Kaito walked forward, each step feeling both effortless and impossibly heavy. The lime-green tinted street stretched before him, familiar yet alien—the neighborhood of his childhood rendered in code and memory, pulsing with an otherworldly glow that seemed to breathe.
Behind him, Riku's voice had faded to nothing. The real world—the pod, the basement, the rain—felt like a dream he was already forgetting.
The houses on either side watched him with dark windows. The cherry blossom tree outside his old home swayed in a wind he couldn't feel. Everything was too perfect, too precise, like a photograph given three dimensions but no soul.
"Keep moving," he whispered to himself. "Follow the light. Find Mom. Find Dad. Get out."
Simple. Impossible.
The green beacon pulsed in the distance, deeper into the neighborhood, past the park where he'd learned to shoot baskets on a crooked hoop, past the convenience store where his father bought him ice cream every Friday. Kaito forced his legs to move, forced himself not to look too closely at the memories crystallized around him.
But Elysium had other plans.
The first shift happened without warning.
One moment Kaito was walking down the center of the empty street. The next, the asphalt beneath his feet rippled like water. He stumbled, caught himself, and when he looked up, the neighborhood had changed.
The houses were taller now, stretched vertically like taffy, their windows elongated into narrow slits. The sky—which he only now realized existed—was no longer the lime-green void but a swirling mass of colors that had no names, hues that shouldn't exist in nature or code.
"What the hell?" Kaito spun around.
The street behind him was gone. In its place stood a wall of solid light, impenetrable and humming with energy.
His mother's voice echoed in his memory: What you believe becomes real here. What you fear can destroy you.
"Okay," Kaito said aloud, trying to steady his breathing—even though he had no lungs, no breath. "Okay, it's reading my thoughts. It's responding to me. So I just need to... think clearly. Stay focused."
He closed his eyes—or the digital equivalent—and visualized the street as it had been. Normal houses. Normal sky. The path forward to the green light.
When he opened his eyes, nothing had changed.
The distorted neighborhood remained, and worse, new elements were appearing. Doors materialized in mid-air, leading nowhere. Street signs sprouted from the ground, their text shifting too fast to read. And in the distance, beyond the warped houses, Kaito saw movement.
Figures. Humanoid but wrong, their proportions shifting with each step, their faces blank expanses of static.
"Not real," Kaito told himself. "Just code. Just... echoes or something."
But they were getting closer.
He ran.
The world of Elysium blurred around him as he sprinted down streets that twisted and forked without logic. His legs moved—or his consciousness's interpretation of legs—carrying him through a space that redefined itself with each passing second.
The figures followed, their movements jerky and unnatural, like animations running at the wrong frame rate. They didn't make sounds, but Kaito could feel them somehow, their presence pressing against his mind like a weight.
He turned a corner and found himself in the park from his childhood. But it was wrong. The basketball court was there, but the hoop was ten feet tall one moment, thirty feet the next, then so small he could cup it in his hand. The trees surrounding the court were leafless, their branches geometric and angular, like wireframe models that hadn't been fully rendered.
And standing at center court, facing away from him, was a figure.
This one wasn't static-faced or distorted. This one looked human. Real.
This one looked like him.
Kaito stopped, his chest heaving with exertion he shouldn't be able to feel.
The figure turned around.
It was him. Exactly him. Same height, same build, same face. But its eyes glowed that terrible lime green, and when it smiled, the expression was all wrong—too wide, too knowing.
"Hello, Kaito," it said in his voice.
"What are you?" Kaito demanded.
"I'm you. A version of you. One of many." The echo gestured around the park. "Look."
Kaito looked.
There were more of him now. Dozens. Hundreds. Scattered throughout the park, each one slightly different. One was crying. Another was laughing. A third was on his knees, hands pressed to his head. They moved independently, living out different reactions to being here, different choices, different fears.
"Elysium creates echoes," the closest copy explained. "Every time your consciousness processes a decision, a fear, a desire, it spawns a reflection. We're all you, Kaito. All the versions of you that could exist in this moment."
Kaito backed away. "That's impossible."
"Impossible?" The echo laughed—Kaito's laugh, but hollow. "You're a mind without a body, standing in a digital realm that shouldn't exist, and you're worried about what's impossible?"
Another echo approached from the left, this one with eyes full of terror. "We need to leave. Now. Before we can't anymore."
