Chapter 17 - Chapter 17: Echo's Arrival

The warning came at 2:47 AM, three minutes too late.Aya's monitors erupted in cascading red—every sensor, every camera, every data node screaming the same impossible message: DIMENSIONAL BREACH – SECTOR COLLAPSE – REALITY FAILURE. She slammed her fist on the console, forcing her systems to reboot, praying it was a glitch, a hack, anything but what the data was telling her.It wasn't a glitch."Ryo!" Her voice cracked through the comms, all pretense of calm abandoned. "Wake everyone. Now. We have maybe five minutes before—"The sky split open.Not metaphorically. Not gradually. One moment the Neo-Tokyo skyline was its usual neon-scarred mess of light pollution and generator smoke. The next, a seam tore through reality itself—a wound in the fabric of existence that bled nothing. Not darkness. Not void. The absolute absence of being, spreading like ink through water.Ryo was on the rooftop before he fully registered moving, Kaminari-no-Ha already in his hand. The coin in his pocket burned ice-cold against his chest. Below, the city's familiar chaos—traffic, arguments, late-night vendors—froze as every head tilted upward to witness the end of their world.The rift widened. Something moved within it."Mei," Ryo said into his comm, his voice steady in a way that felt like lying. "Tell me you're seeing this.""I'm seeing it." Mei's voice was thin, stripped of its usual warmth. "And I'm telling you we need to run. Now.""What is it?"A pause. Then, barely a whisper: "Hunger."The thing that emerged from the rift had no shape—or it had every shape, cycling through forms too quickly for the eye to hold. One moment it was a mass of writhing shadows with too many limbs. The next, a geometric nightmare of impossible angles. Then something almost humanoid, if humans were built from collapsed stars and screaming math.What remained constant were the eyes. Thousands of them, scattered across its ever-shifting form, each one reflecting a different dead universe.Echo.The name arrived in Ryo's mind not as sound but as knowing, carved directly into his consciousness by something that didn't need language to communicate its nature. Echo. The Devourer. The thing that came when realities forgot how to hold themselves together.It looked at Neo-Tokyo, and the city began to unwrite itself.Sector 12 went first. The eastern industrial district simply stopped. Buildings didn't collapse—they ceased to have ever been built. The people inside didn't die—they were erased from the timeline entirely, their screams ending before their lungs remembered how to produce them. The space where Sector 12 had existed for eighty years became a smooth void-scar, a missing tooth in the city's jaw.Then Sector 9. Then 15. Then—"MOVE!" Shin's roar cut through the paralysis. He was suddenly beside Ryo, one hand gripping his shoulder hard enough to bruise. "We evacuate who we can. We fight when we can't run. But standing here watching won't save anyone."Ryo forced his legs to remember how to function. "Aya, where's the breach expanding?""Everywhere." Aya's voice was fracturing, her usual precision dissolving into panic. "It's not following physics. It's consuming... it's consuming possibility. Areas with high emotional density are going first. Places people care about."The marketplace where Ryo had bought his first meal after escaping Hazama's first capture—gone. The underground clinic where Mei had taught refugee children to fold paper cranes—erased. The bridge where Shin had told him about his sister, the one Hazama's forces had taken—unmade.Echo was eating their story.Ryo's comm crackled with a frequency he hadn't heard in weeks. Hazama's voice, stripped of its usual calculated calm: "Ryo. If you're listening, you need to get to the Spire. Now. This is what I tried to prevent. This is why I—" Static consumed the rest."No." Ryo's hand tightened on his blade. "We're not trusting him. Not now. Not—"A scream cut through the night. A familiar scream.Ryo turned. Three blocks west, the orphanage where he'd once hidden for two weeks, where a woman named Sora had fed him soup and asked no questions—the building was phasing, its edges blurring between solid and ghost. Children poured from the exits, some making it to the street, others flickering like bad holograms, caught between existence and erasure.Sora stood in the doorway, trying to shepherd the last few kids out. She looked up, saw the approaching void-tide, and her face—Ryo moved.Lightning doesn't ask permission. It finds the shortest path and burns everything between. Ryo crossed three blocks in four heartbeats, his body remembering what his mind hadn't learned—the way Hazama had engineered him to move, to be the bridge between human and storm.He caught Sora and two children as the orphanage dissolved behind them. Solid ground. Solid ground. Keep them on solid ground. He rolled, using his body as a shield, and came up in a crouch as the building's absence washed over them like a wave of cold forgetting.The children were crying. Sora was staring at where her life's work had been. "What—what is—""Get to Sector 4," Ryo said, helping her stand. "Tell everyone you meet: Sector 4, the old subway tunnels. Mei's heading there to set up barriers. Go. Now."She nodded, numb, and ran with the children.Ryo looked up. Echo had fully emerged from the rift now, and with it came its army. Not soldiers. Not monsters. Fragments. Pieces of consumed worlds given terrible half-life, shaped like the nightmares of civilizations that had died screaming. Some wore the twisted forms of heroes who'd failed. Others were abstract—living concepts of despair and entropy given