I opened my eyes. The rough touch of the sofa against my back was the only anchor I had to reality. I looked up; that stained, familiar ceiling belonged to our hideout. I stood up slowly, bracing for a collapse, death, or something worse, but my body felt... healthy. Too normal, even.
I looked around. The hideout was exactly as we had left it before the mission, but the silence was absolute. No one. A strange urge, a corrosive necessity to use the bathroom, took hold of me. I staggered to the door, went inside, and after relieving the pressure, faced the mirror above the sink. The tarnished glass reflected back a stranger.
I still had the same messy black hair and the same expression of chronic exhaustion, but something was deeply broken. My right iris remained black, deep as the abyss, but the left eye... it had ceased to be human. Where the white should be, there was now a grey sclera, pulsing with electric blue veins. Bluish ramifications escaped the socket and traveled down my cheek like scars of fused glass beneath the skin. The System hadn't just rebooted; it had stitched itself to my DNA to prevent my brain from melting after the five doses.
I tried to touch the reflection, but my hand hesitated. My fingers trembled at an imperceptible frequency—a motor glitch that made my hand look slightly blurred, as if it were running at a lower frame rate than the rest of the world. Lifting my shirt, I saw the final price: my waist seemed to have been "compressed," the skin smooth and artificial where the System had consumed my own organic mass to rebuild my vital organs.
I summoned the Status in my mind.
[Status]Name: Arata Henjiro | Age: 17 Class: [The Re:Creator] Skills: Decomposition, Storage, [Archive]System Error: Protocol 0 Activated.
The Eye of the Architect was gone. My current vision was unstable. What the hell was this [Archive]? I ignored it for now. I washed my hands and decided that if the others were out, the best I could do was train to understand this new carcass. I went up to the ring and put on the gloves. I set my stance, ready for the first punch, but the System had other plans.
[Installing Archive into your field of vision...]
A blue, transparent figure appeared in front of me. It was a soldier from that base. I hadn't disintegrated him, only killed him. The theory took shape: the Archive didn't store materials; it stored the record of the lives I had snuffed out. While I was immersed in thought, the ghost soldier advanced and hit me in the stomach with a brutal hook. There was no physical impact, but I gasped for air. It was a phantom pain, purely sensory, injected directly into my nerves. I tried to strike back, but my fist passed through the hologram. The figure vanished and reappeared behind me, delivering a kick that left me agonizing.
The ringing in my ear changed pitch. [Combat Failure. Protocol 0: Stage 2.]
Within seconds, the ring was overtaken by a thick mist. Red and blue particles began to float around me. [Objective: Destroy the red particles. Avoid the blue ones.]
I lunged at a red sphere, but my hand passed through a blue one. A violent shock exploded in my left eye. I screamed, clutching my face. The failure now punished the source of the power directly. I closed my human eye, and the system eye took over, tracing vectors. It predicted the movement of the spheres: 45 degrees to the lower right. Ten successes later, the mist dissipated.
[Success in Concentration and Reflexes. Protocol 0: Stage 3.]
Two training dummies appeared, along with a neon blue silhouette—a copy of myself. [Objective: Destroy the target's vital points in perfect synchrony with your representation.]
The silhouette moved with fluidity, but my real body seemed to "stutter." [SYNCHRONY FAILURE: 12-frame delay detected. Punishment: Nerve Overload.]
An electrical sting shot through my spine. "You don't want me to be fast," I whispered, tasting blood in my mouth. "You want me to be there at the exact moment." On the next sequence, I stopped trying to "feel" my arm and focused on the frequency of the air. There was a snap. For the first time, my arm simply appeared at the target.
[SYNCHRONY ACHIEVED: 98%.]
The silhouette accelerated into a blur of impossible strikes. I entered a trance. The floor seemed to vanish, replaced by lines of code. On the final blow—a spinning kick—I felt the synchrony hit 100%. The training dummy decomposed into dust under the impact of my foot.
[Protocol 0: Stage 3 Successfully Completed. Synchronization with Archive: 25%.][New Function Unlocked: Frame Step (Flash Step).]
I fell on my back, breathless. The silence was broken by the creak of the door downstairs. Heavy, irregular footsteps. Something was dragging metal and flesh along the corridor. The hall door swung open, revealing a grotesque silhouette: a man, absurdly obese, pulsing with diseased energy, hissing a single word: "Hamburger..."
He charged the ring, splintering everything. I leaped over him, landing silently behind. That figure instantly reminded me of Mr. Tanaka, my old neighbor. Seeing that man deformed by corruption was the trigger. Hate took control. The monster turned sharply, advancing again.
— Flash Step! — the command roared in my thoughts.
The world froze. In one frame, I was standing still; in the next, I occupied the space in front of him. I delivered a brutal uppercut to his jaw. The creature's head was ripped from its neck, launched toward the ceiling like a projectile. The core in its skull was pulverized by the impact before it even hit the ground.
"Too strong for humans," I thought. But the body hadn't even cooled when a new metallic sound echoed: Creek. Snap. A new corrupted figure emerged. A thin, skeletal woman, with arms that ended in long, serrated blades that she scraped against each other.
She leaped. I tried to raise my arm, but her precision was surgical. The steel pierced the palm of my left hand. I screamed at the lancinating pain tearing through my nervous system. She withdrew the blade and smiled—a sickly pleasure that reminded me of that other woman from the base.
I advanced with pure rage, but my punch to her stomach had no effect; her flesh seemed to absorb the force. She just kept smiling. I leaped back, gaining distance as blood dripped onto the floor. She came at me like a silver blur. The system eye traced vectors in red: Downward cut. Lateral. Horizontal. I dodged them all by millimeters.
Running toward her, I lunged and tackled her to the ground. I tried to pin her arms with my strength, but she got the upper hand, throwing me back. I fell hard on the floor and saw her rise quickly for the final cut. With the last of my strength, I raised my already injured left hand. The blow came down heavy, slicing my wrist open.
Nothing. I thought of nothing as I lost too much blood. My vision began to darken, but my left eye burned like molten metal.
[CRITICAL STATE: 40% Vital Fluid Loss.][ACTIVATING EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: MOLECULAR OVERLOAD.][Class Skill: Decomposition - Overdrive.]
The creature leaped for the final blow, blades crossed toward my neck. I didn't dodge. At the last second, I raised my mutilated left arm and grabbed her blades with my open wrist. The metal cut to the bone, but I felt the flow.
— MY TURN. — My voice came out distorted, as if two of me were speaking at once.
I used the blood gushing from my wrist as a conductor, activating Decomposition through the wound. Blue system light seeped into the steel, and the blades disintegrated into black dust between my hands. Before she could retreat, I used a static Flash Step. I drove my right hand, charged with the decomposed mass, directly into the center of her face.
I slammed her body against the ground, disfiguring her face in an explosion of fragments, blood, and black dust.
The silence returned, heavy. I fell to my knees, my left hand hanging limp, blood now only trickling slowly as the System tried to cauterize the wound with blue electricity. I was no longer the same Arata who entered this world.
At the entrance, desperate footsteps echoed. — ARATA?! ARE YOU OKAY? — It was Ren's voice.
I tried to respond, but my consciousness finally gave way to the void.