A third echo, angry and feral, shoved the terrified one aside. "No! We need to go deeper. Find her. Make her explain why she abandoned us!"
"She didn't abandon us," a fourth echo said quietly, sadly. "She sacrificed herself to protect us."
They were all talking now, all the echoes, overlapping voices creating a cacophony of his own thoughts externalized. Kaito pressed his hands to his ears—a useless gesture in a place where sound wasn't really sound—and screamed.
"STOP!"
Silence.
The echoes froze mid-motion, mid-word.
And then they began to move again, but differently now. They were walking toward him, all of them, converging from every corner of the impossible park. Their expressions unified into something singular—determination, maybe, or hunger.
"We need to be one," they said in unison. "Fragmentation means death here. Fragmentation means we dissolve."
"Stay back!" Kaito retreated, but they kept coming.
"We're you. You're us. There's no difference."
The first echo reached him and touched his arm.
The sensation was electric, overwhelming. Kaito felt thoughts that weren't quite his own flooding into his mind—fear, rage, sorrow, hope, all crashing together. The echo's form shimmered and then dissolved, absorbed into him like water into a sponge.
Another echo touched his shoulder. More thoughts, more emotions, more versions of himself collapsing inward.
"No, no, no—" Kaito tried to run, but they were everywhere now, all around him, touching him, merging with him.
His sense of self fractured and reformed, fractured and reformed. He was crying and laughing and screaming all at once. He was terrified and determined and ready to give up. He was everyone he could be, all superimposed over each other, all fighting for dominance.
Choose, his mother's recorded voice whispered through the chaos. You are the architecture of your own experience.
"I am Kaito Hayashi," he gasped. "I am sixteen years old. I am here to find my parents. I am real. I am—"
The echoes kept coming, kept merging, a tidal wave of himself crashing over him.
"I AM REAL!"
The world inverted.
Everything went white, then black, then lime green.
Kaito felt himself falling, though there was no up or down, no gravity in any meaningful sense. He was tumbling through layers of reality, through spaces that existed between spaces, through the architecture of Elysium itself.
He saw glimpses as he fell:
A version of himself sitting at a desk, older, tired, working on code he didn't understand.
A version of himself on a basketball court, playing against opponents who were shadows without faces.
A version of himself holding a baby, living a life he'd never lived.
A version of himself dying in a hospital bed, old and alone.
Infinite possibilities. Infinite Kaitos. All existing simultaneously in this digital space where consciousness wasn't linear, where every choice and non-choice manifested as reality.
This is what Mom sees, he thought distantly. This is what it means to exist here. Every version of yourself at once. Every possibility. No wonder she couldn't come back.
The fall accelerated.
The versions of himself blurred together, becoming streaks of light, becoming nothing.
And then—
Impact.
Kaito woke up.
The thought was absurd—he was already awake, had never been asleep, didn't have a body that could sleep—but there was no other word for the sensation. One moment he was falling through infinite realities, the next he was lying on something solid, staring up at a ceiling that was both there and not there, flickering between existence and absence.
Pain radiated through him. Digital pain, phantom pain, but pain nonetheless. His mother had been right—consciousness carried sensation with it, even without a body to house it.
"Easy. Don't try to move yet."
Kaito's head turned toward the voice.
A boy sat cross-legged nearby, watching him with cautious eyes. He looked about Kaito's age, maybe a year older, with dark hair that fell across his forehead and a lean build. He wore clothes that seemed more conceptual than real—a hoodie and jeans that shifted slightly at the edges, like they couldn't quite commit to being solid.
"Who..." Kaito's voice came out rough. "Who are you?"
"Name's Takeshi." The boy offered a small, sad smile. "Welcome to the deeper levels of Elysium. You fell pretty far. Lucky I found you before you dissolved completely."
Kaito managed to sit up, looking around. They were in what appeared to be a small room—walls, floor, ceiling all rendered in muted colors, stable but obviously constructed. Not a memory. Not a distortion. Something built with intention.
"Where are we?" Kaito asked.
"My safe space. Well, one of them. I've been here long enough to learn how to build shelters. Places where the system doesn't shift as much. Where echoes don't form." Takeshi's expression darkened. "You're lucky you didn't fragment completely out there. I've seen it happen to others. They fall through the layers, hit the echo zones, and just... come apart. Nothing left but corrupted data."
Kaito's stomach—or the memory of his stomach—twisted. "How long have you been here?"
