Junyo slipped out on the excuse of the toilet, the bar door easing shut behind him with a soft clack that cut the others off mid-breath. The hallway waited, narrow and long, a tunnel of peeling wallpaper and low, buzzing lights. The toilet door was right there, at the end, plain and metal, yet every step stretched the space wider, pushed it further away.
His skin prickled. First the back of his neck, then the inside of his elbows, then the soft skin under the hoodie at his ribs. Fingernails found a spot and dragged; relief lasted one heartbeat, then the itch bloomed somewhere else, hotter, deeper.
He kept walking. One foot, then the other. 'Just breathe. Just reset. You're fine.'
The floor swayed under him in tiny waves, a drunken horizon in cheap tiles. The voices from the bar thinned to a muffled smear behind the wall.
He reached the handle and pushed.
The bathroom was colder than it had any reason to be, square and bare, the light a harsh white that flattened everything. A single mirror over a stained sink, cracked tiles, the faint chemical tang of cleaning product struggling against the sour smell of old drains.
Junyo went straight to the basin. Turned the tap. Water gushed, clear and fast, the sound too loud in the small room. He cupped his hands, drew the water up, and pressed it over his face. Shock of cold. He let his eyes fall shut and stayed there, bent over the sink, breath rasping in and out.
'It's fine. This is fine. No danger, no combat log, no damage numbers. Just you. Just water.'
He inhaled. Something metallic slid in at the edge of the scent.
He opened his eyes.
Red spiralled in the basin. It had started at the drain, a thin ribbon, then spread, blooming through the water in lazy coils. His fingers were stained, knuckles smeared. The clear stream from the tap cut through the colour, but the red stayed, dense and slow.
His gaze crawled upward.
The mirror met him with someone else's eyes.
Gluttony stared back—only wrong. Skin greyed, drained of warmth; lips pale; sockets hollowed, two pits where eyes had been, darkness sunk so deep the light could not touch the bottom. Damp hair clung to his forehead; a smear of darkness traced his jaw where Kazami's blade had torn through.
Junyo's breath locked. His own hoodie and his own round face were still there in the edges of the glass, but the bones beneath had shifted. The man's expression sat on top of his features, layered, wrong. A dead man folded into a boy still trying to breathe.
'We killed him.'
The thought dropped straight through his chest.
There had been no body in the real world. No corpse in a hospital bed tied to a neural rig, no official notification from any government. Just an avatar falling, a health bar cutting to zero, a cursor winking out. The system had not told them what happened next. No respawn. No penalty timer. Just silence.
But the rule had been clear. Death here meant death there.
His stomach clenched. 'I did that. I helped do that.'
His skin crawled.
The itch tore back through him, no longer scattered but everywhere at once. Jaw, shoulders, the soft underside of his arms, his chest. He clawed at his hoodie, dragging it over his head with clumsy fingers, breath hitching. The fabric caught at his ears, tangled in his hair, then fell to the floor in a dark heap.
He turned sideways towards the strip of mirror on the adjacent wall.
Rashes had bloomed across his body—angry red patches, raw and raised, branching out from his collarbone, creeping under his armpits, down his sides. Old patterns. His skin remembered spring in another world, the nights he had rubbed ointment into these same patches while a television murmured in another room and no one checked if he could breathe. Red crawled up his throat, under his jaw, a tide of his own body turning on him.
'Even in here. I really thought I could leave everything behind.'
His throat closed. The rash burned under his fingernails as he scratched, harder now, needing the sting. Red streaks crossed old scars, his reflection warping in the mirror as his shoulders shuddered.
In the mirror, the man's eyes seemed to drag over his rash-covered torso; the expression shifted from amusement to something almost pitying, then to hunger again. Junyo squeezed his eyes shut.
'You helped. You saved them,' one part of him tried. 'If he had lived, the others would have died. You did something right. For once, you mattered.'
His chest tightened. Breath had trouble getting past a knot behind his sternum. The bathroom shrank, walls leaning in, tiles too close. He spread his long fingers over the basin, forcing them to be still.
'I never wanted to hurt anyone.'
Water still ran. He glanced down; the red was gone. Only clear water spiralled into the drain. His hands were bare again, apart from the angry tracks of his own nails. The mirror no longer held Gluttony. Just a boy with puffy eyes, blotched skin, and hair flattened against his forehead.
'Maybe he's fine. He is an admin after all. Maybe this is all in your head. Maybe you got carried by the others; your attacks were nothing. he would have died anyway.'
None of it settled.
