That night, Ruri couldn't sleep.She crept to Hikari's empty bed—neatly made, untouched. Under the pillow, her fingers found a small, metallic object.A data?chip.It was smaller than her thumbnail, metallic bck with a faint blue LED pulsing at one edge. Hikari must have hidden it there before the test—a contingency pn.Ruri turned it over in her palm. The surface was smooth, featureless except for a tiny serial number: ZERO?07.Zero. Subject Zero.Her breath caught. This was Hikari's legacy—a message, or a weapon, buried under a pillow in an empty bed.She pocketed it, her heart pounding. She'd need to find a way to read it. And she'd need to decide who, if anyone, to tell.Yuma, in his own room, reviewed the surveilnce footage of Hikari's fall.There was a glitch.At the exact moment she disappeared, the video skipped—0.1 seconds of missing footage. The timestamps didn't match.Edited. Tampered.Why?Komachi y awake, her perfect memory repying Hikari's final instant.The shape of her lips. The unspoken words.Lip?reading:"…Father… still alive…"Sakuya sat at his desk, analyzing the maze data.His scanner had picked up something else—a secondary signal, faint, encrypted.Not ARK's.Something… older.He decoded a fragment:"Protocol δ: team?cohesion stress test. Secondary objective: assess Subject Zero's loyalty. Tertiary objective: identify external interference."External interference?Who else was watching?

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