There was no sound.
No wind.
No weight.
Kaito opened his eyes slowly, expecting light—but was met with only white. Not bright, not dark. Just… endless.
He sat up. The ground beneath him felt like glass, but when he touched it, it rippled like water and vibrated like static.
His clothes were different—pure white fabric with thin black seams, like the default avatar of a character before customization. No scars. No memories. Just an empty shell.
And yet… he was still him.
Somehow.
His voice echoed strangely when he whispered, "Where am I?"
"Nowhere."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Or rather… before where."
A figure stepped out of the white—a woman in a long coat of shimmering grey. Her face blurred around the edges, shifting between familiar features. Sometimes she looked like Misaki. Sometimes like Rin. Sometimes like no one at all.
"You are in the root environment, Kaito. The space between initiation and identity. The system calls it Zero-State."
He stood slowly. "Why am I here?"
"Because you were not deleted. You were… archived."
He narrowed his eyes. "Archived by who?"
"By yourself."
Suddenly, flashes—brief and brutal—crashed into his mind.
Him at the server core.
Him choosing release.
Him seeing Misaki glitch.
Him looking into the eyes of Echo-Nine… no—of her.
"You fractured the system, but not its essence," she said gently. "You gave it the freedom to rewrite itself. But you forgot one rule."
"What rule?"
"Everything that breaks… can be rewritten."
"Everything rewritten… can become something else."
The world flickered.
The white space grew threads—like cracks in porcelain—stretching outward and upward into the void. Through them, Kaito saw slivers of impossible things:
A version of himself with red eyes, smiling in the middle of a burning city. Misaki standing in front of a class, speaking a language made entirely of code. Rin—older, hardened—plugging a neural jack into her neck and whispering, "We were never out."
"I don't understand," Kaito said. "What is this place really?"
She walked closer. "It's not a place. It's a choice. One last one."
A console blinked into existence before him—floating, ancient, pixelated.
[RE-ENTER SYSTEM?]
[Y/N]
"But I destroyed the system."
"No," she said. "You freed it. Now it has evolved. It's you who's out of sync."
He stared at the screen.
"If you return," she warned, "you will not remember this. Not at first."
"But you'll feel it. Like a knot in your chest. Like deja vu."
"And when the time is right… you will awaken."
Kaito stepped forward.
Looked down at the console.
He reached out…
And pressed Y.
Everything went black.
Then—
A subway station.
Morning air.
People passing.
Normal.
And yet—
Kaito turned toward a vending machine.
Inside, instead of drinks, it offered:
SYSTEM³ – INSERT MEMORY TO BEGIN
And deep in his mind, something whispered:
"Not this loop again."