He bled data.
His fists were cracked. His vision blurred in red and static.
And yet—he smiled.
Jay stood in the center of a battlefield not made of dirt or sky, but of memories—fragments of desks, rooftops, broken alarm clocks, teachers' shouts, vending machine hums, lonely lunch breaks, the museum's cold marble floors...
All frozen in midair like shattered glass in a zero-gravity cage.
Across from him: the Phantom Jay, a perfect, grinning replica of himself—sharper, crueler, and infinitely more awake.
"You're not supposed to exist," Phantom Jay sneered, brushing blood from his cheek. "You're a failed User. You were chosen to be nothing. To observe. And now look at you…"
He gestured at the decaying dreamspace around them.
"A mess of rewritten code, dead ends, corrupted logic... You infected the system."
Jay smirked and spat a glitched pixel.
"Guess I'm not good at following instructions."
He rushed forward.
CLASH.
