Error 0
Shinji stumbled through the ruins of Tokyo, his Shinobi Combat Gear hanging in tatters, his cybernetic limbs spitting sparks. The sky bled pixelated crimson, the air thick with the stench of ozone and rotting meat. Around him, the city was a graveyard of glitching horrors—halfdigested corpses frozen in midscream, buildings warped into impossible geometries, and the distant shrieks of Fallen Angels—winged abominations with too many eyes, tearing survivors apart in the streets.
[HP: 39%]
[STATUS: LEFT ARM PROSTHETIC 12% FUNCTIONALITY]
[RIGHT LEG PROSTHETIC CRITICAL FAILURE IMMINENT]
A shadow loomed.
The ground trembled as something approached—a titanic figure clad in blackened steel, its body crackling with arcs of blue electricity. Five massive floating rings orbited it, each humming with lethal energy.
[WARNING: HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED]
[DESIGNATION: "FIVE RINGS JUDGE" LVL ???]
[THREAT LEVEL: EXTINCTION]
The giant's voice boomed like thunder:
"ERROR 2250 VERDICT: TERMINATION."
THE BATTLE OF RUINED TOKYO
First Exchange:
The Judge's rings detached, shooting forward like guided missiles. Shinji barely rolled aside as one pulverized a collapsed highway pillar behind him. The second ring came from above—he parried with his katana, the shockwave sending him skidding back.
[HP: 34%]
Second Exchange:
Shinji lunged, aiming for the Judge's exposed wiring at the knees—but the third ring intercepted, slamming into his ribs. He felt bones splinter as he crashed through a burntout storefront.
[HP: 27%]
[STATUS: 3 RIBS FRACTURED]
The Revelation:
The rings couldn't cut—but they hit like freight trains and conducted electricity. Every impact sent surges of pain through his prosthetics.
Shinji (coughing blood): "Tch… no blades, huh?"
Third Exchange:
He let the fourth ring hit him.
The electricity overloaded his right arm prosthetic, the limb exploding in a shower of sparks—but the backlash fried the ring's circuits. It clattered to the ground, inert.
[LEFT ARM PROSTHETIC DESTROYED]
[FIVE RINGS JUDGE 1/5 RINGS DISABLED]
Fourth Exchange:
Now Shinji understood. He baited the next ring into striking his leg prosthetic, detonating it to kill another.
[RIGHT LEG PROSTHETIC DESTROYED]
[FIVE RINGS JUDGE 2/5 RINGS DISABLED]
The Judge roared, the remaining rings spinning wildly.
THE KILLING BLOW
Shinji was crippled, dragging himself across rubble with one working arm. The Judge loomed over him, raising a ring for the final smash—
Shinji smirked.
He stabbed his katana into a downed power line, sending a surge of electricity into the Judge's own rings.
CHAIN REACTION.
The rings overloaded, detonating in sequence. The Judge staggered, its armor melting from the inside as Shinji's final prosthetic (his spine reinforcement) exploded, sending him flying into a collapsed skyscraper.
[HP: 8%]
[FIVE RINGS JUDGE TERMINATED]
THE FINAL RIFT
Shinji lay broken in the wreckage, his body a mess of blood and exposed wiring. He couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.
Then—a shadow moved.
A Red Glitched Warrior, unlike the others—its body sleek, its eyes knowing. It crouched over him, tilting its head.
Red Warrior: "You… are not supposed to be here."
Before Shinji could react, it grabbed him—and the world ripped apart again.
THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD
Shinji tumbled through a void of screaming faces and inverted colors, before crashing onto a surface that wasn't ground, wasn't floor—but something alive.
He looked up.
A city of flesh and machine, pulsing like a heartbeat. Towers of bone and chrome stretched into a sky that wasn't sky but a gigantic human iris, staring down at him.
[LOCATION UNKNOWN]
[DIMENSION UNKNOWN]
[WARNING: REALITY INTEGRITY FAILING]
A voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere:
"Welcome… to the Core."
Shinji's railgun blast tore through the Core's throne in a storm of screaming light. The explosion sent shockwaves through the fleshcity, toppling bone towers and rupturing the skyiris above. Black blood rained down as the massive figure on the throne shattered like glass—
—only to reform instantly, its laughter echoing through six hundred thousand dimensions at once.
"Foolish child."
The Core's voice came from everywhere—from the air, from the ground, from inside Shinji's own skull. The ruins around them glitched, revealing infinite variations of the same throne room across countless rifts. In some, the Core wore a crown of fire. In others, it was a machinegod wrapped in human skin.
"I am ERROR 2250. I am the collapse of reality. And you..."
The Core's form solidified before him, now towering fifty feet tall, its body a mosaic of every victim it had ever consumed.
"...have only killed me in one world."
THE ASCENSION
Shinji's TechBlade Yaminari vibrated in his grip, its hoverboard mode activating instinctively as the ground beneath him dissolved into a black hole of screaming data. He shot upward just as the Core's true army emerged—
—millions of Glitched Warriors, each stronger than the last, pouring from every rift. Their power levels climbed exponentially with each dimension they crossed.
[WARNING: CORE FRAGMENTS DETECTED IN 600,000+ REALITIES]
[ENEMY STRENGTH INCREASING: 900% PER DIMENSIONAL LAYER]
Shinji barely dodged a spear of crystallized blood thrown by a winged warrior with four faces. His counterattack—a railgun blast—only vaporized a hundred before ten thousand more took their place.
Shinji (snarling): "Tch. Fine."
He slammed Yaminari into its hoverboard form and raced through the collapsing city, the Core's laughter chasing him through fractal corridors of dying worlds.
