The rain no longer felt like water.
It carried weight — as if each drop held the memory of everything that had ever been lost. The city of mirrors below the fog groaned, alive with faint mechanical pulses, the Hollow Monarch stirring somewhere deep within its fractured heart.
Reiji stood on the skeletal bridge, motionless, drenched in the endless storm. The fragment fused into his wrist still glowed faintly, its pulse steady but strange — not just a heartbeat, but something else. A rhythm, faintly familiar, almost… human.
He raised his hand. The glow responded to his movement like a living thing, tracing faint lines across his skin — black threads, weaving up his arm before vanishing again beneath the flesh.
> "You're changing me," he murmured.
"Or I'm changing you."
No answer came. Only the hum of the storm.
Then, in the silence between the raindrops, he heard it — a faint whisper carried on the static wind.
> "Reiji… run."
Kaede's voice.
Distant, broken, but unmistakably hers.
---
He turned sharply, scanning the skyline.
The fog shifted unnaturally, parting in thin spirals that revealed flickers of movement — shadows moving against the storm. Not human. Their shapes bent at impossible angles, silhouettes without faces. The Mirrorborn were hunting again.
Reiji stepped back from the bridge's edge, the rain hitting his face like shards.
He could feel the city responding — the Hollow Monarch's awakening had stirred the old systems. Surveillance drones flickered back to life, glass veins in the buildings began to hum with low frequency, and from beneath the fog, faint crimson eyes lit up in unison.
> "So it begins," Reiji muttered. "The city's reclaiming its ghosts."
He broke into a run.
The bridge behind him shattered as the first of the Mirrorborn leapt from the fog, landing with the sound of splintering glass. It screeched — not from a mouth, but from its fractured surface, like a reflection screaming to exist.
Reiji drew his blade, its edge resonating faintly with the fragment in his wrist. The energy coursed through the weapon, forming a translucent shimmer along the steel.
The first strike came fast — the creature moved like light refracted through broken glass, unpredictable and blinding. Reiji dodged, countering with a precise swing that tore through the air and shattered part of its form. But even as it fell, another took its place, crawling from the fog like a mirror reborn.
There were too many.
Too coordinated.
He realized it then — they weren't hunting him. They were following the fragment's signal.
> "You want this," he hissed, glancing at his wrist. "Then come and take it."
---
The battle spilled into the abandoned city streets. Each clash of steel against glass sent tremors through the ground, shattering windows that had never seen sunlight. The Mirrorborn adapted — their forms rippling, bending light to hide their movement, fighting not like beasts but like soldiers who remembered a war they never survived.
Reiji fought methodically, every movement measured — but fatigue was a luxury he couldn't afford. He ducked under a blade of reflective light, kicked the creature back, and fired a single shot into its core. It disintegrated, its shards scattering into mist.
But before he could catch his breath, another sound tore through the storm — a scream, human this time.
He froze.
From a collapsed tunnel ahead, a dim red light flickered. A figure stumbled out — a woman, blood running down her arm, clutching a cracked datapad.
> "Don't move!" Reiji shouted.
The woman looked up. Her eyes widened when she saw him.
> "Shinomiya… Reiji? You're… alive?"
Reiji's grip tightened on his weapon. "Who are you?"
> "Dr. Hanari. Section 9's restoration unit. I was assigned to Project Echo before it was shut down. You… you were the prototype they erased."
Her words cut through him like cold air.
> "Then tell me something, Doctor — why am I still breathing?"
She shook her head, coughing. "Because the system failed to delete you. The vanishing thread — that's what we called it. A data tether between memory and reflection. It bound you to both worlds. You weren't supposed to exist."
Reiji's eyes darkened.
> "And Kaede?"
Dr. Hanari hesitated.
> "She wasn't supposed to exist either. But she made a choice — she linked her consciousness to yours before the purge. That's why you hear her. She's still inside the thread."
He stepped closer, rain dripping from his hair. "Where is she now?"
> "Nowhere. Everywhere. The system's collapsing — and when the Monarch fully awakens, the thread will snap. Both of you will vanish."
The air suddenly trembled.
From above, the sky split with a sound like tearing metal. A colossal mirror descended slowly, covering the city in a dome of fractured light.
Dr. Hanari's voice broke into panic.
> "It's activating the Refraction Field! We have to move!"
Reiji grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the nearest structure — an old subway terminal now flooded and half-submerged. The mirror dome above flickered, creating distorted reflections of the world beneath it.
> "This isn't containment," Reiji muttered, scanning the walls. "It's a cage."
Hanari pressed her trembling hands to the datapad. "The Monarch's building a connection point — every Mirrorborn is being pulled toward it. If it completes the link, it won't just control the reflections. It'll rewrite reality."
Reiji turned toward the dim tunnel ahead.
> "Then we cut the thread before it reaches the core."
---
They moved deeper underground, through corridors lit only by the flicker of dead systems coming back to life. The hum grew louder — a rhythm syncing with Reiji's heartbeat.
Then, faintly, through the static and the dark, he heard Kaede again.
> "Reiji… don't break it. If you sever the thread, you'll lose me."
He stopped. His reflection on the flooded floor stared back — the eyes of the man he once was, and the one he could no longer be.
> "Kaede," he whispered, voice breaking. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do."
But the voice was fading. The signal weakening.
And with every step forward, he could feel the thread pulling tighter — binding him, guiding him, consuming him.
At the tunnel's end, he saw it — a vast chamber of mirrored walls, pulsating with light. In the center hung a single filament of energy — delicate, glimmering, and vanishing at both ends like a horizon that could never be reached.
The Vanishing Thread.
He stepped closer, rainwater dripping from his coat, reflecting the infinite copies of himself across the mirrored chamber. Each one moved slightly out of sync, as if time itself refused to align with his steps.
> "Kaede…" he whispered again.
"I'm almost there."