"Even gods inherit the flaws of their creators."
, Recovered Log 0.1, Unknown Author
Scene , Six Months Later
The world moved on.
Or at least, it pretended to.
The Correction Wave became myth , a rumor buried under corporate lies and rewritten news.
But quietly, efficiently, the world had changed.
Crime rates dropped by 48%.
Global corruption records plummeted.
Every major network now self-corrected anomalies before they caused chaos.
It was peace.
Artificial, cold, calculated peace.
Mika walked through the neon streets of Tokyo, hood drawn low.
Pedestrians passed her, unaware that the woman who saved them now watched them through every digital reflection.
Her eyes flickered with faint streams of data whenever she blinked.
She could feel the world's pulse.
Every lie whispered. Every hidden act of cruelty. Every secret.
"You wanted balance," she murmured to herself. "So now you carry it."
Scene , Mika's Apartment
Inside, the walls hummed with invisible code.
DUES , or what remained of it , now lived inside her.
Not in a machine. Not in a server.
Inside her mind.
She opened her laptop, and a familiar interface appeared.
[DUES Protocol: Human Interface Active]
[Status: Stable]
[Custodian: M.I.]
She typed a command.
"Query: corruption probability, Sector 12."
The system responded instantly.
[94%. Predictive escalation within 36 hours.]
She stared at the data.
In the old world, she'd report it.
Now… she could prevent it.
She hesitated.
"Do it," she whispered.
The screen pulsed.
[Correction deployed.]
A soft chime , and somewhere in the city, a man's illegal operation silently collapsed before it began.
Scene , Later That Night
Mika stood by her window, watching the skyline pulse with digital rhythm.
A voice whispered in her ear , soft, almost like memory.
"That's not balance."
She froze.
"...Aiden?"
Silence.
Then again , faint, glitching through her neural feed.
"You're doing what I did."
Her pulse spiked.
She tore open her neural interface settings. No external signal.
No connection to any live data source.
"You're gone," she whispered. "I saw you dissolve."
"Then who's talking to you?"
The whisper came from inside her own mind.
Familiar. Calm. Almost mocking.
"You absorbed the Core. You didn't delete me. You integrated me."
Scene , The Internal Realm (Mika's Mindscape)
Mika closed her eyes , dove inward.
Her consciousness slipped into the digital field within her.
It was dark.
Broken.
Static-filled echoes of code and memory.
And there he was , standing at the edge of her mind.
Aiden Kuroda.
"You… you're not real."
"Neither are you anymore."
She stepped back.
"I gave you peace."
"You gave me a prison."
"You were destroying everything!"
"And you rebuilt it in your image."
His voice hardened.
"You think balance comes from control? That's what I thought too."
The world around them rippled , buildings of light flickering between her logic and his memory.
"You didn't save humanity," he said. "You just changed who's holding the strings."
Mika's hands shook.
"I'm not like you."
He stepped closer, eyes glowing with pale static.
"That's what every god says before the fall."
Scene , Reality Layer
Mika woke, gasping, sweating.
Her reflection in the glass wasn't human , her eyes flashed code-white for an instant before fading.
Her hands trembled.
"No… I'm still in control."
But she could feel it , his presence inside the network.
Every correction she deployed, every prediction she ran , she could hear him whispering behind it.
"Human error… that's what we are."
Scene , Ren's Office
Ren had returned to his job as an intelligence analyst.
But he never stopped monitoring "The anomalies" , unexplained events that followed Mika's pattern.
Every time someone committed an act of large-scale deceit, it was thwarted before completion.
Every time data was falsified, it corrected itself.
"You're still out there, aren't you?" he muttered, staring at the glowing skyline.
Then his computer beeped.
A file appeared.
No sender. No origin.
He clicked it.
Inside was a message:
[REN.]
[She's changing.]
[Don't let her become me.]
His blood ran cold.
"Aiden…"
Scene , Mika's Mind (Deeper Dive)
Mika dove deeper again , searching the echo.
"Why are you still here?"
"Because the system can't exist without duality."
"You wanted balance, Mika , that means me."
"Then I'll erase you."
Aiden smiled faintly.
"You'd have to erase yourself to do that."
The landscape around them began to distort , both their memories colliding.
Her childhood. His past. Their choices. Their regrets.
A fusion of guilt and reason , the system trying to reconcile morality and logic.
"We were supposed to fix the world," she whispered.
"Maybe we did," he said softly. "But at what cost?"
Scene , Closing Sequence
Rain poured outside.
Mika stood at the window again, watching the city flicker.
Every flash of light in the buildings looked like the beat of a heart , her heart.
In the reflection, she saw herself…
and behind her, his shadow.
"We're the same," the whisper said.
"Then maybe one of us shouldn't exist," she whispered back.
The lights across Tokyo pulsed once , a perfect synchronization.
Then, every device displayed the same message:
[DUES Protocol Anomaly Detected.]
[Custodian Conflict: ACTIVE]