05:00.
The chime arrived like it always did: soft, precise, merciless.
Ryuji Shiratori opened his eyes into the half-dark and felt the silence hit him harder than any alarm ever could. The room was exactly the same, and that was the problem.
Same white walls. Same recessed lights climbing from 0 % to 35 %. Same vent breathing its sterile lullaby overhead.
But the corridor beyond the open door was dead.
No shuffle of Yuna's too-small slippers hurrying to catch up. No low whistle Kai used when he was pretending not to be nervous. No quiet scrape of Mira dragging her heel on the third tile because it helped her count heartbeats.
He waited for the lights to reach 8 %, the threshold where the human eye could distinguish detail again. When they did, the first thing he noticed was the ghost of yesterday's tears.
They had dried sometime in the night, leaving a tight, salt-stung film across the right side of his face only. The skin there felt raw, bitten, as though the tears had carried tiny teeth and had spent the hours gnawing at him while he slept. The green eye, his real eye, still carried the swollen weight of everything it had released. The yellow one stared at the ceiling, untouched, almost bored.
He sat up slowly, the mattress exhaling the faint warmth of one body instead of four.
The sheet slid down his chest like a verdict.
He swung his legs over the edge. The floor was colder than yesterday; the heating algorithm had already recalculated for a single occupant and decided warmth was an unnecessary expense.
He walked to the sink. The mirror returned a stranger wearing his face: the right cheek cracked with salt, the left pristine. He looked like a painting someone had started to erase and then changed their mind.
He turned the tap. Water fell in its regulated ribbon. He cupped it, pressed it to the right side only. The salt dissolved, stinging, then numbing. He did not touch the left side. Let the yellow eye stay comfortable in its lie.
When he stepped into the corridor, the silence was physical. It had mass. It pushed against his eardrums, thick as water, cold as debt.
Every footstep rang too loud, then died too fast. The hallway had always been narrow; now it felt cathedral-wide, built for ghosts that had already left.
He passed Yuna's door. The nameplate was blank, the magnetic seal glowing soft amber—locked forever. He could still see the faint scuff mark her slipper had left on the lower panel, a tiny grey comma that had survived years of cleaning drones. Today it looked like a scream frozen mid-breath.
Kai's door: the whistle mark he used to make by blowing across the vent grate was gone, polished away overnight. Mira's door: the third tile still bore the faint drag of her heel, but the rhythm was broken. One scrape, then nothing. Like a heartbeat that forgot to finish.
The meal hall was a museum of absence.
Twenty-three chairs. Twenty-two pushed in with robotic perfection. His tray waited alone beneath the dispenser, centered on the table like an offering to a god who had stopped believing in sacrifice.
He sat. The chair opposite him—Yuna's old place—felt farther away than another planet. He could almost see the indentation her elbows used to leave in the soft padding. Almost.
He ate without tasting. Twelve bites. The nutrient bar crumbled like chalk made of goodbye.
When he stood, the silence rushed back in to fill the space his friends had once occupied. It was heavier than gravity.
He walked the final stretch to Prep Chamber 9.
The attendants were waiting, visors reflecting his fractured face back at him. They did not speak. They didn't need to. The emptiness had already said everything.
He stepped forward.
Both of them knew, with perfect clarity, that after today the White Room would finally be what it had always wanted to be:
Completely, achingly, irrevocably empty.
Except for the boy walking out of it, carrying every missing heartbeat inside his chest like shrapnel he would never be allowed to remove.
He finished the nutrient bar in twelve bites, as always.
The last crumb dissolved on his tongue like dust from a forgotten grave. He placed the wrapper exactly 3 cm from the table edge, aligned parallel, and pushed the chair in with a soft click that echoed too loudly in the empty hall.
No one cleared the tray behind him. The drones would come later, when even his absence was just another data point to log.
He walked out.
The corridor to the elevator felt longer today—120 meters of unbroken white, broken only by the soft blue glow of access panels every 10 meters. The air pressure dropped slightly as he approached the secured lift: a subtle shift, 0.2 kPa, designed to heighten alertness. His footsteps were the only sound, steady at 78 per minute, but each one landed in a vacuum that swallowed it whole.
