Shirakami Academy was a quiet, elite boarding school tucked into the mountains—fog-covered, ivy-wrapped, expensive as hell.
They didn't take visitors.
But when Ren and Aika said the name "Kyo Morinaka," the gate opened.
---
Kyo was 15.
Top of his class. Polite. Soft-spoken.
And a Spiral-infested prodigy.
The school psychologist's letter said it plainly:
> "Kyo claims to 'dream strangers.' He draws them. Then they show up at school. One by one."
"He doesn't know who Ren is… but he's drawn him 47 times."
"All slightly different. All dead-eyed."
---
The staff led Ren and Aika to an art room.
Hundreds of drawings pinned to the walls. Lined in spirals. All in pencil.
> The same boy.
The same smile.
The same eyes.
Ren.
In some, he was laughing.
In others—screaming, bleeding, glitching, melting into spiral lines.
But in every one?
No pupils. Just spirals.
---
Kyo sat cross-legged at the back of the room.
Sketchbook open. Smiling calmly.
He looked up.
"You're different," he said.
"The real one came."
Ren knelt slowly.
"You know me?"
Kyo nodded.
"I built you."
---
Aika stepped forward. "You mean you dreamed him."
Kyo shook his head.
"No. I remembered him. From before I was born.
He was always dying in my dreams, so I drew him over and over.
Until he walked in."
He flipped the sketchbook to a fresh page and pointed.
There—Ren and Aika standing in front of the SEA VAULT.
Behind them, a glowing, rotting face made of tangled memory strands.
Ren's voice caught.
"…You dreamed Spiral Eye."
Kyo smiled wider.
"It dreams me, too. We're friends."
---
Suddenly—
The light in the room flickered.
The drawings shivered.
One fell off the wall.
A sketch of Aika. Mouth stitched shut. Tears spiraling down her face.
Another—Ren. Eyes missing. Clock hands in his mouth.
Then the walls began to peel.
Not the paper.
Reality itself.
---
Aika grabbed Ren's arm. "It's happening again. He's not just dreaming memories—he's reconstructing Spiral architecture through imagination."
Ren backed up.
"Kyo—have you drawn anything that hasn't happened yet?"
Kyo blinked.
Then pointed to the very last page.
A drawing of Ren and Aika standing in a graveyard.
Only… it wasn't just any graveyard.
It was Midoribashi.
And the grave they were looking at said:
> REN ASANO
Born of memory. Died for real.
---
Aika whispered, "It's a prediction."
Kyo tilted his head. "You have to die. Or it doesn't end."
Ren looked down at his own hands. They were flickering.
"…I think I'm already starting to."
---
The walls groaned again.
Spirals crawling along the windows.
Lights dimmed.
One of Kyo's sketches moved on its own—spiral eyes opening across the paper like blinking stars.
And somewhere deep inside Ren's head—
> He remembered dying.
Not once.
Not twice.
But hundreds of times.
Each one just like the drawings.
And Kyo?
Kyo was the one who'd been keeping him alive.
---
The room had stopped flickering.
But the silence left behind was worse.
Ren stared at the grave sketch.
Aika stood beside him, arms crossed tightly, eyes scanning Kyo's face—looking for even a flicker of corruption.
But the boy sat peacefully, chin resting on his knee, pencil spinning slowly in his fingers like a metronome.
"Why did you draw this, Kyo?" Ren finally asked, voice low.
Kyo didn't answer for a long time.
Then:
> "Because you're already dead, Ren. You just haven't remembered it yet."
---
Aika stepped forward, her voice like ice.
"What do you mean? We destroyed the Spiral core at Sea Vault. We reset the system."
Kyo blinked.
"You reset a system. One node. One part."
Then he pointed to the page again.
> "But memories aren't systems. They multiply. You can cut off a head... but the dream doesn't bleed. It just finds someone else to finish the sentence."
Ren slowly sat down, every movement heavy, like gravity had doubled just for him.
"…So what are you saying? I'm... already a memory again?"
Kyo looked at him with a sad little smile.
> "You were always a memory. The only difference is: you used to think you weren't."
---
Outside, a cold wind blew across the hills behind the academy.
Kazamura and Midoribashi shared old terrain—connected by a forgotten path used long ago for mining operations.
Locals called it the Iron Sleep Road.
And on that winding, leaf-choked trail?
A cemetery so small and overgrown it didn't appear on any maps.
But it appeared in Kyo's dream.
Over. And over. And over.
---
They followed the drawing.
Three hours through the brush. Cold mist. Old stone steps sunk beneath moss and memory.
The graveyard rose out of the fog like an echo caught in physical form.
Just twenty or so headstones.
No names visible except for one—fresh, clean, unnaturally preserved.
Aika's voice was a whisper.
"There it is."
The headstone read:
> REN ASANO
Born: Unknown
Died: Unknown
"YOU EXISTED BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T STOP."
---
Ren stepped closer.
The moment his fingers brushed the stone, his vision fractured.
---
FLASH.
> A room full of screens—each showing a different version of himself. Ren Asano: Version 004, 005, 017.b, 017.e, 017.z... One screaming. One burning. One whispering Aika's name over and over as wires tear through his brain.
