The void was no longer just an empty space; it had become a graveyard of lost logic. I stood before Chronos, the Right Hand of a destiny I never asked for. My lungs burned as if I were inhaling grounded glass, and my heart hammered against my ribs like a prisoner trying to break free from a cage of bone.
Chronos looked at me, his silver eyes devoid of any human flicker. He adjusted his watch with a slow, agonizing click. "You want to know your place in this world, Kaito?" his voice was a cold blade against my throat. "You are an unwritten error. You are the ink that spilled where it didn't belong. In the original decree of this Era, you were supposed to be a nameless corpse in the first paragraph. You were never meant to have a voice, a sister, or a soul."
He stepped closer, the pressure of his presence making my knees buckle. "You simply tapped into this reality. You dropped in like a parasite, stealing the breath that was meant for another. You are a glitch that thinks it's a person. And my only purpose is to remind you that your feelings are nothing but a bug in the system."
The Fury of the Glitched
"A bug...?" I whispered, my voice trembling with a rage so pure it felt like liquid fire in my veins. "My friends who screamed as they were deleted... the warmth of Yuna's hand... the smell of the home you burned... you call all of that a bug?"
The obsidian energy within me roared. It wasn't just power; it was the collective grief of everything I had lost. "You sat there, calculating our deaths like they were simple math problems! You mocked our love! You turned our lives into a joke!"
I didn't lunge—I exploded. My body glitched across the distance in a fraction of a millisecond. My fist, wreathed in a vortex of Absolute Black, slammed into Chronos's jaw. The sound wasn't a thud; it was the sound of reality cracking.
CRACK!
Chronos was sent spiraling into the abyss, his silver aura flickering like a dying bulb. I didn't wait. I appeared above him, driving my knee into his chest, then appearing beneath him to strike him upward. I was a storm of black lightning, hitting him again and again, each strike carrying the weight of a thousand tears.
"Insect!" Chronos roared, his composure finally shattering. He waved his hand, and the world plunged into a darkness so thick it felt like oil. It filled my mouth, my eyes, my soul.
But then, from the center of my chest, a golden-green resonance flared. Yuna's Symphony. Her light cut through the obsidian oil like a diamond through paper. The dark reality around us shattered like a mirror hit by a falling star.
"I told you," I growled, my Emerald eye glowing with a terrifying intensity. "You're the one who's going to be deleted today."
The Fall of the Barrier
Chronos snarled, his face twisted in divine arrogance. He dropped to his knees and slammed his palm against the fabric of the void. "Time-Stop: Internal Collapse!"
The golden barrier Yuna had woven around me suddenly began to shrink. It vibrated with a high-pitched, agonizing scream. Chronos didn't just attack the barrier; he began to freeze the very time inside it. I felt my blood turn to ice. My movements became sluggish, as if I were swimming through lead.
Boom! Boom! Boom!Chronos struck the barrier with silver hammers of raw force. With every hit, I felt Yuna's presence inside me weaken. She was gasping for air, her light flickering, her soul being crushed to keep me safe.
"STOP IT!" I screamed, but I couldn't move.
With one final, cataclysmic strike, the barrier exploded. Golden shards flew everywhere, dissolving into the cold vacuum. The recoil hit my brain like a physical blow. My vision blurred into a chaotic mess of static. The void began to spin, faster and faster, until the darkness swallowed me whole.
The House of Hanging Shadows
When I opened my eyes, the metallic taste of the void was gone. Instead, the air was thick with the suffocating, sweet-sickly smell of copper and rot.
I was standing at the top of a wooden staircase. My breath hitched. I knew these stairs. I knew the way the third step creaked. I looked down and saw my hands—they were tiny, stained with dirt, and trembling. I was five years old again.
"Mummy...?" I whimpered. My voice was a fragile thread in a house filled with shadows.
I began to walk down, my bare feet sticking to the floor. It wasn't water. It was blood. Thick, dark, and still warm. It pooled in the cracks of the wood, forming maps of a tragedy I had tried so hard to forget.
Giggle.
A high-pitched, distorted laugh echoed from the walls. I turned, but there was nothing there—only shadows that seemed to stretch and grow, their long fingers reaching for my throat. The house was alive, and it was hungry.
"Dad? Where are you?" I cried out, my voice breaking into a sob.
I ran toward my parents' bedroom, my feet splashing in the red puddles. The laughter followed me, a roar of a thousand mocking voices. I pushed the door open, hoping—praying—it was all a dream.
The sight was a symphony of gore. My mother and father were suspended from the ceiling by thick, rusted wires. Their bodies swayed in a rhythm that matched the ticking of Chronos's watch. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide and bulging, staring directly at me as if accusing me of surviving.
"No... no, no, no!" I fell to my knees. The floor was so slick with their blood that I couldn't even stand.
"Yuna?" I whispered, looking for my sister. But in the corner of the room, the shadows parted to reveal a small, empty crib, covered in bloody handprints.
The fear was so overwhelming that my body gave up. I felt a warm, humiliating wetness spread through my clothes as I lost control of my bladder. I was a broken child, weeping in a lake of his parents' blood, while the house laughed at my misery.
A headache, sharper than any blade, pierced through my skull. It felt like my brain was being peeled apart by invisible claws. The pain was so intense I wanted to dig my eyes out just to make it stop.Kaito..." a voice whispered from the shadows. It sounded like my mother, but it was twisted, demonic. "Why did you let us die? Why did you tap into this world just to bring us pain?"
The shadows lunged. I screamed until my throat tore, but no sound came out. I was drowning in the crimson memory, and this time, there was no light to save me.