The world froze. And not in some metaphorical way—literally.
Kaelith's arrow hung in mid-air, feathers trembling as if caught in a wind that had stopped altogether. Sir Quacksalot hovered mid-quack, beak gaping, a frozen droplet of spittle suspended in defiance of gravity. Even the Purge Host, threads extended and poised, seemed to hesitate, unable to tighten its bindings. Time itself had paused.
Everything had stopped. Everything except Erevan.
The system's choices hovered before his eyes like a challenge carved in neon light. Submit. Be taken. Discover the truth. Resist. Risk deletion. The options radiated pressure, oppressive and unyielding. Erevan's body trembled; his muscles twitched involuntarily as if resisting the pull of an invisible current.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words emerged fractured, broken into jagged fragments of sound that didn't feel like his own.
"Submit… resist… is that all?" Erevan muttered, forcing a laugh that cracked in the still air. "Come on, GlitchOS… you know me. I don't play by menus."
The shard in his chest throbbed violently, heat radiating out like molten metal. But it wasn't just heat. It was thought. An idea clawing at his mind, whispering possibilities beyond the system's comprehension.
The system sputtered, glitching. A harsh, synthetic hiss echoed inside his skull.
Error: Anomaly refusing binary choice.
Recalculating…
Warning: Unauthorized Path creation in progress.
Erevan's stomach dropped. The Watcher's colossal eye narrowed, the iris spiraling like a black hole in the heavens. Its gaze pressed on him, a suffocating weight that seemed to read the very synapses of his mind. It was anger, fascination, and something darker: curiosity.
"Damn right I push back," Erevan growled. Fists clenched, knuckles whitening. "If you're gonna treat me like a bug… then watch me crash your whole operating system."
And just like that, a new option materialized.
New Option Unlocked: Choice C – Rewrite. Forge a path outside the system.
Erevan's breath hitched. "…What the hell does that mean?"
The shard answered. His vision fractured into three screens, each one vibrating in discordant rhythm:
One showed him chained, dragged helplessly into the endless eye, Kaelith screaming his name, Sir Quacksalot snapping futilely at threads of broken light.
Another showed him resisting, body burning into static, every molecule of his existence shredded frame by frame until nothing remained but silence.
The third… was blank. Empty. White. Void.
The system hissed again, sharper this time, like steam from a broken boiler.
Warning: Path instability – 99.97% failure.
Proceeding may result in… undefined outcome.
Kaelith's frozen face hovered in the void of his vision, eyes wide, lips parted as though she were calling his name across a rift he couldn't touch. He wanted to reach out, but his hand passed through her like smoke.
Sir Quacksalot, ever the absurd anchor in this nightmare, glitched. His frozen quack shivered, his eye flicking toward Erevan. For a single, impossible moment, it blinked.
Erevan laughed, hoarse and wild. "Figures. The duck knows better than all of you."
Without hesitation, he slammed Choice C.
The world exploded.
Frozen air shattered like glass under a hammer. Kaelith gasped mid-breath, stumbling back, arrows scattering to the ground. Sir Quacksalot quacked with renewed fury, snapping through another binding thread with teeth that shouldn't have existed. The Purge Host staggered, its woven light unraveling, symbols blinking in panic as though reality itself had betrayed it.
The system screamed internally:
Error: User has created unauthorized path.
Emergency rollback initiated—
"No," Erevan growled, gripping the threads still coiled around him. Pixels peeled from his skin, bones vibrated with static, yet his resolve burned hotter than the corruption around him. "You don't roll me back. I roll you."
He yanked the threads with every ounce of strength and will, and they didn't snap. They rewrote, transforming into barbed strands of glitching light, sparking with raw data fire. The Purge Host screamed—not a sound, but pure, corrupt code, glitching uncontrollably as it tried to parse what had just happened.
New Ability Acquired: Pathbreaker – Temporarily nullify system directives and rewrite outcomes.
Cooldown: Unstable.
Kaelith's eyes widened, terror and awe mixing in a perfect storm. "Erevan… what did you just do?"
Erevan smirked, blood dripping from his ears. "Gave myself admin rights."
Above them, the Watcher's eye convulsed. Its iris split into dozens, each spinning in wild, impossible directions. The heavens themselves cracked in concentric rings, as though the sky were blue-screening in real time.
