Akino found herself again inside that previous room with the same metallic stalls, lying on the ground, but now instead of grey boxes the stalls have baskets of fruits, vegetables, condiments, and packed bread. Akino looked around and noticed something on her peripheral vision.

CONSCIOUSNESS FORCIBLY PLACED IN VIRTUAL MATRIX ANTI NEURAL REPULSION SYSTEMS ACTIVATED FOUR CONSCIOUSNESS ENTITIES DETECTED INSIDE LOCAL VIRTUAL SPACE: HQC-31, HQC-32, HQC-101, ONE UNKNOWN CONSCIOUSNESS ENTITY UNKNOWN CONSCIOUNESS ENTITY DESIGNATED AS U-1 U-1 STATUS: UNKNOWN

Akino: I’m… we’re in the virtual matrix?

Akino stood up and tried to look for the others.

Akino: LYKA! ALEXA! CAMILLA! WHERE ARE YOU?!

She heard something from a far corner, another shout. She ran toward that place and found the three. She saw Camilla unconsciously lying on the ground, with her body already covered in cracks. Lyka was nervously and agitatedly casting a healing spell, but as the magic circle appears, it disintegrates. The only thing keeping Camilla ‘alive’ was the IV tube that Alexa provided using her blood.

Lyka: Aki! Help her out! I can’t cast a magic in here!

Akino: Try to calm dow-

Lyka: I CAN’T! Every time I cast a magic, something appears on my vision! It says something like ‘program is not compatible’?! What is that?!

Alexa: I tried doing the same thing we did with ma last time, but it isn’t working!

Akino: That’s because we were dragged inside this virtual space… this place isn’t even our virtual space, it’s someone’s or something’s… the three of us won’t feel anything since we’re already part of the quantum core system, but Camilla’s mind isn’t… dragging her in put her mind in a strained state. We have to get out of here to save her, that’s the only choice…

Lyka: But?

Akino: But only the three of us can get out of here… since we didn’t know how exactly we were dragged in here, we can’t figure out in what way we can place Camilla back…

Alexa: Then do the same thing to her!

Akino: You want me to turn her into a quantum computer? Like us?

Lyka: If that’s an option to save her, we should!

Akino pulls out a wire from her hair and connects it with Camilla’s forearm. A holographic screen appears, and text shows:

UNKNOWN CONSCIOUSNESS STREAM, U-1 DETECTED U-1 INTEGRATION WITH THE QUANTUM CORE SYSTEM, INITIATING INTEGRATION FAILED CAUSE OF FAILURE: NO SLOT FOR ADDITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS AVAILABLE, ALL CORES ARE ALREADY OCCUPIED

Alexa: WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN?!

Akino: I – I DON’T KNOW!

Lyka: We… we are the ones occupying the cores, right?

All of them looked down on Camilla, sadden on her uncertain fate. Camilla opens her eyes and tries to stand up.

Lyka: Camilla! You shouldn’t be… moving?

Camilla: What? What’s going on?

Alexa: Umm… what do you feel?

Camilla: I feel fine, thanks – WHAT HAPPENED TO MY SKIN?!

Akino: You – you feel fine?

Camilla: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY SKIN?! WHY IS IT FULL OF CRACKS?! ARE WE DEAD?!

Alexa: Calm down!

As they were arguing, Lyka noticed something moving. She stood up and looked around, seeing a metal sliding door. The door rattles, as if someone is trying to open it. Lyka immediately tell them what she saw, and they prepared.

Akino tried to fabricate some rifles and handed each one of them. Camilla nervously holds the rifle, so is Lyka who don’t know how to use it. They aimed at the door, waiting for it to open. It slides, and a man in a white lab coat appears.

Akino: MAKE ANOTHER STEP, AND YOU’LL BE FILLED WITH HOLES!

The man raises his arms and stops where he stands. Akino and Alexa slowly approaches the man in white lab coat and saw his ID: Eng. Emmanuel Suarez.

They looked at each other. The two girls seemed confused while the man is totally calm.

Emmanuel: Long time no see…

Akino snaps. She used the rifle’s heel to hit the engineer on his face, knocking him down. Alexa and Lyka tried to hold off Akino who’s about to bludgeon the face of the poor engineer with her fists.

