Kouga Alley, abandoned building, third basement floor. In the darkness where server cooling fans droned their low, ceaseless hum, Otori Shuji was on his knees. His fractured ribs stabbed into his organs with every breath. His neatly parted black hair had come undone, and the old scar running from his temple down to his jaw stood out in the pale blue glow of the LEDs. On the display before him, Shinji's words glowed quietly. *"You are alone. And you cannot stop me."* That was when it happened. Something burst deep inside Otori's chest. The flames from fifteen years ago. His wife and daughter's smiles. Mayu's hollow eyes embedded in the wall. The interrogation room where Miyake kept her silence. Asahi's address that vanished. Komatsu's trembling voice. All of it, all of it—things he had lost, things he had nearly lost. —Never again. "[angry]I'm not losing anyone ever again...!!!" A scream that tore at his throat shook the cold air of the server room. In that instant, pale light erupted from his entire body. Faint, but unmistakably the light of will. The counter-generated Negai-ba wave that had neutralized Shinji's psychic interference now carried his most fundamental wish—*I don't want to lose anyone*—and began surging backward through the entire Tsukinomiya network. As his consciousness faded, Otori felt it with absolute certainty. His scream, racing through the network. Tamanoi General Hospital. Miyake Sayuri, who had been transferred from the late-night police interrogation room to the hospital and placed under surveillance, stared at five biometric monitors without a moment's rest. Her shoulder-length black hair was disheveled, and dark circles hung heavily beneath her dark brown eyes. The old scars under the watch strap on her left wrist flickered in the white fluorescent light. Five former Tsukinomiya users. All in comatose states, their brainwaves tracing abnormal patterns without cease. Miyake had every one of their charts memorized. Names, ages, medical histories, and—what wishes they had carried when they used the app. That was when it happened. *Beep.* An electronic tone sounded. Miyake stared hard at the screen. All five patients' brainwaves, at the exact same moment—4:17:28 AM—returned to normal values. Waveforms that had been completely disparate now aligned with flawless precision, like an orchestra responding to a conductor. "[surprised]...That's impossible." Miyake removed her glasses and double-checked the numbers. No mistake. Five waveforms, now in perfect synchronization. And the first to open her eyes was a woman in her thirties. Slowly, her eyelids lifted, and she gazed at the ceiling. Her pupils tracked the light properly. "[whispers]...I won't be fooled anymore." Her voice was small and hoarse. But it carried a clear, unwavering will of refusal. Then the second patient, the third, the fourth, the fifth—one after another, they regained consciousness. The words that escaped their lips were the same. "I've had enough." "I'm stopping." "It's over." "I'm sorry." "Thank you." With trembling fingers, Miyake gripped her pen and began scribbling in the charts. In small letters, as if hiding them from the eyes of the investigators. Time of awakening, brainwave transitions, the content of their words of refusal—she recorded everything by hand. (*This will be evidence.*) Her intuition as a physician told her so. That this simultaneous awakening was no mere medical recovery. That something far larger was in motion. The maintenance structure of Negai-ba had begun to be shaken from within. Café Lunatica, underground kitchen. The backflow of the Tsukinomiya network had reached this place. The walls were no longer walls. They sagged like clay, the boundary between ceiling and floor melting together. Vein-like roots pulsed, and at their center, Mayu was embedded. From her shoulders to her waist, her body had been absorbed into the wall. Her skin, pale and discolored. Only her arms hung limp, swaying with gravity. Her eyes were half-open, her lips moving faintly. "[whispers]...help me." A flat sound, produced by machinery mimicking her vocal cords. But the moment the backflow wave touched the depths of her psyche, her voice changed. "[crying]...I... I never wanted to be a burden to anyone." This was not the machine's imitation. It was her own voice, the voice that had remained within the wall. The fundamental motive Tsukinomiya had first extracted from her—*I don't want to be a burden to anyone. I want to be useful to someone. I want someone to need me.* It was a pure emotion, lying far deeper than the mask of self-deception. The Katashiro—the smiling attendant dolls—all stopped moving at once. "[whispers]...If I'm a burden, I want to disappear." Mayu's unconscious mind hurled a wish toward the aberration that was consuming her. It was not an act of destroying the Katashiro from without, but of negating the very basis of their existence. The Katashiro, which had run on the distortion of her wish as fuel, now harbored an internal contradiction the moment the source of that distortion was purified. *Crack.