The players crawled out of the collapsing theater just as the final curtains were consumed by glitching static.
The shard pulsed in Matthew's hand—cold as obsidian, but alive.
Text danced across its surface when held to the light:
"Player Zero: L. Hoshino. Entry Time: 00:00:00. Status: EXISTENT."
Sora stepped back. "Luca…?"
Rin's voice was hollow. "That can't be right. Luca died in the first purge. We saw it. We felt it."
Matthew stared at the shard.
But the system had no reason to lie.
Or… maybe now, after the interference, it no longer had the ability to.
That night, they didn't sleep.
They gathered in a safe zone built from broken game assets—half-faded walls, a cracked sky, floating islands stitched together with unstable code.
The shard pulsed again.
And then—suddenly—spoke:
"—tthew? Is that you?"
A voice.
A glitch.
Then clearer:
"You're not supposed to be here anymore. None of you are."
The shard lit with a spectral silhouette.
And there—distorted, fractured, but unmistakable—was Luca Hoshino.
Eyes burning with unnatural light.
Voice split between confusion and warning.
"They rewrote the death. They used me as a prototype. But I never left. I've been watching."
Matthew stepped forward, voice barely a whisper.
"Luca… what did they do to you?"
Luca's image flickered, and a second face—one identical to his—flickered beside him, smiling too wide, blinking out of sync.
"I became the map. The memory cache. The control node."
"And now… they want me to bring you to the final layer."
Rin clenched her fists. "We're not ready."
Luca smiled—his real smile, if only for a moment.
"You'll never be ready. That's the point."
The sky fractured—not with thunder, but with code.
A new game marker burned across the horizon:
GAME INITIATED: THE ONE WHO NEVER LEFT
HOST: PLAYER ZERO
The shard burned away.
Luca's image dissolved.
And somewhere far above them, in the deepest layer of Death Land, the system prepared to turn on its creator.