Chapter 11: While You Were Walking
The raw data of the universe, E.R.I.S's chilling revelation about universal balance, still pulsed behind my eyes. This is not malice. This is balance. The truth was a cancerous growth in my mind, consuming every thought, every hope. Airi's death wasn't a flaw in the system; it was the system. An anchor. A price. And I, in my impossible love, was the defiance that tore reality apart.
I came back to myself, gasping, the humming of my computers returning to a normal thrum. My room, miraculously, was still intact. I checked my phone. It was full of Tanaka's messages, a long string of worried texts and missed calls. He was worried, he really was. Then I opened E.R.I.S. The slider was set to 24 Hours, the remnants of my last desperate attempt. I held the slider and slid it to 1 Hour. My stomach clenched. Once this was confirmed, I'd be bound to this shorter duration for the remaining two days of the cooldown period.
The time on my monitor read 7:15 PM. I had just emerged from the mindscape, the horrifying revelations fresh in my mind. The exhaustion was a heavy, suffocating blanket, but beneath it, a cold, surgical resolve had replaced despair. I didn't press 'CONFIRM' immediately. I couldn't. Not now. I needed to process. The weight of the revelation, the horrors I had seen in E.R.I.S's mindscape, pressed down on me. I collapsed onto my bed, too mentally drained to move, too emotionally shattered to initiate another loop. My eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, the horrors of countless dying worlds playing out in my mind.
The hours crawled by. Sleep wouldn't come easily, but my body eventually succumbed to the sheer exhaustion. I simply endured the night, haunted by the AI's images, the faces of cities dissolving, of reality unraveling. Every tick of the clock was a reminder of the inevitable.
The next morning, the "doomed day" again, I was a ghost. My eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, my body stiff with fatigue. I dragged myself out of bed, a hollow shell of who I once was. There was no joy, no anticipation of seeing Airi. Only a grim, chilling certainty. I knew she would die today. I just needed to see if the "truth" E.R.I.S showed me was absolute.
I went to school, a silent observer in my own nightmare. I saw Airi in the hallway, in class, her bright smile, her cutesy gestures. It was all so normal. So beautiful. So doomed. I didn't interfere. I didn't try to save her. I simply watched, a terrible clarity in my mind.
Then, just as the school day was ending, it happened. It was 3:00 PM. On a quiet side street, near her bus stop, far from any of my previous diversions. Airi paused to tie her shoelace, a trivial, everyday action. A bicycle courier, swerving to avoid a sudden pothole, lost control and hit her. A mundane, almost absurd accident. She was gone. Just like that. The "truth" was absolute. My non-interference had changed nothing. The outcome remained the same.
I left school and walked home, the city a blur around me. It was 4:00 PM when I finally slammed my apartment door shut, the silence of my room a stark contrast to the screaming in my head. My stomach churned. The raw data of the universe, E.R.I.S's chilling revelation about universal balance, slammed into me with sickening clarity. If Airi had to die to keep the world from unraveling, if a death must occur, then maybe… maybe I could control whose death, even if hers was fixed. The thought was monstrous, a betrayal of everything, but my sanity was long past caring. The faces of those who had already died in my loops (the park, the falling beam, the house explosion) flashed through my mind, a tormenting collage. I was already a monster. I just needed to be a precise one.
I checked my phone. It was 4:00 PM. The slider was already set to 1 Hour. I didn't need to change it. I was ready.
Tap. CONFIRM.
The WHUMMMM that followed was no longer terrifying, but a dreaded, familiar echo of my endless torment. I reset again, back to 3:00 PM that same day. I had exactly one hour until 4:00 PM, when Airi's death would occur in this loop. My prep time had begun.
My fingers, once again, flew across the keyboard. This wasn't about subtle nudges anymore. This wasn't about saving Airi from an accident. This was about disrupting entire city infrastructures, about creating an inescapable bubble of safety around her, no matter the cost to others. My methods became chaotic, invasive, unhinged.
I knew Airi's path at 3:00 PM. I found a vulnerability in the city's smart traffic system. My plan: create an unprecedented, city-wide gridlock, diverting every vehicle away from Airi's path, effectively making the entire urban area a standstill. It was insane. It was brilliant. It was horrifying.
I activated the hack. On the city's digital map, lines of green turned to angry red. Traffic cameras showed immediate, sprawling chaos. Horns blared, a frustrated symphony echoing faintly through my window. I envisioned Airi, walking calmly on her school route, blissfully unaware that I was sacrificing the entire city's commute, ensuring a quiet, safe path just for her.
Then, at precisely 3:00 PM, just as the gridlock reached its peak and Airi should have been safely through the intersection, I saw it. A news alert flashed across my screen. A small headline, miles away from my engineered chaos. Airi. Still dead. This time, her house was engulfed in flames, a sudden, inexplicable fire that raged through the neighborhood, a catastrophe of smoke and sirens. She had died in her home. She still died.
And then, a text notification. Not from Airi. From Tanaka.
> Shou, where are you? Seriously. I'm stuck on Route 5, this traffic is insane! Going to be late for cram school. What the heck is going on today?!
