Chapter Text
[Location: Somewhere in the collapsed South Quadrant of Facility 09-C | 02:14 Hours]
The smell hits first.
Frigid. A rush of metal, ozone, and cauterised nerve endings—sharp, like biting down on a power line. It surges through Kim’s sinuses, behind his eyes, punches into his skull like a needle threaded with fire. But what really flays him open is the second scent underneath: blood, acrid and intimate. Not his own.
His boots skid over scorched tile, and Kim stumbles, bracing one hand against a melted wall panel as his body spasms. He dry-heaves bile and static onto a section of floor still steaming from the blast. His own vitals are stable—he checks automatically: heart rate fast but even, lungs clear, extremities responsive.
But that’s not what matters.
What matters is the other heartbeat ricocheting in his skull like gunfire inside a steel drum.
Kenta.
He's somewhere ahead. Close. Just down the corridor—past the buckled blast doors and sputtering halogen strips, the ones swinging overhead like nooses of dying light. Maybe thirty meters. Maybe less. But every second ticks like a countdown.
Kim flinches as a red-hot jolt tears across his shoulder—not his pain, Kenta’s. The feedback floods his system too fast, too raw. For a split second he loses track of his limbs, of his breath, of who he is.
I’m not supposed to feel this, his subconscious rattles, reeling—like it’s been shoved out of place, trying to claw its way back into his head.
The chip in his neck pulses—angry, foreign, alive.
Failed sync. Termination protocol initiated.
Kim doesn’t flinch, he just runs.
The link should be breaking. Instead, it’s hardening. Rooting in. Becoming real. And Kim doesn’t have the luxury of dissecting the tech, or the ethics, or even the why. Not now. Not when he can feel Kenta slipping.
He pushes off the wall, runs.
The hallway is torn to hell. Whole panels melted from the walls, biotech glass shattered like sugar underfoot, consoles still sparking with half-dead power. Blood smears across the floor in streaks that curve and drag, like something crawled—no, like something was dragged—through here. The scent is everywhere.
He’s already stepped over six corpses since breaching the west wing. Ex-security, ex-scientists, ex-something. He doesn’t count anymore. He doesn’t even look down.
He only looks forward.
Through the smoke. Through the digital howl clawing at his mind. Through the static screech of the failed connection that isn’t failing at all.
Kenta’s pulse pulls him like gravity.
He finds him crumpled beside an emergency panel—what used to be a door override, now nothing but warped steel and blinking error lights. Kenta’s body is curled in on itself, twitching with each laboured breath. Skin clammy, blistered at the edges. His collar is soaked through with sweat and frost residue from cryo-drugs not meant for living tissue. Both wrists raw where restraints had rubbed skin to meat. Behind his ear, the cortex node sticks out jagged—like something chewed through it from the inside.
Kim hits the ground hard, knees to concrete, hand flying to Kenta’s throat. Pulse. Weak. Fast.
Too fast.
Adrenaline spike. Panic.
No...
Withdrawal.
And beneath that—rising slow, like magma under ice—
Heat.
Not full onset. Dull, but not far.
The chip shrieks again, a warning encoded in agony. Kim hisses as the back of his neck lights up—then whites out.
He sees nothing. Just pain. Not his. Kenta’s. Every nerve ending screaming. It rips through his chest like a scream with no mouth to give it voice.
Then—suddenly—a hand wraps around his wrist.
Hard. Uncoordinated. But deliberate.
Kim freezes.
Kenta’s eyes are open.
Glazed with fever, but aware. Just barely. Like a man drowning in static, clawing up for one breath of air. His grip shakes. His voice, when it comes, is glass and gravel.
“You’re in my head,” Kenta croaks, every syllable a wince. “Get the fuck out.”
Kim exhales, sharp. It’s not relief. Not really.
It’s darker than that.
“I’ve been trying,” he says.
They don’t speak after that.
Kim slips under Kenta’s arm, hauling him upright. Kenta’s heavier than he looks—solid with tension, soaked in chemicals and pain. His weight is unstable, one leg dragging, breath catching every few seconds in his chest like his lungs are still deciding whether to keep working.
They move like that, one body dragging another. Step by step through what remains of the facility. Burned hallways. Cracked containment doors. Kim hotwires locks on instinct—fingers flying through manual overrides and corrupted code he shouldn’t know, but does. The link feeds him information in flashes: Kenta’s maps, Kenta’s memories, Kenta’s fear.
Every time Kenta stumbles, Kim feels the fall in his own gut.
And every time Kim bites back pain, it’s Kenta who flinches.
They’re bleeding together, minds soldered by accident or design or maybe just the universe's last cruel joke.
The facility finally gives way to open air—if you can call it that.
They burst into the outside sometime near dawn. The sky above them is a bruise. Deep purple, smeared with smoke trails and ash rain. The trees nearby are twisted, stripped by chemical winds. The air stings. Kim breathes it in anyway.
He doesn’t trust silence anymore. Not after everything that silence let happen.
They make it to the treeline before Kim finally drops.
Not from injury. From overload. The chip has reached maximum burn—his brainstem flooding with static, foreign code scrambling his central nervous system. He crashes to the ground, gasping. The world sways.
And Kenta, barely conscious, half-catches him.
They collapse together. Dirt grinding into their clothes, their skin. Smoke curling around them. Bodies tangled like wreckage—spines to the same earth, shoulder to shoulder.
For one moment, there’s stillness. Breathing.
“Still in my head,” Kenta whispers, raw. It’s not an accusation anymore. Just a fact.
And Kim, eyes open to a sky that looks nothing like he remembers, doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t have to.
His answer is already pulsing in Kenta’s chest. Like a warning. Like a promise.
