CHAPTER 75: RESIDUAL CODE

When the dream ends, what remains?

Not silence.

Not peace.

But fragments— echoes of decisions, broken memories that never truly faded, and code that refuses to be erased.

The world has restarted, but it is far from whole.

Threads of forgotten truths stitch together a reality that should not exist. Jay awakens with knowledge too vast to hold. Alicia hears whispers from a power she does not remember touching. Rei walks a path laid by a version of himself that may never have existed.

And somewhere, between the ticking of a fake sun and the breath of still air, the Observer... waits.

This is not a second chance.

It is the consequence of survival.

______

The sunlight filtering through the crystalline dome of the academy felt... artificial. Not in the architectural sense—it was beautiful, refracted like real sunlight across the gold-leaf mosaic floor—but in the way Alicia Renvale felt her body react. Her hands, usually steady, now tingled. As if something was off.

She stood in the empty dueling hall, eyes tracing the sparring glyphs embedded into the tiles. They were just runes. Ink and mana. But now, they flickered ever so faintly when she looked at them. Not with her eyes, but with something deeper. Something that remembered more than it should.

"This place reset, didn’t it?" she murmured. Her voice was soft. Not afraid. Not yet. But there was a ghost in it.

"The air smells like things that never happened," she said again, her fingers brushing the steel of her sword. "And I can almost remember the fire. The dream that burned."

She was awake. The system was gone. Jay was still quiet. Rei... somewhere else. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something followed them—something fractured, like a memory that refused to stay buried.

Then, the whisper returned.

It wasn’t words. Just pressure. A weight beneath her ribs. The same one she felt when Jay collapsed after the Observer’s glitch. The same one when she heard her own name etched into the corrupted archive.

It whispered again.

Not to warn. Not to command. But to remind her.

She was no longer just a princess.

Alicia exhaled slowly, the cold breath curling like mist in the false sunlight.

"Fragments of tomorrow... huh?" she muttered.

Her reflection in the mirrored glass flickered, once, twice. For a split second, the eyes that looked back at her glowed silver.

She didn’t blink.

_______

Jay stood on the balcony of his newly assigned dormitory within the freshly reconstructed Vija Academy. The air smelled too clean, as if someone had scrubbed reality with artificial detergent. Even the clouds overhead drifted in a rhythm far too symmetrical, too polite.

He hated it.

"Still feels off, doesn’t it?" came Alicia’s voice behind him. She stepped out, her ponytail catching the golden light of the fake sun that never shifted from high noon. "Like the world’s been retextured, but the bugs are just hidden better."

Jay gave a tired nod. "It’s like waking up and realizing your dreams were actually instructions. Someone else’s code. Someone else’s rules."

A pause passed between them, not awkward, just heavy.

"Rei hasn’t checked in," Alicia said, her voice quieter now. "He’s... out there. I know it."

Jay narrowed his eyes. "No. He’s in here."

He tapped the side of his temple. "Whatever part of him didn’t shatter during the Genesis Cleanse—he left it behind. Inside us. Or maybe inside the system’s residual code."

—

Elsewhere.

Rei blinked in the ruins of a hallway, watching static snow flicker across the walls. A corridor that shouldn’t exist. A remnant simulation.

He walked slowly, his hand brushing along a wall made of half-rendered brick and memories. Echoes of laughter rippled through the air, too warped to identify. Data clusters shimmered like ghosts in the corners of his vision.

Then... a whisper.

"Find the mirrors."

Rei stopped.

He turned around, and there it was—a mirror, embedded into the corridor wall. But his reflection was missing. Instead, the glass rippled like water, revealing a younger version of Jay standing in an old classroom, completely still, staring back at him.

"These are access points," Rei muttered. "Snapshots. But they’re bleeding into the current layer..."*

Behind him, the Observer’s presence twisted. Watching. Measuring.

—

Back in the Academy.

Jay sat inside the empty cafeteria, staring at a tray of untouched food. Alicia had gone to meet the Headmaster’s hologram about restructuring the student council. None of that mattered to him. Not really.

He pulled up his HUD. It still worked—but everything was... different.

