Ashen walked.
Neon bled across the streets, washing over his coat and blade alike. Traffic roared overhead on magnetic rails. Screens flashed faces, numbers, lies. None of it slowed him.
He didn't look back.
He never did.
By dawn, the rain stopped. The city changed color—less red, more gray. Corporate districts rose higher here, cleaner, quieter. Cameras followed everything.
They didn't follow him.
Not because they couldn't.
Because they didn't know how.
Ashen felt it then — the pressure. Not fear. Attention.
Something in the city had shifted after the alley. Not panic. Not chaos.
Interest.
He turned down a narrow street and entered a forgotten block where lights flickered and signals died. Old buildings. Dead zones. The kind of place people avoided because systems didn't work right.
That was when he noticed it.
A drone lay smashed against a wall, sparks still twitching.
Ashen stopped.
He hadn't done that.
He knelt, studying the wreckage. The metal was cut — not burned, not crushed.
Clean.
Precise.
The same way his blade moved.
His fingers tightened slightly.
"I didn't do this," he muttered.
Static rippled through the air.
Behind him—
Footsteps.
He turned.
She stood at the mouth of the street, hands tucked into her jacket, breath visible in the cold air. No panic. No fear.
Just… there.
"You're hard to follow," she said gently.
Ashen's expression didn't change.
"I told you to stay away."
She nodded. "I tried."
That answer bothered him more than it should have.
"You shouldn't exist here," he said.
She tilted her head. "Neither should you."
Silence stretched.
The city hummed uneasily around them.
Ashen turned and walked past her.
She fell into step beside him without asking.
For a while, neither spoke.
Then she said, quietly, "They're searching for you."
"I know."
"They're calling you an anomaly."
He didn't react.
She glanced at him. "Does that word mean anything to you?"
"No."
A pause.
"…Does it bother you?"
Ashen stopped walking.
For the first time since waking in this world, something inside him stirred — not memory, not emotion.
Instinct.
"No," he said. "It warns me."
Above them, hidden satellites adjusted trajectory.
Deep within black servers, a file failed to load.
SUBJECT STATUS: UNKNOWN
RECORD SOURCE: NULL
ERROR: ORIGIN NOT FOUND
The girl looked up at the sky.
"…They're afraid," she whispered.
Ashen resumed walking.
"They should be."
And somewhere far beyond the city of 3054, the Endless Loop turned once more —
not smoothly,
not cleanly,
but with a fracture that had never existed before.