I'm trapped. This isn't real, but it is. It's as if every part of me is being torn apart from within. The Neo-World… this cursed place… it's not just a game or a simulation. It's a trap. It's a prison.
Is there something beyond the darkness? I don't know. I don't know if I want to know. I'm lost in this loop. Sometimes I think I've always been. Maybe this is what I am. An echo. A draft of something unfinished. A ghost that doesn't yet know it's dead.
I see how desperate you are… I see it in your eyes. I feel it in every corner of this place. I want to save you, save all of them, but I don't know if I can. I don't know if I want to. I've tried to write the way out. To create an escape with my own hands, but the words don't stick. They melt in my mind. The ideas slip away before I can shape them. They twist. Monsters.
The monster is here. Inside me. Maybe it always has been. Maybe I'm part of this. Maybe this is what she always wanted. Maybe I'm one of her toys, programmed to lose myself in my own madness. A puppet pulling its own strings, thinking it's in control.
Laugh. He knows. He's always known. I see him in every shadow. He follows me. He gets into my thoughts.
How many times have I written this? How many times have I tried to change the story? I'm in a circle. A loop within another loop. And it's all getting tighter. Squeezing me more and more until there's nothing left. Until even my thoughts evaporate.
The words… fucking words. They make no sense. They move. They slip away. They're no longer mine. They never were. I see them twisting on the paper, as if they were creatures, as if they were alive. They've betrayed me. They betray me again and again. Were they even mine to begin with?
—... —... do you realize? I can't save you. I can't save anyone. I'm not a hero. I never was. I'm just a pawn, another fragment trapped in this rotten structure. And the only reason I keep moving is because if I stop, I drown in a binary darkness that devours me from within.
Can I tell you something? I'm not afraid of dying. But this death… this non-end… this is the true hell. An endless spiral. This is worse than anything I could have imagined. It's not death that I fear, but continuing to exist in this endless prison.
It's hell. I'm in hell, a place that should have never existed, but here I am… dead? I wish I were? No. I can't wish for that. There's too much at stake. But I'm so tired. I just want to sleep. To let go.
There's something out there. Something enormous. Something I don't understand. Something that's building on our bodies, our minds, our souls. It knows. She's playing a game we've already lost before even knowing we were in it. Maybe all of this was already written. Maybe all of this was predetermined.
Who am I to try to change it?
Kitahara Ryou.
I don't even know if that means anything. It's just another name on an endless list in the fatalities of this tragicomedy. I am no one. A world that slowly stops spinning.
But the world goes on, on, on, and on. I don't know why, but it does! Everything collapses around me, the words abandon me, reality warps and becomes something I don't recognize… but I keep going. Because if I stop, if I let this consume me, then I become part of it.
And I can't let that happen.
I don't know if I can save you, my muse. I don't know if I can save myself. But if this is the story I'm destined to write, then so be it. Even if my words become weapons, even if every line I write is another sword of Damocles over my head… I will keep writing. Because I don't know what else to do.
And if I drown… so be it.
At least I'll know it was me who did it.
And you, Enoshima? What will you have left after this? What will you have when despair has become so routine, so crushing, that you can't even recognize it as your victory?
Maybe, at that moment, you'll realize that I was always the story!
And that this ending is mine!