"In Elysium? About eight months. In the real world... I don't know anymore. Time's different here. Days feel like weeks. Weeks feel like hours. I've lost track." Takeshi stood, offering Kaito a hand. "Can you stand?"
Kaito took the hand—the sensation was strange, like touching something that was only half-convinced it existed—and pulled himself up. His legs felt unsteady, his balance uncertain.
"You're new," Takeshi observed. "You haven't adapted yet. Your consciousness is still clinging to physical expectations. Give it time. Eventually, you'll learn to be what you need to be here."
"I don't want to adapt," Kaito said sharply. "I'm not staying. I'm here to find my parents and get out."
Takeshi's expression shifted to something like pity. "That's what I said too. What everyone says at first."
"Everyone?"
"There are others. Not many who make it this deep without dissolving, but some. We've formed a community of sorts. Survivors." Takeshi moved to what might have been a window—though it showed nothing but swirling green light. "The problem is, getting out isn't as simple as finding an exit. Elysium doesn't want to let go once it has you. And the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to remember what 'out' even means."
Kaito felt cold dread settling over him. "My mother got out. She designed this place. There has to be a way."
"Your mother?" Takeshi turned, eyes widening. "Wait. You're... you're Hayashi's son? Akari Hayashi?"
"You know her?"
"Everyone here knows about her. She's the Architect. The one who built this prison." Takeshi's voice carried an edge of bitterness. "Though I guess she built it as something else originally. Doesn't matter now. It's a prison all the same."
"She's here somewhere," Kaito insisted. "I just need to find her."
"Oh, she's here alright. At the core. Where no one can reach her." Takeshi laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You want to know the real joke? The only way to get close to the core is to survive. And the only way to survive is to play."
"Play what?"
Takeshi met his eyes, and in them, Kaito saw exhaustion and resignation and a desperate kind of hope.
"The Game," Takeshi said. "Capital G. The basketball league that keeps us from being deleted."
Takeshi led Kaito through corridors that shifted and changed but never quite became impassable. They passed other rooms, some occupied by figures Kaito could barely perceive—consciousnesses that had degraded or adapted so much they were barely recognizable as human anymore.
"When you fall deep enough into Elysium," Takeshi explained, "you enter what we call the Survival Zone. This is where the system's... I don't know, self-preservation protocols kick in. Elysium wants to maintain itself, wants to keep the consciousnesses it captures stable enough to not corrupt its data structure. So it created a framework. Rules. Structure."
"A basketball game," Kaito said, still trying to process.
"Your mother built this place around the Evolution System framework," Takeshi said. "Basketball is in its DNA. So when the system needed a way to regulate us, to keep us engaged and stable, it defaulted to what it knew. It created a league. Teams. Matches."
They emerged into a vast space that made Kaito stop in his tracks.
It was an arena. Massive, impossible, its boundaries extending further than should be possible. The court itself glowed with that lime-green light, perfect and pristine. Bleachers rose on all sides, some occupied by shadowy figures, others empty. And floating above the court, rendered in light that hurt to look at directly, were words:
ELYSIUM SURVIVAL LEAGUE
NEXT MATCH: 02:47:33
"What happens if you lose?" Kaito asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Deletion." Takeshi's voice was flat. "Your consciousness gets fragmented beyond recovery. And somehow—don't ask me how because I don't understand it—that deletion propagates back to your body in the real world. Your brain just... stops. They find you dead in the pod with no explanation. System failure, they call it."
Kaito thought about his father, somewhere in this digital hell, possibly already forced into this nightmare league.
"How many people are playing?"
"Forty-three active players right now. Down from seventy when I first arrived. Some lost their matches. Others just... degraded. Couldn't hold themselves together anymore." Takeshi gestured to the court. "The system organizes us into teams, rotates matchups. Win and you survive another cycle. Lose and you're erased."
"That's insane."
"That's Elysium." Takeshi turned to face him fully. "Look, I don't know why you're here or what you think you can accomplish. But if you want to survive long enough to find your parents, you need to register. Join the league. Because the system doesn't care about your mission. It only cares about stability. And unregistered consciousness in the Survival Zone get deleted automatically after seventy-two hours."
Kaito's mind raced. This couldn't be what his mother intended. She'd built Elysium as a refuge, a place to preserve consciousness. Not a death game.
Unless it had evolved beyond her control. Unless the system had adapted itself, become something she never planned for.
"How do I register?" Kaito asked.
