We moved at dusk.
The mansion sat on a hill like a dark tooth in the city's jaw—gilded, guarded, and full of the kind of wealth that buys silence. Kaito's family had rebuilt faster than rumor; the brothers who'd once ruled back alleys now wore suits, their violence tucked behind manicured smiles. Tonight, they would come out to defend the prize they'd stolen.
Airi rode with me in the stolen van, knees pressed together, jaw clenched. She held the cube in a fabric-wrapped palm like a relic and stared at it as if it might answer the questions it had no right to. Her calm had a brittle edge, the kind that snaps under pressure. I could feel it in the way her fingers tightened around the wrapper.
"This is where we strike?" she whispered.
"Distract, draw, locate." I checked the small rifle I'd found in a pawnshop months ago, the cold steel of it familiar and heavy. "You get the Core or whatever resonance we can pull from the mansion. I get them mad enough to fall into the open. We don't take prisoners unless we have to."
She nodded. "We do this together."
We parked a half-mile away, under the shadow of a service alley. The plan had holes—the biggest of which was our lack of backup—but it was the only plan we had. Ren's tip about the mansion's basement servers was valuable: the Cycle's echo should be strong in places where Kaito's family laundered money and protected secrets. Money that fed The Cycle's funding funnel. If we could sever that, the Core might flare.
We moved like ghosts.
Airi slipped through the staff entrance with practiced hesitance—she'd been practicing how to pass as nothing for days—and I followed behind, blending in with a trash cart and a cleaning uniform I'd stolen. The kitchen was a kingdom of heat and stainless steel. Chefs cursed and knives flashed. From there, we wound through corridors that smelled of lemon polish and expensive perfume.
I watched Airi's face up close: jaw set, eyes hollowed into focus. She looked beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with girlish charm—this beauty was sharpened by purpose.
We split when we reached the service stair. I went down; she went up to the private wing where the family's quarters were. The mansion's heartbeat was a generator room below—a mechanical throat that hummed with the rhythm of the house. That hum hid other things: cables to safe rooms, routed power to hidden servers, and somewhere, the resonance that matched the cube's faint pulse.
The first confrontation came in a corridor lit by opal sconces. A man in a suit stepped out, phone in hand—one of Kaito's enforcers, big-shouldered and slow of thought. He didn't expect me. I didn't give him time to react.
The fight was quick, brutal, and surgical. I moved like muscle memory resurrected from the other life: strikes to the collarbone, a throat jab that didn't kill but incapacitated, a throw that sent him headfirst into an ornate vase. He hit the marble with an audible crack. The vase exploded. A chandelier swung, scattering droplets of light. Behind me, footsteps came—more of them, trained and coordinated.
They swarmed. I danced the way I'd been taught by necessity—two steps right, shoulder dip, knee, elbow, then a sweep. Metal met flesh. I tasted blood. I broke a man's nose with a shoulder and felt a grim satisfaction that was almost terrifying. This was not clean. It was retribution.
Upstairs, the alarms began. Red lights painted the corridor like a warning. Airi's message buzzed: Found a server room. Looks anchored. Need time. Then: Kaito is here.
The mansion erupted. Men streamed down staircases with guns, faces furious and contemptuous. Kaito stood at the top of the main stair, framed by gilt and confidence, his smile a blade.
"You look different, Ryo," he called, voice smooth. "Either you've grown a spine or you've lost your senses."
I didn't reply. Words wasted breath. I moved forward.
Kaito lunged, and the fight that followed was personal. He had the arrogance of someone used to buying outcomes; his fists were precise, trained in private schools. But my hands remembered angles, revenge, the feel of breaking bones. I met him strike for strike. For every hit he landed, I marked a reply.
The fight cascaded down the staircase—fist against bone, a flash of broken glass, a spray of blood that arced like a confession. Airi's presence was a phantom at the edge of it; her messages came in jagged fragments: Basement server—massive. Something else— then static.
I caught Kaito's jaw with a right hook that should have ended him. He staggered and then laughed, a sound that dripped contempt.
"You think it's that simple?" he spat, wiping blood from his lip. "You think killing us will change anything?" He glanced at the guards, and the contempt in his eyes widened into a grin. "You're just feeding the machine."
