[EN] Chapter 14: The Scream of Colors

# Chapter 14: The Scream of Colors

The fall was endless.

When Zero finally broke through the white void, he wasn't greeted by silence, but by a storm of noise that threatened to tear his eardrums apart. It was less like sound and more like a collision of data—a colossal dissonance born from trillions of ones and zeros repelling and overlapping one another. Within those waves of noise, Zero felt his very ego being dismantled, shredded into a thousand disparate pieces.

Then, suddenly, color returned to the world.

But these were not the soft hues Zero remembered, nor the gentle tints he had glimpsed through the memories of others. These colors were aggressive, jagged, and grotesquely distorted.

As Zero opened his eyes, he stared into a sky drenched in blood and a land undulating in a putrid, rotting blue. Giant geometric shapes drifted through the air like shards of broken glass, flickering with erratic rhythms. Beyond the horizon, skyscrapers that had liquefied into a black, oily substance defied gravity, soaring backward into the heavens.

"Agh…!"

Zero screamed, collapsing and rolling across the ground. The visual shock translated instantly into physical agony. It felt as if the colors were striking his brain directly. Every time a saturation of violent purple pierced his vision, a needle-like pain stabbed into his left temple; every flicker of deep yellow noise felt like a searing burn deep within his lungs.

This was the next layer of the Oracle Shell: the *Stratum of Fragments*.

If the Ghost Layer had been a white tomb where everything was erased, this place was a landfill—a dumping ground where the residue of memories that refused to be deleted had been forcibly compressed. It was a hell where unrefined emotions and raw memories manifested as physical colors and forms, swirling in a vortex, devouring one another.

Zero struggled to his feet and scanned his surroundings. He still carried the shards of other people's memories he had absorbed in the Ghost Layer. Those fragments now acted as a makeshift filter, allowing him to maintain a semblance of form amidst this grotesque tide of color that sought to swallow him whole.

But even that shield was precarious.

The environment itself began to whisper to him. It wasn't a voice, but a forced imprinting carved directly into his skin.

*[You… are part of this place.]*
*[Remember. You are failed data.]*
*[Abandon your will. Then, the pain will vanish.]*

The twisted landscape seeped into Zero's consciousness. It relentlessly probed the cracks in his resolve—the sheer will to survive—attempting to assimilate him into the achromatic noise. The tips of Zero's fingers began to dissolve into blue static. He could feel his identity being slowly erased, crushed under the atmospheric pressure of this vast wasteland.

*'No… I am…'*

He grit his teeth. Instead of struggling to remember, he reached deep inside and pulled up the 'Void'. The truth he had realized while passing through the Beacon: that because he was empty, he could be filled with anything. Rather than rejecting the forced memories pushing in from the outside, he drew them into his own void, dismantling them.

As he took a step forward in defiance, something lunged from the ruins.

It had the shape of a human, but in place of a face, a single, massive eyeball was embedded in its skull. Its entire body was covered in shards of broken mirrors, flashing as they reflected the hideous colors of the environment.

"Memory… give me… your memory…"

Its voice was a grotesque harmony, sounding as if dozens of people were wailing in unison. This was a *Lapped-up Entity*—a hollow shell that had completely lost its own will and existed only to crave the memories of others.

The entity closed the distance in an instant, reaching for Zero's throat. He could feel the starving predator's hunger radiating from its fingertips. Zero instinctively raised his arm to block it, but the moment the entity's hand touched him, a fragment of memory in his mind surged violently, trying to be ripped away.

*A brief conversation with someone; the warmth of a cup of tea.*

"Give it to me! Give it here!"

The entity shrieked with madness, slamming Zero onto the ground. Gasping under the suffocating pressure, Zero realized the truth: the predators here didn't feed on physical flesh, but on 'memory'—the very foundation of existence. To have one's memory stolen was to be relegated to the background noise of this world.

In that moment of desperation, a shard he had absorbed in the Ghost Layer resonated from the depths of his consciousness. It was a tiny, sharp fragment, laced with hatred and fury.

Instead of suppressing the emotion, Zero detonated it.

"You'll never… take what's mine!"

With his shout, a violent shockwave of blinding white light erupted from his palm. It wasn't a refined power, but a 'Burst of Will'—the condensed explosion of the countless pains, sorrows, and rages of others that he had carried within him.

*BOOM!*

The white flash slammed into the entity's mirrored body. The glass shards shattered with a scream, scattering in every direction as the entity was hurled backward, rolling across the ground. Its massive eye widened in shock. To the beings of this place, 'will' was a concept already extinct or forgotten; Zero's pure resistance had become a lethal weapon.

Zero stood up, breathing heavily. His fingertips were still trembling, and a wave of mental exhaustion washed over him from the exertion. However, his gaze was sharper than ever before.

He looked down at his hands. The skin that had been turning into blue noise was returning to its original color.

When the environment tried to erase him, he defined himself through resistance.
When others tried to steal his memory, he used that craving to prove his existence.

Zero looked up at the sky once more. It was still a hellscape of blood-red clouds and fractured geometries, but he was no longer overwhelmed by the colors. Instead, those intense hues began to look like signposts.

The place where the darkest, most twisted colors converged. That was the center of this stratum, and where the gate to the next stage would be.

Zero began to walk slowly, stepping over the debris of fallen buildings. With every step, the surrounding colors tempted him, threatened him, and mocked him. But he did not waver.

He knew now.
The only way to survive the scream of these hellish colors was to become a louder scream himself.

He gripped the memory fragments within him tighter. They were no longer mere burdens, but the only map and weapon he possessed to navigate this distorted world.

Zero marched silently toward the crimson horizon. Behind him, only where he had stepped, vivid white footprints lingered for a moment before being swept away by the tide of color.