The click of that Delete button sounded like a thunderclap inside the grey wasteland. Reyhan froze, his skin shimmering with a dying violet hue, his gaze locked on the flickering screen of the monitor. Inside the apartment, his apartment—the stranger sat motionless. The room hummed with the eerie stillness of an unrendered buffer. Through the pixelated window, the street was just a collection of unfinished textures. The stranger reached out again, his finger hovering over the mouse. He looked bored. He looked like someone clearing a desktop, not someone deleting a reality. "Don't," Reyhan hissed, the sound tearing out of his throat, raw and distorted. The man in the apartment stopped. Slowly, painfully, he turned his head, staring directly through the fourth wall—directly into Reyhan’s soul. A faint, knowing smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. He wasn't the extraction. He was the admin. The end-user. The ghost of a man

The feedback hit Reyhan like a collapsing star. It wasn't just pain, it was an existential dissolution. The shard of obsidian he’d pulled from the wreckage of the Guardian began to fuse with his skin, turning his blood into liquid lead and his nerves into frayed wire. Every beat of his heart sounded like a structural pillar snapping in an earthquake. He collapsed to the floor of the white-washed void, the "reality" he’d breached finally starting to solidify into something horrific. Across from him, the Extraction—the mirrored, soulless version of himself, stood trembling. But it wasn't the double who suffered the most. It was Reyhan. Aeros wasn't just lurking in the marrow anymore; the primordial entity was feeding on his physical density, tearing away the cells to construct a form that could exist outside the simulation's sandbox. "Price is a funny word for it," the double croaked, clutching his chest. His digital features