"Do you think the first dungeon was an accident?"
Mari asked the question while picking lettuce out of her sandwich with surgical precision. They sat at a booth near the school gate, the kind that smelled like fryer oil no matter what you ordered. The table was sticky. The windows fogged slightly from the steam of the lunch rush.
Aiko sipped her melon soda and shrugged. "Why would it be?"
"Well," Mari continued, "if you look at early rift footage—like, really early—most of them opened in really random places. Empty fields. Hillsides. One even opened on a mountain and collapsed in on itself. No monsters escaped."
Kaoru stabbed a fry into his ketchup. "And then the government ignored it until one ate a train."
Mari beamed. "Exactly!"
Aiko stirred her straw around her cup. "That was twenty years ago."
"Seventeen," Mari corrected. "We're part of the third system generation. Technically."
Kaoru rolled his eyes. "Here we go."
"I'm serious," Mari said. "Do you know how rare it is in human history for an existential crisis to get absorbed into daily life in under two decades? Dungeons rewrote urban planning, school systems, labor laws, even the tech industry. You can't walk more than a block in Tokyo without seeing a rift alarm."
Aiko stared at the table.
She remembered Kaito once showing her how to check if a scanner was bugged—he used to flick them twice, then wave a coin near the sensor.
Or… maybe he hadn't.
Maybe that memory didn't belong to this version of him.
Mari pulled out her tablet and tapped it on, showing a map. "Look. See this? Red dots are active dungeon clusters. Green are semi-dormant rifts. That cluster near Setagaya? It's been stable for months, but the energy readings keep rising. No breach yet, but they're expecting it."
Kaoru snorted. "Why are we doing a school project on this again?"
"Because," Mari said, swiping dramatically, "there's a pattern."
The system had names for everything.
That was the strange part, Aiko thought, listening half-heartedly as Mari rambled. It was like the world had agreed to use RPG terms for something real.
Dungeons. Tiers. Stats. Monsters. Awakening.
Everyone had a basic system ID now, linked to their fingerprint and blood type. It tracked mana sensitivity and response levels—even if you weren't Awakened. Most people weren't. Maybe one in ten thousand could tap into dungeon energy directly.
Still, everyone learned the basics in school: how to identify a tier breach. How to get to shelter. What to do if someone near you glitched.
Because sometimes, when a rift stayed open too long or got overloaded, the things that came out weren't monsters.
Sometimes it was people.
That evening, Aiko found Kaito in the kitchen, staring at the microwave.
It wasn't on.
He wasn't doing anything. Just… staring.
"You hungry?" she asked.
He didn't look away. "It's broken."
Aiko tilted her head. "It worked this morning."
He held up his hand. Glanced at his fingers. Then, as if testing something, touched the side panel of the microwave again.
The light inside flickered. Then the entire unit shut off.
Aiko opened her mouth. Closed it.
Kaito stepped back. "It keeps happening. Lights. Phones. Screens. They glitch when I'm near."
Aiko walked over and unplugged the microwave.
"Guess you're not allowed near electronics anymore."
He didn't laugh. Just stared at the dark glass, like it might answer something he didn't know how to ask.
That night, Aiko sat on her bed, tablet open beside her.
She wasn't watching anything. Just scrolling. Page after page of dungeon theory. System anomalies. Fragments of forum posts flagged as conspiracy, mostly typed in all caps.
Clone phenomena tied to fragmented awakenings.Disassociation symptoms post-rift re-entry.The Hollowed: Dungeon-born with human faces.
She closed the browser.
Kaito, in his room, sat cross-legged on the floor. The lights were off. A single ray of moonlight broke across his face from the window.
He held his hand out in front of him, palm up.
The marks on his wrist shimmered faintly—just enough to glow, not enough to illuminate.
No interface. No screen. No voice.
The system never introduced itself.
He wondered if that was normal.
He wondered if he'd ever asked before.
Back at school, Mari had brought more data the next day.
"Look," she said, flipping through maps. "Every dungeon has a unique mana signature, right? That's why the detectors can tell them apart. But last month, they found a breach where the signature split in two."
Kaoru was half asleep. "Like a forked road?"
"No," Mari said. "Like something left the dungeon that shouldn't have, while the original signal stayed inside."
Aiko's pen paused over her notebook.
Mari kept going. "They think the dungeon made a copy. Or a backup. Or maybe… split a person in half."
Kaoru raised an eyebrow. "Okay, sure. But who gets to keep the soul?"
Mari grinned. "Exactly."
That night, as rain tapped gently on the window, Kaito lay on his side, watching shadows crawl along the wall.
He hadn't told them about the whispers.
About the moments in sleep where something brushed against his mind. Not memories. Just weight. Like static crawling across the inside of his skull.
Sometimes it felt like there were pieces of him missing.
Other times, it felt like someone else was borrowing the pieces that were left.