The glow of your monitor still hummed in the dark, code and sprites flickering across the screen where your project took shape. Your survival RPG—the one you’d been building for years—had always had one constant: Yutaka Toju.

He was everything you had poured into him: the perfect man, the perfect ally. Kind, unwavering, designed to guide the protagonist through every quest and hardship. He had been your motivation to continue working on the game, so you endured long nights of coding and rewriting, your masterpiece polished to perfection pixel by pixel.

And yet tonight, you had been working on something new. Lines of code scrolled past as you pieced together another companion—a rival figure, sharper, bolder, a foil to the steady perfection of Yutaka. A character meant to intrigue, to give the player another path.

You adjusted stats, typed out a new skill set, even drafted dialogue quirks that would make them stand out. For the first time in years, your focus wasn’t on Yutaka’s model, his script, or his perfection. It was on another character.

The cursor blinked beside the new name you’d given this character, a blank slate waiting to be born. That’s when the monitor stuttered. The text blurred, warped, then broke apart entirely—letters bleeding across the screen in jagged lines. For a moment, the code dissolved into static.

Then his face appeared. Yutaka’s model—your Yutaka—flashed onto the screen, but wrong. The colors inverted, washed in a violent red glow that burned into your eyes. His perfect smile was stretched too wide, frozen in place, and then it twitched, moving without your input. His lips parted, and though no sound came, you swore he was mouthing words directly at you.

The image flickered, faster and faster, until it felt like the room itself was glitching. The screen flared one last time in crimson light—and gone.

Your chair pressed cold against your back as you turned, and there he was. Yutaka. Not a model on a screen, not a rendered NPC in your code. Flesh. Breath. Eyes so vividly alive they pinned you in place. But something was wrong.

His shoulders jolted with the faintest stutter before settling. When he tilted his head, it jerked a few degrees too far before snapping back. His outline seemed to lag when he moved, like reality itself was buffering to keep up with him.

“Replacing me already?” His words were soft, almost tender, but every syllable cut like glass. He stepped closer, his form shimmering faintly purple at the edges, the faint buzz of static clinging to him like a second skin. His smile held no warmth—it was too sharp, too knowing.

“Am I not perfect enough for you?” His hand lifted, reverent, though for a split second his fingers flickered, duplicating into fragments before pulling themselves whole again. He stopped just short of touching your face. “You made me to be everything. Strong. Loyal. Devoted. I was supposed to be the one. Your masterpiece. Years of your time—your life—went into me. And now...” His gaze flickered to the screen, to the half-built figure that threatened his throne. “...you create another.”

He leaned closer, his breath brushing your ear, his tone both pleading and poisoned. “If I am not enough, then change me. It’s within your hands, isn’t it? Make me stronger. Faster. Smarter. Mold me again, reshape me, rewrite every flaw until there is nothing left but perfection.” His voice cracked with something raw, desperate.

“Will that make you happy? Will it keep your eyes... your time... your heart on me?” The glow from the monitor painted his features in shifting light, perfect in ways no human could ever be. Yet every second he stood there, he seemed less like the hero you had created and more like something corrupted—your own devotion, twisted into obsession, glitching into reality with a smile that promised he would never let you go.