He reached for the hoodie. Every brush of fabric over his skin sent a sting through the rash, but he forced it on, tugged the sleeves down to his wrists, and pulled the hood up. Small armour. The best he had. He stood there another moment, swallowing around the tightness in his throat until his breathing evened out enough to pass.
His hand eventually found the handle.
In the hallway, the bar noise seeped back in—a low rumble of chairs, footsteps, and voices. He walked towards it, each step lighter than the way in and heavier at the same time.
'I want them to rely on me,' the thought came, steady for once. 'Just once. Not because no one else is free. I want them to turn and expect me to be there. I want proof I exist that isn't a health bar on someone else's screen.'
He crossed the threshold into the main area.
The others were still gathered in a loose semi-circle. Every gaze, every body, every stray attention line drifted the same way, pulled to the small figure at the centre. Her shoulders hunched, hands folded tight around a mug she no longer drank from, eyes wide with the weight they had just placed on her.
Junyo stopped. Something in his chest dropped and kept falling.
'Of course. It's her. It was always going to be her.'
His lips moved before he knew what he was doing.
"Tang-Ji."
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The city had corners that the light forgot. Kazami and Junyo found one without trying.
They had followed quest markers, half-broken signs and flickering icons through three streets and two plazas, past a crashed tram looping its collision animation, past an NPC news vendor shouting the same headline on repeat. Nothing useful. No leads that mentioned seeds or barriers or anything except fetch this, kill that, deliver here.
Junyo's breathing went ragged first.
"I need a break," he was already slowing down.
Kazami glanced back. Junyo's shoulders rose hard, each inhale scraping. Kazami's brows drew together, then he scanned the street and jerked his chin toward a narrow side lane.
They ducked into a space behind a shuttered café where an outdoor seating area had been frozen mid-service: metal tables, chairs skewed at odd angles, a tray of untouched digital drinks hovering just above a counter, never quite landing. An NPC waiter stood at the far end, holding an empty tray, eyes blank, glitched into a half-bow he would never finish.
Junyo dropped into one of the chairs. His lungs dragged for air that was code and still unwilling. He pressed a hand to his chest, "thought this would be different. That I wouldn't get tired here."
Kazami sat opposite, elbows on knees. "You pushed yourself pretty hard already. Your avatar is catching up."
"That's one way to put it."
A group of NPC students wandered past the mouth of the lane, all identical uniforms and copy-pasted laughs. Their path curved neatly around the café, eyes never landing on the two players. Junyo watched them go, the same looped conversation spilling from their mouths, an argument that never progressed, never resolved.
"You wanted to talk," his gaze still on the NPCs.
Kazami leaned back a little. "Yeah. The Desidica Seed. You said you heard that man mention it again?"
Junyo's fingers found the edge of the metal table and worked at it. Cold material under his nails. "When we fought him. When he dropped to zero. I thought he was just going to vanish."
His eyes slid to the hovering drinks, each one perfectly rendered, forever untouched.
"He didn't vanish. He looked straight at me. Through me. Mouth full of blood, health bar empty, and he kept repeating it. The Desidica Seed will bloom and bring ending. Over and over. I could hear every word. Couldn't move, couldn't do anything except watch him fall apart."
A faint tremor worked its way into his hands. He pulled them into his sleeves.
Kazami noticed. The line of his mouth thinned. "Back in the bar. Something was wrong."
"Yeah. There was." Junyo stared at the tabletop. The surface reflected the projector's distant blue, warped into a thin line that cut his face in half. "There's something I didn't tell the others."
Kazami waited.
"In the log it looks like a team kill. Everyone contributed. Ji-Soon tore his health down, Emiko's seals locked him, you carved through, Tang-Ji did… whatever she did, pulled it all together. But the system still has to choose someone for the final hit."
A notification from somewhere down the street pinged, too cheerful. Junyo flinched.
"It chose me."
Kazami went still.
Junyo's breath scraped again, not from the walk this time. "I thought this would stay here. Just numbers. It's a game. You fight enemies. You move on. But this system doesn't have a respawn." His jaw clenched. "We don't know what happens to them outside. We can't check. But if the rules are real then I might have helped kill someone who used to breathe."
Kazami's tongue touched the back of his teeth. "Junyo—"
"I don't need comfort," he cut in. "Not now. We're burning time. People are dying in here and out there and we're probably the only people that are willing to save everyone." He forced a breath through his nose. "I just needed you to know why that word is stuck in my head."
The NPC waiter at the end of the lane glitched, tray flickering in and out of his hand. His half-bow looped, reset, looped again. Service without purpose. Junyo looked at him and saw his own shoulders in that bend.
