The secret of the universe, Ryoichi Tanaka's final, cryptic truth, lay unfolded on the floor of his best friend's bedroom. A map of the heavens. A promise of a terrible revelation on the night of the new moon. We had our target. We had our deadline. We had a plan, fragile and insane as it was. For a fleeting, foolish moment, I felt like we had a chance.
That was when the universe decided to stop playing games and show us the face of our true enemy.
It began not with a sound, but with a pressure. The air in Renji's darkened room grew thick, heavy, and cold. The low hum of Aoi's laptop seemed to curdle. The Eidolon camera, sitting inert on the floor, began to emit a low, dissonant thrum, a vibration that resonated deep in my bones.
The static in my head, a familiar companion for weeks, suddenly spiked. But it wasn't the usual chaotic hiss. The noise sharpened, coalesced, the random signals aligning into a single, coherent, terrifying waveform. It was the sound of a voice preparing to speak.
Yuki materialized beside me, her form flickering violently. "Kaito, something's wrong!" she cried. "The noise... it's not just noise anymore. It's..."
It's me.
The voice wasn't spoken aloud. It bloomed directly inside my skull, a thought that was not my own, delivered in a tone that was. It was my voice, but stripped of all inflection, all doubt, all humanity. It was the voice of a system prompt. The voice of a diagnosis. It was the coldest sound I had ever heard.
My eyes darted to the darkened screen of Renji's computer monitor. A reflection stared back. It was my face. My messy black hair, my grey-blue eyes. But there was no one there. The eyes were vacant, the expression a perfect, placid zero. It was the face of a doll. A backup file.
"The Forgotten," I breathed, my blood turning to ice.
A misnomer, the voice in my head replied calmly. I am not the Forgotten. I am the Remembered. The baseline. The original file. It paused, and I felt a sense of it 'looking' at me, not with eyes, but with a pure, analytical focus. You are the one who has been forgotten, Kaito Hoshino. Or rather, you are the one who was never meant to be.
The revelation was so profound, so existentially jarring, that my mind simply short-circuited. I wasn't the hero of this story. I wasn't the special boy who could see the truth. I was the mistake. The glitch. The corrupted data that was breaking the system.
Renji and Aoi stared at me, seeing my pale, horrified expression, feeling the oppressive wrongness that had filled the room.
"What is it? What's happening?" Renji demanded.
"It's him," I choked out. "The Forgotten. It's... me."
I am the template of Kaito Hoshino as he should be, the voice continued, its placid, internal narration a form of torture. A normal boy. Unreceptive to the static. Unaware of the necessary corrections that maintain reality. You, this current iteration, are an anomaly. A mutation. A divergence that occurred 1,247 days ago, following a severe febrile seizure. Your neural pathways were altered, creating a perceptual paradox. You began to retain echoes of sublimated data. You became a bug.
A fever. A stupid childhood sickness had turned me into a ghost in my own life.
The recent sublimations in your proximity were not an attack, the Kaito-that-should-have-been explained. They were systemic antibodies. Attempts to isolate and contain the error. But your continued interaction with other anomalies—the residual phantom 'Yuki Amasawa', the grief-vector 'Hina Yuzuki', the trauma-imprinted 'Renji Kurobane'—has amplified your deviation. You are now a critical threat to system stability.
The Eidolon camera on the floor hummed louder.
The Master Artifact you possess has acted as an amplifier, a beacon. It has made your signal too strong to ignore, the voice stated. Therefore, a final correction has been scheduled. On the night of the new moon, at the point of lowest cosmic interference, the system will perform a factory reset. This anomaly—the you that you think you are—will be deleted. I will be restored. Reality will be repaired.
The floor dropped out from under my world. Our deadline wasn't a chance to find answers. It was my execution date. The new moon wasn't an opportunity. It was the apocalypse. My personal, tailor-made apocalypse.
"It's going to erase him," Yuki cried, her voice thin with panic. "It's going to overwrite him with itself!"
The reflection in the monitor smiled, a cold, empty gesture. Correction is not erasure, it said, its voice echoing with the chilling finality of a judge's gavel. It is simply... healing.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the pressure vanished. The voice went silent. The reflection on the screen was just a reflection again. But the terror it left behind was absolute. The war had just become terrifyingly personal. I wasn't fighting for the forgotten anymore. I was fighting for my own right to exist.
The four of us sat in the suffocating silence of Renji's room, the revelation hanging over us like a shroud. I was a bug. A glitch scheduled for deletion. The past few weeks hadn't been an investigation. They had been the frantic, final throes of a dying program.
"This," Aoi said, her voice a low, intense whisper, "changes all parameters." She was staring at the Eidolon camera, her eyes gleaming with a fearsome, intellectual fire. "We have been operating under the assumption that we are reacting to a phenomenon. We are not. We are the phenomenon. Or rather, Hoshino-kun is. He is Patient Zero."
"So what do we do?" Renji asked, his earlier weariness replaced by a fierce, protective anger. "We just let it happen? We just let this... thing... delete him?" He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw a reflection of his own survivor's guilt. He wouldn't stand by and watch another friend be sacrificed.
