Ayato stood at the edge of the new platform—a silver circle etched into glassy black obsidian, suspended above a void too deep for even the Tower's gravity to explain. The darkness stretched below, swallowing all sense of distance. From the floor, glowing threads rose in every direction like luminous roots, each one pulsing gently with living color. He stepped hesitantly, the threads' faint light flickering across his shoes and hands. Each luminescent line carried a name in wavering script—people he loved, hated, or failed. Every classmate was there, suspended between existence and memory.
"These are our karmic threads," Mio said, voice grave as she joined him on the circle. Her eyes glinted gold. "All of Class 3-C. Still alive… for now."
Ayato watched as one thread shivered, flickered, then twitched violently like nerves pricked by electricity. The name hovering over it: Yuta.
'Something's wrong. That thread is breaking.' The sickness in his stomach sharpened into dread. "Why is Yuta's thread fraying like that?"
Before Mio could answer, red data spilled across the air in angular script:
[Thread Execution Protocol Initiated]
Detected: Rogue Proxy Interference
Countdown: 00:59
Ayato's heart pounded. "Someone's trying to erase him. Not just kill—erase." Gone, not dead. No thread. No echo.
He spun to the others—Kenta, Sera, the trailing fears and shadows. "Fan out. Find him now."
The group scrambled. Yuta had separated from them earlier, promising to run a quick check on the floor's perimeter. Now his fate dangled by mere seconds, each digit on the countdown burning into Ayato's memory.
Mio closed her eyes, lashes trembling. The True Eye spun open, its golden iris swirling with glyphs, the world's hidden structure unveiling itself in veins of radiant power. She focused, her mind diving deep into the flood of data. She saw Yuta's corrupted thread—but worse, she saw the interference.
"It's not the Tower doing this. It's a Proxy. Someone's in disguise," Mio breathed. 'Threads don't just glitch for no reason. Someone wove rot into our cluster and wore a friend's skin to sneak inside.'
She forced herself to look harder, searching for the chaos inside the pattern. And then she saw the red sigil—a Proxy brandover "Sera," the echo flickering, her Karma pulsating with static and digital malice. Sera's thread was unnatural, overlayed with a mask code.
Mio's voice was rough as iron. "Sera… it's not her. Someone's wearing her face."
The imposter smiled—teeth just slightly too sharp, shadows crawling beneath her skin. "Took you long enough, Archivist." Sera's skin glitched, her eyes bleeding black ink, her mouth stretching wider than should be possible.
'Run,' Ayato thought, but his body moved in battle memory, not fear. The Proxy's bone-bladed knife shimmered and hummed as it struck—a weapon swimming in the data stream.
Ayato caught a blow on the edge of his blade. Sparks flew as Karma forces collided. "You've already killed this version of me in another cycle," the Proxy's voice hissed—bitter, spliced with static, like someone else was controlling the mouth.
Ayato's hands shook. 'I remember… You again. Always you.' "And I'll keep killing you until there's no thread left to fray," he spat, twisting to parry the next attack.
Mio focused, summoning Archive code into her palm, glyphs spinning faster. She slammed the golden rune down. "Thread Seal: Echo Lock!" The entire platform flashed gold. The Proxy froze—briefly—caught mid-lunge by the pressure of a thousand memory anchors.
Ayato seized the opportunity, driving his blade across the Proxy's core in a sweep that would've killed any ordinary foe. This one laughed, discarding Sera's skin like old clothing as it re-formed as a thing made of faces—all students Mio had watched die in previous cycles. Three faces at once grinned, sobbed, screamed.
"They're stitched together," she gasped aloud. "A monster made of erased threads. A Frankenstein of the class's pain."
The Proxy's many mouths hissed as one: "That's right. I'm the result of your failures. Every sacrifice you rationalized, every friend you let the Tower take, made ME."
Ayato felt his hands tighten in rage and shame. 'It's not fair. But it's not wrong either.'
The battle shifted, morphing into more than just blows and parries. Now Ayato and the Proxy circled in echo space, barriers of memory swirling, old wounds refusing to stay closed. The Proxy tried to loop Ayato's last regrets through a Karma feedback trap—trying to break him with guilt recycled from a hundred deleted save files.
Mio's vision sharpened, the gold in her gaze framing every movement as if seeing the code inside the Proxy. 'It's not using current Karma,' she realized with a chill. 'It's drawing power from memory echoes—old sins, old deaths, old heartbreaks.'
She spun, letting her True Eye lock on to the one unstable point among the web. There—glitching—an old name: Minako Sato, a girl erased early in Cycle 2. Mio shouted, "I know who you were! I remember your real self, Minako!" She said the name, and the Proxy shrieked, its stolen forms juddering, almost coming apart at the seams.
It screamed, fissured, and fled. The faces ripped apart, dissolving back into the raw system void.
Ayato dropped to his knees at the edge of the circle, chest heaving. The void pressed in with silent static, broken only by the hum of the restored threads. Mio found Yuta unconscious, but his thread—once ragged and fracturing—was now shimmering, bright and healthy.
"So the Tower's not the only enemy," Ayato muttered, gaze distant as he looked upon the shifting lines of their fate. "The broken pieces of us—the ones we've forgotten—are turning into monsters now."
Mio nodded slowly. Her eye was gold fire, yet her voice was gentle, sad. "That was a Memory Proxy. Something that shouldn't exist. But the system let it form."
Ayato touched the circle again. "Which means the rules are failing."
'We're running out of time. The Tower's code is coming undone—and when it does, anything we've ever lost might come back as a weapon.'
He looked at Mio with gratitude and quiet terror, watching the glyphs flicker in her eyes. 'She's changing every minute now. So am I.'
Mio met his gaze. "And we might be the only ones who can rewrite them."
They stood together, uncertain but unbroken—the only two left standing between the Tower's rules and the chaos of a class whose scars stretched across every cycle, every thread, every betrayal that had ever mattered.
(Chapter 35 End)