The subway hummed beneath Rei’s boots. The phantom card sat heavy in her hoodie’s chest pocket, its single white kanji 幻 pressing against her like a dare.
She hadn’t slept. Not since Miru had handed her the mission. Not since Riku told her he’d wait, again. The city moved around her, indifferent. Trash flew past convenience stores. Punks scrawled graffiti into vending machines. Tourists snapped selfies in places she used to call home.
She didn’t look like Rei anymore. Hair dyed black with choppy red streaks. New piercings. No hoodie—just a faux leather jacket with a barcode stitched across the back.
In this world, names were currency. And tonight, she had none.
---
The entrance to Node-6 was hidden behind a karaoke bar that never played music. Rei approached slowly, the phantom card in her hand. A man with mirrored sunglasses and no sleeves blocked the door. He glanced at the card, then at her eyes.
“You speak code?” he asked.
“I live in it,” she replied.
He pushed the door open, revealing a stairwell lit in flickering red. “Don’t speak unless spoken to,” he muttered.
The descent smelled like steel, old sweat, and cigarette embers. At the bottom—chaos.
---
Node-6 looked like a computer lab collided with an art gallery. Neon phrases looped across walls in pixelated distortion:
> "TRUTH IS OBSOLETE."
> "WE ARE THE NETWORK."
> "IF YOU CAN’T BREAK IT, BECOME IT."
People moved like signals. Some coded, Some coded, some danced, some just sat silently watching screens with faces twitching in concentration. Rei’s breath slowed. This was no club. This was a server hive with a pulse.
A woman approached her—hair silver, eyes like cracked glass, dressed in layers of shredded denim.
“You’re early,” she said. “You must be the ghost girl.”
Rei said nothing.
The woman smirked. “They call me Namie. I’ll train you in Network Echoes. You’ll learn to slip in without being seen. Or known. First step: burn your name.”
Namie pointed to a digital wall glowing with embedded chips. Rei stepped up and entered:
> NAME: []
She typed in five letters:
> “PHANT.”
It wasn’t the word phantom. It was something emptier. Something lost.
Namie nodded.
“You’re in.”
---
Three hours later, Rei sat in front of a holographic interface, tracing a lattice map that pulsed like Tokyo’s veins. Namie narrated behind her: “Everything flows through nodes. Messages. Assignments. Orders. But the key to survival isn’t seeing the map. It’s knowing when to move—between echoes.”
Rei blinked, absorbing more than she expected. Her fingers danced across the interface like muscle memory. All the missions. All the stealth. All the silence.
“Why me?” Rei finally asked.
Namie leaned against the console. “Because someone out there already knows your real name. And they want to erase it. We’re just trying to beat them to it.”
---
Later that night, Rei slipped out of Node-6 into the Tokyo streets, neon bleeding across rain-slicked pavement. She didn’t go straight home. She wandered.
Near a shuttered record shop, she found Riku—hood up, coffee in hand.
“You changed your hair,” he said.
“You changed your location,” she replied.
“I told you. If the rooftop ever disappeared…”
“We climb higher,” she finished.
Riku handed her the drink wordlessly. She took it. It tasted like vanilla, old memories, and things she couldn’t say aloud.
“How long are you staying?” he asked.
Rei looked up at the blinking city around them. Then at the phantom card pressed against her chest.
“Not long,” she whispered. “But this time, I’m not just leaving. I’m becoming something else.”
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