The NULL SHEPHERD does not move.
It unfolds—fracturing reality like a mirror dropped in slow motion.
Every shard becomes a memory.
But not any memory.
The one memory each of the trio refused to let surface.
Because this time, the reflection isn't metaphor.
It's replay.
And they are forced to watch.
MATTHEW
He's back in a sterile hallway.
Lights buzz overhead.
He recognizes the door at the end.
The one marked:
"VOLUNTEER - EXPERIMENT 01: CONSCIOUS DEATH LOOP TRIAL"
His hand is on the handle.
Behind him, a girl is crying. His sister?
No—someone younger. A copy of himself.
Begging.
"You don't have to go. You can forget. Just forget—"
But Matthew goes in anyway.
The system promised him something.
A trade.
"Let your mind fragment… and your body will survive."
He had accepted.
And he had forgotten—until now.
SORA
She stands in the mouth of a broken bridge.
Rain—not acid—falls gently.
Across from her: the girl in white.
The one erased too early.
The one who whispered into the void.
"You told me not to speak. That they weren't ready."
"But you weren't ready, were you?"
The figure hands her a small, silver cube.
It glows faintly with a symbol from the King's Trail.
Sora doesn't take it.
She had refused.
"I didn't want to know. I just wanted to win."
And as she watches herself walk away in that old memory, the bridge behind her collapses—like the chance she lost.
RIN
She sits in the center of a simulated school classroom.
Empty.
But papers float in the air—game reports, challenge layouts, prediction patterns.
She'd written them.
Drawn the maps.
She wasn't just a survivor.
She'd designed some of the games.
Before the wipe.
Before she chose to be a player instead of a controller.
"I wanted to be part of it," she whispers.
"Not above it."
But the NULL SHEPHERD forces her to watch herself submit her memory for deletion.
Smiling.
Calling it freedom.
Then the mirror flashes once more—
And all three find themselves in the same room, now.
The Reflection Archive.
A chamber of screens showing dozens of versions of themselves:
Winning by betrayal Dying in silence Killing each other Letting someone else take their place
And one screen still flickers with static.
It hasn't played yet.
A future choice.
One the NULL SHEPHERD hasn't accessed.
Until now.
A message appears in the air, carved in reality's own skin:
"You may move forward."
"But not until you remember what you chose not to be."
And one final prompt:
"Manifest your truth—or watch the system reset."
The countdown starts.
2:00
1:59