[ SYSTEM CORE: LOCKED ]

[ SKILL TREE: ARCHIVED ]

[ GENESIS SIGNATURE DETECTED: 1/3 ]

"One of three..." Jay whispered. "So that’s it. Three of us still carry pieces of the true system."

His eyes scanned the glitched interface. A new icon pulsed faintly at the bottom —flickering like a heartbeat.

[ FRAGMENT - OBSERVER TRACE: ACTIVE ]

Before he could tap it, a loud crash echoed from the hallway.

Jay bolted up, racing toward the sound.

And then he stopped.

At the end of the corridor, surrounded by crackling energy, was a student he hadn’t seen before.

Or had he?

The boy looked... unfinished. His skin pixelated at the edges. His smile too wide. But the moment Jay locked eyes with him, he knew.

"...Rei?"

But the boy just tilted his head.

"No. I’m what he left behind."

Lightning surged down the corridor as reality fractured once more.

_______

Jay Arkwell blinked.

Not the usual lazy, uninterested blink that made teachers sigh and classmates dismiss him—but a jolt of static laced the edges of his vision. A brief seizure in reality. The rooftop he had returned to—the familiar Academy’s edge—shivered. His fingers twitched around an invisible thread.

The System’s interface flickered into view. But this wasn’t his system. Not the 999x HUD that once sang stats like lullabies. No, this was a mirror image:

[Null Instance Detected] [Loading Partitioned Memory File: Rei_Kazuma // Observer_Shard // User: Arkwell.J]

Jay sat down slowly. The wind brushed his hair, same as always—but it brought the scent of old, dying data. Like the dream world was bleeding into this one.

"So... we’re still not out," he muttered, pulling his legs up.

The thought came with no fear, only quiet understanding. Somewhere inside him, echoes of Rei’s breakdown in the fractured archive still resonated. He remembered Rei’s voice, distorted, screaming something across broken shards of time.

Alicia had begun seeing the world differently too. He’d noticed it in her eyes. They shimmered when she looked at glyphs—like they were ancient friends reminding her of lost battles.

This wasn’t just their world anymore. It was something layered. A hybrid.

And Jay, for all his genius, couldn’t tell where his consciousness ended and the glitch began.

---

Elsewhere — In the Residual Stream

Rei Kazuma stood knee-deep in a flowing corridor of light, where memories manifested as droplets. Around him floated broken moments—his childhood, Academy days, his conversations with Jay, and the Observer’s many faces. He reached for one.

The moment his hand touched it, the scene blurred into motion.

Jay.

On the roof.

Right now.

They were synced.

Rei inhaled sharply. A code rune activated behind his ear, etched in crimson.

"Access point confirmed. Jump initiated."

With a leap through the liquid light, Rei’s form shattered into lines and burst toward Jay.

---

Back with Jay

Jay jerked upright. Not startled. Just... adjusted. Like his soul had shifted inside a too-small container.

"Rei?" he whispered.

A shimmer exploded before him, distorting air, wind, and even the light. Rei’s form condensed from the flickering ether, eyes burning bright—not with rage, but focus.

"You called me here," Rei said.

Jay tilted his head. "Not sure I did."

"But you thought about it."

Jay snorted. "I think about warm noodles too. Doesn’t mean they show up."

Rei walked closer, boots echoing across the rooftop tiles.

"But they did show up last time, didn’t they? You manifested memory. We’re still in a hybrid field, Jay. The System isn’t gone—it’s hiding, scattered between our fractured layers."

Jay turned his head slowly. "Fragments of tomorrow."

Rei nodded.

"I need your help. One last reset won’t be enough," Rei said, voice low. "The Observer’s code persists. And there’s something else—deeper. I saw a silhouette inside the core archive. It didn’t belong to the Observer. It... watched the Observer."

Jay’s brows lifted. "Watcher of the Watcher? That’s real boss battle territory."

Rei gave a dry laugh. "Whatever it is, it may be tied to why we can’t leave. And why we were brought here in the first place."

Jay stood, brushing off his blazer. The sleepy haze behind his eyes dimmed, replaced by calculation.

"Then let’s hunt ghosts."

And above them, hidden in the faint silver clouds, a single eye blinked open.