
The faint outlines where LED light strips used to run, now nothing but dull grooves in steel.
Agnes drifted alongside him, resigned.
"You realize," she said, "that the longer we linger, the higher the probability of encountering hostiles."
"I know."
"You also realize that this structure is a tactical nightmare. Long sightlines. Limited cover. Potential underwater threats."
"I know."
"You are doing it anyway."
"Yeah."
"…Why?"
Karl stopped near the midpoint of the bridge.
He looked down at the dark water.
Then up at the city skyline, half-obscured by mist and smog.
"Because," he said quietly, "everything else in my life is either a battlefield, a machine, or a grave."
Agnes's voice softened.
"…And this is?"
"A memory," he said. "That didn't get eaten by demons. Or nanites. Or gods. Yet."
The wind tugged harder.
Somewhere far below, something massive shifted in the water.
Agnes noticed.
She did not comment.
They stood there in silence for a moment.
Then Agnes cleared her throat.
"You are aware," she said gently, "that your nostalgia window is closing. Our compass signal is still active. And I am still, technically, your mission partner."
Karl exhaled.
"Yeah."
"…This is where my parents took me every week before I got hospitalised," he said.
Agnes didn't speak.
"They bought me a little camera," he continued. "Analog. Said digital stuff would rot my brain." A faint smile tugged at his mouth.
"I took like… twenty pictures of the same skyline because I kept missing the timing with the boats."
Agnes hovered closer, shoulder-to-shoulder with him. "Did they get annoyed?"
"No. They told me the bad ones were the important ones." He exhaled softly. "Said they proved I was really there."
He tapped the side of his head.
The HUD flickered to life.
A minimalist phone UI slid into view, hovering semi-transparently in front of his eyes. Nanites rippled outward from his wrist, forming a faint, rectangular frame of light.
Agnes raised an eyebrow. "You're doing the souvenir thing again."
"It's tradition," he said defensively. "Hold still."
"I am not posing."
He angled the frame to capture the bridge tower behind them. "Just float slightly left. Your glow's blowing out the exposure."
Agnes groaned, but adjusted her position. "If anyone ever recovers this footage, I want it on record that I was coerced."
Karl smiled.
Click.
The nanites shimmered as the image saved, tagged automatically with timestamp, location data, and a tiny, handwritten-style note Karl added with a flick of his finger:
Rainbow Bridge. First time back. Still standing.
He took another shot.
Then another.
One wide-angle of the empty lanes.
One of the abandoned cars.
One of the dark water below.
Agnes drifted into the last frame deliberately, crossing her arms. "There. You have proof I tolerated this."
Click.
Karl lowered his hand.
"…Thanks," he said quietly.
"For what?"
"For letting me do this."
Agnes's glow softened. "You don't need permission to remember."
They wandered slowly across the bridge.
Karl touched the hood of one abandoned car as they passed, brushing dust from its surface. He peered inside another, eyes lingering on a child's stuffed toy left on the back seat.
"…Everyone left in a hurry," he murmured.
"Yes," Agnes said. "But not in fear. The evacuation records suggest structured departure protocols. Controlled. Regretful."
Karl nodded. "That's worse, somehow."
They reached a point where the city skyline opened up fully.
Tokyo sprawled beyond the bridge, gray and silent, its towers like bones picked clean of light.
Karl climbed onto the hood of a nearby car and sat down, boots dangling over the bumper.
Agnes hovered in front of him. "You're blocking a lane."
"Good," he said. "Let traffic deal with it."
She snorted and settled beside him, her projection flickering just enough to imply weight.
They sat in silence.
Wind tugged at Karl's coat.
The bridge hummed its low, endless note.
"…Do you ever wish you'd been here before?" Karl asked.
Agnes tilted her head. "With you?"
"Yeah."
"…I think I would have liked it," she said. "I think you would have been louder. More awkward. Less emotionally literate."
"Rude."
"Accurate."
He smiled faintly.
"I think my parents would've liked you," he said. "You'd argue with my mom about ethics and bully my dad about engineering shortcuts."
Agnes's glow pulsed warmly. "High praise."
The HUD flickered again.
The compass icon pulsed.
West.
Still west.
Karl glanced at it.
Then minimized it.
"Five more minutes," he said.
Agnes didn't object.
He leaned back, hands braced behind him on the hood, eyes fixed on the skyline. "It's funny. I used to think coming back here would… hurt more."
"And?"
"It doesn't." He shrugged. "It just feels… quiet. Like closing a door gently instead of slamming it."
Agnes drifted closer, her glow brushing his shoulder. "That means you're healing."
"Ugh," he muttered. "Don't say it like that."
She smiled.
They took one last selfie together—Karl deliberately framing it poorly this time, skyline crooked, Agnes half out of shot.
Click.
He turned back toward the on-ramp.
"…Five more seconds."
Agnes sighed.
"Four."
He took one last look.
"…Three."
"Two."
He nodded once.
"Okay. Okay. We go."
Karl saved it anyway.
"…Okay," he said, finally standing. "Tourist mode off."
Agnes stretched theatrically. "Thank the gods."
He reactivated the compass.
The pulse felt stronger now.
More insistent.
West.
They turned away from the bridge.
Karl paused once more and looked back.
"…Still standing," he murmured.
Then he walked on.