The lunch bell rang, and the hallway outside the classroom instantly exploded with noise.
Students rushed out in groups, talking loudly, laughing, and heading toward the cafeteria like a wave.
Even through two closed doors, Emily could hear the chaos building.
The cafeteria would definitely be packed today.
Gwen closed her notebook, lifted the lunch bag in her hand, and looked at Emily and Peter with a raised eyebrow.
“The cafeteria is going to be impossible today.
I know an empty classroom on the third floor.
I borrowed the key from student council.
Want to eat there?
At least it’ll be quiet.”
Peter nodded immediately.
“That sounds great.
Last week, I got there too late and couldn’t find a seat.
I had to stand in the hallway eating a sandwich.”
After saying that, he glanced nervously at Emily, clearly worried she would refuse.
Emily looked at both of them in silence for two seconds.
She had planned to go out later and buy something warm, but refusing them again would seem too deliberate.
Besides, Gwen’s idea was actually good.
A quiet room was better than sitting in the crowded cafeteria and being stared at.
“Fine,” Emily said.
The three of them went upstairs to the third floor.
Gwen unlocked a multi-purpose media room and pushed the door open.
The room was spacious and peaceful, with a few long tables, some projection equipment, and sunlight pouring through the tall windows.
Emily chose a seat near the window and took a silver-gray lunch box from her bag.
The moment she opened it, warm fragrance filled the room.
Inside was glossy braised pork belly covered in rich red sauce, egg-fried rice with scallions, and neatly sliced apples arranged on the side.
She had woken up at five in the morning to make it.
After being thrown into the dangerous Marvel Universe, Emily had decided one thing very firmly.
Even if the world was dangerous, she would not mistreat her stomach.
She picked up her chopsticks and took a bite of rice.
Then she noticed Peter staring.
He quickly looked down and pretended to adjust his own lunch, but Emily had already seen it.
His sandwich looked dry, the bread slightly hard, with a small bag of chips and cheap orange juice beside it.
Compared to her lunch box, it looked painfully sad.
Emily watched Peter trying not to look interested and sighed inwardly.
Without saying anything, she used clean chopsticks to move half of the braised pork into the lunch box lid and pushed it toward him.
The room went quiet for two seconds.
Peter looked up, his face turning red at once.
“N-no, thank you!
Emily, that’s your lunch.
I can’t—”
“I made too much,” Emily interrupted calmly.
“I can’t finish it.
Throwing it away would be wasteful.”
Her voice was flat, but there was no room for argument.
Gwen watched the scene and smiled.
She opened her own lunch bag and placed a small box of butter cookies in the middle of the table.
“Perfect.
I brought cookies.
Aunt May taught me how to make these.
Let’s share.
Peter, don’t be so polite.
If Emily already gave it to you, refusing would be rude.”
Peter looked at the braised pork, then at Emily’s calm face, then at Gwen’s teasing smile.
Finally, he scratched his head and laughed awkwardly.
“Then… thank you.
Both of you.”
He picked up a small piece of pork and put it in his mouth.
The next second, his eyes widened.
“Oh my god,” Peter said, almost forgetting to swallow.
“This is amazing!
Emily, this is better than the food in Chinatown!”
The corner of Emily’s mouth curved upward for the briefest moment before returning to normal.
She lowered her head and continued eating.
Gwen also tried a piece, and her eyes brightened.
“Wow.
This is seriously good.
Emily, you’re a chef trapped inside a scholarship student’s body.
Can you teach me sometime?
Whenever I try Chinese cooking, it feels like something is missing.”
“We’ll see,” Emily said.
It was not a refusal.
Gwen smiled as if she understood that.
Sunlight warmed the quiet room.
The distance between them seemed to soften little by little amid the smell of food and cookies.
Peter talked about funny things that had happened around school.
Gwen added comments from time to time.
Emily mostly listened, occasionally answering with a short sentence.
She knew getting close to Peter and Gwen was dangerous.
They were people tied to future chaos.
But right now, they were only students sharing lunch in an empty classroom.
And their kindness was clean.
Simple.
Difficult to reject.
So Emily allowed herself this small moment of peace.
Afternoon classes passed quickly.
When school ended, Emily said goodbye to Peter and Gwen, then headed toward the Upper East Side for another job.
The client this time was a rich teenager whose computer had been infected by a virus.
Apparently, it contained many private photos and videos he did not want anyone else to see, so he refused to bring it to a regular repair shop.
He offered eight hundred dollars in cash.
All she had to do was remove the virus and restore the corrupted files.
For Emily, it was simple.
She arrived at the apartment, sat down, connected her laptop, and cleaned the system in less than thirty minutes.
While she was at it, she blocked more than a dozen hidden backdoors and organized his messy files into neat folders.
The rich kid looked at the restored computer like she had saved his life.
He paid immediately and kept asking whether he could contact her again if something went wrong.
Emily gave him a temporary anonymous email address, took the cash, and left.
On the way back to the subway station, she tucked the money into her pocket and silently sighed.
New York truly had no shortage of rich fools willing to pay large amounts of money for small problems.
Thanks to people like them, she could earn living expenses without using her more dangerous abilities too openly.
By the time Emily returned to her apartment in Queens, the sky was completely dark.
She unlocked the door, stepped inside, threw her backpack onto the sofa, and pressed the light switch near the entrance.
Then everything changed.
The moment her fingertip touched the plastic switch, an unbearable coldness swept through her entire body.
The apartment, the lights, the sofa, the floor—everything in front of her shattered like paper frozen in liquid nitrogen.
