Morning came, but light barely entered the temporary cell in the assembly hall. A single thin white line slipped through the boarded-up window. Yui traced it with her eyes while organizing last night's events in her mind. Detained by the syntaxists of the Kaihachou, her wrists bound by syntax restraints—bands of light wrapped tightly around them. Whenever she tried to deploy Debug, a dull pain shot through her immediately. The sensation of her cognitive capacity being suppressed from the outside hadn't eased at all, even after a full night. The door opened when the morning light had shifted its angle on the floor only slightly. Two people entered. One was a middle-aged man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. Short, ash-brown hair trimmed close to his head, frameless glasses. His facial muscles barely moved. The way he spread several syntax boards in a fan shape with practiced hands was like arranging documents before starting office work. The other was a woman in her early twenties, perhaps slightly younger than Yui. She had light-pigmented black hair tied back, and eyes that revealed no emotional fluctuation whatsoever. Even when her gaze turned toward Yui, it was as if nothing was reflected in them—that kind of eyes. "We'll begin the examination." The middle-aged man announced it. Not an explanation or greeting, but a declaration. "What kind of examination?" Yui asked. "Mental Scan Syntax—direct interference with the cognitive domain to measure the type and scale of syntax aptitude. There will be no pain," the Kaihachou syntaxist replied. That was a lie, Yui would realize later. The young woman deployed a syntax board. Light-formed characters flowed across its surface, their tips extending like thin threads—toward Yui's temple. The moment they made contact, it wasn't pain. It was something else entirely. A sensation like someone else's fingers stirring the inside of her brain. Discomfort without a single category. Just everything was wrong. Her memories began playing back involuntarily. An office after an all-nighter. A half-empty coffee cup placed beside the desk. Monitor screens with error logs scrolling endlessly. Her own fingers tapping the keyboard. A coworker's voice asking, "Seto, another all-nighter?"— All of it, visible to someone else. A sensation closer to violation than shame dealt another blow to her exhausted body. Yui clenched her teeth. There was nowhere to escape. The syntax restraint was blocking the exit of her cognitive capacity, so the load from the mental scan had nowhere to go, creating a traffic jam inside her head. She could feel cold sweat forming on her forehead. "...This," Yui spoke. She moved her mouth despite being told not to speak. "This is torture, isn't it?" she said. The middle-aged syntaxist answered without turning around. "It's a medical procedure." It was clinical. Emotionless. That made it all the more frightening. Fear came before anger. An opponent you can direct anger at is at least someone with emotions. This man had nowhere for anger to land. Yui remained pressed against the wall, enduring in silence. The scan reached deeper after a little more time had passed. Suddenly, both their hands stopped. The middle-aged man and the young woman exchanged glances without speaking. Not a long silence. One or two seconds. But that silence carried the clear weight of "something happened." "Did you see something?" Yui asked. "Silence," the Kaihachou syntaxist commanded. The returned word was only one, but Yui understood. Ah, this—the face of someone judged to have utility. The face of someone being appraised. The face of someone whose story will be longer than execution. That realization brought both strange relief and even stranger revulsion. She might live longer, but was that really a good thing? Yui couldn't answer that question right now. At that moment—something interfered in the corner of the room. While Yui's memories were being scanned, the side effects caused syntax fragments to leak out unintentionally. Seven candles placed near the fireplace went out all at once. Simultaneously, a sound came from outside. A splash—the sound of water scattering. The young woman turned around. The middle-aged man also looked toward the door. Yui couldn't see it, but—a water bucket that had been placed outside the assembly hall had been knocked flying as if struck by something, splashing water against the wall behind them. The middle-aged man's back was soaked. "...What did you just do?" the Kaihachou syntaxist asked, turning to look at Yui. Yui lifted the bands of light around her wrists to show him. "I'm restrained. Look," she said. The man checked the syntax restraint on her wrists. The young woman who had been conducting the scan also checked. Both their expressions shifted subtly in an "awkward" direction. Yui watched that change. The restraint syntax had malfunctioned in response to the side effects of the scan—probably something like that, and it wasn't Yui's fault. But it was hard to admit. Because it meant the Kaihachou syntaxists had caused their own syntax to malfunction. "...The restraint syntax needs adjustment. Wait a moment," the middle-aged syntaxist said. The man began adjusting the syntax. A situation where the test subject watches the torturer debug their tools—Yui observed this vaguely while internally half-smiling. It shouldn't have been a situation to laugh at. But she could laugh. The sight of the middle-aged man with his soaked back, adjusting the syntax with a serious expression, was somehow unbearably absurd. In the afternoon, the second examination began. It was a deeper scan than the first. She felt the light threads extending not just to the surface of her memories, but much deeper. Before her office desk—her student days, childhood, fragmented images surfacing and disappearing on their own. Everything she didn't want others to see was being carelessly turned inside out. "Please