The elevator door opened without prompt—facial scan complete before he even reached it. He stepped inside: a 2-meter cube, walls mirrored on three sides, floor a non-slip grid. The descent began immediately, smooth and silent, dropping 120 meters in 22 seconds. No buttons. No displays. Just the faint vibration underfoot and the reflection of his own face staring back from every angle: the green eye shadowed with yesterday's grief, the yellow one clear as a blade.
The doors parted into the Portal Chamber.
It was vast—50 meters in diameter, a perfect dome ceiling arched 20 meters high, reinforced with interlocking titanium struts that gleamed under harsh, focused spotlights at 6500K color temperature. The walls were a matte gunmetal grey, etched with circuit patterns that pulsed faint electric blue, like veins carrying the lifeblood of the facility's final hope. The floor: a polished alloy grid, black with silver inlays, designed to conduct and dissipate the massive energy surges without melting. Humidity controlled at 35%, temperature locked at 18°C to prevent condensation on the equipment. The air smelled sharp—ozone mixed with heated metal, the scent of something about to break open.
In the dead center stood the portal apparatus: a circular platform 4 meters across, elevated 30 cm off the floor, ringed by eight emitter pylons towering 3.5 meters each. The pylons were sleek cylinders of composite alloy, matte black with glowing cobalt rings at the base and tip, humming at 40 Hz—a frequency just low enough to vibrate in the chest like an unspoken warning. Between them, faint arcs of plasma danced sporadically, blue-white and crackling, contained by magnetic fields that made the air around the platform shimmer like heat haze over asphalt.
To the side: the control console, a curved bank of six holographic screens floating above a sleek panel, displaying flux readings in green numerals—dimensional stability at 94.7%, energy capacitance building to 1.4 gigawatts. Technicians in full radiation suits—white with red hazard stripes—moved like shadows behind a shielded glass partition 15 meters away, their voices muffled through intercoms.
Dr. Ayanami waited on the platform's edge, tablet in hand, her white coat pristine under the lights. Two armed escorts flanked her—faceless in black tactical gear, sidearms holstered but ready. Standard for transfer day.
Ryuji approached without hesitation, stopping exactly 1.5 meters from her—regulation distance.
She didn't waste time on greetings.
"Diagnostics complete. You're cleared."
He nodded.
She gestured to the platform. "Step up. We'll finalize instructions here."
He complied, the grid under his boots vibrating faintly as the pylons registered his weight. The air inside the ring felt thicker, charged, like standing in the eye of a storm that hadn't broken yet.
Inside, the green voice stirred, a quiet tremor: This is it. The end of white. But... what if the other side is worse? What if we're trading one cage for another?
The yellow voice silenced it: Irrelevant. Mission first.
Dr. Ayanami tapped her tablet, projecting a holographic overlay above the platform: a schematic of Astraeum—vague continents, energy signatures in red hotspots, the Helios Diamond marked as a pulsing core icon with coordinates redacted.
"Your objective: infiltrate Astraeum, locate the Helios Diamond, and secure it for extraction. It's the energy source draining our world—crystalline structure, approximately 30 cm diameter, emits arcane particles at 1.2 teraherz. We don't have its precise location; intelligence suggests it's held in a central kingdom stronghold, possibly the capital. You'll need to gather intel on-site: observe hierarchies, exploit weaknesses, build alliances if efficient."
She paused, eyes locking on his. "No deviations. Report progress via This Bracelet—short-range only until the gateway stabilizes., This Bracelet has a microphone , a speaker and Tracker which will be used to communicate "
He absorbed it. "Extraction method?"
She reached into her coat and produced the metal chain key: a slim, 15 cm rod of iridium alloy, one end tapered to a connector prong, the other etched with quantum entanglement circuits that glowed faint silver under the lights. It weighed 85 grams in his palm—cold, unyielding.
"Connect this directly to the Diamond's core interface. It will initiate a resonance cascade, opening a stable bidirectional gateway. Our world connects to theirs permanently. Resources flow back. Earth survives."
He pocketed it. "Timeline?"