Like something that refuses to let go.
[Location: Outside Facility 09-C | Unknown Forest Zone | Daylight: gray-blue, untrustworthy]
They don’t speak once the trees swallow them.
Not when the cold moss silences their footsteps.
Not when the rusted perimeter sensors fall away, and the pulse in Kim’s spine—quiet for the first time in hours—dissolves into nothing.
Not even when they stop walking in the same direction.
Kim heads northeast with a cracked survival map peeled off a dead handler’s vest. The paper’s burnt at the edges, blood-soaked through the folds, but the landmarks are legible. Mostly.
Kenta angles south. One glance, one tilt of the head, and he’s moving toward a ridge buried in fog—where rebel encampments were rumored to have gone underground years ago.
They don’t discuss it. Don’t even look at each other.
They just go.
Because anything else would be too much.
Too close.
Too dangerous.
Too real.
The separation is easy at first. Necessary.
Like air flooding into collapsed lungs. Like pain being given back.
Kim doesn’t even realise how tightly he’d been holding himself until the tension starts to ebb.
The noise in his head? Gone. That splitting pressure between his eyes? Dissolving. He can feel his own breath now—shallow, yes, but steady.
He moves with purpose. One boot in front of the other, skirting soft mud and glacial stone. He knows how to survive alone. He always has.
Kenta will be doing the same, no doubt. Regrouping. Breathing. Grateful for the distance.
It’s better this way.
But fifteen minutes later, the ringing starts.
It’s faint at first. A thread of high-pitched frequency wound tight behind Kim’s eyes—just enough to make him blink hard, like his skull’s holding pressure.
He keeps walking.
Five minutes pass. The ringing deepens.
Not just pitch—but density. It’s no longer sound; it’s weight. Like his ears are filling with cotton and static at the same time. Like something old and mechanical is grinding just behind his temples.
Kim sways on his feet.
A hand slams against a nearby tree, catching himself before he can fall. His breath leaves in a hiss. Bark splinters beneath his palm.
He blinks again.
His vision splits. Double, then triple. The forest pulses sideways.
Is this me?
No.
No, it’s not.
The moment he acknowledges it, everything sharpens. Not painfully. Not yet. But with clarity. Like his body’s tuning itself toward something it had just started to forget.
Kenta.
Something’s wrong.
He doesn’t even have to debate it. Doesn’t question the logic, the science, the morality of the link that shouldn’t exist. He knows. The sensation is instinctual—animal-level, coded into his nervous system now. Somewhere south—the direction Kenta had taken—something has gone off.
And somewhere else entirely—
Kenta is on his knees in the ridgebrush, wild-eyed, shivering in air that doesn’t feel like air anymore.
His fingers are clamped into his scalp, nails digging through blood-matted strands as the world starts to bend.
The trees vibrate. The soil crackles beneath him. His ribs feel like glass.
The ringing is everything now.
No longer internal. No longer even sonic. It’s existential—wrongness screaming through every cell. The neural link in his head is severing like torn circuitry, and with every breath he takes, he feels something—
No. Not missing.
Disconnected.
Like a limb amputated mid-thought. Like a heartbeat losing its echo.
His thoughts spiral.
His name. His mission. His orientation.
Gone. Slipping out of reach one by one. He knows he’s breathing, but it doesn’t feel like enough. His lungs hitch. His vision tunnels.
What did they do to me?
Why does it hurt more now that he’s gone?
He tries to crawl. But his legs won’t obey. Every nerve is misfiring. The cold is back now, worse than before—icy static threading through his joints like broken wire. His body shakes. His teeth chatter. His mind is full of someone else’s absence.
He chokes on a sound. Something sharp and raw. Could be a scream, could be a name, could be nothing.
All he knows is this: the farther Kim goes, the less alive Kenta feels.
And at some point—unmarked, unknown, too far—he crosses a threshold he shouldn’t have.
And his body shuts down.
His limbs give out all at once, like a switch flipped. No ceremony. No warning.
He collapses face-first into soil and frost, vision pulsing black, hands twitching as if trying to claw back something already gone.
Above him, the clouds crack open.
But it’s not rain.
Not yet.
Just light—cold, gray-blue, and untrustworthy.
The next moments are a blur.
Later, neither of them will be able to piece together how they got back to each other.
Not the forest.
Not the blood smeared across bark and bone.
Not the howling space of time that stretched between collapse and impact.
Only this:
A jolt—like being plugged back in, violently, completely—followed by sudden, blessed silence.
They crash together at the edge of a shallow stream, water kicking up around their boots in silver arcs. Kim barrels into Kenta, hands fisting in the fabric of his jacket like he doesn’t trust the world not to steal him again. Kenta stumbles, but doesn’t resist. He folds forward—forehead pressed to the hollow beneath Kim’s collarbone, breath ragged and wet.
He’s not holding on.
He’s hiding.
Like there’s something inside him that still wants to scream, and this is the only place it can’t reach him.
Their chests heave, lungs scraping in tandem. But the pain—the spikes, the pressure, the shrieking—has stopped.
No ringing.
No static.
Just stillness.
Breath syncing.
Heartbeats folding into each other.
We can’t be apart.
No one says it. Kim doesn’t speak. Kenta wouldn’t dare. But the thought echoes between their ribs like something carved into bone—a law older than logic.
A curse they didn’t choose.
A fact they’ll never outrun.
They don’t move for a long time.
Kim’s eyes fix on the trees, cold and indifferent beyond Kenta’s shoulder. Kenta doesn’t look at anything. Doesn’t need to.
They’re too close. Too fused.
But neither of them lets go.
Because now they know the truth:
The farther they pull away, the deeper the wire twists.