stop," Yui said aloud. Clearly. The syntaxists didn't stop. Her vision wavered. Nausea came. Her body, already at the edge from overwork, was being crushed under the load of the mental scan, and her baseline was collapsing. Yui placed her hand against the wall, feeling the light of the syntax restraint cutting into her wrist, and clenched her teeth. I haven't done anything wrong. I only tried to stop the erosion. She squeezed out the thought. But it didn't become words. And even if it had, no one would stop. There was no reason to stop. Here, the fact that Yui "hadn't done anything wrong" held no power whatsoever. She dropped to one knee. Leaning against the wall, she knelt on one leg. In her mind, she recalled the moment Ratharis received the order. At that moment, Ratharis had averted his gaze. Just for an instant, before Yui was taken to the cell. The meaning of that instant still eluded her. Had he betrayed her? Had he never believed in her from the start? Or—was there something else? She didn't know. Not knowing hurt more than anger. She had no certainty to be angry. Yui hugged her knees and closed her eyes. The word "go home" floated in her mind, but it didn't become a voice. She didn't have the energy to voice it. Only her shoulders trembled. At that moment—a sensation of weight returned to her mind. That night fleeing through the forest. The moment her feet stumbled and she nearly fell, the weight of a hand placed on her shoulder. Being supported silently, that touch. For just that instant, she thought she wasn't alone. Where is that person now? What are they doing? The moment after thinking that, Yui became aware that she was thinking it—and somehow, her cheeks grew slightly warm. A small, out-of-place warmth at the bottom of despair. She thought it was stupid. But that warmth was real. As evening came, the northern sky changed. The sky visible through the window gap was no longer the color of clouds. A black distortion of light was spreading slowly, steadily. Yui understood immediately. Erosion. And—a big one. Larger in scope than any erosion she'd seen until yesterday. The outside of the assembly hall suddenly grew noisy. "Deploy! Defensive syntax, everyone!" a Kaihachou syntaxist outside shouted. Screams. Running footsteps. The two who had been conducting the examination threw down their tools and flew out of the assembly hall. The door was left open. Yui rushed to the window. Through the gap in the boards, she looked outside. A wave of black light was coming from the north. Swallowing houses. Swallowing farmland. Erosion—Erosion. The wave of collapse leaking from the fractured seal of Nox Regalia. It rendered living things "undefined" in syntactic terms and erased them. Even if Yui possessed that knowledge, witnessing it firsthand was another matter entirely. One of the farmers was trying to flee northward. An old man. Running at a speed he couldn't maintain. Black light crawled at his feet. The old man's toes began to lose their outline quietly. There was no scream. Without even time to cry out, he simply—vanished without a trace. "Father!" a child's voice screamed. That voice too cut off midway. Yui gripped the window frame. The syntax restraint cut into her wrist. It hurt. That pain kept her mind anchored to reality. The Kaihachou syntaxists deployed in the plaza, firing defensive syntax in rapid succession. High-level syntax. Walls of light were generated one after another. But the black wave passed through them. The syntax magic, as if it didn't exist at all, simply continued its erosion. Black light crawled at one syntaxist's feet. "Wait—" the Kaihachou syntaxist began. He vanished the moment he started speaking. The other syntaxist retreated while his voice shook. "It's not working... nothing..." the young Kaihachou syntaxist said. Yui, looking out the window, tried to read the syntax structure of the erosion. She could see it. Even with the syntax restraint, her vision wasn't restricted. Inside the black wave—memory leak. Cascading asynchronous errors from the source. A loop running without a termination condition. She could see the stopping point. The place to insert Debug was crystal clear. But the moment her fingertips tried to touch the light-formed characters, dull pain shot through her. The syntax restraint was blocking her cognitive capacity. She couldn't deploy Debug. She could see it but couldn't reach it. That frustration dealt another blow to the bottom of despair. Half the village was already swallowed by the black light. —At that moment, the assembly hall door was kicked in. In one blow. Hinges and all. Silver hair with red mesh mixed in, cut short. A sword scar on the left cheek. Sharp golden eyes. A 182-centimeter frame stepped over the door's remains and entered. It was Ratharis. "Where is she?" he said. A single short word, but his eyes scanning the room didn't stop. The moment he found Yui, he moved toward her without hesitation. Ratharis drew his sword. Holding the blade horizontally, he inserted it between Yui's wrist and the syntax restraint. He applied force between the light band and the blade. Syntax restraints weren't normally something that could be removed by physical force. But Ratharis didn't care. He was physically prying open a syntax that a syntaxist had spent hours adjusting. The sound of the light band cracking. A sensation like syntax screaming. And then—it snapped. The restraint came off. Her cognitive capacity rushed back all at once. Like water flowing down her throat, a sensation of liberation. Simultaneously, all the fatigue in her body—the parts whose sensation had been numbed by the restraint until now—came crashing down at once. Her knees nearly buckled. "Can you stand?" Ratharis asked. Yui looked at Ratharis's face for just one second. "...You're thirty minutes late asking that," she said. Ratharis's expression—just barely, but definitely—softened. For just an instant. Then it vanishe