The world was unraveling at the edges.
The Censor's will was a corrosive wave, bleaching the vibrant, dreaming data of the Kurosawa Gallery into a flat, grey non-color. The humming melody of the place choked into static. The walls, once alive with shifting art, became featureless slabs, their history deleted line by line.
But their small office held. The Memory Anchor—the knot of Yuiri's song and Arata's will—hummed defiantly, a tiny pocket of defiant reality in a sea of dissolving data. It was a shield, but a shrinking one. The grey tide lapped at the doorway, inches away.
"We cannot outrun them in this state," Yuiri said, her fractal eyes fixed on the dissolving gallery. "Their authority is too absolute here."
Arata's mind, cold and clear with adrenaline, analyzed their options like a failing system. Fight? Impossible. Their reality was being edited away. Flight? They were cornered. The Censor wasn't just blocking the exit; it was deleting the concept of an exit from this location.
His eyes fell on the only thing in the room that wasn't fading: the single, pulsing mote of light, still dancing to the ghost of Yuiri's song. It was part of the gallery's core code, resistant to the purge. An idea, desperate and insane, sparked in his mind.
Error-0. Core Instability. A glitch that could propagate.
He wasn't a fighter. He was an Archivist. His power wasn't to create, but to amplify.
"Yuiri," he whispered, his voice tight. "The song. Louder. Don't just remember it. Be the memory."
He didn't wait for her response. He slammed his hands against the walls of their fragile pocket reality, not to hold it up, but to push. He pushed his own fractured memory—the white room, The Architect, the words "Error Zero"—into the fabric of the Anchor. He fed the glitch.
Yuiri understood. She closed her eyes, and this time, she didn't hum. She sang. The lonely folk tune filled the small space, no longer a whisper, but a declaration of war. It was a sound that denied the grey, sterile world outside. A sound that remembered the moon.
The pulsing mote of light flared, burning with the intensity of a miniature star.
The Censor outside faltered, its hand pausing mid-gesture. The grey tide stopped its advance. For a moment, the gallery's dying dream fought back, colors flaring back to life in violent, strobing bursts.
"What is this?" the other Censor's flat voice intoned, a flicker of something—not emotion, but computational surprise—in its tone. "An unregistered resonance."
Arata focused everything on that single mote of light. He wasn't just preserving a memory anymore; he was overloading it. He was turning their Anchor into a bomb.
"Now!" he gritted out.
He gave one final, mental shove.
The mote of light exploded.
But it wasn't an explosion of force. It was an explosion of narrative.
A wave of pure, unformatted data—the gallery's dream, Yuiri's song, Arata's classified past—erupted outwards. It wasn't a weapon aimed at the Censors. It was a virus aimed at the local reality itself.
The world glitched.
The two Censors flickered, their solid forms becoming translucent. One moment they were there, the next, their own data was being rewritten by the chaotic burst. One of them raised its hand, and instead of deleting a wall, it caused a flock of crystalline birds to burst from the floor, shattering against the ceiling. The other spoke, and its voice came out as a bar of shifting color and the smell of rain.
They were confused. Disoriented. Their authority, derived from a stable, predictable reality, was useless in this sudden, localized chaos.
"Run!" Arata grabbed Yuiri's hand. They didn't head for the deleted main entrance. They ran through a wall that was currently displaying a forest of silver trees, bursting out into a back alley that stank of real, wet garbage.
They didn't stop running for five blocks, until the last echoes of the data-bomb faded from their senses. They collapsed in another anonymous service corridor, gasping for air. They were safe. For now.
But the cost was clear. Arata felt a profound emptiness. A part of his own memory, the fragment of The Architect, was gone. He had used it as fuel. It was the price for amplifying the glitch.
Yuiri looked at him, her eyes wide with a new kind of fear. Not for herself, but for him.
"You... you burned a part of yourself," she whispered.
"It was a corrupted file anyway," he lied, his voice hoarse.
Before she could reply, his coat pocket vibrated. His dead scanner. He pulled it out, frowning. The screen was still black, but it was warm. He shook it.
A single line of text, faint and green, flickered on the screen for a second before vanishing.
//Ghost_File_Detected: 'Project_Vein'// Location: Akatsuki District//
It was a data-fragment, a piece of the explosion they had created, caught by his unique device. A breadcrumb. A clue to a deeper mystery.
And a confirmation.
They were no longer just running. They were on a mission. NOKRA had the power to erase.
But they had just discovered they had the power to remember things that were never meant to be found.
To be continued...