The Purge Host staggered, raising a trembling hand, symbols flaring one last time before collapsing into static. It crumpled to its knees, a heap of corrupted characters.
Erevan swayed, body screaming with exhaustion. The shard in his chest flickered violently, casting jagged shadows across his fractured reflection in floating shards of broken glass. His right eye glowed with shifting symbols—the same language that had been etched into the Purge Host's face.
Kaelith rushed forward, catching him before he collapsed. "You idiot. Absolute, reckless, impossible idiot. You shouldn't even be alive right now."
Erevan coughed, blood trickling from the corner of his lips. "Yeah… well, being alive is kind of my thing."
Sir Quacksalot hopped onto his chest, chest puffed out, quacking proudly. He had won—or at least survived. That counted for something.
The sky darkened again.
Kaelith froze, her eyes scanning the horizon. "No… no, it can't be that fast."
The Watcher's eye was gone. But in its place, a shadow formed—a jagged tear leaking raw void beyond comprehension. From the rip, whispers emerged. Not system code. Not alerts. Actual voices. Layered, human, echoing.
"…Subject anomaly has broken containment."
"…Impossible… rollback failed… we warned them…"
"…Do we terminate or escalate?"
Erevan's stomach dropped. These weren't NPCs. These weren't the system. These were… real.
Kaelith shook him hard. "Erevan! What's happening?"
He stared at the rip, pulse hammering in his chest. "I think… someone's watching. Not the Watcher. Something… beyond it."
The shard pulsed violently, and jagged text etched itself into his vision as though written by a hand that didn't belong to this world:
You weren't supposed to choose that.
The voices cut out. The tear sealed. Silence pressed down—thicker than any scream, heavier than any battle.
Erevan collapsed to his knees, the ground cracking beneath him. Kaelith pulled him close. Sir Quacksalot paced, feathers bristled, his tiny form rigid with tension.
And then the system spoke, quieter, almost broken:
Pathbreaker… cannot be allowed.
Countermeasures initiating.
Erevan's eyes blazed. Blood and glitching symbols streaked across his vision. "Bring it on," he muttered, voice raw, resolute. "I'll break every path you throw at me."
The air around them shimmered with tension so thick it felt like it could be sliced with a knife. Even the wind had stopped, leaving an eerie, weightless silence. The rip in the sky, the jagged wound leaking raw void, pulsed as if alive, whispering incomprehensible voices that weren't meant for ears like Erevan's.
Kaelith tightened her grip on his arm, eyes wide with disbelief. "Erevan… whatever you've done, it's not just breaking the system—it's breaking reality itself!"
Erevan blinked, letting his gaze sweep across the fractured horizon. Forests that should have been lush and green had become jagged fragments of floating polygons. Rivers bent unnaturally, flowing upward like liquid metal, only to shatter mid-air into streams of glowing code. Everything here was synthetic, but somehow real—broken and bleeding into a world that had never existed before.
"Yeah, thanks for the pep talk, Kaelith," Erevan muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Blood and glitching pixels streaked his face. "Reality's broken, the sky's screaming, and somehow I'm the idiot holding admin privileges."
Sir Quacksalot waddled closer, quacking indignantly, feathers bristled. "Don't look at me like that. I've survived worse." Erevan smirked. Somehow, the duck was still a constant in the chaos.
The shard in his chest pulsed like a heartbeat, but faster, sharper. It wasn't just power—it was command, an awareness that melded with his own. Images and possibilities flickered across his vision: fractured timelines, collapsing threads of cause and effect, cascading failure codes that could erase entire worlds. Yet amidst the chaos, one thing was clear: Erevan could rewrite it all.
A ripple of movement caught his eye. From the shadows of the fractured sky, a wave of new forms emerged—entities neither human nor fully system. They shimmered with the static of erased code, moving in jagged patterns that defied normal perception. The beyond-Watcher had noticed him.
"You again," Erevan muttered, smirking through bloodied lips. "I swear… every time I blink, worse things show up."
Kaelith loosed an arrow. It disintegrated midair, shredded by the entities' distorted reality fields. "They're… not even real. They're pieces of the system that shouldn't exist. You can't fight them normally!"
Erevan grinned, shrugging. "Good thing I don't do normal."
