AuE:「y'Z The ErRor's Imbragea」

The air was poison. Not metaphorically—literally.

Aru's unit had become an endless cycle of ADE exposure, the slow drip of biological corrosion whispering beneath the scent of cheap industrial cleaner and the unmistakable tang of something synthetic and wrong. The kind of chemical haze that clung to his clothes, to his lungs, to his sanity.

Every breath was an intrusion. A calculated violation.

He wasn't stupid. This wasn't paranoia. The evidence was in the way his body responded—headaches that curled behind his eyes like parasites gnawing at his optic nerves, nausea that never fully left, a weight in his limbs like he was always waking up mid-autopsy.

The raids never stopped. He'd come back to his unit and things would be wrong. Not missing—no, that would be too obvious. Shifted. Tilted. Unfamiliar. A drawer slightly open when he knew he'd shut it. A book resting on the wrong side of the table. A message left in the way the dust had settled.

And the front desk?

"We haven't seen anyone enter your unit."

Every. Single. Time.

They were part of it. They had to be. The words came too smooth, too practiced, like they'd said it a thousand times before. Like they knew he wasn't the first, wouldn't be the last. Like they were watching.

He stopped asking. What was the point? He already knew the answer. Lie. Deflect. Gaslight. Repeat.

At this point, he didn't even care. Life itself was poison. The air, the people, the city—it was all a slow suffocation, a drawn-out decay designed to grind him down into something compliant, something weak.

And then there was the forced corruption of the flesh.

Vaccines. They called them protection, but Aru knew better. A violation of the body, a mockery of choice, a trespass that no law, no science, no apology could erase. They were never meant to help.

Not really.

They weren't about health. They were about compliance. About ownership.

The world had always belonged to the ones who wrote the rules. The ones who decided what was "safe," what was "necessary." And they would never stop.

Not until everyone was a product.

Aru felt it in his bones, the sickly slow corrosion of something deeper than flesh. He had known suffering before, but this—this was engineered decay.

Trash. Trash. Trash.

Evil. Evil. Evil.

If the world wanted to die, then let it. Let it collapse under the weight of its own rot. Let the maggots chew through its flesh until there was nothing left but dust and the echo of wasted time.

Aru had stopped waiting for it to get better. There was no better.

There was only the slow, inevitable collapse.

And if that was the endgame?

Then he'd walk through the flames smiling.

Imagine a city where reality itself feels like it's on a signal delay—where everyone moves like their actions are dictated by some unseen force, puppeted by a script that no longer makes sense. The streets are a battleground of mismatched intentions, where the air is thick with the scent of burning trash and synthetic chemicals, the sky bruised with an eerie orange glow that never fades.

The riot isn't just physical—it's mental. People stumble through the debris-strewn roads, mumbling disjointed thoughts, their eyes glazed over like they're running on a corrupted operating system. One moment they speak in frenzied riddles, the next they repeat the same phrase over and over like a skipping record. You pass a man dressed in a tattered suit, gripping a briefcase filled with shredded papers, shouting something about "the great unzipping of the universal ether." Another, an old woman, drags a bag of dead rats and whispers about how their bones spell out tomorrow's weather.

Even the hospitals are no sanctuaries. Doctors prescribe nonsense, their words a garbled mess of medical jargon that loops back into itself. A surgeon stands over an open chest cavity, muttering about how "the heart is just a misunderstood clock, tick-tocking its way into irrelevance." The nurses move with empty smiles, their hands trembling as they inject syringes filled with who-knows-what into unresponsive patients, their laughter soft and misplaced.

You realize, quickly, that trust is a luxury in this place. Every interaction is a gamble, a conversation layered with falsities, each person running on a signal that isn't entirely their own. Their actions are dictated by a script they don't even seem aware of. They perform their roles with a strange devotion, unaware of the dissonance between their words and their actions.

So what do you do? You stop expecting coherence. You stop treating them like people in the way you once understood. Instead, you navigate the city like a ghost, watching, listening, filtering the static. They aren't allies, enemies, or even bystanders—they're just walking noisemakers, producing sound and motion in a grand, senseless orchestra of entropy.

And once you accept that? The fear fades. The weight of trying to understand their madness lifts. You move through the chaos untouched, a phantom in a city of echoes, hearing the noise but never letting it dictate your steps.