There was a problem, and it wasn't just in the air or our heads—it was like the very fabric of existence was off-kilter, like we'd glitched out of some fucked-up video game. Alepou, Yuki, and Taiyo just stood there, frozen as if the world around them had hit a damn pause button. The colors were all wrong, the sounds warped and off-key—like someone was actively rewriting memories rather than just erasing them. It made you wonder: did any of us even really exist?
Alepou tensed up, narrowing her eyes like she was trying to decipher some cryptic code. "Yuki's right," she hissed in a low voice. "This ain't some random memory loss. Someone—or something—has been pulling the strings from the very start." Her heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
Yuki spun to face her, panic edging her voice. "Wait—what do you mean? Is it this world doing it? Or is it us? Are we the ones being messed with?"
Alepou shook her head, exhaling sharply. "I don't know. But I feel it—there's something we're meant to remember, something huge. And every time I get close, it's like my brain just… freezes, like there's an invisible wall blocking me." She clenched her fists. "What if every time we almost figure it out, they erase it?"
Taiyo stiffened beside them. "You're saying we've been fucked with this whole time? That nothing we know is even real?"
Yuki's throat tightened as she stared at her own hands, half-expecting them to vanish. "What if we're just… data in some goddamn system? NPCs in a world that isn't even ours?"
Alepou's eyes bore into Yuki's. "Think back to when we first woke up here. Does any of it make sense? Do you remember what happened before?"
Yuki's mind raced—the first fight, the first quest, the day we arrived… but before that? Her blood ran cold. Nothing. No house, no school, no last moments before landing in this nightmare. Just static, like it was all wiped clean.
"Alepou... I don't remember. Nothing. Like it never existed," Yuki whispered, her voice trembling.
Alepou nodded slowly. "Exactly. What if we're just pieces in someone's game?"
Taiyo stepped back, unsteady. "No way. That's insane."
"Is it?" Yuki's voice was barely a whisper now. "Then tell me—if this is real, if we're real, why can't we remember who we were before?"
The silence that followed was suffocating. Then, out of nowhere, Yuki's head exploded with pain—like a switch had been flipped. She gasped and staggered back, clutching her skull as the world blurred. Colors melted together, shapes twisted into madness. With her heart hammering in her chest, she doubted for a split second that she was even alive—flashes of shattered memories, a city without a city, a family with no face, and a younger Taiyo, all warped as if his life were being rewritten on a loop. "STOP—!" she tried to scream, but the words died in her throat.
Alepou caught Yuki, shaking her fiercely. "Yuki! Stay with me! Fight it, whatever's happening!"
With eyes wild and desperate, Yuki forced herself to breathe. "It's them," she murmured, the revelation hitting her like a freight truck. "The ones behind all this—they're watching, listening, and they sure as hell don't want us to wake up."
Alepou's grip tightened. "Then we break the cycle."
Taiyo swallowed hard, his terror slowly morphing into cold resolve. "So… what do we do?"
Yuki's voice trembled as she answered, "We stop playing by their rules. We find the cracks—the glitches, the pieces of this fucked-up world that just don't add up. And when we do…"
Alepou grinned, eyes blazing with fierce determination. "We break out."
As if the world itself knew what was coming, the ground trembled beneath them—an ominous sign that it was watching, waiting for their next move.
Damn right—this isn't just some memory slip-up. It's a full-blown power play, and if we don't fight back, everything we know will be erased.