The night after the obstacle stations, Kaito couldn't sleep. Not because his body ached — though it did, every fiber of it — but because of the sentence that kept replaying behind his eyes like a corrupted file loop.
"Your grandfather not only trained his father. They created the first prototype of the perfect player. You are version 4.0."
Version 4.0.
Not "the third," not "the last one before you." Four-point-zero. Which meant there had been a 1.0. A 2.0. A 3.0.
He sat up in the narrow dormitory bed, the fluorescent strip under the door casting a thin blue line across the floor. Two bunks over, Ren was awake too — he always was — his silhouette lit by the pale glow of a tablet he wasn't supposed to have.
— "You're thinking about the family tree." Ren didn't look up.
— "How do you—"
— "Because I am too." Ren turned the tablet so Kaito could see it. On the screen, a photograph he'd taken during the tour of the hidden room — blurry, stolen in half a second before a guard turned. A wall. Dozens of names in a branching diagram, half of them scratched out in red.
Kaito's stomach dropped before his eyes even found it.
SHIROGANE, KENJI — TERMINATED (INJURY) — 2005
Right below it, connected by a thin white line:
SHIROGANE, KAITO — ACTIVE — v4.0
— "There are two more branches." Ren zoomed in, fingers steady despite the tremor Kaito had watched in them all week. "Both end the same way. Red line. 'Terminated.'"
— "Terminated how?"
— "The photo doesn't say. But I'd bet my scholarship it isn't just contracts being cancelled."
Kaito thought of the alcohol on his knee, his grandfather's hands never once shaking while cleaning a wound, and shaking now, only now, over a closed notebook. He thought of a man who spent ten years polishing a photograph like a shrine.
Haruto didn't retire. He was removed from something.
⸻
05:17 AM — Day 3
The cold water didn't come this time. Instead, a single knock — human, not automated — pulled Kaito out of a shallow half-sleep.
Nakahara stood in the doorway, still in yesterday's clothes, a folder under his arm instead of a tablet.
— "Walk with me, Shirogane. Just you."
They crossed the training center in silence, past the biomechanics lab, past the dining hall where the vacuum-sealed trays sat waiting like specimens. Nakahara stopped in front of a door Kaito hadn't noticed before — unmarked, its lock a simple keypad rather than the retina scanners on every other door in the building.
— "Old tech." Nakahara caught him staring. "This room predates all of it. Predates me, actually."
Inside: no holograms. No force platforms. Just filing cabinets, a wall of framed photographs going yellow at the edges, and, at the center of the room, a single treatment table with leather restraints bolted to its sides.
Kaito's mouth went dry.
— "Sit."
— "I'd rather stand."
Nakahara almost smiled. — "Good instinct. Sit anyway. I'm not going to strap you down. That was your father's era, not yours."
Kaito sat. The leather was cracked, old, unused in years but never removed.
Nakahara opened the folder and laid three photographs on the table, one by one, like a dealer laying down cards.
— "Ichiro Kazama. 1998. Left foot rated the best in Asia at seventeen. Version 1.0." A young man, unsmiling, standing in almost the exact spot where Kaito had stood for his ID photo two days ago.
— "Sora Amano. 2001. Version 2.0. Faster than anyone this club has produced, before or since."
— "And your father. 2003. Version 3.0. The one your grandfather believed in most."
Kaito's fingers found the edge of the table and gripped it.
— "What happened to them?"
Nakahara was quiet for a long moment, the kind of quiet that felt deliberate, weighed, released only when he'd decided Kaito could carry it.
— "The program pushed further each generation. Amano's heart stopped on this table during a conditioning trial. He survived. He never played again — not because of injury. Because he couldn't stand to look at a ball without his hands shaking." A pause. "Your father was luckier. His body broke before his mind did. We called it an accident in the paperwork."
— "You wrote that report." Kaito's voice was flat. "'Talented, but undisciplined.' You signed it."
— "I did." No flinch. No apology in his tone, which somehow made it worse. "I was twenty-six and I believed the program was more important than the boy in it. I have had eleven years to decide whether I still believe that."
— "And?"
Nakahara gathered the photographs back into the folder, slow, careful, the way a man handles things he can't afford to damage twice.
— "Ask me again after this season. I haven't finished deciding." He stood. "What I can tell you is this — your grandfather didn't leave the program because he retired. He left because he refused to sign the same kind of report about you before you'd even been born. He has spent seventeen years keeping you as far from this building as a man in his position could manage."
Kaito thought of the invitation hidden under his mattress. Of Sato's yellow envelope, delivered like a trap disguised as an opportunity. Of his grandfather's voice on that message, cracked in a way it had never been before. Your mother would be proud.
— "Then why let me sign the contract?"
— "I didn't ask him." Nakahara's hand was on the door now. "You did. On your own. That's the one variable version 1.0 through 3.0 never had, Shirogane. Every one of them was placed here. You put yourself here." He opened the door, and the ordinary fluorescent hallway light flooded back in, washing the old room pale. "The program has never once had to test a boy who chose it. I intend to find out what that changes."
⸻
11:00 AM — Field 3
Ren was waiting by the fence when Kaito came out, arms crossed, expression unreadable even to someone who'd spent a week studying him back.
— "You look like you saw a ghost."
— "Four of them." Kaito told him everything — the room, the table, the names, Amano's hands. Ren listened without interrupting, which was itself unusual; Ren always had something to add.
When Kaito finished, Ren was quiet for a full ten seconds. Then he pulled a folded printout from his jacket — data, columns, the same clinical formatting as the reports Nakahara had shown on day one.
— "While you were gone I pulled my own file from the system." He handed it over. "Guess what heading is at the top."
Kaito read it. His stomach turned again, a different way this time.
TSUKIMOTO, REN — TACTICAL COGNITION PROJECT — SUBJECT B-1
— "There's no version number next to mine." Ren's voice was carefully even, the tone of a boy narrating someone else's crisis to keep his own hands from shaking. "Because I'm not the fourth of anything, Kaito. I'm the first of a different line entirely."
Somewhere behind them, the sprinklers kicked on across Field 3, right on schedule, indifferent to the two boys standing at its edge discovering, in the same hour, that neither of them had ever really chosen this game — only the shape their entrance into it would take.
Kaito looked down at the printout, then up at the training center gleaming white and merciless in the morning sun.
— "Then let's find out what Phase 3 actually is." He folded the paper once, twice, and put it in his pocket next to the invitation he still hadn't thrown away. "Before it finds out what we are."