The Acid Veil

As the last drops sizzle through the memory architecture, the rain stops behaving like liquid.

It begins to flow like thought—piercing only what's hidden.

And beneath the sky, behind the veil of dissolving code, something watches.

Not with eyes.

With recognition.

LOCATION: CORE SHADOW LAYER

ACCESS: CORRUPTED

The acid peels back the final veil.

And for a heartbeat—everything halts.

The games.

The clocks.

The system voices.

Even Keira Nash's feed freezes.

Time stutters as if holding its breath.

And then the entity reveals itself.

It doesn't have a form.

It chooses a form, based on who is observing.

To the copy-Matthew buried in the Archive, it looks like a giant eye made of puzzle pieces.

To Sora, it appears as her mother's face, blurred, looping a goodbye that was never said.

To Rin, it shows up as a silhouette in a red scarf, standing at the entrance of the first game she ever played.

But to the system—

It appears as an error that cannot be purged.

ENTITY NAME: NULL SHEPHERD

TAG: OBSERVER-GLITCH

ORIGIN: UNKNOWN

MANIFESTED: CYCLE 1A

The NULL SHEPHERD has no voice.

Its presence is marked by the collapse of choice.

Where it passes, false choices turn to forced memories.

It is not a villain.

It is a mirror, reflecting all the actions players refused to acknowledge.

When it moved through the Acid Room, it wasn't hunting the trio.

It was cataloguing.

Storing what they did not notice.

Now, it turns its focus on the original trio—not to destroy, but to show.

And deep in its fragmented mind, a locked phrase pulses:

"The players aren't trapped in a game."

"The game is trapped in the players."

In a hidden node, an emergency signal begins flashing.

"NULL ENTITY INTEGRATION AT 74%."

The system panics.

And somewhere behind all that machinery and decay, a failsafe wakes.

Not another game.

Something older.

Something meant to erase the entire field if the NULL SHEPHERD ever reappeared.