flesh.They descended on Neo-Tokyo like locusts made of unmaking.Shin appeared beside him, his blade already red. "Mei's evacuating civilians to the underground networks. Aya's trying to keep the power grid stable long enough for people to see where they're running." He paused. "We're going to lose this city, aren't we?"Ryo watched a shadow-construct—something that might have once been a warrior from a dead timeline—tear through a marketplace, each swing of its weapon erasing vendors from history. "Maybe. But we save who we can anyway.""That's not a plan.""It's all we have."They fought.Ryo learned that Echo's constructs could be cut, but doing so required will more than strength. Each strike had to be an assertion: You are not real. You are not here. I deny you. His blade sang with lightning, and where it struck, the constructs flickered—not destroyed, but doubted back into nothing.Shin fought like a man who'd already made peace with dying. His movements were economical, brutal, perfect. He didn't waste breath on quips or taunts. Every motion was a statement: I am here. You are leaving.But for every construct they unmade, three more descended. Echo itself hung above the city like a cancerous moon, its thousand eyes cataloging everything worth destroying, its presence a weight that made the air taste like rust and amnesia.Ryo's comm screamed back to life. Mei, breathless: "The barriers are holding, but barely. We've got maybe four thousand people in the tunnels. It's not enough. The northern districts are already gone. Ryo, we need—" Her voice cut to static, then returned weaker. "We need a miracle.""Working on it," Ryo lied.Then Nocturne was there, appearing from a shadow that shouldn't have been deep enough to hide anyone. His mask was cracked, his mantle torn, but his blade was steady. "Follow me. Hazama has a plan.""Hazama caused this—""No." Nocturne's voice was raw. "He tried to stop this. The Reconciliation protocols were supposed to seal dimensional rifts, not open them. Someone sabotaged the system. Someone wanted Echo to come through."Ryo stared at the masked warrior who fought like his reflection. "Who?""Does it matter? The city's dying. You can either trust me or watch everyone you know get erased from every timeline that ever was." Nocturne turned. "Choose fast. We don't have slow."Ryo looked at Shin. Shin shrugged, the gesture somehow conveying What's one more terrible decision in a night full of them?"Lead," Ryo said.They ran through a city eating itself. Sector by sector, Neo-Tokyo was disappearing—not destroyed but deleted, reduced to void-scars that even memory couldn't populate. People fled in rivers of panic. Some made it to the underground. Most didn't. Ryo tried not to count how many faces he recognized among the dissolving.The Obsidian Spire stood untouched, a black needle defying the consumption around it. Whatever Hazama had built into its foundation, Echo couldn't—or wouldn't—erase it. Yet.Inside, the corridors Ryo had infiltrated weeks ago were now evacuation routes. Hazama's forces—soldiers, technicians, researchers—worked alongside refugees, all hierarchy abandoned in the face of extinction. Some nodded to Ryo as he passed. Others flinched. None tried to stop him.Hazama waited in the central chamber, standing before the rebuilt Umbral Engine. He looked older than the video logs, as if the last few weeks had aged him decades. When he turned to face Ryo, his expression was complex—grief, determination, and something that might have been pride."You came," Hazama said."You said you had a plan.""I have a theory." Hazama gestured to the Engine, its crystalline core pulsing with that familiar violet light. "Echo is a multiversal predator. It feeds on collapsing realities. The Reconciliation protocols were designed to stabilize dimensional barriers, to prevent breaches like this." He pulled up a schematic—dozens of timelines, all converging on a single point. "Someone rewrote the core code. Instead of sealing rifts, the protocols invited Echo through.""Who would—""I don't know. A rival faction. A saboteur. A future version of myself trying to correct a mistake I haven't made yet." Hazama's laugh was bitter. "In a multiverse, motives become fractal. What matters is this: Echo can be fought. But not with blades."Ryo's hand tightened on Kaminari-no-Ha. "Then how?"Hazama met his eyes. "With you. The storm-frequency you carry—it's not just power. It's coherence. The ability to assert a single timeline's validity against infinite alternatives. Echo erases by presenting everything as equally unreal. You counter by insisting that this reality, this moment, this choice—" He stepped closer. "—is the one that matters. You become the anchor.""And if I fail?""Then every universe Echo has ever consumed stays dead. And we join them." Hazama's expression softened. "I know you hate me. You should. But your mother believed you could be more than a weapon. Prove her right. Prove I was wrong to only see you as a tool."Ryo looked at the Engine. In its reflection, he saw Subject R-01—the child in the pod, wired and weaponized. And he saw Ryo Hazama—the man who'd chosen his family over his father's plan.Both were real. Both were him."What do I have to do?"Hazama exhaled, and for a moment looked like a man who'd been given permission to hope. "Enter the Engine. Let it synchronize with your frequency. And when Echo comes for you—" He pressed something into Ryo's hand. The coin. His mother's coin. "—remember who taught you to count thunder."Outside, Echo's scream tore through the sky—a sound like every ended world screaming in unison.The war had begun.And Ryo stepped into the light.