His words struck a different kind of chord. Before I could process, a shout rose from behind—a commotion that wasn't part of our plan. Airi's messages stopped.
I flung Kaito aside and sprinted toward the basement door. The corridor flooded with chaos: men screaming, servants ducking, lights exploding in showers of sparks. The smell of burning varnish filled my nose.
Down in the generator room, the hinge of fate creaked. A steel door guarded a concrete shaft; behind it, a stairway spiraled downward into a vault. I kicked it open and dropped into the dark.
The server chamber was a cathedral of blinking LEDs and humming towers. At the center, ringed by cables like roots, stood a console—its screen alive, showing lines of code that crawled like worms. Airi was there, breathing hard, clutching the cube. Her hands were trembling, and across the room one of the brothers—Hiro, I'd learned his name—stood watching with a hand pressed against a cloth-wrapped jaw.
"Hiro," I hissed. "You."
He grinned with teeth like bone. "You hurt family," he said. "Family rebuilds."
He didn't attack. He didn't need to. He slapped the cube from Airi's hands. It bounced once, then vanished into a shadowed alcove. He darted for it.
I moved like a viper, but his knife met my forearm. Pain flared. I struck his elbow with a bone-crunching blow. He fell, but his body twitched back up like a puppet jerked by strings. I saw it then: the slight shimmer along his collarbone, a pale brand beneath his shirt that pulsed faintly blue—the same hue as the cube.
Before I could comprehend, the man rose again. His eyes had a hollow flash, and he smiled with the same grin he'd worn minutes earlier.
"No," I breathed. "They—"
Airi screamed. "Ryo! They're coming back!"
The room filled with movement. Men who looked like they'd been dead in the corridor reassembled, bodies stuttering back into motion with jerky, unnatural grace. The pulse in the brand beneath their skin synchronized like a conductor raising a baton. The Cycle wasn't merely resurrecting them; it was stitching them from memory and machinery.
I felt the loop's teeth sink into me. Everything I had done—every kill, every broken jaw—was a data point for the machine. The more violence I birthed, the more information The Cycle harvested. Revenge fed it.
Terror rose inside me, not because I would die but because my actions were the data. I saw it with a clarity that slammed like a sledge: my revenge could strengthen the very thing I wanted to end.
"Hiro!" Airi shouted, rushing for the cube. Her hand slipped past the alcove, and the cube pulsed, recognizing her touch. The server lights flared white-hot.
Across the racks, a panel opened and a face—projected, distorted—materialized. The man in black's voice came out like a sermon: "Perfect. The variables stabilize. Increase aggression. Collect responses."
Airi's eyes met mine, wide with a mix of triumph and horror. She grabbed the cube, and for a moment the room fell still—as if the heartbeat of the machine paused to cough.
"No more," I said to the room and to myself. I had a single choice left right then: run and save what I could, or stay and make this a killing ground to deny The Cycle its data. Both were traps.
I grabbed Airi's hand. "We leave. Now." I pulled her toward an access duct I'd noticed—small, close to the floor, just wide enough for two.
Behind us, the reborn brothers rallied, not as men but as algorithms housed in skin. They moved with purpose—less the rage of the living and more the obedience of a protocol.
We crawled through the duct with scraping metal biting our knuckles. The cube in my jacket pulsed irregularly, a heartbeat in a world that wanted endless repeats. We slid out into the night, coughing, lungs burning with smoke and the stink of burned circuitry.
Down the hill, the mansion's silhouette burned against the stars. Inside, The Cycle learned.
As we ran, I looked at Airi—her face streaked with soot, eyes hollow and the same age as the girl who'd said sorry in the rain. In that moment the truth was a blade between my ribs: violence alone could not end what violence had fed.
The revenge I'd wanted was not a path to freedom but a currency The Cycle traded in. We had to be smarter. We had to be colder.
Behind us, the mansion collapsed into a roar, and the night swallowed the sound.
We stopped when the city lights swallowed the screams. Airi leaned against me, shaking.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
I didn't have an answer. I had only one truth.
"We find the Core's source," I said. "And we make sure The Cycle never uses us for data again—even if it costs everything."
She nodded, and together we walked into the smoke, into the next loop of danger—wiser, angrier, and aware at last that our rage might be the very thing that kept the world repeating its horrors.