CHAPTER 81: CRACKS BENEATH THE CLOCKTOWER

The breeze was fake.

Jay leaned against the school rooftop’s fence, eyes half-lidded, watching a sun that didn’t warm anything and clouds that had no water in them. Somewhere below, echoes of laughter and footsteps played on loop like a corrupted video.

This wasn’t the real world.

Or the dream world.

Or even that strange corridor where reality folded in on itself like bad origami.

It was something else entirely, a place stuck between memory and simulation.

He exhaled and let his head fall back. The metal fence dug slightly into his neck.

"You again," said a voice, one he knew too well.

Jay didn’t even flinch. "Hey, Null."

A glitch flickered beside him, his other self. Null-Jay, incomplete but aware, sat down like a shadow gaining mass. His hair was slightly shorter. His face less tired, but colder. His presence was unnervingly still.

"You’re stalling," Null said plainly.

Jay shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe I just like this moment. The quiet before everything breaks again."

They sat in silence for a while. Somewhere below, the bell rang. It had rung six times already. No students moved. Just an echo on loop.

"Do you think they remember?" Jay asked.

"Who?"

"Rei. Alicia. The real versions. Not the fragments we keep seeing. Not the... rewinds."

Null didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the sky. A crack spread across it barely noticeable unless you stared.

"Some of them do. Some of them don’t want to. Others were never real to begin with."

Jay laughed softly. "You know, for a figment of my system’s failure, you’re surprisingly poetic."

"I’m you. Just the part that stopped lying to itself."

That shut Jay up for a while.

"You’ll have to choose soon," Null added.

Jay didn’t ask what the choice was. He already knew.

Let go or dive deeper.

Erase the past or force the truth to bleed out from broken code.

He stood up slowly, brushing imaginary dust from his wrinkled uniform.

"Then I guess we’re out of time."

Null-Jay didn’t respond, only nodded once before fading out, leaving only a faint afterimage in the shape of a person who shouldn’t exist.

Jay stared at the cracked sky one last time. Then he walked toward the rooftop door.

Time to go back.

To the others.

To whatever came next.

To whatever he had to become.

______

The academy simulation shimmered, its glossy, false sky flickering with faint lines like hairline fractures on a glass dome. Jay stood near the old clocktower, where time was said to be "stored" within the archive records. Behind him, Alicia’s breath caught as she looked up at the shifting sky. Rei wasn’t with them this time.

They were alone again.

And that was never a good sign.

Jay’s eyes narrowed as the artificial sun above them skipped, jumping forward a few seconds in rapid succession, then freezing again.

Another temporal hiccup.

"How many more before this whole place collapses?" Alicia murmured. Her hand hovered close to her sword. Not drawn, not relaxed either.

Jay shrugged, eyes half-lidded. "Two? Three, maybe. Depends how stubborn the system is."

"That’s not reassuring."

"It’s not meant to be. Reassurance costs energy. I’m conserving mine."

She shot him a sharp look, but didn’t argue. That alone was proof something had changed. The Alicia from fifty Chapters ago would’ve scolded him, told him to take things seriously.

But now?

Even Alicia Renvale understood the world didn’t obey logic anymore.

They walked in silence, footsteps echoing along the courtyard tiles that had once welcomed hundreds of students. The academy’s holographic memories flickered into existence around them, moments out of sequence. A duel between two seniors. A teacher scolding a student who wasn’t there. A banner for a past festival, only half-rendered.

"Rei said this simulation is drifting," Alicia said quietly, "like a dream where memories don’t know where to go."

Jay nodded, not answering.

Because he had started hearing voices too.

Whispers when no one spoke. Shadows when no one moved. And sometimes, faces, familiar ones, warped behind classroom windows.

Something was watching.

He could feel it now.

"You hear it too?" Alicia asked, noticing the way he paused.

Jay didn’t want to lie. Not to her.

"Yeah."

Her expression tensed. "Ever since Rei left the perimeter of this sector, the distortion rate has increased by 19%. I can’t confirm without the Observer fragment, but—"

"Observer’s already watching," Jay interrupted. He tilted his head toward the top of the clocktower. A black-feathered bird- not a real one, but a glitchy rendering of it, it flickered, pixelated, then reformed, staring down at them.

Alicia followed his gaze. "That’s not one of ours."

"No. And it’s not part of the simulation either."

The wind picked up, unnaturally sharp. Then

BOOM.

A section of the academy hall behind them exploded outward in a ripple of corrupted code. Reality bled like oil into the sky, forming a gash in the air, revealing... nothing.

No light. No darkness. Just absence.

Jay cursed under his breath and grabbed Alicia, pulling her behind one of the clocktower’s steel columns as the sound of unregistered footsteps emerged from the breach.

They came one by one.

Students. Dozens of them.

But none of them were real.

Their eyes glowed with static. Their limbs twitched, out of sync with gravity. Their uniforms bore incorrect emblems, eras from different timelines mashed into one.

Jay recognized one of the students. A boy with silver hair who had once challenged him in the duel.

But the boy had lost.

Jay had watched it happen.

"They’re echoes," Alicia whispered. "Residual constructs. Failed data merges."

"Yeah," Jay muttered. "Ghosts of students who never made it."

The ghost-students wandered the courtyard with jagged, delayed movements, some whispering, some laughing, some repeating phrases like broken dolls.

"Top of the class... top of the class..."

"I want to go home now..."

"It’s cold inside the sun."

Jay’s gaze drifted past them, toward the fissure in the sky that continued to spread.

That wasn’t the Observer’s work.

That was something else.

Something older.

He knew it now. Whatever corrupted the dream world hadn’t just broken the system. It had rewritten the concept of structure itself. Time. Space. Memory. Cause. Effect.

All optional now.

Alicia tapped her wrist—activating the fading traces of her Knight Archive. "We should find Rei."

Jay nodded. But before they could move, a voice echoed above them.

"Funny how long it took you two to realize you’re not the players anymore."

The bird on the tower was gone.

In its place stood a silhouette.

Not Rei.

Not the Observer.

But a figure clothed in a cloak of flickering fragments—faces, voices, eyes, laughter—all stitched into one.

A self-aware glitch.

Or worse—a consciousness that had evolved from corrupted data.

Jay’s body tensed. "You’re not part of this world."

"Oh, but I was," the figure replied. Its voice didn’t match its shape—sounding like dozens of people speaking at once. "I was once a student. Once a victim. Once a savior. And now? I’m the final choice you refused to acknowledge."

Alicia drew her sword.

Jay held out a hand to stop her.

"Wait."

The figure tilted its head. "You remember me, don’t you? Buried in the parts of your brain the system couldn’t wipe."

Jay’s head throbbed.

And suddenly—

He did remember.

A girl.

A glitch.

An experiment during the academy’s prototype simulations.

He had met her before the system fully activated—before he even had a System HUD.

Before he became the Lazy Genius.

She had been the first failed subject of the 999x Program.

Her name was...

"...Ivy."

The figure smiled. "Hello again, Jay."