"No," I said, my own voice surprising me with its steadiness. The initial shock was giving way to a cold, hard resolve. I may be a glitch, but I was a glitch that had friends. I was a glitch that remembered. That had to count for something. "We don't wait for the new moon. We use it."
I looked at the Eidolon, then at the star chart. Ryoichi's plan suddenly came into focus with blinding clarity. He wasn't just leaving us clues to understand the past. He was leaving us a weapon.
"Aoi, you said the Phenomenon follows rules," I began, my mind racing. "The Conservation of Existence. The Paradoxical Cost. They're like laws of physics. But Ryoichi... he didn't just follow the rules. He hacked them."
"He performed an existential transfer," Aoi confirmed. "A rewrite of a targeted individual's state."
"Exactly," I said, my voice gaining momentum. "He used the Eidolon to do it. Renji, you said the camera doesn't just record things, it imprints them. It's not just a camera. It's a printer. It can write data onto reality."
The new plan, born of desperation and a flash of borrowed genius, unfolded between us. The new moon wasn't the date of my execution. It was our only window of opportunity. The night of absolute darkness, of minimal cosmic noise, was when the system was at its most vulnerable, most receptive to a major rewrite.
We weren't going to use the Eidolon to look back at Mio's erasure. That was just the key, the emotional catalyst Ryoichi knew we'd need to unlock the camera's true potential. We were going to do something far more audacious. Far more dangerous.
We were going to aim the camera at me.
And instead of letting the system overwrite me with its backup file, we were going to use the combined power of every anomaly, every Artifact, every phantom memory we had, and we were going to force the system to accept me as the original. We were going to hack my own existential save file.
It was the most insane idea I'd ever heard. It was our only hope.
The four days leading up to the new moon were the longest and shortest of my life. A strange, surreal calm settled over our group. We had a purpose. We had a suicide mission.
My own existence felt thin, precarious. I'd look at old family photographs, at the younger, smiling version of myself. Was that him? The original? The boy without the static in his head? When did I become me? The question was a bottomless pit I couldn't afford to fall into.
My relationship with Yuki transformed. We were two impossible beings, clinging to existence by a thread. The guilt between us was still there, a soft, sorrowful shadow, but it was overshadowed by a fierce, unspoken solidarity. In the quiet moments, she would just hover near me, her ghostly presence a comfort against the encroaching silence promised by my other self. "We're the mistakes, Kaito," she told me one afternoon, her voice soft. "Maybe the mistakes are the only things that make the system worth having."
We brought Hina into the inner circle. We didn't tell her everything—the full, terrifying truth would have broken her. We told her a simplified version: that a dangerous force was threatening me, and that on the night of the new moon, we needed her help to fight it. We told her that her feelings for Saki, the love and grief anchored by her sunflower charm, were a form of power we desperately needed.
She didn't hesitate. Her loyalty was as bright and uncomplicated as her smile. "You believed me when I thought I was crazy," she said, her hand closing around her sunflower pin. "Of course, I'll help. Let's go punch this thing in the face." Her simple, direct courage was a rock in our sea of metaphysical anxiety.
Our team was complete. The Anomaly Investigation Squad had become the Reality Protection Force.
Renji became the keeper of the Eidolon. He cleaned it, studied it, treated it with the care of a watchmaker and the caution of a bomb disposal expert. He was rediscovering his friend through the machine he had built, and in doing so, he was slowly, painfully, starting to heal. Aoi was our mission controller, spending hours on her laptop, creating complex models, calculating the exact astronomical second the new moon would be at its zenith, and identifying the precise geographical coordinates on Kirigamine Hill that would offer the most stable "existential ground."
We were a well-oiled machine, running on grief, genius, and desperation. We were ready.
The night of August 13th was unnaturally dark. The sky over Kitahama was a starless, moonless void, a sheet of black velvet that seemed to absorb all light and sound. We stood on the summit of Ghost's Hill, the five of us, a small island of defiance against an ocean of nothing.
The air was electric, the silence so profound it felt like a roar. In the center of our circle, the Eidolon sat on a tripod, aimed at an empty spot in front of me.
"All environmental conditions are optimal," Aoi announced, her voice tight. "Atmospheric pressure is stable. Ambient energy readings are at their lowest recorded levels. We are at Zero Hour."
As if on cue, the pressure returned. The cold. The feeling of being watched by an indifferent god. I looked at the dark screen of Aoi's laptop and saw his reflection. My reflection. The original. He looked calm, serene. It was the face of a program about to execute a command.
The correction is imminent, his voice echoed in my mind. Your resistance is illogical. The system will be restored.
"Not if we write a new patch first," I muttered, my hands finding the cold, metal body of the Eidolon.
This was it.
"Now!" Aoi commanded.
I looked through the viewfinder, but I wasn't looking at anything. I was the target. I pressed the shutter button down.
The camera didn't click. It began to hum, a low, rising tone that vibrated through my entire body.
"Renji!" I yelled.
Renji's hands were on the custom dials of the lens. "Channeling Ryoichi's frequency!" he yelled back, his face beaded with sweat. "I'm focusing the resonance!"
