At first, it looked like déjà vu.
Brian woke to the sound of rain—soft, rhythmic, nothing unusual. He reached for his jacket on the chair, but his hand met air. It wasn't there. He frowned, turned around—
—and saw it already on him.
He blinked. "Okay. Either I'm sleep-dressing now or…"
The System pinged.
> [MINOR TEMPORAL OFFSET DETECTED]
[CAUSE: UNKNOWN]
"Right. Temporal offset. That's definitely what I thought."
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. The day hadn't even started, and the universe was already pulling tricks.
---
The HQ felt off. Not broken—just… unsynced.
Aurora was cooking breakfast like usual, except the eggs were already on the table before she cracked them. Lyra walked in mid-conversation, then stopped, confused, realizing she'd repeated the same sentence twice. Kira was sharpening her blades, but every scrape made a faint echo, like two versions of her were doing it out of rhythm.
Selene looked the worst of them all. Her aura shimmered unevenly, flickering between her and a version wearing different armor.
Brian stepped in. "Okay, so who else feels like reality's lagging?"
Aurora raised a hand. "The toaster just pre-burned my bread. That count?"
Lyra groaned. "Something's happening to the timeline again, isn't it?"
Selene nodded slowly. "The fractures are bleeding through. The System's holding them back, but not perfectly."
Brian sat down, rubbing his temples. "So, what, we're all living slightly out of sync with ourselves?"
"No," Selene said, eyes glowing faintly. "We're overlapping with other versions of us. Echo bleed."
The phrase hit like a chill. Echo bleed—he'd seen the term once in the System archives, a corruption loop caused by dimensional instability. But it wasn't supposed to happen after a reset.
Aurora frowned. "So how do we fix it?"
Lyra tilted her head, scanning the data around them. "We can't. It's like trying to fix a dream while you're still inside it."
Kira exhaled. "Then we ride it out. Or we find the source."
Brian smirked. "Right. Find the source of the universe having a migraine. Sounds easy."
---
Hours later, the small impossibilities started piling up.
An entire hallway in HQ vanished for three seconds, replaced by what looked like a futuristic version of itself—sleek black walls, neon veins pulsing like a heartbeat.
The training room filled with mist that spelled out ancient runes before dispersing.
And the mirror outside the medical bay? It didn't show reflections anymore. It showed other places.
Brian caught one once. For half a second, the mirror showed a city in flames—floating towers collapsing, two figures standing against the inferno. One of them looked like him. The other… not quite human.
He didn't tell the team about that one.
---
Night fell fast.
The others had gone to rest. The System stayed eerily quiet, no notifications, no errors. Just a faint static hum beneath the surface of everything.
Brian wandered outside, the city lights below him flickering like distant code.
"Alright," he muttered. "Creator, System, whoever's listening—you mind explaining why my life's turning into a glitched PowerPoint?"
No answer. Just the sound of wind.
Then—
> [ECHO FLUX: 2% STABILITY LOSS]
[REALITY LAYER 01: FLICKER IMMINENT]
"Flicker?" he said aloud. "What the hell's a—"
The world blinked.
For one horrifying second, the city wasn't there. The stars weren't either. Just black static and a single glowing line of text suspended in space:
> [YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.]
Then the world came rushing back, like someone slamming a door.
Brian stumbled, heart racing. "Yeah… definitely not sleep deprivation."
He opened his System UI, hands shaking slightly. "Show me logs."
> [ACCESS DENIED.]
[PRIORITY LOCK: CREATOR SIGNATURE DETECTED.]
He froze. "Creator signature?"
The screen glitched again—briefly showing coordinates that didn't exist, then dissolving into static.
---
Back inside, he found Selene waiting in the hallway, expression tight.
"You felt it too," she said quietly.
"Yeah," he said. "The whole world blinked."
She nodded. "The System's not healing—it's mutating."
Brian exhaled slowly. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," she said, "the fractures aren't reopening… they're merging."
He looked up at her, frowning. "Merging into what?"
Selene met his gaze. "A convergence point. Something's trying to reconnect the fragments."
Brian laughed under his breath, more out of disbelief than humor. "Great. The multiverse has trust issues."
Selene's expression didn't change. "It's not a joke, Brian. If the fragments merge incorrectly… we won't survive the rewrite."
He stared at her, the humor fading from his eyes. "…Rewrite?"
Selene nodded. "The System's rewriting reality as we speak. But not all of it belongs to this world."
---
Outside, unseen, the cracks in the night sky pulsed faintly—tiny, shimmering lines of code weaving together like veins of light.
And in one of those cracks, a pair of eyes opened. Not Brian's. Not any human's.
Something was watching.