Alexa: Aki! Calm the fuck down!

Lyka: Aki! What are you doing?!

Akino: This man… THIS MAN! YOU’VE GOT A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!

Emmanuel: I know… I know…

Emmanuel stands. He shook off his coat and opens wide the sliding door. The light outside that room enlightens Emmanuel’s skin, same as Camilla’s of having cracks.

Akino: What is this place?

Emmanuel: A virtual matrix, but from a pseudo-core.

Lyka: Pseudo-core?

Emmanuel: Kind of like in other facilities, only a bit ‘smaller’ but not that inferior.

Akino: What about the ‘real’ place?

Emmanuel: Oh… it’s – a bit complicated…

Akino steps towards Emmanuel, attempting to grab his collar but Lyka stops her.

Lyka: Aki, please… calm down… you’ve been telling me the same thing when I’m going overboard, right?

Akino: Sorry… its just… ARGH! YOU BETTER BE TELLING US THE TRUTH!

Emmanuel: I am… please, follow me.

The four girls went outside that room with the engineer. They saw small houses outside, made of cement and wood, like a small village. The residents are all… human with skins covered in cracks, same as the one with Emmanuel and Camilla.

Akino: Are they part of the system matrix? A memory of yours?

Emmanuel: No… they are real.

Alexa: Real? As in, true people? But where are the bodies? I mean…

Emmanuel: There was… but now…

Camilla: If these are the minds of ‘real’ people… then the heads we saw…

Emmanuel: That’s not them… but it was supposed to be them.

Akino: STOP WITH THE RIDDLES AND GET STRAIGHT TO THE POINT!

Emmanuel sighs. He gestures them to follow him further. On their way, the other people seemed to notice them, greeting them with a smile. The four girls were feeling some eerie aura coming from the people, but as soon some children (also having the same cracked skins) approach them… they felt a bit ‘relieved’. At least the place is not totally an illusion made by some machine.

The children happily tease Alexa, making her annoyed. Lyka watches them and giggles a bit. Camilla focuses herself on looking on a plant field, seeing the other people peacefully plant some crops.

Akino ignores them and chose to focus on Emmanuel, who took some wooden chairs from a small storage hut. Akino looked back to where they came from before after waking up, only seeing a small warehouse. She thought to herself: “a peaceful village, huh?”

Emmanuel sat down and offered Akino a chair, but she was reluctant and decided to stand in front of him.

Akino: You knew about the protocol shit, didn’t you?

Emmanuel: Yes, and… I am ashamed…

Akino: You should be, fucking coward…

Emmanuel: I wandered like a beggar outside the facility, seeing how the world changed… the time inside the facility-13 seemed to be slowed down by an anomaly, and all of us… seemed to be aging slower and slower…

Akino: Then the machines…

Emmanuel: The MC-00 took the personnel inside the facility as anomalies and terminated them.

Akino: And you left them to die?

Emmanuel: I… I had no other choice… fear already driven me to get out of the facility and find the others that might have the same mind as I am… but I failed… at least, in our world…

Akino: What do you mean?

Emmanuel looked at the horizon. During this time, Akino unconsciously takes a seat.

Emmanuel: As I wandered outside the facility, I saw another facility near the Alaskan territory, but it is specialized in portal technology… and to my surprise, it was recently used when I found it. It took me a long time to make it work, and when it starts working I tried to go back and tell everyone back in the facility-13 that we could make it out alive… but facility-13 warped, turned into huge sphere of void above the Manhattan area…

Akino: I… remembered it… the facility was on another place… a grass land of red glass of some sorts… kind of overwhelming when we first saw it…

Emmanuel: I know…

Akino: So…?

Emmanuel: Oh, right… well, as soon as I saw what happened, I moved on, and went to the portal, finding myself here… I tried to look for the presence of the Institution… and found this place…

As Emmanuel talks, the other three went near them and took their seats.

Emmanuel: This place… is a special bunker that incase something happens in our world, the Institution is ready to help our race to survive. They were calling this the ‘vault’, but I’m not sure its true schematics… when I got here, the corrupted MC-00 units dragged me and when I opened my eyes, I found myself in here…

Lyka: So, the heads we saw in the glass containers… what are those?

