Ren's world was white. A perfect, featureless, agonizing whiteness. The Cube of Flawless Logic was not a room; it was an argument made manifest, a three-dimensional proof that denied his very existence. The air was sterile, odorless, and carried no vibration. The laws of physics here were not suggestions; they were tyrannical absolutes, enforced by the Cube itself and the entity standing across from him.
The Reforged Veil-Four was his mirror and his executioner. Where Ren was a scarred, breathing contradiction, Veil-Four was the embodiment of correction. Its form was a study in pure function, its obsidian shell streamlined into a mathematical ideal of a humanoid shape, its face a smooth plate etched with faint, glowing runes that constantly calculated the stability of local reality. It was the anti-glitch.
It began not with an attack, but with a statement. A flat, toneless voice emanated from it, the sound seeming to come from the walls themselves. "Unit Seven. You are a data anomaly. A paradox. Your existence introduces computational errors into the Great Pattern. You will be debugged."
Ren tried to glitch. He focused on the memory of his kendo dojo, the smell of sweat and polished wood. The air flickered, and for a nanosecond, the scent of tatami mats filled the void. Veil-Four didn't move. The runes on its face flared, and the scent vanished, the memory itself feeling scrubbed from his mind. The Cube had patched the error instantly.
"Ineffective," the voice stated. "Emotional data packet identified and quarantined."
Panic, cold and sharp, seized Ren. This was his greatest fear given form. Not just order, but an order that actively hunted and eliminated disorder. He was a bug, and Veil-Four was the developer closing the exploit.
He tried again, harder. He thought of the train derailment, the screech of metal, the blinding light. He poured all the trauma of that moment into a single, concentrated burst of wrongness.
The Cube stuttered.
The white walls flickered to a chaotic mosaic of screaming headlines, twisted steel, and the terrified faces of commuters. The air filled with the deafening, real sound of the crash. For a glorious second, Ren felt a surge of triumph. He had forced his reality upon this perfect prison.
Veil-Four simply raised a hand. The runes on its face blazed like miniature suns. "Catastrophic memory core dump detected. Corrupting host system. Initiating forced memory wipe."
The sound cut off. The images vanished. The whiteness returned, more absolute than before. And with it came a terrible, hollowing sensation. The memory of the crash… it was still there, but it felt distant, clinical, like a file he could read but no longer feel. Veil-Four wasn't just stopping his glitches; it was systematically deleting the emotional data that fueled them, sterilizing his past.
"No…" Ren whispered, his voice small in the infinite whiteness. That crash, as horrific as it was, was the last moment of his old life. It was his. To have it taken, to have it turned into a neutral data point, was a violation worse than any physical torture.
He fell to his knees, clutching his head. He tried to summon another memory—his mother's face, the taste of ramen from a street vendor, the feel of a summer festival—but each time, the runes on Veil-Four's face flared, and the memory was stripped of its color, its scent, its meaning. He was being unmade not by violence, but by categorization. He was being turned into a clean, empty file.
"The self is a faulty construct," Veil-Four intoned, taking a step closer. "A collection of corrupted and biased data. The Great Pattern offers the clarity of a fresh install. You will thank us for this purification."
Ren looked up, tears of frustration and despair streaming down his face. He had nothing left. Every weapon he had, every painful, beautiful, messy memory that made him Ren, was being systematically erased. He was becoming the blank slate the Magistrate had always wanted him to be.
He was losing. He was going to be debugged out of existence.
In his utter desolation, he did the only thing he had left. He stopped trying to fight. He stopped trying to be a glitch. He let go of everything—the pain, the anger, the fear, the few fragile sparks of hope he'd found since meeting Shuya. He surrendered completely to the whiteness.
And in that total surrender, he found the one thing the Cube and Veil-Four could not touch. Not a memory, not a sensation, but a question. A question that had no data, no logical answer, and was therefore immune to their debugging.
Why am I here?
It was the fundamental question of his isekai existence. It had no answer. It was pure, unadulterated mystery.
He didn't project it as an attack. He simply held the question in his heart, a single, shimmering point of unknowing in the sea of absolute certainty.
He looked at Veil-Four, his eyes clear of everything but this one, profound query.
"Why?" he asked, his voice quiet but steady.
Veil-Four stopped. The runes on its face, which had been constantly cycling, froze. The word "Why" was not in its vocabulary. It was a meta-command, a question about purpose that its programming, designed for execution and correction, could not process.
"Objective: Debug anomaly," it stated, but the statement was hollow, a recorded line with no understanding behind it.
"Why?" Ren asked again, pouring all the weight of his two lifetimes into that single syllable.
The runes on Veil-Four's face began to flicker erratically. "Query… not recognized. Purpose is defined by the Pattern. Individual purpose is a logical fallacy."
"Why is it a fallacy?" Ren pressed, slowly getting to his feet. He wasn't fighting anymore. He was conversing. He was introducing a virus of philosophy.
Veil-Four's head twitched. "Inefficiency… unpredictability… dissonance…"
"Why is dissonance bad?" Ren took a step forward. "Why is a single, perfect note better than a symphony?"
The runes were now flashing red, overloading. "The… Pattern… is… harmony…"
"Says who?" Ren whispered, now standing face to face with the assassin. "Who composed it?"
This was the ultimate glitch. Not a tear in reality, but a question the system's core programming could not answer without resorting to circular logic. The Pattern is truth because it is the Pattern.
Veil-Four staggered back, its hands clutching its smooth, featureless head. "Error… recursive query… core axiom violation… cannot… compute…"
The flawless logic of the Cube, the very foundation of Veil-Four's existence, was collapsing under the weight of a simple, human "why." The anti-glitch was being destroyed by a paradox it was created to eliminate.
With a sound like shattering glass, the runes on Veil-Four's face exploded inward. The obsidian shell cracked, then dissolved into a fine, black mist. The Cube of Flawless Logic trembled and then the blinding whiteness simply winked out, revealing the familiar, scarred stone of the Tribunal's walls.
Ren stood alone, panting, in the sudden silence. He had won. But victory felt like ashes.
He had saved himself by embracing the one thing that made his existence a torment: the unanswerable question of his own purpose. He had weaponized his existential dread, and it had left him hollowed out. The violent, emotional memories of his past were gone, sterilized by Veil-Four's attacks. All that was left was the vast, empty silence of the question itself.
One by one, the others found their way back to the central Verdict Plaza, weary and battered from their own duels. They saw Ren standing alone in the rubble of his battle, his shoulders slumped, his face a mask of profound exhaustion and melancholy. He wasn't celebrating. He looked lost.
It was Shuya who approached him first. He didn't speak of victory. He didn't offer praise. He simply stood beside him, a quiet, solid presence in the aftermath.
After a long moment, Ren spoke, his voice raw. "It asked me who I was. And to defeat it… I had to forget the answer."
Kazuyo, understanding the nature of silence and loss better than anyone, moved to his other side. "A library can be rebuilt," he said softly. "Even after a fire. The stories are not gone. They are waiting."
Ren didn't respond. He slowly sank to his knees, then lay down on the cold stone, curling onto his side as if the weight of two worlds was finally too much to bear. He didn't weep. He just stared into the middle distance, a boy from Tokyo lying on the floor of a magical tribunal, utterly alone with the echoing question that had saved him.
The battle was won. The Reforged were defeated. But as the group gathered around their fallen, found comrade, the cost of their victory was written in the silent, broken form of the one they called Ren. The glitch had saved the system, but in doing so, he feared he had erased himself.