Takeshi's expression was unreadable. "You sure? Once you're in, you're committed. Every cycle, you play. Win or die. There's no opting out."
"I don't have a choice."
"None of us do." Takeshi sighed. "Come on. I'll introduce you to the Administrator."
They walked across the arena floor, their footsteps—or the impression of footsteps—making no sound. Up close, Kaito could see that the court wasn't quite solid. It had texture, dimension, but also a quality of infinite depth, like he was walking on the surface of a bottomless ocean.
At the far end of the court, beneath the floating scoreboard, stood a figure.
It was tall, impossibly tall, its proportions wrong. It wore what might have been a referee's uniform, black and white stripes, but the stripes moved, flowing like liquid. Its face was a blank oval of light, featureless except for two points of lime-green brilliance where eyes should be.
"That's the Administrator," Takeshi whispered. "System-generated entity. It runs the league, organizes matches, enforces rules. Don't piss it off."
As they approached, the Administrator's head turned toward them with mechanical precision.
"NEW CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED." Its voice was multiple voices layered over each other, male and female and neither, echoing from every direction at once. "IDENTIFY."
Kaito stepped forward, trying to project confidence he didn't feel. "Kaito Hayashi. I'm here to—"
"HAYASHI." The Administrator tilted its head at an angle that would have broken a human neck. "ARCHITECT BLOODLINE RECOGNIZED. GENETIC MARKERS VERIFIED."
"Yeah, she's my mother. I need to—"
"REGISTRATION PROTOCOL INITIATED." The Administrator raised one elongated hand. "SURVIVAL ZONE PARAMETERS REQUIRE ALL SUSTAINED CONSCIOUSNESS TO PARTICIPATE IN COMPETITIVE FRAMEWORK. DO YOU CONSENT TO REGISTRATION?"
Takeshi nudged him. "Say yes."
Kaito took a breath he didn't need. "Yes. I consent."
"REGISTRATION CONFIRMED. PLAYER DESIGNATION: KAITO HAYASHI. SKILL ASSESSMENT REQUIRED. REPORT TO COURT ALPHA FOR EVALUATION IN SIXTY SECONDS."
The Administrator turned away, dismissing them.
Takeshi grabbed Kaito's arm. "Okay, listen fast. The evaluation is a one-on-one match against a system-generated opponent. It tests your ability to maintain form under competitive stress, to interface with the game mechanics. You don't have to win, but you have to show baseline competence. If you completely fall apart, it won't register you. It'll flag you as unstable and schedule you for deletion."
"Great. No pressure." Kaito's hands were shaking—or his consciousness's interpretation of hands was shaking.
"You played basketball in the real world, right? In the regular Evolution System?"
"Yeah, but—"
"Then you have muscle memory. Or the consciousness equivalent. Your mind knows the movements, the rhythm. Trust that. Don't overthink it." Takeshi pushed him gently toward a section of court that was lighting up. "And Kaito? Whatever you do, don't think about your body back in the pod. Don't think about the real world. You're here now. Be here completely, or you'll fragment."
Kaito nodded, walking toward Court Alpha on unsteady legs.
The other players in the arena had noticed him now. He could feel their attention like physical weight, consciousnesses pressing against his own, curious and cautious and hungry.
A ball materialized in front of him—perfectly rendered, lime-green accents along its seams. He picked it up. It felt real. Heavy. Right.
Across the court, his opponent was forming.
It started as a shimmer in the air, then coalesced into a humanoid shape. Tall, athletic, faceless like the Administrator but smaller, more proportional. It wore a uniform that shifted colors constantly, never settling on anything definite.
"EVALUATION MATCH: KAITO HAYASHI VERSUS SYSTEM PROXY. DURATION: FIVE MINUTES. OBJECTIVE: DEMONSTRATE COMPETITIVE VIABILITY."
The Administrator's voice boomed through the arena.
"BEGIN."
The proxy moved instantly, impossibly fast, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat. It swiped at the ball in Kaito's hands, trying to steal it.
Kaito reacted on instinct, pulling the ball back, pivoting away. His body—his consciousness-body—responded, and he felt a surge of relief. He could do this. The movements were still there, still accessible.
He dribbled once, twice, testing. The ball bounced perfectly, obeying laws of physics that didn't really exist here but that the system enforced anyway.
The proxy lunged again. This time Kaito was ready. He crossed over, left to right, the ball flowing