The silence that followed the global cataclysm was not the peaceful silence of a world at rest; it was a heavy, suffocating pressure, like being trapped inside a sensory deprivation chamber. Kaito stepped over the shattered, splintered remains of his bedroom door, his legs feeling like leaden pillars, vibrating with a residual electric hum that seemed to resonate with his very bone marrow. Every breath felt like inhaling static electricity.
In the hallway, his mother was kneeling on the cracked mahogany floorboards beside Ryu. Her face was a mask of primal, maternal terror as she applied a cold, damp compress to Ryu's bleeding forehead. But as Kaito looked at her, his heart skipped a beat, a cold sweat breaking across his neck. Her silhouette was no longer solid. Every few seconds, her edges would shimmer and blur, dissolving into fine, crystalline white pixels before snapping back into a low-resolution focus. "Mom... your hands... they're flickering," Kaito whispered, his voice cracking. She didn't respond; her movements were repetitive, robotic, and jerky, as if her entire existence was caught in a corrupted animation loop.
Kaito staggered toward the balcony, his mind racing back to the white void and those nine mysterious, ethereal shadows. "Who were they? Why did two of those girls feel like a part of my own soul?" He looked at Ryu, and a chilling realization gripped him. When Ryu touched him, the resonance was perfect—too perfect. "Is Ryu one of the nine? Is he a part of this broken system too?"
Before he could process the thought, a wave of traumatic memories flashed back to the college campus just moments before the world splintered. As the first strike of White Lightning hit the Earth, the university had transformed into a slaughterhouse of digital chaos. The power had vanished in a microsecond, leaving thousands of screaming students trapped in pitch-black, suffocating hallways. Alarms shrieked—a high-pitched, wailing frequency that signaled the literal end of days. Kaito remembered seeing his friends bolting toward the exits, their faces twisted in blind, animalistic panic.
Then, the earthquake had ripped the world open. The very ground beneath the campus split like a hungry, tectonic mouth. Kaito saw, in his mind's eye, the horror of those who didn't make it. Students he had laughed with just hours ago were pulverized under falling concrete slabs. Some were swallowed whole by deep, glowing fissures in the Earth, their final cries silenced by the crushing weight of the soil. A massive section of the city simply sank into the abyss, disappearing into a pit of pure, blinding white energy. People looked at the violet sky, weeping, screaming at a God they thought had abandoned them.
Yet, amidst this global graveyard, Kaito's house stood perfectly still. Not a single crack appeared on its walls; not a single window shattered. It was an island of impossible, terrifying stability in an ocean of absolute destruction.
"No! You both are in no condition to go anywhere!" his mother cried out suddenly, her voice sounding distorted, like a scratched vinyl record. Ryu groaned, pushing himself up with sheer willpower. His eyes, once dark and human, were now flecked with glowing white sparks. "Kaito... I can see it too," he rasped, staring at a semi-transparent screen that only he could perceive. "The game... it's real. We are the fuel for this nightmare."
Kaito slapped his own face hard, the sting of the blow anchoring him to reality. "Mom, stay inside. Don't leave this house. I'll find Dad, I promise."
As they stepped out onto the street, the true horror revealed itself. The souls of the dead were rising from their broken bodies—not as ghosts, but as pillars of swirling grey dust and binary code, floating upward toward the violet sky like data being uploaded to a server.Ryu, look at the souls! They're being deleted!" Kaito gasped, pointing at the sky.
Ryu turned, looking at the empty air. "There's nothing there but smoke and rubble, Kaito. You're losing your mind! Move!"
Kaito froze. "He can't see the deletion? Why am I the only one who can see the spirits being wiped?" He looked at the sky. "Ryu, what color is the sky to you?"
"It's black and grey, man! Like a storm that won't end," Ryu snapped, his breathing becoming heavy. As they ran toward Hina's house, Kaito noticed a bizarre phenomenon. Everywhere Ryu stepped, the "glitches"—the floating pixels and distorted geometry—seemed to vanish or flee. Ryu was like a walking "Anti-Virus," clearing the path without even knowing it. But the effort was visibly draining him; his skin was turning ashen, his movements becoming sluggish.
They finally reached Hina's house. The metallic, copper scent of fresh blood hit them like a physical blow. The front door was ajar, hanging off one hinge. Ryu kicked it open with a desperate roar. Hina's father and brother were sprawled in the foyer, their throats slashed with surgical, impossible precision.
In the living room, Hina and her mother were sitting perfectly still in front of a massive, cracked vanity mirror. Both of them held jagged, bloody kitchen knives. But it was their faces that were truly haunting. Hina was smiling—a wide, distorted grin that stretched her cheeks until they nearly tore, showing every single tooth in an unnatural display. Her mother was doing the same, their eyes completely vacant and glassy, fixed on their own reflections. They were laughing silently, their shoulders shaking in a rhythmic, terrifying synchronization that defied human anatomy.
Suddenly, Kaito felt a violent jolt in his brain. The world stopped. A bird mid-flight outside the window froze in the air. A drop of blood falling from Hina's knife stayed suspended, like a red jewel hanging in a vacuum. For exactly two seconds, time simply ceased to exist.
"This has happened before," Kaito's heart pounded against his ribs. He remembered childhood "glitches" where the wall clock would skip, or a falling glass would pause for a heartbeat before shattering. "I haven't been living in reality. I've been living in a broken simulation my entire life."
Then, time snapped back with the force of a whip. The blood drop hit the floor with a soft, final thud.
High above the ruins of the city, perched on the flickering, skeletal remains of a radio tower, a figure sat shrouded in shifting shadows. This was the Puppet Master. He wasn't looking with physical eyes; he was perceiving the world through the digital threads he had woven into the survivors' minds. He watched Hina through the mirror, his lips curling into a jagged, wicked grin.
"Dance for me," he whispered into the static, his voice echoing in the subconscious of every living soul.
The Puppet Master stood up, looking down at the burning, glitched horizon. He threw his head back, letting out a deafening, distorted laugh that resonated through the digital clouds.
"Cry! Scream! Beg for a mercy that doesn't exist!" he roared into the void. "The old laws are dead. The old gods have been deleted. Look at this beautiful chaos... it is my canvas, and I am the only artist left! In this new era, I am the only God!"
His laughter echoed across the shattered sky as a bolt of White Lightning struck the tower, framing him in a halo of terrifying, celestial power. The first act of the deletion was over; the reign of the Puppet Master had begun.