"Hina!"
Hina stood beside me, her eyes squeezed shut, both hands clutching her sunflower charm so tightly her knuckles were white. "I'm thinking of Saki," she said, her voice trembling but strong. "I'm thinking of how much I miss her. How much I loved her. All of it!" I could feel a wave of pure, potent emotional energy, of love and loss, flowing from her, pouring into the camera.
"Yuki!"
She was a brilliant, shimmering form beside me now, brighter than I had ever seen her. She placed her translucent hand over mine on the camera. "We're all anomalies, Kaito," she whispered, her voice filled with a strength that belied her ghostly form. "Let's show it what a mistake can really do."
Her energy, the very essence of her paradoxical existence, flowed into me, into the machine.
The hum of the camera rose to a deafening shriek. I could feel all of it—Renji's guilt for Ryoichi, Hina's grief for Saki, Yuki's sorrow for Mio, Aoi's fierce desire for order, my own desperate will to exist—all of it being drawn into the Eidolon's lens, converted into a new kind of data.
System error! the voice in my head screamed, its calm composure finally breaking into digital panic. Unauthorized reality rewrite in progress!
The world outside the viewfinder dissolved. I was floating in an ocean of pure information. I saw my own life, not as memories, but as lines of code. I saw the original file, the boy I was supposed to be, pristine and simple. And I saw my own code, a messy, patched, bug-ridden string of beautiful, painful chaos.
I focused all my will, all the power my friends were pouring into me, and I pressed 'Enter'. I hit 'Save'.
There was a silent, blinding explosion of pure white light. For a single, eternal moment, I was everything and nothing. I was Kaito, and I was the stars. I was the memory, and I was the forgetting.
Then, there was only darkness.
I woke up to the feeling of cool morning dew on my cheek. The sky above was a gentle, pre-dawn blue. The birds were singing. The air was clean and light. The oppressive, heavy silence of the night was gone.
Aoi, Renji, and Hina were scattered around me on the grass, sleeping the sleep of the utterly exhausted. But they were safe. They were whole.
I pushed myself up. My head was... quiet. For the first time in as long as I could remember, there was no static. No hiss. No background noise. Just... silence. A peaceful, normal silence.
I scrambled for my phone, my hands shaking. I flipped it to the camera and looked at my reflection. It was just me. My messy hair, my tired grey-blue eyes. There was no blankness. No empty vessel. The Forgotten Kaito was gone. We had won. The glitch had become the official software.
A laugh escaped my lips, a sound of pure, unadulterated relief. We did it. We actually did it.
But then, I noticed it. The silence. It was too perfect. Too complete.
I looked at the empty space beside me. The space that had always held a familiar, cool presence.
"Yuki?" I whispered.
Nothing.
I looked again, concentrating, trying to find her signal, her light. But there was nothing there. Just empty air. The antenna was gone. The channel was closed.
"Yuki!" I said, my voice louder now, laced with a dawning panic.
My friends began to stir. Hina sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Kaito-kun? Man, I'm so tired... Did it work?"
"Where's Yuki?" I asked frantically.
Hina gave me a confused look. "Yuki? Who's Yuki?"
My heart plummeted into a black, bottomless abyss. I whipped my head toward Renji and Aoi. They were getting up, looking at me with the same blank confusion.
"Hoshino, what are you talking about?" Renji asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
It hit me then. The final, terrible price. In the reality rewrite, in the act of solidifying my anomalous existence and making it "real," the system had "fixed" the most glaring paradox connected to me. It had resolved the existence of the ghost that only the glitch could see. My special sight was gone. My connection to her was severed. I had paid for my normalcy with my most important person.
She wasn't erased. Not like the others. She was just... inaccessible. A file on a drive I no longer had the password for.
I was alone again. Truly, fundamentally alone in my memory of her.
Tears streamed down my face, hot and bitter. But as I looked at my friends, I saw something that stopped my breath. Renji was stretching, a genuine, unburdened smile on his face as he looked at the sunrise. Aoi was watching a ladybug crawl on her hand, a look of quiet, simple curiosity on her face. Hina was humming a cheerful tune. The crushing weight that had defined them was gone. The emotional echoes of their trauma had been... soothed. The rewrite had healed them, too.
I reached into my pocket and my fingers closed around the familiar shape of a 4x6 photograph. I pulled it out. It was the picture of Misaki Shrine. But the corner of the photo, where she had been standing, was now empty. Just leaves and shadow.
My heart broke.
But then, my eyes caught something else. At the bottom of the photo, almost too small to see, was a single, tiny, shimmering point of light that hadn't been there before. It looked like a misplaced star, captured in the branches of the tree. An impossible light. An echo. A single pixel of hope.
I looked at my friends, my real, solid, breathing friends, who were now free from their ghosts. I looked at the inert, powerless Eidolon camera lying in the grass. I looked at the empty sky.
I was normal now. But I remembered everything. And I had a promise to keep.
"I'll find you, Yuki," I whispered to the rising sun, a single tear falling onto the photograph in my hand. "I swear. I'll find a way to break the world again."