THE TRAINING NEVER ENDS
A rift swallowed him whole, spitting him out into—
—a dojo.
But not the one he knew. This one floated in a void of static, its wooden floors stained with blood that never dried. Fox Mask waited at its center, his mask now fused with his face, his sword crackling with the same energy as the rifts.
Fox Mask: "You're still weak."
Shinji didn't hesitate. He attacked.
For three subjective years (or was it three seconds?), they fought across the endless dojo. Each time Shinji died, the rift spat him back out—stronger, faster, more ruthless. His body mutated further:
His bones reforged into hyperdense alloy
His nervous system rewired for combat precognition
His TechBlade evolving into Ōkami, a living weapon that fed on dimensional tears
When he finally landed the killing blow, Fox Mask's corpse dissolved into a single glowing Core Fragment.
[CORE FRAGMENT 1/600,000 DESTROYED]
[POWER INCREASE: 0.00016%]
Shinji crushed it in his fist.
"Only 599,999 to go."
THE OMEGA WARRIOR
The battles blurred together:
1. The Blood Colosseum Where he fought a thousand versions of himself to claim their power
2. The Neon Abyss A cyberhell where each kill made him forget a memory (he forgot his friends' faces by the 10,000th kill)
3. The Throne of Screams Where he dueled a Robert Prime, a perfect fusion of all Roberts across dimensions
With each fragment destroyed, his TechBlade Ōkami grew more monstrous—now capable of:
Firing black hole rounds
Generating realitycutting slashes
Deploying nanite swarms that ate dimensions whole
But the Core grew stronger too.
Its final form awaited in the Omega Rift—a throne room built from the corpses of every being Shinji had ever killed.
THE LAST BATTLE
Core Prime sat waiting, its body now a perfect mirror of Shinji's own—except where Shinji had scars, it had smiling mouths.
Core Prime: "You can't win. I'll just rebuild."
Shinji raised Ōkami, its blade singing with the power of 599,999 dead realities.
Shinji: "Then I'll kill you forever."
The final clash:
Their swords meeting with a supernova's fury
Each strike collapsing a dimension
Shinji's body breaking and reforming midswing
In the end, it came down to one move.
Shinji let himself be impaled—then used Ōkami's final evolution:
"[INFINITY SLASH]."
The blade cut through all dimensions at once.
For a single, perfect moment—
—every Core screamed as one—
—and then ceased to exist.
THE PRICE
Shinji stood alone in the void.
His body was now more machine than man, his mind filled with 600,000 lifetimes of war. The rifts were closing. Reality was healing.
And then—
A single notification:
[WARNING: CORE SIGNATURE DETECTED LOCATION: WITHIN USER]
Shinji looked down at his chest—where the Core's last fragment had always been.
His hand gripped Ōkami.
The blade glowed.
The moment Shinji plunged Ōkami into his own chest, the universe screamed.
Light erupted—not outward, but inward—collapsing into a singularity within his ribcage. His body shattered like glass, each fragment multiplying endlessly across three million newborn dimensions. In every reality, a different Shinji emerged:
A warlord drowning in the blood of conquered worlds
A weeping child cradling the ghosts of his friends
A hollow machine still swinging his sword at longdead enemies
And at the center of it all—
—her.
A shimmering wisp of silver and pale blue light coalescing into human form. The last uncorrupted fragment of Shinji's soul, given independent life by the Core's death throes. She opened eyes the color of a glitching sunset and spoke her first word with Shinji's voice, but none of his rage:
"Aiko."
[WARNING: CORE ESSENCE DETECTED IN NEW ENTITY]
[DESIGNATION: "AIKO" ERROR 0 PROTOCOL]
THE THREE MILLION WAR
Aiko raised a hand—and every dimension froze.
The warlord's blade halted middecapitation
The child's tears hung suspended in air
The machine's sword vibrated against an unyielding force
Aiko (whispering): "This isn't your fate."
With a gesture, she merged the three million Shinjis back into one—not the bloodsoaked conqueror, not the broken hero, but the boy who'd first picked up a sword to protect others.
The reborn Shinji collapsed to his knees, his body finally human again, his scars glowing faintly with Aiko's light.
Shinji (gasping): "Why... save me...?"
Aiko knelt before him, her fingers brushing the Ōkami now embedded in his chest—the last anchor tethering him to existence.
Aiko: "Because the Core was wrong. Reality isn't chains to break..."
She pressed her forehead to his, their shared memories flashing between them—every laugh with Kaito, every eyeroll from Airi, every drop of blood spilled for nothing.
Aiko: "...it's people to come home to."
Then she pulled the sword free—and with it, the last of ERROR 2250.
THE LAST WORLD
Shinji woke to the smell of ramen and rain.
Tokyo stretched out before him—whole, unglitched, alive. No rifts. No corpses. No hovering UI warnings. Just the neon glow of Akihabara and the weight of a familiar katana strapped to his back.
And sitting across from him at the tiny ramen stall—
Kaito (mouth full): "Dude, you gonna eat or just stare at me?"
Airi (stealing Kaito's dumpling): "He's probably still salty I beat his ass in MechaStrike last night."
Shinji's hands trembled around his chopsticks.
Then—a whisper only he could hear:
Aiko: "Go on. They've been waiting."
When he turned, he caught just a glimpse of silverblue light vanishing into the crowd—and the faintest echo of a sword's song.
[ERROR 2250: TERMINATED]
[FINAL NOTIFICATION: LIVE WELL, SHINJI]
The ramen tasted better than he remembered.
[PROLOGUE END]
25/4/24
Note:Thanks for reading this short novel of mine but I might have future plans for it
-Ax