"Indefinite. But failure is not viable. If compromised, activate self-termination protocol. The Recall will reset you to a checkpoint , The Location And Time that locks in the checkpoint will be chosen by the will of the tiny helios we spent on this invention , the dimond has a will , its almost alive , and thats what makes it soo mysterious and wanted .—as for the death . You either die or we choose when its best for you to die , so you can choose a new path of victory. "
The green voice flickered: Self-termination... death on command. Like always. But what if we don't want to come back?
Yellow: Focus.
Dr. Ayanami stepped back. "Any final queries?"
"None."
She nodded. "Then begin calibration."
The pylons whined higher, blue arcs intensifying, the platform humming under his feet. The air crackled, pressure building in his ears.
As the countdown initiated—60 seconds—the green eye stung once more, not with tears, but with a quiet, burning resolve.
The white world ended here.
Whatever waited beyond... it couldn't be emptier than this.
00:00:06
Ryuji stood at the edge of the platform, shoulders loose, eyes on the floor. The alloy grid reflected the cobalt glow of the pylons in perfect squares across his face, but he didn't look up yet. He was somewhere else.
Six seconds.
He saw Yuna at age nine, pressing her last piece of chocolate into his hand during a 72-hour fast, whispering, "Don't tell them I gave it to you." Her fingers had been trembling. The chocolate had been half-melted from her pocket. He had never tasted anything sweeter.
Five seconds.
He saw Kai at twelve, teaching him how to whistle through the vent grates so the isolation box felt less like a coffin. Kai had grinned, crooked and defiant, and said, "Music for prisoners, man. They can't take this." Ryuji had learned the tune in three tries. He still knew it by heart.
Four seconds.
He saw Mira at fourteen, silently sliding her jacket over his shoulders the night the temperature dropped to 8 °C and the instructors wanted to test hypothermia thresholds. She hadn't said a word. She had just stood there afterward, arms wrapped around herself, pretending she wasn't cold too.
Three seconds.
He finally raised his eyes...
The portal had finished forming...
It was not a ring of light or a sci-fi shimmer. It was a wound in reality: a perfect circle of pure, violent sapphire fire, 3.8 meters tall, edges writhing like living flame. Inside it there was no color, only depth—an endless cobalt abyss that hurt to look at directly. The air around it bent and screamed, heatless but electric, raising every hair on his body.
At its heart floated the last fragment of Helios Diamond they had left on Earth: a shard no bigger than a child's thumbnail, suspended in a magnetic cradle, glowing with a white-blue intensity that made the entire chamber look like it was drowning in starlight. That single, pathetic sliver—harvested decades ago from a failed probe—was all the power they had left to tear open the sky just once. Just wide enough, just long enough, for one boy under seventy kilograms.
Two seconds.
Ryuji stopped at the very rim. The portal's breath washed over him—ozone, frost, and something sweet he had no name for. It smelled like the first time he had ever imagined the word "outside."
One second.
The green eye filled—not with tears this time, but with the blinding blue reflection of a world he had never been allowed to hope for. The yellow eye stayed dry, calculating exit vectors it would never need again. As The Memories Of His Old Dear Friends Struck Him In His Heart Like An Arrow ..
Zero.
The room detonated into light.
Blue fire roared outward in perfect silence, flooding every corner of the chamber, turning the gunmetal walls into mirrors of liquid sapphire. The white that had ruled his life for sixteen years was suddenly, violently, beautifully drowned. Shadows vanished. Edges vanished. There was only the color of possibility.
Ryuji felt his heartbeat stutter—not from fear, but from something older than fear. Wonder. Raw, childish, forbidden wonder.
For the first time in his life, both eyes felt the same thing at once.
He couldnt help but let out a smile
In that moment he looked like a newborn baby that saw the beatiful sunshine for the first time..
He took the final step forward.
The portal swallowed him whole.
Behind him, the tiny Helios shard shattered into glittering dust, its last light spent and he could feel Kai , Mira and yuna's small hands waving at him from somewhere.. . Ahead of him, the wound in the universe closed with a sound like a sigh.
And Ryuji Shiratori, the only survivor of the White Room, the boy who had never been allowed to be amazed, fell into the blue.