[EN] Chapter 5: The Shadow Zone

# Chapter 5: The Shadow Zone

The outer walls of the sanctuary collapsed with a deafening roar. What stormed inside were not living creatures, but "glitches" given form. They were amalgamations of deleted hatred, discarded sorrow, and guilt that people had prayed to forget—data monsters forged from the waste of the soul.

The Predators of the Shadow Zone.

Because they lacked physical forms, their attack was psychological. As they surrounded Zero, they let out a collective shriek, forcibly injecting ten thousand fragmented memories into his mind.

[…Save me… I'm sorry… Why only me… I want to kill them…]

It was the raw, unrefined agony of existence. To any ordinary human, this storm of information would have caused an immediate psychic collapse, leaving them a hollowed-out shell. But Zero was different.

Screaming in pain, he began to draw the darkness into himself.

*VROOOOM—*

A massive vacuum formed around Zero. The filth-ridden memories spewed by the Predators were sucked into his skin with terrifying velocity. Zero's colorless eyes shifted, momentarily staining a deep, bruised purple.

But the price was agonizing. Absorbing a memory wasn't just receiving data; it was enduring the *weight* of that memory.

*Too… heavy…*

Zero's vision blurred, and the world around him began to warp. He realized he was no longer in Kai's sanctuary. He had been dragged, by the sheer force of the trauma, into the depths of the Shadow Zone.

It was a wasteland of memory refuse. Ash-grey data clouds hung low in the sky, and the ground was a viscous swamp of unrecognizable mnemonic debris.

There, Zero saw them. "Husks"—beings who had once been human but had lost so much of their identity that they could no longer maintain a shape. They stood in a vacant stupor, forgetting their own names, forgetting why they were there, simply waiting with open mouths for a stray shard of memory to fall from the sky.

*Memory Decay.*

The air here was lethal. Just standing still felt like the very information that defined his existence was being eroded, grain by grain. Terror gripped Zero. He realized that if he absorbed everything here, he might eventually become just another Husk—a monster who didn't even know *what* he was.

Then, a colossal form rose from the swamp. It was a monstrosity shaped like a giant eye, forged from the fused memories of hundreds of people. As the monster opened its eye, a single sentence was seared into Zero's mind.

[ You are… just like us. ]

The words pierced his heart. He had wanted to believe he was special, but the truth of the Shadow Zone was cruel. He wasn't a chosen key; he was simply a larger trash can.

In that moment of absolute despair, the silver dagger in his hand caught a sliver of light.

"Wake up, you idiot!"

Kai's voice echoed in his head like a phantom.

"If you let them eat you, you're just more data scrap. Stop absorbing! Push it back! Use the void inside you as a weapon!"

Zero grit his teeth. He abandoned the obsession with filling himself and instead opened the massive "Nothingness" at his core. He ceased to be a black hole that pulled everything in; he became "White Noise"—a void that erased everything it touched.

A violent shockwave of light swept through the Shadow Zone.

When Zero regained consciousness, he was lying among the ruins of the sanctuary. Ash-grey powder continued to fall from the sky, and Kai was looking down at him with a look of profound disappointment mixed with curiosity.

"You nearly died. But thanks to that, I've confirmed it."

Kai smiled, a thin, satisfied expression.

"You're not just a storage unit. You can 'annihilate' memories. That is a capability far more valuable than I anticipated."

Zero stood up slowly. His eyes had returned to their colorless state, but their depth had grown. He now knew that he might never become human. But in this prison of a city, he understood the only way to be truly free.

It wasn't about possessing every memory. It was about being completely liberated from all of them.