---
FLASH.
> A hospital room. Ren's father speaking into a recorder: "Subject 017 continues to adapt memory architecture.
Current behavior suggests it's forming a recursive identity loop.
In lay terms: he believes he's real."
> Pause.
"God help him."
---
FLASH.
> A sketchpad in a child's hands. Kyo. Much younger. Drawing Ren's face with tearful eyes. Whispering, "I'll fix you this time…"
---
Ren collapsed onto the grass.
Sweating. Pale. Eyes wide open.
Aika was beside him in a flash, holding his head.
"Ren. REN. Talk to me. What did you see?"
He whispered:
> "I'm not the original.
I'm not even the first memory.
I'm… a rewritten glitch of a rewritten glitch."
> "Kyo didn't draw my grave as a warning.
He drew it as a limit.
If I pass this point—I overwrite everything. I become... something else."
Aika's hands trembled.
"Kyo said if you remember too much—"
"—I become the Spiral."
---
A slow, strange laugh came from the woods.
They turned.
Kyo stood at the top of the slope.
But… it wasn't just him.
Behind him: a line of children.
All holding sketchbooks.
All with blank faces.
Each slowly drawing Ren.
---
Kyo's eyes glowed faintly now.
He spoke, but his voice was layered—his own, and dozens beneath it.
> "We are the next Spiral. The Spiral born not from memory... but from art."
"Every image, every dream, every sketch—they're hosts now."
> "And you, Ren, are the source material."
---
The wind screamed.
The trees shivered—not with weather, but with shared memory.
And the grave?
Vanished.
As if history just decided to delete it.
---
Ren stumbled backward as the grave vanished beneath his feet—
not buried, not broken, but undone.
As if history simply rewrote itself without asking.
Aika caught him, but her grip felt distant.
He turned toward Kyo.
The boy—no longer entirely boy—stood calmly, barefoot among the weeds,
his eyes reflecting dozens of moving, blinking spiral pupils.
> "The grave was an anchor," Kyo said gently.
"Now it's gone, so you can't die anymore.
You're pure recursion now."
---
The forest bent behind him—trees leaning toward Ren like audience members in an ancient theater.
And those kids—blank-faced, pencil-clutching—
were sketching again.
Each page they drew on glowed faintly as lines formed: Ren and Aika, over and over, in a dozen poses and deaths.
Ren bleeding from his mouth.
Ren holding Aika's hand while they burned.
Ren smiling with black holes for eyes.
---
Aika stepped forward, fury lacing her voice.
"Kyo. This isn't dreaming anymore. You're forcing their minds to imagine pain they've never seen."
Kyo smiled warmly. Innocently.
"They're not imagining anything.
They're just remembering the Spiral I left inside their sleep."
He held up one drawing.
Aika.
Naked. Bound by wire. Spiral symbols burned across her skin.
Ren lunged—but the air twisted.
He hit a wall that wasn't there—a spiral barrier of static.
Kyo didn't flinch.
"You can't hurt me. Not until you choose."
Ren gritted his teeth. "Choose what?"
Kyo's spiral eyes widened.
> "Whether to become the final sketch…
or tear the page."
---
Suddenly—
The kids stopped drawing.
And their sketchbooks bled.
Real blood—oozing from paper seams, soaking through their clothes.
Aika screamed, rushing to the nearest girl—maybe ten years old—whose mouth trembled as her pencil etched the word "HELP" beside a picture of Ren with a knife in his hand.
---
Ren stood frozen.
This was it.
Kyo hadn't built a death machine. He'd built a consciousness printer—an art infection where imagined versions of Ren enacted Spiral patterns across new hosts.
They weren't dreaming Ren.
They were trapping him.
Over and over.
In nightmare loops.
And now, Aika was being pulled in.
---
Ren saw the drawing in the girl's hands flicker:
Aika—eyes rolled back, spiral tongue unraveling from her mouth, whispering his name as she dissolved into graphite ash.
The page bent.
It was trying to make that happen in real time.
---
Ren closed his eyes.
And made his choice.
---
He walked through the spiral barrier.
Bleeding instantly—nose, ears, teeth.
The Spiral wasn't designed to let the subject touch its frame.
But Ren wasn't just a subject anymore.
He was source code.
And he reached into Kyo's sketchbook—ripping the page with the grave, the deaths, the sketches of Aika tied and torn—
Tearing the recursion.
---
The forest howled.
Every sketchbook burst into flames—no fire, just deletion.
The kids dropped their pencils.
The spiral patterns on the trees and dirt evaporated.
Kyo screamed—hands clamped over his head.
"You weren't supposed to tear it! That page was ME!"
Ren held what remained: an ashen spiral, crumbling.
"I don't care.
No more versions.
No more hosts."
---
Then—Kyo collapsed.
The Spiral Eye in his pupils snapped shut.
The forest calmed.
And for the first time in years…
Ren wasn't afraid of who he was.
---
Aika helped him stand.
She looked back at the kids—some crying, some staring, some blinking as if waking from years of fog.
Ren whispered, "Did I kill him?"
Aika shook her head.
"No. You un-imagined him."
---