Tokyo : Nightfall
The rain finally returned.
Not soft or cleansing.
It fell like glass sharp, rhythmic, deliberate.
Kazuki awoke on the edge of a collapsed highway, the world around him fractured. Streetlights blinked between years some from the present, some from decades ago. He could see the skyline bending, buildings flickering between old and new.
The fight with his future self had done something.
Broken something.
The air itself felt stitched together with pain.
He touched his chest the suit was silent, but it pulsed faintly, like it was remembering what just happened.
His voice came out low.
"Where… am I?"
A whisper answered.
"Not where, Kazuki."
He turned.
> "When."
Aeva stood there but not the Aeva he knew.
Her hair was shorter. Her clothes different. And her eyes… they glowed faintly, with a thread of the same light running through Kazuki's veins.
He froze. "Aeva?"
She nodded. "You're two years too early."
Cut To: The Present-Day Aeva Somewhere in Tokyo
Aeva Lin sat on the floor of her dark apartment, staring at the projector still playing the last flicker of Dr. Vale's warning.
The rain tapped the window. The lights outside were dimming one by one.
Her phone vibrated.
A hidden number.
She hesitated and then answered.
"You shouldn't have opened that message."
It was Drexon's voice ,calm, patient, almost teacher-like.
Aeva whispered, "What do you want from me?"
"Not from you," he said. "From what's inside you."
The call ended.
Her reflection in the glass shifted slightly it blinked before she did.
Elsewhere The Broken Timeline
Kazuki walked beside the older version of Aeva. The air shimmered with distortion, like every step could erase the world.
She spoke softly.
"You broke the timeline when you fought him. The shockwave fractured moments scattered fragments of the future into the present."
Kazuki frowned. "How do you know this?"
"Because I saw it happen. Because I lived it."
She looked down at her hands.
Lightning ran through her fingertips golden, not blue.
"You're like me," Kazuki said quietly.
>"No," she replied. "I'm like you will be."
Kazuki's breath caught.
"What do you mean?"
"Project Velocity wasn't built for one host. It was built for two — a balance. Light and shadow. Energy and mind. You're the speed. I'm the anchor."
He looked at her, eyes wide.
"Aeva… are you saying"
She nodded.
"In every reality that survives, we're connected."
The sound of thunder rolled through the broken skyline. The light above shifted from blue to white a sign.
>"He's coming," she said.
Kazuki turned toward the horizon a figure was walking through the distortion, calm and controlled, like gravity bent around him.
The future version of himself.
Meanwhile : The Chamber of Echoes
The two remaining Echoes stood motionless as Drexon worked at the console. His hand hovered above a crimson spiral, a symbol pulsing like a heartbeat.
"You see?" he said. "The merge begins."
The Echoes' visors flickered with static. One asked,
"And the consequence?"
"A collapse," Drexon replied. "Every choice, every second, every version imploding into one singular moment."
He smiled faintly, cracked lips curling.
"The moment where the boy becomes the god."
The chamber lights flared.
The red spiral expanded into a vortex — swallowing the screens.
Back in the Fractured Tokyo
The two Kazukis faced each other again but this time, Aeva was with the younger one.
She could feel time folding, bending around their heartbeat.
>"You can't keep doing this!" she shouted.
"Every second you fight, the timeline dies faster!"
The future Kazuki looked at her with a strange sadness in his eyes.
"You think this is about fighting?"
He raised his hand.
"This is about remembering."
Lightning exploded outward, flooding the entire sky. Every flash showed a different Tokyo ruined cities, flooded streets, empty towers, burning skies.
Kazuki fell to his knees, clutching his head.
Each vision tore through his mind — thousands of lifetimes, thousands of deaths.
"Stop it!" Aeva screamed.
"You'll kill him!"
The future version stopped. The storm dimmed slightly.
He looked at them both — his younger self, his anchor and whispered:
"I already did."
He vanished.
Silence.
The world steadied.
The fractures stopped pulsing.
Kazuki fell forward, breathing hard, his body twitching from overload.
Aeva knelt beside him, grabbing his shoulders.
"Kazuki! Can you hear me?"
His eyes flickered open not blue this time. White.
"He… he left something in me."
"What do you mean?"
He looked up lightning reflecting in his tears.
"A memory."
He could see it clearly a place he'd never been, but somehow knew:
A facility deep beneath Tokyo. A spiral symbol glowing on the walls. A pulse of energy beating like a heart.
"It's not over," he whispered.
"It's beginning."
Cut To: Underground Facility Moments Later
Drexon stood before a massive containment structure, red light bathing his face.
Inside the chamber floated a shape — humanoid, motionless, wrapped in electricity and data streams.
The machine beside it read:
PROJECT VELOCITY: FINAL HOST. STATUS : WAKING.
Drexon smiled.
"Welcome back."
Final Scene — Tokyo, Present Day
The real Aeva jolted awake in her apartment, gasping.
Her walls were covered in strange light markings glowing faintly, tracing veins of energy.
She looked at her hands.
Lightning soft, golden danced between her fingers.
The projector on her desk flickered one last time.
Dr. Vale's voice, faint and broken:
"Aeva… it's inside you now. Run before they find out."
The screen went dark.
She whispered to herself
"Before who finds out?"
From the reflection in her window
two glowing eyes opened.