The moment my fist connected with the outer shell of the Chronos-Virus, the world didn't shatter—it buffered.
The cold, sterile air of Shibuya vanished. The screams of my friends, the roar of Yuta's cursed energy, and the flickering neon lights of the 109 Building were cut off as if a giant hand had pulled the plug on reality. I wasn't standing on a rooftop anymore. I was floating in a horizontal sea of white light, surrounded by millions of floating, semi-transparent cubes.
Each cube pulsed with a faint, rhythmic heartbeat. As I drifted past one, I saw a blurred image of a woman laughing. In another, a child was crying over a broken toy. These were the memories the virus had stolen—the "files" it was currently digesting.
[WARNING: MEMORY INTRUSION DETECTED]
[SYSTEM STATUS: DATA CORRUPTION SPREADING]
A voice, distorted and layered like a skipping record, echoed through the white space. "Why... save... them? Memories... are... weight. To... delete... is... to... be... free."
Out of the white fog, a figure stepped forward. It wasn't a monster. It was me. But it was a version of me I didn't recognize. This Ren wore a pristine white version of the Jujutsu High uniform. His eyes weren't violet with the Void; they were a cold, clinical blue. He held a tablet identical to the one the Architect had used.
"Who are you?" I demanded, my voice sounding thin in the vacuum.
"I am the Backup," the other Ren said. His voice was a perfect, emotionless mirror of mine. "I am the version of Ren that was supposed to exist if you hadn't 'glitched.' I am the archive of everything the System took from you to make you a King. Do you want to know the truth, Ren? Or would you rather die in the dark?"
The Deleted Childhood
The Backup Ren swiped his hand across the air. A massive cube floated between us, expanding until it swallowed my entire field of vision.
I saw a house. A small, traditional home on the outskirts of Sendai. It was a memory I hadn't touched in years—not because I had forgotten it, but because the System had actively walled it off. I saw a man with the same stubborn jawline as mine, sitting at a table covered in complex seals and old scrolls.
"My father," I whispered.
"He wasn't just a sorcerer," the Backup said, walking through the memory as if it were a museum. "He was a Logic-Smith. He spent his life trying to bridge the gap between Jujutsu and mathematics. He was the one who discovered the 'Source Code' of cursed energy. And he was the first person the Architect ever deleted."
In the memory, the man looked up, his eyes widening in terror as the walls of the house began to turn into blue pixels. He looked at a small boy—me—standing in the doorway.
"Ren, listen to me!" the man in the memory shouted, his voice cracking as his lower half vanished into code. "The world isn't what they tell you! The Void isn't a curse—it's the 'Clear' button! Don't let them program you!"
The memory shattered. I fell to my knees, the weight of the revelation hitting me harder than any physical blow. My father hadn't died in an accident. He had been "formatted" because he found out the world was becoming a game.
The Logic of the Void
"The System didn't choose you because you were special," the Backup Ren said, standing over me. "It chose you because you were the only 'file' left from the Logic-Smith's research. You were a seed of the Void that the Architect tried to domesticate. But you're failing, Ren. You're letting 'friends' and 'emotions' slow down your processing speed."
The white space began to turn red. The Chronos-Virus was finishing its meal. Below us, in the real world, ten thousand people were about to lose their identities forever.
"You're wrong," I said, pushing myself up. My legs were shaking, but the Void in my chest was no longer a cold, empty hole. It was a roar. "My father didn't call the Void a weapon. He called it the 'Clear' button. It's not about deleting people. It's about deleting the lies."
I reached out and grabbed the Backup Ren by the throat. He tried to dissolve into pixels, but I gripped him with the raw gravity of my soul.
"You're just a file," I growled. "And I'm the user."
[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: SYSTEM FORMAT]
I didn't punch him. I reached into his chest and pulled. I pulled all the stolen memories, all the suppressed data of my past, and all the stolen souls of Shibuya back into myself. The white space began to crack. The Backup Ren screamed—a sound of pure static—as he was pulled into the black hole forming in my palm.
The Great Restoration
I opened my eyes back on the roof of the 109 Building.
The Chronos-Virus was screeching, its many clock-hands spinning wildly in reverse. The faces on its surface were being spat out as glowing orbs of light, flying back down into the street and into the chests of the frozen people below.
"Ren!" Nobara shouted from a nearby rooftop. She was covered in blue sparks, her hammer glowing with a desperate light. "It's collapsing! Get out of there!"
The monster began to implode. Because I had absorbed the "Backup," I could see the monster for what it really was: a giant compression file. If it exploded, the shockwave would erase Shibuya.
"I've got this," I muttered.
I didn't use a [Gravity Repulse]. I used the Void to create a containment field. I wrapped my arms around the center of the flickering clock-monster, and for a moment, I felt the weight of ten thousand lives. I squeezed.
The Chronos-Virus didn't explode. It vanished. It was compressed into a single, tiny black marble that sat in the palm of my hand.
[ERROR DELETED]
[MEMORIES RESTORED: 99.8%]
I slumped against the railing of the roof, the marble rolling out of my hand and shattering into harmless dust. Below, the city of Shibuya suddenly burst into noise. Cars honked, people shouted in confusion, and the "static" in the air vanished.
The Aftermath
Maki and Yuta appeared on the roof a moment later. Maki looked at me, her eyes lingering on the new expression on my face.
"You found something in there, didn't you?" she asked softly.
"The truth about my father," I said, looking at my hands. They were still shaking. "The System wasn't just a game that appeared out of nowhere. It was a project. And the people who started it... they're still out there. The Architect was just the software. We still need to find the hardware."
Yuta looked toward the north, toward the mountains where Jujutsu High sat. "The elders know, don't they? That's why they want you dead."
"Probably," I said, standing up with a newfound purpose. "But they don't have the System to help them anymore. And I have the 'Clear' button."
We looked out over the city. It was a "Cursed Age," and the world was full of Errors. But for the first time, I wasn't playing a game. I was writing my own story.