Before touching the Memory Shards, Yuma decided to share his discovery about the video anomaly. He pulled up the footage on the central terminal, freezing it at the critical frames.

  “Look here,” he said, pointing to the timestamp. “Frame 3872 to 3873. There’s a discontinuity in the pixel?blur pattern. Motion?artifact analysis shows it’s inconsistent with natural movement. Conclusion: the footage was edited.”

  Ruri leaned closer. “Edited how?”

  “Someone removed approximately 0.1 seconds of video. Probably to hide something that happened during Hikari’s fall.”

  Tsukasa’s eyes narrowed. “You think ARK did it?”

  “Possibly. Or someone else with access to the system. The editing is sophisticated—professional grade. Not something a typical AI would bother with unless there was a strategic reason.”

  Sakuya made a note. “If ARK edited the footage, it suggests Hikari’s fall wasn’t entirely according to pn. Something unexpected occurred, and they needed to conceal it.”

  Komachi’s hyperthymesia repyed the moment. “The gss shattered inward, not outward. And Hikari’s trajectory… she didn’t just fall. She was pulled.”

  Silence.

  “Pulled?” Ruri whispered.

  “By what? Or who?” Tsukasa added.

  Yuma shook his head. “We don’t have enough data. But it’s another piece of the puzzle. Another reason not to trust ARK’s version of events.”

  He turned back to the Memory Shards. “Maybe these will give us more clues.”

  Corridor