Time: 5:14 PM – SkyTier Terminal Collapse Zone, Foreign Safehouse Pending
The shockwave had barely faded. Cracks zigzagged across the floor like fractures in time itself. Hollow Vane's shape was gone—dissolved into lightcode and static—but its presence hadn't left. It had embedded itself deeper, like malware lodged in the air.
The glass behind Aiko still trembled. The echo of her voice—"I'm not breaking. I'm blooming."—lingered like defiance encoded into reality.
Ryoji didn't wake.
His body lay still beside her, caught between life and something colder.
No blood now—his wounds had sealed from the Seal's surge—but his breathing was shallow. Unsteady. Like he was fighting something internally, and losing.
Aiko dropped to her knees beside him again, her fingers brushing against his.
"Come on," she whispered. "You're still here. I know it."
Her Seal responded—slow and steady pulses. Not flaring now. Controlled. Listening.
The mark at its center—the fractal spine—glowed faintly, tracing signal paths like a nervous system etched into skin.
Behind her, the terminal screamed one last error code and went dark.
Then silence.
The aftermath.
Miura burst through what was left of a side hallway, blood on her shoulder, a cracked lens hanging from her visor.
"We need to exfil now. If Hollow Vane broadcast that pulse globally—every ghost-hunter on the network's going to zero in."
"Where?" Aiko asked, voice flat.
Miura hesitated. "Marek prepped a fallback point. Mountains, south border. Ghostline route. We'll be buried."
"I'm not leaving without him."
"You won't have to." Miura knelt, checked Ryoji's vitals. Her jaw clenched. "He's degrading fast. Neural signature's burning out like someone's erasing it line by line."
"No," Aiko whispered. "He's still in there. He's Ryoji. Not a code-map, not a construct. He's real."
The Seal surged in her palm again—then flashed. Not outward, but inward.
Spine signal active.
A line of code unfurled behind her eyes. Coordinates. Frequencies. Not a command.
A memory.
Time: Unknown – Location: Unknown Neural Layer
The world was blue and cracked like ice. A mirrorworld of thoughts half-formed. Ryoji stood at the edge of a highway made from fragmented reflections. Silent. Alone.
Then—
A figure stepped from the mist.
Him.
The clone. The kill-mapped one Aiko had shattered. But not whole.
This one bled.
"You think you're the real one?" the clone sneered. "You think flesh makes you human?"
Ryoji's fists curled. "I'm not real because I bleed. I'm real because I choose."
And then he punched. Hard.
The clone shattered—glitched apart into fragments.
A moment later, the mirror-world began to collapse—falling upward in chunks of frozen light.
And Ryoji started to run.
Back in Reality – Time: 5:21 PM
Ryoji breathed. Once. Then again.
His eyes opened.
Aiko cried without making a sound. Her hand reached for his, and this time—
He reached back.
Miura exhaled hard. "We move. Now."
Aiko nodded. But her eyes didn't leave his face.
"Ryoji," she whispered.
He blinked. Pain flickered. Confusion. But behind it—something else.
Clarity.
"I saw him," he said hoarsely. "The other me. I killed him."
"You didn't need to," she said.
"I did. Because I'm done running from ghosts."
And as the team lifted him onto a carrier platform, the Seal on Aiko's palm shimmered once more.
The spine wasn't just growing.
It was connecting.
To be continued in Chapter 55...