Kaito collided with the heavy oak of his front door, his lungs oscillating in a desperate, agonizing struggle for oxygen. Every inhalation felt like swallowing shards of broken glass. The very atmosphere within his own hallway had been transmuted into a viscous, liquified lead—heavy, suffocating, and impossible to process. Behind him, the street he had just sprinted through was de-rendering in a terrifying display of digital decay. He had seen a crowded city bus stutter in its movement, freezing for three agonizing seconds before teleporting fifty meters forward in a violent flash of light. The sky was no longer a natural blue; it was stretching into jagged, unnatural polygons, and the sun flickered like a dying neon bulb on the verge of total extinction.
Beneath the very foundation of his house, a rhythmic, subterranean luminescence was pulsing—a cold, electric-emerald glow bleeding out from the soil itself, as if the Earth was a cracked monitor screen leaking its backlight. Kaito's mother rushed out from the kitchen, the scent of spices and home-cooked food clashing with the metallic tang of ozone in the air. Her face was etched with deep, maternal worry.
"Kaito! What in the world happened? You look like you've seen a ghost! And what is that strange green light coming from the garden floor?" she asked, her voice trembling.
Kaito forced a distorted, shaky smile, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal. "It's nothing, Mom," he lied, his voice cracking with a terror he couldn't hide. "I just did an extremely heavy workout at the college gym... I'm just exhausted. And that light? It's probably just some experimental new street lamps being tested by the city council. Don't worry about it, just go back to the kitchen, okay?" It was a blatant, desperate lie—a thin veil of normalcy over a world that was screaming in pain. He bypassed her quickly, his footsteps heavy as the air around him crackled with static electricity that made the hair on his arms stand on end. He ascended the staircase, the ancient timber shrieking under his frantic momentum, and secured his bedroom door with a sharp metallic click that resonated with the finality of a prison sentence.
He slumped against the door, his phone vibrating violently in his pocket as if it were alive. It was Ryu.
Kaito picked up with trembling hands, his voice a frantic whisper. "Ryu! Tell me you're seeing this! The world is lagging, the sky is breaking, and my own house is glowing like a radioactive emerald!"
On the other end, Ryu's voice was filled with a primal, raw panic that Kaito had never heard before. "Kaito! I'm trying to reach you, but the road is a literal nightmare! People are screaming in the streets, running blindly as buildings flicker like ghosts in the wind. Cars are clipping through the ground! But the weirdest part? Kaito, I just turned onto your street... and it's GONE. Everything is empty. No houses, no cars, no people. Just a flat, infinite grey void where your neighborhood should be. I'm standing right where your house is supposed to be, but I see NOTHING! I am standing in a vacuum, Kaito! Where are you?!"
Kaito's blood ran cold. He looked out his window and saw his neighbor's house, the streetlights, and the trees. But to Ryu, standing in the same spot, there was nothing but a void. Two different versions of reality were overlapping, and they were both wrong.
Suddenly, the floor beneath Kaito's feet surrendered its solidity. He did not fall; he levitated as gravity was overwritten by the glitch. He opened his eyelids to find himself suspended in the Void Dimension—a vast, pressurized abyss of absolute obsidian darkness. Millions of predatory, unseen eyes analyzed the "Systemic Error" within his soul. His extremities began to fragment, his skin dissolving into incandescent blue pixels that drifted away like digital embers. He was being methodically deconstructed.
Suddenly, a sonic boom tore through the void—an aggressive, metallic percussion that resonated through his very bones. Ryu had arrived, fueled by a sheer will that forced him through the void and back into Kaito's reality. A deafening, Spartan kick pulverized the front door downstairs. "KAITO! I'M HERE! I DON'T CARE IF THE WORLD IS DELETING ITSELF, I'M NOT LEAVING YOU!" Ryu roared. The moment the wood splintered, the Void Dimension evaporated. Kaito jolted back onto his mattress, gasping for air as the cold, hard reality of his room re-synced. The glitch was no longer a hidden secret; it was a battle for their very existence.