The rain in Tokyo never cleansed. It only blurred.
It smeared the neon signs into weeping watercolors and drowned the city in a perpetual, electric hum. Arata Kurogane watched it from his sterile apartment, tracing the paths of individual droplets on the reinforced glass. Each one was a data point, falling in a predictable pattern. He found a strange comfort in that.
His terminal glowed, displaying the day's work: cataloguing echo #734-B, a "residual sentiment" from a café that had been deleted from city records six months ago. The echo was a faint impression of laughter and the scent of roasted coffee. Arata tagged it, filed it, and closed the file. Another ghost laid to rest. It was his job as a Mnemic Archivist for the Municipal Data Integrity Bureau—a grand name for the janitors who swept up after NOKRA's revisions.
A notification flashed on his personal scanner, a sleek, black device of his own design. It was tuned to frequencies most people couldn't perceive. A Data Storm warning. Category 3.
Most people hid during Storms. They boarded up windows and huddled in their homes, fearing the reality-glitches, the time-skips, the whispers that weren't there. Arata pulled on his long coat. For him, Storms were an opportunity. The chaos shook loose fragments that NOKRA had missed.
The streets were a symphony of malfunction. A billboard flickered, displaying a landscape of crimson grass and twin suns for a nanosecond before snapping back to an ad for synthetic juice. The rain didn't just fall; it stuttered, hanging in the air like frozen jewels before plummeting again. The hum of the city was now a discordant screech of tearing data.
Arata's scanner whirred in his palm, its readings going haywire. He was searching for "echo-spikes"—strong, coherent memories that could survive the Storm. But tonight, the scanner wasn't finding echoes.
It was finding a void.
A perfect, absolute null-signal in the heart of the Shinjuku ward. According to the city's data-stream, that location was an empty lot. A non-place. But his scanner insisted something was there, something that absorbed all data, all perception. An error. An impossibility.
His Archivist instincts, the part of him that craved order, screamed at him to report it. An anomaly of this magnitude was a system-critical threat. But the other part of him, the part with the locked-door past, was intensely, dangerously curious.
He found the "empty lot." It was a narrow alley, choked with the pulsating, visual static of the Data Storm. At its end, a dumpster flickered in and out of existence. And huddled against it was a shape.
A girl.
She was curled into a ball, her clothes simple, unassuming. But her hair… it seemed to drink the light, a darkness deeper than the night. And as a flicker from a broken streetlamp caught her face, Arata saw her eyes.
They were not human.
They were like fractured glass, a kaleidoscope of a thousand different colors, shifting and swirling as if reflecting worlds that did not exist. They were windows into a broken universe.
His scanner emitted a single, piercing shriek and then died. The screen went black.
The girl looked up. Not at the alley, not at the storm, but directly at him. Her gaze was a physical weight, a cold needle in his mind.
"Please," she whispered, and her voice was the sound of a corrupted audio file, layered with static and a heartbreaking fragility. "They're coming. They're going to delete me."
A cold that had nothing to do with the rain seeped into Arata's bones. Delete. That was a NOKRA term. A final term.
Before he could think, before he could rationalize the career-ending, life-threatening insanity of it, he was moving. His legs carried him forward, his hand reaching out.
A new sound cut through the storm's cacophony. A low, resonant hum, like a swarm of mechanical insects. Down the far end of the alley, two figures stepped through the shimmering air. They wore long, grey coats that seemed to repel the rain. Their faces were obscured by shadows that clung too perfectly. Eidolons.
One of them raised a hand. The air around Arata's head suddenly felt thick, fuzzy. A name—his own name—slipped from the edge of his thoughts. They weren't just coming for her. They were going to make him forget he ever saw her.
The choice was made in a heartbeat. There was no logic to it. It was an error in his own programming.
He grabbed the girl's arm. It was ice-cold. "Run," he said, his voice tight.
He pulled her into the stuttering, bleeding heart of the Data Storm, the hum of the Eidolons closing in behind them. The last thing he saw on his dead scanner's reflective surface was not his own face, but a line of text that flickered and died, a final message from the glitching device:
//ERROR-0: CORE INSTABILITY DETECTED//