Kazami let the quiet sit for a moment, then nudged it forward. "All right. Then we keep moving. We treat it as information. Desidica Seed..." He paused. "Any idea of what it could mean?"
Junyo leaned back, dragging his hood further over his hair. "Desidica. Seed. Seed of what? Desire? Disaster? It seems like some Latin mashup, someone in the design team thought sounded profound?"
Kazami let the word hang between them."Seed ties to World Seed. That much makes sense. Whatever the hell that is beyond marketing."
Junyo tapped his fingers in a staccato rhythm. "We know the World Seed is central. The whole reason why we're all here. Every teaser, every dev interview: 'The World Seed will redefine immersion.' But nobody actually said what it is."
"Could be the server spine," Kazami leaned back. "The core node that runs the whole city cluster. Might not be a physical thing. Could be code architecture."
"But what does that really mean?" Junyo frowned. "It felt like that man was hinting towards something grand. Something blooming in the shadow, growing where it shouldn't."
A pair of child avatars ran past the alley mouth, chasing a digital balloon that refused to float higher than their reach. One tripped, fell, got up again with the same canned animation, no bruise, no dirt. The balloon bounced once, then snapped back to its preset height.
Junyo followed it with his eyes. "If we look at the name itelf, it could be a seed that twists the world instead of building it. The opposite of the World Seed. Maybe a root bug the devs never pulled. Maybe someone planted it on purpose."
Kazami's gaze tracked a crack in the pavement between them. "Or a backdoor. A key. Something that can shut the system down from inside."
"If that's true, whoever holds it could free everyone." Junyo's fingers went still. "Or lock us in for good."
They sat with that.
Traffic hummed in the distance. Somewhere closer, a quest NPC repeated their line for the tenth time: "Adventurer! Please, I need your help!" The plea bounced uselessly off the alley walls.
"Let's keep this between us for now." Kazami pushed off his knees, stood, glanced toward the street. "We need to keep gathering pieces until something clicks. Taking down this barrier should be our top priority. It's all the same puzzle."
Junyo stared at his own shoes for a moment, then hauled himself up. The itch under his hoodie had settled into a low burn. Manageable. For now. "Before we go, can I ask you something?"
Kazami turned back. "Sure."
Junyo's tongue tangled on the first attempt. "How do you— what do you think about Tang-Ji?"
Kazami blinked once. "That came out of nowhere."
Junyo's hands flew up. "I don't mean it in a weird way. Or whatever you're thinking. I just…" He groped for words, shoulders curling in. "Everyone looks at her now. She's at the center of everything. I'm trying to understand how other people see her. She seems… dependable."
A delivery NPC trudged past the alley mouth with an oversized box in his arms. The package clipped through his chest every few steps. No one in the main street looked his way. His route never changed.
Junyo watched him until the script carried the man out of sight. "Some people get noticed even when they don't want to. Some of us could log off and no one would check the status window for hours."
Kazami didn't answer right away. His gaze went to the tray that hovered above the counter, the ghost drinks still waiting for a hand that would never take them.
"Dependable fits. She stepped up when every part of that fight screamed at her to freeze. She saw all of us at once. Not just our skills, but how they fit together."
Junyo waited. The air felt thinner again.
"But that's not the whole answer," Kazami went on. "When I look at her, I feel… wary. Not of her. For her." He searched for the right edge. "There are gaps around her. Things that don't add up. Moments where her eyes go distant, where she knows something she couldn't have learned in the time we've been here. She carries weight she doesn't talk about."
Junyo's mind drifted to the cracked mirror above the sink he could no longer see, only remember.
"I want to ask. I want to know what she's hiding, whether it's going to get her killed, whether it's tied to that reverie thing or something worse. But every time I get close to that question, the moment slips. Or I pull back." Kazami's jaw worked once. "Maybe I'm scared of the answer. Maybe I don't think I have the right to ask yet. Maybe both."
A trio of avatars passed the alley wearing matching guild cloaks, laughing, nudging shoulders, their health bars lined up in a neat row above their heads. They didn't glance in. Their shared party chat shimmered faintly around them, a separate world.
Junyo watched them until they vanished behind the corner. A small, sour ache lodged under his ribs. "In a way, she inspires people. Even without trying."
"Yeah." Kazami stepped toward the street. "Which is why we have to make sure she doesn't burn out before the end."
Junyo adjusted his hood, fingers pressing against the rash hidden underneath. The sensation grounded him.
They stepped back into the noise of the main road, swallowed by the restless flow of avatars and NPCs, the city's false daylight pressing down from above.