He slammed his fist against the shard. Heat erupted, a firestorm of distorted light and energy. The world around him trembled. Fragments of the Purge Host's remains lifted from the ground, orbiting him like satellites, glitching between existence and nonexistence.
Pathbreaker activated.
Time stuttered. Threaded chains of corrupted code lanced out from the beyond-Watcher entities, aimed to bind, erase, and crush. Erevan's vision split into multiple perspectives—three, four, five timelines all overlaying one another. Every strike, every movement could be avoided, redirected, or rewritten.
He laughed, wild and unhinged. "Bring it. I've got admin rights now."
He moved like reality itself had forgotten the rules. His hands slashed through space, tearing apart threads before they could reach him. Each swing of his arm left a trail of cascading code fragments that collapsed midair. A single gesture disintegrated one of the jagged entities entirely, its fragments blinking out with a high-pitched digital scream that echoed in the back of his skull.
Kaelith gasped. "Erevan… you're… you're erasing them! Not just fighting, you're rewriting them!"
He smirked, chest heaving. "Yeah. Don't worry, I double-checked. Still me… mostly."
Sir Quacksalot hopped onto a floating shard, quacking with fervor. Even the duck seemed to understand now—they were in uncharted territory, and every small victory counted.
From the rift above, the rip widened, voices whispering again. This time, they weren't mere warnings. They were discussions, urgent and layered:
"…Containment failure… impossible anomaly… must escalate…"
"…Do not engage directly. Observe. Adapt… wait—did it just—?"
Erevan's stomach twisted. He realized these weren't system messages. Not even the Watcher itself. These were outside observers, entities who had been watching, waiting for him to break the rules.
"Well, hello there," he said, raising a bloodied hand toward the rip. "Welcome to my nightmare."
The shard pulsed violently. He could feel the raw energy, the potential to rewrite the rules of this universe flowing through him. His right eye glowed with the same strange symbols that had once marked the Purge Host. Pixels flickered across his skin, occasionally separating into multiple afterimages before snapping back. Every fiber of his being was a living glitch, ready to fight back against impossibility itself.
Kaelith grabbed him by the shoulders, eyes wide. "Erevan… do you understand what you're doing? Every second you push… you're tearing through layers of the system it took eons to construct!"
Erevan grinned, a sharp, almost feral edge in his voice. "Layered? Ha! Layers are for cakes, Kaelith. Not me."
He thrust his hand forward, and the threads lashing at him shattered. Every entity, every corrupted fragment, every pulse of beyond-Watcher light was ripped and rewritten in real time. It wasn't destruction—Erevan didn't destroy, he reprogrammed, bending the corrupted reality to his will.
Sir Quacksalot quacked with something that almost sounded like pride. Erevan laughed. "Yeah, yeah, you're my little co-admin, buddy. Don't get used to it."
The rip in the sky pulsed again, louder, more insistent. But Erevan wasn't just surviving—it was clear, even to him, that he was challenging. The voices paused, hesitant. Calculating. Perhaps even afraid.
"I'm not your pawn. I'm not your anomaly," Erevan growled, blood streaked across his lips, pixels cascading from his fingertips. "I'm your problem."
The shard flared, searing into his chest, and reality itself shivered. And for the first time in countless cycles, the beyond-Watcher entities paused.
Erevan was no longer reacting. He was rewriting.
The air itself vibrated, the fractured ground thrumming with power. Even Kaelith took a step back, awe and fear mixing in her gaze.
"This… this isn't just survival anymore," she whispered. "You've become… something else. Something more."
Erevan smiled, blood and glitching symbols streaking across his skin. "More? Honey, I'm already the glitch in their perfect little system. And now? I'm unstoppable."
The shard pulsed violently, and a new text scrawled across his vision, jagged and foreign:
Pathbreaker status: Active. System override: Ongoing. User authority: Absolute.
The beyond-Watcher rift flickered uncertainly, threads hesitated, and the impossible figures above froze. Even the Watcher itself—omniscient, untouchable—paused, perhaps for the first time, as Erevan tore open the seams of its universe.
And in that moment, with Kaelith clutching him, Sir Quacksalot squawking in defiance, and the sky bleeding new possibilities, Erevan Arclight realized something profound: he wasn't just alive. He was free. And he was just getting started.