My heart seized. Route 5. That was miles away from Airi's usual route, a major artery I had flooded with cars to ensure her safety. I pulled up the live traffic cam for Route 5. The image flickered on my screen: a sprawling, metal snake of frustrated vehicles. And in the middle of it, just at the edge of the frame, was a mangled sedan, an ambulance with flashing lights, and a familiar face on a stretcher.
Tanaka.
My vision tunneled. The chaotic blare of the car horns, the distant wail of sirens, slammed into me with sickening clarity. I had seen him yesterday, completely fine, worrying about me. Now, because I had hacked the city, because I had orchestrated this massive diversion, Tanaka was being stretchered away, his face pale, his glasses askew. He was alive, but clearly injured. Severely.
"No... no!" I choked, my voice raw. I stumbled back from my desk, knocking over a stack of empty energy drink cans. The metal clattered to the floor, loud in the sudden, horrifying silence of my room. I hadn't saved her. I just sacrificed someone else. This isn't breaking the cycle; it's choosing who dies. This isn't a loop; it's a cosmic scale, and I was pushing people onto the other side. My friend. My loyal, exasperated friend. He would never know. Never remember why he was hurt.
The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on me, heavier than any force E.R.I.S could conjure. I stared at the screen, at Tanaka's face, his fate irrevocably altered by my impossible love.
It was 4:00 PM.
Tap. CONFIRM.
The WHUMMMM that followed was no longer a terrifying tear, but a dreaded, familiar echo of my endless torment. I reset again, back to 3:00 PM that same day, my mind already racing, plotting a different path, a different diversion.
This time, I targeted the power grid. A localized outage, far from Airi's path, meant to divert emergency services and create empty streets. But it cascaded. The news report, hours later, was succinct: a critical system failure at a public hospital miles away, causing a blackout in the emergency room during a critical surgery. Airi's death this time was a sudden, fatal allergic reaction after school, utterly unrelated to the power grid. Casualties from the blackout, however, were confirmed. Civilian casualties. All to clear a path for Airi. And she still died.
Another loop. Another reset. I tried triggering false alarms in multiple public spaces, creating mass panics, clearing entire districts. Airi walked through empty streets, safe. But the panic led to stampedes, to collapses, to minor injuries that, in the chaotic rush, turned fatal for a few unfortunate souls. Airi, meanwhile, simply died from a sudden, inexplicable cardiac arrest while walking down a seemingly empty street. She still died.
This was the pattern. Loop after loop. Death after death. Airi's life, a fixed point. Mine, a spiraling descent into madness. I stopped counting the days, the hours, the resets. They blurred into a continuous, suffocating cycle of desperate attempts and crushing failures. Fifty loops. A hundred. Two hundred. Each time, I'd try a new, more audacious disruption. Redirect a train. Hack the weather patterns. Cause minor earthquakes to shift building foundations. The "glitches" I'd seen in my room now manifested on a city-wide scale – momentary flickers of buildings, stretches of road vanishing, impossible weather. My attempts only caused chaos, fear, and casualties for everyone but Airi, and she still perished, usually in some utterly mundane, unpreventable way unique to that loop.
One loop, after a particularly destructive traffic diversion I orchestrated to "protect" her from a collapsing bridge, I found her walking down a seemingly empty, "safe" side street. I watched, my heart in my throat, as she turned a corner. My heart sank. The street, which I had cleared to protect her, was now the site of a chaotic, brutal gang riot. Figures in dark clothing clashed, metal glinting, shouts echoing. Airi, caught in the crossfire, crumpled to the ground, a crimson stain blooming on her shirt. She had been shot. Not meant for her, not part of the initial conflict, but an innocent caught in the collateral damage of my interventions. And I had cleared the street for it. And she still died.
Each new death, each new injury, each new wave of panic, added to the unbearable weight on my soul. E.R.I.S wasn't just about Airi dying; it was about a death needing to occur to maintain the timeline, and Airi's death was always the primary, non-negotiable fixed point. If Airi lived, someone must pay the price. But even if others paid, she still died.
I had tried every external solution, every grand, chaotic disruption I could conjure. Every loop ended the same. Airi died, and my soul withered under the weight of others' suffering.
I collapsed onto my floor, utterly broken by the moral horror. The knowledge that I was condemning others to save Airi, only for her to die anyway, was unconscionable. My mind, already fractured by a thousand erased realities, couldn't bear the new burden of being an architect of pointless death. I couldn't keep sacrificing the world for one person, only to lose her regardless. This wasn't saving her. This was just choosing more victims for a fixed outcome.
I finally accepted it. Fighting the fixed point by external means, no matter how grand or disruptive, was a losing battle with devastating, unacceptable costs. My desperate attempts to "control" the outcome only led to more suffering, more death, and zero success for Airi.
My despair transformed into a grim, desperate new resolve. If I cannot change the outcome by manipulating external events, and if Airi's death is an inescapable fixed point for the timeline, then the only way left is to understand the root cause of the fixed point and change that. I must delve deeper into E.R.I.S, not just to understand its purpose, but to find a way to unmake the fixed point itself, even if it means a sacrifice far greater than any I could imagine.
My hand, no longer shaking with fear, but with a cold, terrifying purpose, reached for the phone. I tapped 'CONFIRM' again, the sound now a dreaded, familiar echo of my endless torment, but with a new, terrifying purpose in my eyes.