Haneul had gotten good at pretending machines didn't scare her.
She'd grown up watching Kael walk into Towers that chewed people up. Compared to that, lying under humming arcs and letting her soul be scanned for "metadata" was supposed to be nothing.
It didn't feel like nothing.
She heard footsteps before she saw him. The soft shuffle she could pick out in a crowd.
Kael stopped in the doorway like someone had slapped a wall in front of him.
"You look like trash," she said.
"You look like someone got into a fight with a photocopier and lost," he shot back automatically.
It was weak, and they both knew it.
Kael moved to the chair by her bed, dropping into it harder than necessary. His eyes flicked to the IV, the monitors, then to her face. Back to the monitors. Back to her.
"You saw the scan labels?" he asked.
"Pretty hard to miss 'FRAGMENTED SOUL' floating in my eyeballs," she said lightly. "Also the part where it name-dropped you."
He winced.
"How much did you see?" he asked.
"Enough to know the System thinks there's a 'Root Process shard' stuck in me," she said. "Enough to know it tagged you as 'LINK: ACTIVE.' Enough to know Doctor Cho lied when he said that was probably just a 'device mislabel.'"
Kael scrubbed a hand over his face.
"Right," he muttered. "Okay. So. Good news and bad news."
"Start with the dumb news," she said. "I can't handle good or bad right now."
He huffed a laugh despite himself.
"Dumb news is: the System doesn't consider either of us normal," he said. "My HP bug? It… isn't just my body being weird. There's a log entry tied to it that literally says 'soul structure mismatch, linked to Root Process state.' I thought that was just code gibberish. Then your scan popped up."
"Root Process," Haneul repeated. "That's supposed to be, what, the 'core' of the System?"
"That's what the docs think," Kael said. "The ones I've snooped on, anyway."
She narrowed her eyes.
"Snooped," she said slowly. "Kael."
He hesitated.
The words sat in his throat like broken glass.
"I got… pulled into something," he said. "During that Tower glitch. The pit, the rollback event on Floor 1. The System asked if I wanted to debug the error." He gave a humorless smile. "You know me. I file bug reports."
"Of course you said yes," Haneul said. "You're physically incapable of ignoring a broken thing."
"It was supposed to be a tutorial," he said. "Fix a minor bug, get a pat on the head. Except the 'minor bug' category includes my entire existence, apparently."
He told her.
Not everything—he left out the specific flag values, the exact ways he'd cheated the Towers, the little crimes that could get her dragged into his mess. But he laid out the bones: the debug layer, the logs, the vending Node, the tripwire, Watchdog_Ω. The way he'd nudged damage multipliers and friction and human unpredictability.
By the time he finished, Haneul's knuckles were white around her blanket.
"You're… inside the System," she said.
"As a guest," he said quickly. "Barely. I can only touch minor flags. The big stuff is still locked. It's like being handed a screwdriver and told to fix a collapsing building through a keyhole."
"And you didn't think to mention this earlier because…?"
"Because every time I touch something, the System notices a little more," he said. "Because I didn't want that attention near you. And because I wasn't sure it was real until the hospital scanner started name-dropping my soul."
She grimaced.
"Okay, fair," she admitted. "Still mad, but fair."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"When the System tagged my HP as a 'won't fix' bug," he said quietly, "it added a note. Something about 'potential link to Root Process state.' That same note now references you as a 'fragment host.'"
Haneul stared at the ceiling.
"So we're not just sick and broken," she said. "We're… carrying pieces of a fallen god-process in our souls."
"That's a very dramatic way to put it," Kael said. "But… yeah. Kind of."
"Dramatic is what you get for hiding a divine kernel panic from your little sister," she shot back.
Silence stretched.
Monitors beeped.
A cart squeaked past outside the door.
"What else are you not telling me?" she asked finally.
Kael opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"There's a quest," he said slowly. "Called 'Inheritance.' It popped up after I saw references to a previous admin. Someone who had more than Guest access. They… did something to the Root Process. Now it's offline. And… there are hints. In logs. About fragments. Shards."
He looked up, meeting her eyes.
"About you," he said.
Haneul's throat worked.
"So what?" she said, voice too steady. "I'm… what, a piece of someone's failed admin override? A walking error handler?"
"I don't know," he said. "Yet."
She shot him a sharp look.
"'Yet' implies you're going to go poking," she said. "Into something the System itself labeled high risk."
"Someone already broke it," he said. "We're living in the aftermath. If that shard is what's eating your health away—if it's what's keeping my HP at 3—then doing nothing is also high risk."
"Spoken like a true idiot," she muttered.
He smiled faintly.
"That's us," he said. "The Ryu siblings. One idiot in a bed, one idiot in a Tower."
She threw her pillow at him. It barely cleared the IV line before plopping into his lap.
"Fine," she said. "If you're going to chase this 'Inheritance' thing, you don't get to keep me in the dark. Link whatever weird debug interface you have to a projector or something. I want to see logs."
"That's… not how it works," he said. "It's in my head."
"Then narrate better," she snapped. "And don't get yourself deleted. If the System boots you, I'm stuck alone with ghost patch notes in my soul."
He swallowed.
"I'll be careful," he said.
She held his gaze.
"Be clever," she corrected. "Careful won't be enough."
He nodded.
A notification pinged at the edge of his vision—small, unobtrusive.
[QUEST "INHERITANCE" – UPDATED.]
[CONDITION: FRAGMENT HOST AWARENESS – MET.]
[NEW OBJECTIVE UNLOCKED.]
He almost laughed.
"Even the quests eavesdrop," he said.
"Good," Haneul said. "Then tell your patron bug that if it hurts you, I'm suing."
He stood, tucking her pillow back under her arm.
"I'll come back after I know more," he said.
"You'll come back even if you don't," she said. "Bring coffee. The real stuff, not vending Node sludge."
He hesitated.
"About that," he began.
She pointed at the door.
"Out," she said. "Admin boy."
He went.
In the corridor, he leaned against the wall, heart rattling.
"Root Process shard," he murmured. "Fragment host. Inheritance."
The quest pulsed, waiting.
He accepted.