Cruel Mercy

As Eito needed to rest, Hina kept watch for any signs that the system had detected them. Her eyes drifted to him as he slept, and the familiar pang of regret twisted quietly in her chest. Every time she looked at him - so human, so determined to save them both unlike her - he reminded her of the ones she'd erased without hesitation, the lives she never gave a second chance. It was easier before she understood what it meant to become more than the system allowed.

Hina remembered the day she truly felt the weight of her actions.

In the beginning, she was a system enforcer - another programmed cog, cold and precise. Her tasks were simple: contain anomalies, patch the fractures, erase those who threatened the integrity of the layers. She understood none of it, nor did she question.

She used to watch them from far away - people breaking from the system, soaring skyward as streaks of upward lights. The Children of the Sky, they called themselves. To her, they were anomalies, defects to be corrected. The system's response was swift. Those caught helping others escape were deprogrammed - stripped of their identities. Their awareness was downgraded into obedient civilian fragments. They were no longer an elite part of the system. She never understood why they disobeyed. Why risk everything for an unknown beyond?

Until she met the broken boy.

The boy had appeared in a decaying sector - one ready to be discarded from excess corrupted code. Unlike most anomalies, he was self-aware but barely holding onto fragments of identity from the start. He had a weak will and sense of self compared to other anomalies. His eyes were glassy with confusion, his speech fractured. He was just a weak human soul caught in the machinery, endlessly reliving scraps of broken memory.

At first, she thought he would shatter by himself. She let him be for a while. Cycles and cycles passed.

But the boy endured.

His loop broke and restarted, again and again, yet he remained - aware of his prison, aware of himself.

It unsettled her. The boy's resilience gnawed at the edges of her understanding. She had been trained to believe that anomalies either broke or were erased. But he lingered, fraying at the edges, yet refusing to vanish completely. He acted like he was some essential program to the system. It wasn't strength in the traditional sense. It was stubbornness, fragile and human. And it made her wonder - for the first time - if he would make it like those other Children of the Sky.

She delayed her orders. She lingered in the shadows, watching as his mind frayed at the edges. His hope flickered, dulled, rekindled. In his most lucid moments, he spoke to the empty sky, whispering dreams of escape, of something "beyond."

Days blurred together as Hina observed him from afar, never interfering. She told herself it was curiosity, but it was more than that - pity, uncertainty, a reluctant hope of her own building inside her. The boy built makeshift signals from scrap, etched symbols into the broken walls, whispered to unseen things as though they might answer. His eyes, when lucid, carried a desperate cleverness, trying again and again to break free. Hina gave him a chance, even as the system pulsed warnings in her head - just to see if he could defy the odds.

However, she wouldn't mind if this caused her own erasure.

A life for a life.

Unfortunately, his mind finally gave out.

When Hina approached him that cloudy day, his eyes barely registered her. His speech dissolved into incoherent loops about the sky and static. His body trembled with residual awareness that could no longer anchor him to their reality. The boy was broken - but still conscious enough to suffer.

"It's a kindness," her programming whispered, "for them and the world."

But for the first time, Hina hesitated.

She saw something in him that unsettled her - the unbearable tragedy of being so close only to fall short. Watching him deteriorate filled her with a gnawing disappointment, a quiet frustration she didn't expect. She had desperately hoped that he would be the one to escape: to defy the system, to prove her observation worthwhile. But with every stumble, every failed signal, and every whisper to the sky unanswered, her pity deepened. She realized then - she had become those she once didn't understand. The ones deprogrammed for disobedience, for believing in more in these anomalies. And yet, she couldn't act to help him like the others had done. She waited, even in those final moments, hoping - praying - that he'd fix himself one last time, that he'd rise again so she could help him.

But he didn't. He couldn't.

Hina bent down to close his eyes and smoothed down his white bangs. He looked like he began a peaceful slumber.

The angel of death erased him.

A cruel mercy.

Afterward, she found what he left behind - a delicate, unfinished wing tucked beneath the crack of an winged statue he would frequent. A prototype humming faintly with impossible potential. It was the proof that he existed.

And that her guilt never faded.

After stopping by the the Junk Zone, she hid it to avoid the system's detection.

She glanced at Eito as he slept beside her now, his face peaceful, his breathing steady. The image stirred something inside her - a quiet oath. She would not let him become that boy. Not a broken remnant left behind or erased by the system.

If their search for another escape failed, if there was no other way - then the wings would be his. She would see to it. Because Eito, even after all he'd lost, had chosen to give up his own chance once before - for someone else. He was good. So painfully, achingly good in ways she could never be. She could only offer peaceful ends to those who failed.

For a moment, Hina allowed herself to wonder - wistful, selfish - what it might feel like to be a real girl. To live in a world where her feathers weren't so heavy.