Emmanuel: This place reserves human life, it can procreate life in any way… but since the ‘protocol gamma’ has started… the systems of the vault slowly turned rogue… like the one you’ve seen in before you enter this virtual matrix.

Akino: Protocol gamma… what in the world is that? We’ve read the files, but it doesn’t make any sense…

Emmanuel: I’m not sure… it’s a way to maintain the stability of the place, that’s what I’m sure about it… but the way it suddenly activated after that radiation surge in Beijing…

Alexa: Aki, you’ve said the drones seemed to have no log information, right?

Emmanuel: About that, the protocol purposively corrupted the logs to ensure some sort of security.

Lyka: Security through secrecy… that doesn’t make sense…

Emmanuel: I know…

Camilla: Umm… can I ask something? Who are these people? I mean… if you’re from Earth, these folks are?

Emmanuel: Oh… after the ‘Enigma’ event, the facilities on the extra dimensions kept being operational, prepping for the possibility of transferring the remaining populace to habitable dimensions, ensuring our survival…

Akino: But the protocol gamma went up, and things got fucked up for no solid-fucking-reason…

Emmanuel: Yeah… these people were former personnel of the facilities here in Elyn… many of them came from the facility B-18… not survivor though… an event occurred in that facility, and most of them were supposed to be dead but here they are, living as part of this virtual space…

Camilla: D – dead?!

Alexa: Then, the heads… I mean the drones trying to plant stuff by using pieces of brain… I know it doesn’t make sense, but human brain cells naturally have neural stem cells… the drones are trying to ‘plant’ a brain?

Emmanuel: Yes. And once the brain is done, a part of the protocol to pull out the stranded consciousness in this virtual space back and kill them off will be initiated.

Akino: How come you know about this?

Emmanuel: They’ve tried to do it before…

Lyka: They’ve tried…?

The four looked confused. Emmanuel stands on his seat and went back to take something from the hut. A rifle, and the light of the sky in that virtual world made Akino to see more of the firearms inside the hut.

Emmanuel took a small bell and clanged it. The children and other women outside their houses went in, the men lined up near that hut, and one-by-one Emmanuel handed them each with rifles and guns.

As soon the giveaway of weapons finished, Emmanuel approached the four.

Emmanuel: If you don’t want to die… leave this place… I’m not sure how exactly you got in here, but I know a way out of this virtual matrix.

Akino: How? And what the hell is going on?

Emmanuel: You’ll see.

They heard a noise, apparently coming from afar and becomes louder and louder. They looked up at the sky and saw a hovership, carrying a group of fully armed men. The Emmanuel’s companions aim their weapons at the armed men. The hovership lands, and the armed men took their positions.

Emmanuel: Captain Halyo, this fight is endless… it won’t take us anywhere other than this place…

A man covered in high-class Kevlar armor steps out from the crowd of the armed men.

Halyo: Bypassing the system of the core… is a serious offense against the Institution.

Akino: The Institution is dead! A million years already passed and not even a single human soul is alive on Earth!

Alexa: So, we should put down our weapons and talk this through, please?

Halyo: Negotiation is out of the question. This core must be stabilized.

The enemy captain gestures his hands, signaling his men to ready. A loud boom was suddenly heard. The girls looked up to the sky, cracking like a glass.

Emmanuel: Wh – what are you doing?!

Halyo: If we can’t terminate all of you one by one, then terminating this whole virtual matrix will do.

A firefight started. Bullets hitting everywhere. They saw Emmanuel’s companions got torn from gunfire, as well as the opposing side. However, they reformed themselves, like dust assembling to make form. That’s why Emmanuel told to the enemy captain it is an ‘endless’ fight, all of the opposing forces gets killed and brought back to life to get killed again, but that will the last one as the whole virtual space starts to fall apart.

The Lyka and Camilla panics, and Alexa tried to calm them down. Akino leaves the two to Alexa, and dashes towards the fight to help Emmanuel, but he stops her.

Emmanuel: You should leave, now!

Akino: How are we going to leave like this?! We don’t even know how to get out of here! At least allow us to help!

Emmanuel quickly grabs one of the enemy soldiers by its head and he twists it until it decapitates.

Akino: YOU CAN FUCKING DO THAT?!

Emmanuel: You can access his memories, right?

Akino: Yeah, but why this thug?

