A pause. Then:

Outside his apartment, the real Tokyo was waking up. Inside the simulation, the Shuto Revival Project finally had a driver. And the error log on his screen had changed:

The title screen flickered. Then, silence.

Kaelen's pulse quickened. He knew that name. Mira Tachibana. The lead level designer who vanished six months after the project was canceled. Officially, she had resigned. Unofficially, the forums said she had tried to live in the simulation. There were rumors of a secret layer—a "ghost layout"—she had built as an act of digital preservation.

"Welcome back," she said, her voice coming through his headphones not as a file, but as a frequency. "You fixed the missing reference."

Kaelen Okonkwo stared at the error log. It was 3:47 AM in his cramped Osaka apartment, the only light coming from three monitors displaying the decaying corpse of Shuto Revival Project Beta .

[user]: I'm real. Kaelen. Who are you?

He was driving back in time.