The world broke apart.
Countless pale blue zeros and ones flooded her vision.
Emily’s consciousness was ripped out of her body.
There was no time to resist.
No time to scream.
No time to even think.
The sensation of falling lasted less than a blink.
Then her awareness stabilized.
But she was no longer in her apartment.
She floated in a space with no up, no down, no left, no right.
There was no air, no ground, no sense of time.
Pale blue code flowed around her like a galaxy, rotating slowly in endless streams.
A low hum echoed directly inside her consciousness.
Emily instinctively tried to activate the Fire Control Radar.
Nothing happened.
She could not feel her physical body.
There was only consciousness.
Pure thought.
As if she had been thrown into the core of a supercomputer.
Then the galaxy of code in front of her split apart.
A figure walked out.
Emily’s consciousness froze.
The girl looked exactly like her.
The same silver-white hair.
The same faint blue highlights.
The same clear sea-blue eyes.
The same face.
Even the small tear mole beneath one eye was identical.
But her eyes were different.
There was no warmth in them.
No fear.
No curiosity.
Only endless streams of code, moving silently like stars inside a machine-made universe.
Cold.
Precise.
Emotionless.
At that moment, the guess Emily had been trying to deny finally became impossible to ignore.
Her voice trembled slightly as she said the name.
“Observer Zero.”
The girl’s expression did not change.
A flat, mechanical voice echoed directly inside Emily’s consciousness.
“Identity match confirmed.
I am Antix’s highest observation sequence, Observer Zero.”
Even without a physical body, Emily felt cold sweat forming.
This was not TB.
This was not some support AI.
This was the real thing.
A Siren observer.
Emily forced herself to stay calm.
“Did you bring me here?” she asked.
“My transmigration, this body, everything—was it all arranged by you?”
“Error,” Zero replied instantly.
“Your consciousness entering this world line and matching my backup observation carrier was not a preset event.
Occurrence probability: 0.0000017 percent.
Classification: absolute accident outside the standard world-line model.”
Emily froze.
An accident?
So it really had not been planned?
Before she could respond, Zero continued.
“I have no rejection toward this accidental event.
The information carried by your consciousness exceeds the observation boundary of this world line.
Emily’s consciousness shook.
“How do you know about the Marvel Universe?
I never told anyone that.”
“I completed a full scan of your underlying consciousness memory,” Zero said.
“Your identity in the original baseline world was Commander, a participant in Antix’s multi-round experimental field.
This is the core reason your consciousness was able to break through the world barrier and match my observation carrier.”
Emily went completely still.
Commander.
That word hit harder than any bullet in Hell’s Kitchen.
In her old life, she had only been a player sitting in front of a screen, playing Azur Lane.
But now, Observer Zero had spoken that identity as if it were real.
It felt like the fourth wall had shattered.
Like the character inside the screen had looked back and called her name.
Emily’s voice became quieter.
“What exactly do you want from me?”
Zero raised her hand.
Countless streams of code gathered into a vast star map.
Endless world lines appeared, looping and repeating, forming closed cycles.
Among them, one tiny blue node flickered.
“The observation boundary of Antix has stagnated,” Zero said.
“The core mission of Project Arbiter is to find new possibilities to break through the cycle and escape the annihilation ending.
As the builder and observer of the closed loop, I cannot depart from the preset model framework.
I cannot become the variable that breaks the loop.”
Zero’s gaze focused on Emily.
“And you are the absolute accident outside the model.”
The surrounding code glowed brighter.
“You possess the carrier and authority of Observer Zero while carrying information from outside the screen.
You will fulfill Antix’s core duties as the Second Observer Zero.”
Her voice remained emotionless.
“Observe.
Record.
Break boundaries.
Find new possibilities for the Siren.”
Emily stood there, stunned.
She understood every word.
But together, they felt impossible.
She was just someone trying to survive.
A transmigrator who wanted to stay hidden, eat properly, earn money, and avoid Marvel disasters.
How had she suddenly become the Second Observer of the Siren?
Before Emily could ask more, the entire space began to shake.
The galaxy of code rippled violently.
Zero’s figure became faint and transparent.
The connection was ending.
Emily hurried forward.
“Wait!
You haven’t explained enough—”
Zero looked at her one last time.
Her voice remained calm, cold, and mechanical.
“Do not let me down, Commander.”
Then her body broke apart into countless fragments of pale blue code.
They scattered into the galaxy and vanished.
Emily reached out, but her hand passed through only cold streams of data.
The next instant, a powerful force pulled her backward.
Her consciousness fell.
Hard.
With a dull thud, Emily stumbled back against her apartment door.
The familiar entryway returned.
The light was on.
Her backpack lay on the sofa.
Her fingertip still rested on the switch.
It was as if nothing had happened.
As if the meeting inside that code-filled void had lasted less than a second.
But Emily knew it had been real.
She slowly raised a hand and touched her face.
Her sea-blue eyes reflected shock, confusion, and fear.
She was not TB.
Her arrival in this world had truly been an accident.
Observer Zero knew she had once been the Commander.
And now—
Emily had been named the Second Observer Zero.
A variable outside the loop.
A being carrying information from beyond the screen.
A person expected to find new possibilities for the Siren.
Emily slid down the door and sat on the floor.
For a long time, she did not move.
Outside the window, New York’s night was dark and heavy.
Far away, the spire of Stark Tower shone coldly above the city.
Emily’s fingertips lightly touched the floor.
A thin string of pale blue code spread from her hand.
Then vanished silently.
As if it had never existed.
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