Echoes of the Forgotten Timelines

Ren ran.

Not with the cautious steps of a boy who once hid behind paint and silence, but with raw, unfiltered fury. Haruto could barely keep up. Ahead of them, the sanctuary’s wide eastern corridor stretched open. It was half-collapsed from battle while the ground fractured beneath the weight of unraveling reality.

"Asahi!" Ren screamed.

The boy’s voice cracked like thunder — more emotion in that one scream than in all the quiet years he’d spent curled in fear. His ink tendrils lashed from his back in wild arcs, carving through the dust and rubble like living whips. He was no longer just running. He was hunting.

But Asahi was gone.

Where he had stood moments ago, there was nothing but a shimmer of air, a ripple of energy. A last, mocking afterimage of him dissolving into the chaos.

Haruto came to a halt beside Ren, chest heaving, eyes darting. The Veil above the sanctuary had widened further. Where once it was a crack in the heavens, it now gaped like a second sky — pulsing with alien threads and impossibly deep hues of violet and red.

And the world was responding.

Chunks of earth rose into the air like weightless debris. The wind howled sideways. Fires raged where there was no fuel. A distant mountain shimmered and then folded in on itself as if rejecting its own existence.

Reality was coming undone.

Behind them, the survivors of the battle limped and crawled toward the inner halls. Some had lost limbs. Others, their minds. One man knelt with his hands around his head, sobbing as his skin turned translucent and light began to pour through his veins.

“This isn’t a world anymore,” Haruto muttered. “It’s a grave.”

The chamber was quiet. Too quiet.

Ash drifted from the ruptured ceiling like slow-falling snow. The static from the Veil’s widening breach crackled faintly in the distance, swallowing the sky beyond Sanctuary Zero in unholy hues of red and indigo.

Then came footsteps.

Two figures emerged from the shadows. One Haruto knew too well.

Yukawa.

And beside him, a tall man with silver-threaded hair and pale, unreadable eyes. The air around him shimmered faintly, warped by unseen pressure. Haruto felt his lungs tighten.

The man inclined his head. “We meet again,” he said. “Let me introduce myself.”

Haruto stepped forward, fists clenched. “Then do it.”

“My name was Shin,” the man said. “I was… like you. Once. A child of Sanctuary. An experiment.”

Haruto's brow furrowed, gaze flicking to Yukawa. “Another puppet of his?”

But Yukawa chuckled.

“No, Haruto,” he said softly, voice dry with age and malice. “He was your equal. One of the first.”

He stepped forward, eyes glinting with cold satisfaction. “He just didn’t fail the way you did.”

Haruto’s fists trembled.

Ren stayed silent. Watching.

Yukawa’s tone turned venomous. “You always thought you were the victim. The child soldier. The cursed orphan. But do you remember the very first timeline? No. Of course not. You had me seal it away.”

Haruto’s heart stopped. “…What?”

Yukawa stepped closer. “You caused the first Veil fracture. You. Not me. Not the Order. It was you, Haruto, who triggered the experiment’s collapse.”

The world tilted.

“No—”

“You overloaded the containment core,” Yukawa spat. “You disobeyed protocol and rewired the fail-safe. My team… my family… they burned in that breach.”

Haruto staggered.

“They screamed. My wife. My daughter. I held their hands through the glass as they disintegrated.”

Yukawa’s voice dropped.

Haruto’s mind flashed.

The Veil. The lab. A child’s scream.

“I…” he whispered.

“That determination — it left a mark,” Yukawa said. “You didn’t die. You slipped between the seams. And I became the Traveller. An anomaly.”

Haruto's breathing turned ragged.

“All those timelines,” Yukawa continued. “All those lives. And what did you do in every one?”

He lifted a hand.

A surge of psychic pressure burst from Shin. The walls groaned. Haruto fell to his knees.

“Watch.”

And the memories came.

Flash — a version of Haruto stabbing Ren through the chest beneath a crimson sky.

Flash — watching Aoi drown while he escaped.

Flash — Sanctuary Seven collapsing, the world swallowed in ink. A whisper: “You chose the world over me.”

“No,” Haruto rasped. “That’s not… me…”

Yukawa stepped over him like refuse. “Each time, you failed. Each time, you made different choices — but always failed.”

Blood ran from Haruto’s nose.

“You even fed Ren to the Veil in one timeline,” Yukawa murmured. “A ritual. You said it was the only way.”

Haruto's scream cracked the air.

Ren flinched.

Yukawa smiled faintly. “Do you understand now? The whispers at Sanctuary Seven. The memories bleeding in. The reason you saw through your interrogators.”

Haruto clawed at the ground. “Stop…”

“I can’t. Not until you remember everything.”

Shin’s hand twitched. The pressure increased.

More memories surged.

A timeline where Haruto betrayed Kurosawa.

Another where he killed Emi to save himself.

Another where he and Yukawa fought side by side — before Haruto murdered him mid-ritual.

“I broke you across a hundred lives,” Yukawa said, voice soft. “Because you deserved it.”

Ren stood frozen. But unshaken.

Haruto reached a hand toward him, trembling. “Ren—”

The boy stepped back.

Haruto’s heart shattered.

“Ren…” he whispered again, but the boy said nothing.

Yukawa’s voice sliced through the silence. “He doesn’t remember. That’s the tragedy, isn’t it? You carried all the pain. He carried none. And yet… he’s the key.”

Yukawa’s voice dropped, as if the next words weighed more than the ones before.

“There’s something else you forgot… or maybe chose not to remember.”

Haruto looked up, hollow-eyed.

“When you were escaping from Sanctuary Seven,” Yukawa continued, “Kurosawa broadcast over the comms. She said to take exit 4C — not 4E.”

Haruto stiffened.

“You misheard it. And I didn’t correct you. But if you’d gone through 4C, you’d have passed through the sector where Emi was being held.”

The silence that followed was total.

Yukawa’s next words were almost a whisper. “Not that it would’ve mattered. I had already… handled it.”

Haruto’s mouth opened — no sound. Just a faint tremble in his jaw, like something caving in.

Yukawa didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.

And in that moment, something inside Haruto — something fragile, something he’d been clinging to — cracked all the way through.

He couldn’t rise. He collapsed fully, blood dripping from his mouth. The scars on his body pulsed faintly, glowing with the light of fractured timelines.

“You survived the fracture,” Yukawa said, kneeling beside him. “But I survived you.”

Haruto stared up at him, vision blurring. “Why… tell me now?”

Yukawa gave a cold smile. “Because it’s finally time. The Veil has weakened. And you—”

He turned his gaze toward the yawning tear in the sky.

“You’re broken.”

Haruto’s mouth opened, but no words came. Just a slow breath of defeat.

Behind them, the Veil howled.

Shin watched with unreadable eyes.

Ren lowered his head, unmoving.

Yukawa rose slowly. His coat fluttered from the unnatural wind spiralling inward from the breach.

He clicked on a transmitter at his side.

A faint signal echoed.

Then Yukawa whispered into it:

“He’s ready. Haruto has finally broken.”

He looked back at the horizon.

“Begin the final sequence.”