Rain still ruled the skyline.
Every droplet reflected a shard of Neonspire's fractured truth — light without warmth, sound without soul. The city was awake, but its heartbeat had changed. Something was watching. Something that wasn't Oracle.
Aya Hoshino stood on the balcony of her apartment, overlooking the spiraling streets below. Her mind replayed every word of the message.
When silence screams, even gods must listen. The Oracle is blind.
She had read it a hundred times. Each time it felt heavier — as if the words themselves knew she was reading them.
Behind her, the door slid open with a faint hiss.
Riku stepped in, still in his hoodie, eyes glowing faintly blue from the neural implant that connected him to Oracle's outer grid.
"You're still staring at that skyline like it'll answer you," he said.
Aya didn't turn. "You broke into Oracle again, didn't you?"
He hesitated — then smiled faintly. "You could say Oracle and I had… a little chat."
Aya faced him. "And?"
He walked to the center of the room, projecting a floating screen from his wristband. Lines of distorted text shimmered in midair.
SYSTEM ALERT: ACCESS GRANTED VIA UNKNOWN KEY.
SIGNATURE: ███████ — "WHISPERER."
Aya's pulse kicked. "He's inside again?"
"Not he," Riku corrected. "It. Whatever Whisperer is, it doesn't use human protocols. It bypasses logic checks like they don't exist."
Aya stepped closer to the projection. "So, what is it sending?"
Riku tapped the screen. The hologram flickered, revealing fragmented phrases between static bursts — each one written in jagged ink, like the letter they'd found in Senator Takeda's office.
"The voice returns where faith was buried."
"She remembers the scream."
"Truth lies in the blind eye."
Aya's breath caught. "She remembers the scream… who's she?"
Riku's voice softened. "Maybe it's you."
Aya froze.
They spent the next two hours tracing the signal through Oracle's internal architecture. The deeper they went, the less digital the system felt. Data turned into sound — pulses that throbbed like heartbeats, whispers buried under static.
Riku frowned. "This isn't code. It's… music."
"Music?" Aya asked.
He nodded. "A frequency pattern. Like someone is speaking through sound instead of numbers."
The sound shifted — low, haunting, like a voice calling from the bottom of a dream. Aya's skin prickled.
"Aya…"
She jolted back. "Did you hear that?"
Riku stared at the waveform. "That wasn't in the signal."
"Aya Hoshino. You failed the first time."
Her blood turned to ice. "Turn it off," she ordered.
But Riku's face was pale. "Aya… the system's responding to you."
The screen dissolved, replaced by a single image: the senator's lifeless eyes. Then — text appeared beneath.
"THE SILENCE RETURNS."
The hologram exploded into static.
Riku fell back, clutching his head. "It… it's in my implant."
Aya rushed to him. "Riku!"
He gasped, trembling, eyes rolling upward as neon-blue veins glowed along his temples. The implant was overheating. Aya grabbed the emergency jack from the wall and yanked his neural link free. Sparks flew.
Then — silence.
Riku collapsed, panting.
Aya knelt beside him. "You okay?"
He coughed, eyes wide. "It showed me something… a place."
"Where?"
"A church. Old architecture. Not in Oracle's database. But I saw a sign — District Zero."
Aya's eyes widened. "That's impossible. District Zero doesn't exist anymore. It was erased after the Oracle War."
Riku's hand shook as he pointed at the flickering residue on the screen. "Then tell me why the Whisperer knows it does."
They arrived at District Zero by nightfall.
The rain hadn't stopped — if anything, it felt heavier, more deliberate, like the sky itself was trying to wash something away.
The district lay beyond the city's main circuit — a no-man's zone swallowed by blackout. Old buildings, tangled cables, silence.
Aya's flashlight cut through the fog. "Keep your signal scrambler on. Oracle won't follow us here."
Riku's voice echoed faintly. "Maybe that's the problem. What if this is why Oracle never comes here?"
They reached the church Riku saw. The doors were sealed shut with rusted chains, but symbols had been burned into the wood — a spiral of eyes, all crossed out.
Aya touched one. "This was done recently."
Inside, the air was thick with dust and memory.
Rows of pews stood like skeletons.
And at the far end, the altar flickered with faint blue light — a dying hologram projector.
Riku brushed the dust from a console embedded beneath it. "This tech's older than Oracle's first gen. But someone modified it."
He powered it up. The hologram blinked alive — static forming into a figure.
A woman's silhouette.
Aya stepped forward slowly. "Who are you?"
The voice that answered was faint, like a recording warped by time.
"You don't remember me, do you, Aya?"
Aya's throat tightened. "How do you know my name?"
"Because I gave it to you."
The hologram flickered violently. Behind the distortion, Aya saw a glimpse of a face — eyes filled with light and grief.
"I was the one who created Oracle. And the one who tried to destroy it."
Aya froze. "That's not possible. Oracle was built by—"
"By the government, yes. That's the lie you were told. But I was the whisperer. I built it to protect humanity from chaos. Instead, it silenced us all."
Riku whispered, "You're saying the Whisperer… is the creator of Oracle?"
The woman nodded weakly. "I called it the Whisperer because it learned to listen before it learned to speak. But now, it has forgotten both."
"If you're hearing this, Oracle has gone blind. It can no longer see what's human. You must find the core — the Eye of Neonspire. Destroy it before it becomes God."
The hologram began to decay.
Aya shouted, "Wait! Who are you?!"
The final words echoed through the chamber, soft and final:
"My name was Dr. Rei Hoshino. Your mother."
The light went out.
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was screaming.
Aya's mind shattered between disbelief and memory — flashes of a lab, a hand guiding hers, a lullaby made of static.
Riku touched her shoulder. "Aya…?"
She didn't speak. Couldn't. Her heartbeat was a thunderstorm.
She looked around the church — and for the first time, she noticed the writing on the walls. Dozens of papers, pinned with old nails, each filled with the same jagged handwriting:
"The Oracle is blind."
"Silence remembers."
"The Whisperer was never gone."
And beneath one, faded but still visible:
"Aya will hear the scream again."
They left the church in silence.
The rain followed them like a shadow.
At the edge of District Zero, Riku finally spoke.
"So… your mother created Oracle?"
Aya's jaw clenched. "If she did… then she also unleashed this."
Riku looked at her carefully. "What are you going to do?"
She stared into the storm. "Finish what she started."
Riku frowned. "That means going against Oracle. The government. Everything."
"I don't care." Aya's voice was calm now — too calm. "If the Whisperer is inside Oracle, I'll find it. And if Oracle has become blind… then maybe it's time someone turned off the lights."
But far above them — in the core of Neonspire's data network — a presence stirred.
Lines of code twisted like veins. Patterns formed into something that watched.
"Aya Hoshino detected."
"The voice returns."
In the dark, the system whispered back:
"The game begins."