But Junya had one move. A DLC item he’d ignored: It cost all his HP. He used it.

The game launched, but the familiar velvet room intro glitched. Igor’s long nose stretched into a pixelated spiral. “Welcome… to the Gnarly Repack,” the text read, then crashed.

The cracked vinyl skull on Junya’s screen grinned as the download bar hit 100%. read the folder name, a gift from a shadowy forum user named “Phantom_Seed.”

The Hungry Coat opened its chest-mouth and sucked the data out of a frozen Ann, reducing her to a single .txt file that read: “I beat the Reaper legit. I’m sorry.”

The final boss wasn’t a god of control. It was the repacker’s calling card: a floating, glitching version of the P5 logo with a clown nose. Its health bar read — and it had infinite HP.

Junya watched in horror as Joker—no, the repack —walked him to Mementos. Other Persona users were there. A glitched-out Makoto, her fists replaced with spinning wheels of code. A Ryuji whose skeleton rendered outside his skin. They weren’t fighting Shadows. They were fighting other players’ save files —corrupted ghosts of gamers who’d downloaded the same repack.