* A fissure ran through one of the dolls. The cracks spread in a chain reaction, and one by one, the smiling attendant dolls crumbled from within, as if burning white. A shrill sound, like shattering porcelain, echoed throughout the otherworld. The biological cores were collapsing. It was not a physical explosion. A cognitive pressure wave—a shock that shook the boundary between reality and the otherworld—struck directly at the third basement floor of the Kouga Alley abandoned building. The server room. Before Otori's eyes, the cooling fans of the seven computation servers began to scream. *SKREEEEEEE—* The sound of warping metal. Blue and green LEDs flickered in frantic unison. The room temperature spiked, and sweat ran down Otori's temple. The first server erupted in violent sparks and stopped. In that instant, the shock propagated through the network. The six remaining bases across the world. The Meikai server farm in Ota Ward. The distributed cloud in Singapore. The underground data center in Frankfurt. São Paulo. Sydney. Moscow. At every base, the servers lost response simultaneously. This was the simultaneous shutdown of all bases that the Futaba Cyber Investigation Bureau had attempted and failed to achieve—an accidental self-destruction phenomenon, using the Tsukinomiya network itself as a backflow pathway. Network deep layer. Utsushiyo-no-Soko. Shinji Asakura's virtual study—a Japanese-style room suffused with pale blue phosphorescence like moonlight—had begun to collapse with a roar. The shoji screens tore, the tatami mats peeled away, the floor cracked. His silver eyes, devoid of pupils, reflected countless warning windows. "[cold]...Impossible." A variable that had not existed in his computational models—the human irrationality of others' resolve setting off a chain reaction—was now destroying his plan. Fragments of data spilled from the bookshelves. Tsukinomiya's design data. User lists. Concepts for the next-generation app. All the records he had accumulated shattered into pieces and drifted away. To survive, Shinji began gathering and compressing the remaining personality data. The fingertips of his right hand trembled faintly, just as they had when he transferred personality data in the collapsing Yorudo-no-Ou. Ninety-eight percent of the data was lost, in a state that could not be erased. Two percent remained. "[cold]...This is not the end." Using his last computational resources, he searched for the address of Otori's communication terminal. His judgment was purely rational. Even if he himself vanished, if fragments of the blueprint fell into someone else's hands, the plan could continue. It was the thinking of a system, not a personality. Shinji transferred the data and opened an escape route into the deep network. At the very end, the corner of his mouth twisted. His eyes never smiled. "[cold]This is merely the prologue. The next app will run not on wishes—but on fear." The virtual study collapsed completely. Café Lunatica. The Negai-ba Sakasa-no-Niwa began to rapidly lose its structure. The boundary between the inverted ceiling and floor grew indistinct, and the idealized café space that had stretched into infinity compressed inward. The kitchen wall was beginning to release Mayu. At that moment— *BANG!!* The kitchen door was kicked open. Otori stood there. His fractured ribs wouldn't allow him to run properly; he braced one hand against the wall, spat out blood-flecked saliva, and still kept his eyes fixed on Mayu. His sharp, narrow eyes, though clouded red, held unwavering resolve. "[angry]Hold on!!" He wrapped both arms around Mayu's waist, where she was embedded in the wall, and pulled. The wall's residue resisted like viscous fluid, and searing pain shot through his broken ribs. Bone fragments stabbed at his organs. His vision went white with agony. "[angry]Gh, guaaah...!!" Still, he did not stop. The moment Mayu was fully separated from the wall, the Negai-ba entered its final stage of collapse. Everything in Sakasa-no-Niwa rapidly shrank back to Lunatica's actual dimensions. Still holding Mayu, Otori tumbled out toward the shop entrance. The two of them collapsed into the alley of Kouga Alley. Immediately after— Pale light erupted from Lunatica's windows. The light vanished in an instant, and then nothing more happened. Silence. On the asphalt of the alley, Otori's forehead pressed against the ground. He could no longer endure the pain of his fractured ribs. But his fingers remained touching Mayu's wrist. *Thump. Thump.* A pulse. "[whispers]...She's alive." He murmured it in a voice that barely qualified as one, and then could move no more. The cold asphalt felt soothing against his aching body. By the time Thursday night had given way to dawn. Miyake Sayuri's footsteps echoed through the corridors of Tamanoi General Hospital. She had just been informed by the investigators of her sudden release. At the same time the Tsukinomiya network had ceased functioning, the normalization of the five former users' brainwaves had been recorded as medical evidence, and a judgment had surfaced within the police organization that the contents of the patient charts she had retained did not prove her guilt. Without even asking the reason for her release, Miyake returned to the ward. Her mind was entirely occupied with confirming the condition of the five patients who had awakened. All of them vividly remembered only their motives for using Tsukinomiya. "My father was sick." "I got fired from my company." "My child was being bullied." "I was afraid of being alone." "I wanted someone to acknowledge me." But their experiences within the Negai-ba were missing. What they had seen, what they had felt—only those memories had been cleanly excised. As she scribbled in the charts, Miyake murmured in her heart. (*Human memory conveniently protects itself. That is both its salvation and its greatest vulnerability.*) Her perspective as a physician quietly updated itself. Evening. Otori appeared in the hospital corridor. His ribs had received only emergency treatment, and his clothes were still stained with mud and blood. The scar running from his right temple to his jaw stood out red in the evening sun. Unconsciously, his thumb traced the mark of a ring on his left ring finger. Inside the hospital room, Mayu opened her eyes. Still gazing up at the ceiling, she spoke after a long silence. Her dark chestnut hair lay disheveled on the pillow, and her large brown eyes, though they did not curve into crescent moons as they once had, had unmistakably regained their life. "[gentle]...I've always been weak." Her voice was small and hoarse. "I lived by being needed by others. I thought that was kindness. But—" She paused for breath and gripped the old silver locke