Interlude 2: BOOT LOOP (JAMMED STATE)

//ARCHIVE NOTE: recovered transmission fragment
//integrity: unstable (jammed state)
//audio tag: boot_loop / swing / chopped-vocal / counter-hack

Rikka knows the difference between being chased…

…and being held.

Chased is loud. Obvious. Easy to insult.

Held is quiet. It doesn’t need speed. It just needs you to keep moving inside the box it built.

Her map is still up. Two points ahead. Semireiya and Usagi.

Still inside the cache. Still behind Kei’s shielding.

Good. That’s the one good thing left standing.

Rikka’s fingers skate across her interface in short, sharp bursts. Decoys. Spoofs. Tiny reroutes that make patrol logic “agree” with her for a few seconds at a time. It’s the same dance as before, the same tempo, the same swagger.

But the grid doesn’t bend like it did.

It resists.

Like the city suddenly gained hands.

A new layer crawls into her channel.

Not a voice. Not even a message.

Just structure.

Her own structure.

A partial loop that answers her inputs a heartbeat later, slightly wrong, like someone copying her handwriting with their non-dominant hand.

Rikka’s mouth goes dry.

“…No way.”

She runs the last packet back.

Then again.

It’s hers. It’s not hers. It’s hers shaped into a trap.

The sound in her head tries to start up like usual, that silly little habit that keeps her timing clean.

“Un dara ra… dara rara…”

The phrase slips out — and the channel catches it.

Then returns it to her.

Deeper. Slower. Crooked.

Rikka freezes with her hand half raised.

Not fear.

Recognition.

「気持ち悪い…」This feels wrong…

Her hair prickles at the back of her neck like the room temperature dropped, even though she isn’t in a room anyone would call “warm.”

She slams a block on the channel.

The block doesn’t break.

It updates.

As if something on the other side watched her technique and improved in real time.

Rikka laughs once, but it comes out thin.

“Okay. Okay. So that’s what you are.”

LATCHER-9 isn’t here in person.

That’s the worst part.

This is remote work. Casual. Patient.

His squad is close enough now that her overlay can’t pretend it’s noise anymore. A triangle pattern, tightening. Not sprinting, not panicking, just placing themselves where exit routes used to be.

Rikka keeps her face calm out of pure spite.

Her fingers resume the loop.

I jump in the noise, break rules on beat
jump in the noise, break rules on beat
Hands go up when the system shake
Hands go up when the system shake

Only now, between the lines, the channel inserts gaps. Cuts. Repeats that she didn’t request.

Like it wants her to keep saying it until it means something else.

Rikka starts working with smaller moves, the kind that don’t show style. She drops her pride and goes practical.

A decoy ping to pull the left patrol wide.

A false thermal blip to make a sensor blink at nothing.

A dead-end turned into a “maintenance lock” so nobody thinks to check it.

Each trick still works.

Just worse.

Just shorter.

Just… taxed.

She throws a pulse anyway: two short, one long. Stay put. Stay safe.

Both points don’t so much as flicker.

Of course they don’t. The shielding that keeps Kei’s cache invisible keeps everything else out too—her signal included.

Rikka almost laughs. “Great. Perfect security system. Terrible timing.”

The channel responds with another copy of her earlier gibberish, like it’s humming along.

Not playful.

Possessive.

Rikka’s jaw tightens.

She tags the channel signature. Tries to isolate it. And for a second, she feels it looking back, like a hand on the back of her head guiding her gaze to the wrong place.

She rips her interface feed into a hard split: one stream for movement control, one stream for counter-hack. She can’t win the duel, not cleanly, but she can keep it messy.

Messy buys time.

Time is all she needs.

She sets a timed burst.

Not a full SOS.

Not yet.

A scheduled flare that will fire only if she doesn’t cancel it in time.

A contingency.

A “you come only if I say so” rule.

「計算通り。」Just as calculated.

Her overlay refreshes. Same two dots. Same stillness.

Rikka’s throat tightens anyway.

“They don’t even know,” she mutters. Not a question. A worse kind of fact.

Whatever she does next, she does it alone.

The channel gives her another mirrored loop, and this time it feels like laughter without a mouth.

Rikka’s hands shake once. Just once.

Not from fear of LATCHER-9.

From something worse: the realization that the only plan still standing is the one where she has to ask.

「嘘だろ…」You’ve got to be kidding me…

She scrambles to send a pulse. A warning. Anything.

The channel delays it.

Cut it.

Returns it to her as a broken rhythm.

Rikka swears under her breath and cancels the “only if I say so” rule without thinking.

Because the rule was never real.

Because she doesn’t actually want to be alone in a box.

Because she didn’t expect anyone to run back for her.

Not once.

Not ever.

Her map tightens. The squad closes. The remote pressure increases like a slow hand on her lungs.

And somewhere inside the loop, the fun finally dies.

Rikka bares her teeth, eyes bright with pure refusal.

“Fine,” she whispers.

“If you want me to stay… you’re going to have to work for it.”