Emmanuel: These thugs… are the machines you’ve fought outside.

Akino: How… you mean the MC-00 units?!

Akino connects her hair turned into wire onto the nape of the decapitated soldier. After a few seconds, she grabs the compass of the dead soldier.

Akino: You still owe us, mister engineer! You better get out of here alive!

Emmanuel: That is… an impossible request… but I’ll make sure to pay my debt to you.

Akino: Pay me by protecting the people of this place.

Emmanuel: Heh… protecting the already dead, huh?

Emmanuel saw Akino running away with her companions, heading back to the warehouse where he found them.

Emmanuel: Godspeed, young lady…

The four girls entered the warehouse, and Akino hurriedly closed the door. She pressed the compass against the wall beside the door, and black liquid oozes out of it. The whole place was covered, except themselves, and in a flash, they were transported to a never-ending white room, similar to the virtual space that manifests in their minds.

Alexa: We came back, didn’t we?

Lyka: Aki, what’s next?

Akino: I’ll ‘hook’ Camilla onto us as we leave this virtual space.

Camilla: Hook me? What do you mean?

A small control panel emerges from the ground. Akino asked Camilla to place her hand on the panel, and so Camilla did. The cracks on her skin started to fade during that process, and eventually her skin has returned to normal.

Camilla: MY SKIN WENT BACKTO NORMAL! I’M BACK TO NORMAL! I’M BACK, BITCHES!

Lyka: Language!

Camilla: Sorry.

Alexa: What did you do?

Akino: We just left the virtual matrix where Emmanuel was.

Alexa: So… this is your virtual space?

Akino: Not technically. The soldiers have some kind of a backdoor server, and this is their own matrix connected through the real world.

Alexa: Okay… that’s confusing, shouldn’t have asked…

Camilla: So… how do get back? Or wake up?

Akino: We’ll just have to wak –

Before Akino finishes her words, the ground where they stand cracks and opens. A sludge of black matter forming into tentacles emerges from the opening and tries to grab them. Akino manages to open a ‘portal’, where they immediately ran towards.

Their senses turned numb, but eventually they’ve regained it, seeing themselves being strangled by gelatinous wires of black material coming from the robotic one-eyed spider they’ve faced before going into the virtual matrix. Akino blasts it out with her arm cannon, making the others free on entanglement, and observed that the machine didn’t effort to resist nor to re-strangle them. Akino approaches the lifeless machine, and when she was about to connect to it, she noticed a ticking sound coming from it.

Akino: Don’t tell me it’s another bomb…

Akino connects to the core of the machine. Realizing back that the captain they saw in the virtual space said to destroy them all, they will destroy the whole matrix, which is the whole core.

Akino: Guys, we’ve got to go, now!

Alexa: Wait, that thing is another bomb?!

Lyka: But the machines are still outside this room, right?

Akino looked back at the ticking core, noticing that it starts to glow hot. She immediately rushes towards the three, turned her arms into metallic shields and expanded it into a spherical structure, covering all of them.

A deafening boom was heard, and a violent quake was felt, and it continued to occur many times in very short intervals. Lyka, Alexa and Camilla were frightened by the intense sound and ground shaking, but they couldn’t see what’s going on beyond the metallic plates Akino used to protect them, and they couldn’t see each other due to the darkness inside that metal sphere they reside in.

The noises and quakes stopped. All of them were silent, except for Akino who’s seemingly breathing hardly. Lyka used a magic spell to cast light, seeing everyone uninjured except Akino. Her eyes were wide open but ‘silent’ and stares only at the ground, she drools and coughs blood, and apparently unconscious. The metallic plates of the sphere retract back to her arm, she drops down face first revealing her back portion being ‘cut’ and ‘burnt’, making her cut-off brain, lungs and innards seen like a cross-section of an anatomy doll, but only from head to waist.

Unknown to the other three, Akino could hear them. She could hear Lyka’s sudden scream and loud crying. She could hear Camilla trying to cast a healing spell on her. She could hear Alexa nervously cussing and comforting Lyka by saying that they should get out of there and bring her up to the surface. She could hear all of that, but she couldn’t feel nor see, and she feels like she’s going to black out for the first time as a ‘human’ that never gets tired. Before she totally loses her consciousness, there’s one thing in her mind in that moment: what is going on?