The elevator never stops.
It malfunctions—jerks violently—and instead of arriving at the "source," the trio is thrown back into a room drenched in red emergency light and the scream of sirens.
The air smells wrong. Metallic. Sharp.
The screen flickers to life.
And a new game begins.
GAME: ACID RAIN ESCAPE
RULES:
[THE ACID RAIN BEGINS IN 10 MINUTES. ONLY ONE FULL SHELTER EXISTS.]
They stare out through rusted grates as a sky of black clouds pulses overhead.
Acid drips like strings from the heavens, hissing wherever it touches stone.
Sora speaks first:
"This isn't part of the trail… This is punishment."
Matthew runs to the shattered door, sees a crumbling cityscape and a countdown projected in the sky:
9:33… 9:32…
"No. It's something worse."
Rin steps into the half-built shelter near them.
"This game is about division. They want us to fight again. Only one full shelter? That's bait."
Sora's voice drops to a whisper.
"What if this is one of the copies' memories?"
As they begin searching for clues, the rain begins early—a fine mist, sizzling as it hits a nearby corpse.
The skin melts off in seconds.
The scream it lets out is human.
But it doesn't come from the mouth.
It comes from the air.
Clue 1 leads them to a crumbled statue holding a bent metal panel—marked in the same strange glyphs from the King's Trail.
Clue 2 is hidden beneath a piano with no keys—each hammer labeled with a letter from Rin's old school. A memory, not a puzzle.
Clue 3 is a recording.
Dr. Keira Nash's voice again.
"If this one manifests, it means the fragments rejected synthesis.
They're not playing. They're collapsing.
Tell them: the acid isn't the danger.
It's the choice it forces."
With three minutes left, only one shelter is reinforced.
The materials to build another are scattered, nearly impossible to gather in time.
The rain begins falling harder.
Matthew turns to the others.
"We're not doing this again."
"We don't split."
Rin hesitates.
"But someone has to go out and hold the door closed from the outside…"
The rain begins hissing down like fire.
Sora looks at her friends and whispers:
"Then I'll stall the system."
She steps into the storm.
Without a scream.
Just a breath.
The system shudders.
The rain freezes midair.
The shelter locks.
And a message appears across the sky:
"ERROR: CHOICE RESISTED."
"NEW PARAMETER DETECTED: TRIO UNITY."
As Sora stands alive—untouched—the acid begins falling through the walls, bypassing physics.
It's no longer rain.
It's judgment.
And now, the game mutates in real time.