'What should I do?'
The rain had stopped long ago, but his trembling heart hadn't. As he looked into those pools of liquid darkness, the questions pressing against his mind refused to slow.
Cael reached forward, stepping onto the glitchy surface of the rooftop.
The answer was obvious.
Closing the distance between them, Cael straightened his back and gazed at the black figure, putting a brave façade on his face, full of determination.
"I'm a curious fellow… you see?"
There was no response, but;
'Why did I think they raised an eyebrow?'
He hesitated and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, the response came.
"I know."
"Wh-?"
"I know what you are. What you like, your preferences, your distaste, your past — everything. I know more than anyone would know about you. More than what you currently know about yourself."
The voice came cold, with no emotion in it. Cael was left stunned, not knowing what to say.
"You weren't supposed to live through this Record Break." The figure said calmly.
"But anomalies tend to… linger."
Cael was dumbfounded by that response but maintained his façade, then shrugged and answered evenly:
"Oh yeah? And why is that?"
The figure watched him in silence for a moment.
"Because you interfered," the voice said quietly. "Even if you don't remember it… yet."
Cael's expression became more confused.
'This is confusing.'
"Don't talk in riddles," he snapped, frustration slipping through.
"Just answer my damn questions. What was that talk about rotting me to my core? What were those images flooding my mind? The glitches, the flickering code? You attacked me out of nowhere and you even took my first kiss!"
He paused, drawing in a shaky breath. He was a little flustered.
'Seriously! Was that last line really necessary?' He continued:
"You talk like you know everything about me. Like you're my parent. Who in their right mind suddenly appears, impales someone's chest, then leaves like nothing happened! Well, in the sense that nothing happened, but still."
His cheeks were red.
Huffing aggressively, he tried to look straight into those eyes of darkness.
The figure chuckled and raised one hand. And then, Cael wasn't in one place anymore.
His mind stretched like rubber. His consciousness shattered like glass.
Suddenly he was seeing a dozen fragmented realities, variations of this exact moment.
In nine versions of this moment, he was killed brutally — either by the black figure, the flickering glitches, the aftermath of Record Break shockwaves, by an abomination made of shattered glass and more.
In two, his consciousness was taken over by a plague, a virus, or a different version of himself. In one, his existence itself was erased by the Record Break, leaving him to wander the networks of forgotten streams of simulation code where neither death nor life existed, where concepts like time and space were not coded, wandering the eternal void alongside forgotten stories, their fables long lost and corrupted.
He dropped to his knees, gasping for air. Blood slipped from his nose and ears as the sinister whispers of those revelations clawed at his mind.
Then a filtered voice, broken by noise, came through the chaos.
[I only showed you a glimpse of what your former selves endured but even that took such a heavy toll on you.]
It was the black figure or whatever they were at this point. Their eyes remained deadly calm, hiding some unnameable emotion underneath.
"That act of physical assault was just me planting the seed in your [***], so that you can be saved from those miserable outcomes. Showing you those visions was the most efficient way."
Still struggling for breath, Cael looked into those eyes again. For a fleeting instant, he saw his fractured selves reflected within them.
Braving the strain on his mind and body, he asked while coughing blood:
"Planting the… seed?"
As he steadied himself and rose, the burning feeling in his chest receded, feeling much more like a part of his being. It was as if his body had been remade from scratch with an extra element woven into his core.
His mind brimmed with a clear flow of thoughts and his heart steadied a little.
'Is this what they meant?'
The figure began to glitch, their outline stuttering. They muttered, their voice drowning in the same disturbances:
"Tsk… not good."
The air grew heavy, with reality itself breaking slowly around them. Space and time distorted again, causing ripples in the fabric of simulated reality.
The mysterious figure was looking at the distorted space, their face hidden beneath the hood with only glowing eyes showing.
Cael watched the scene unfold as the wind howled violently with a shriek, whipping the black hood as hard as it could.
He got a vague feeling of déjà vu, as the events of those revelations started resurfacing in his mind.
'To the left.'
He instinctively looked and instantly regretted it.
Flickering into existence like a patch loading mid-runtime — an amalgamation of countless faces and limbs vanishing and reappearing like a living glitch. Numerous shards of luminesh diamonds flashed together, forming an incomplete being.
The monster manifested out of thin air, walking toward them as the countless faces and forms continued overriding each other.
"Eeughh…"
Cael almost retched. The terrifying faces — their voices assaulted his ears, all repeating the same thing in unison.
"Save me… save us… save… ave… plea… sae…SAVE…"
Holding his head from exploding, he closed his eyes and endured the terrifying shrieks for help:
"Come towards us…come to us…come to us…come…COME…COME."
"You don't have time. Snap out of it."
The black veil cloak flowed without wind, obscuring the monster from his view.
The false shadows grew darker and heavier around the corners, near the glitchy surface and beneath the flickering sparks, surrounding the black figure in their mystical embrace.
The faint glow residing in those eyes shone brighter than ever, enveloping the world in a silvery hue and scattering the darkness away as if it had never existed.
Raising their hand again, the world shuddered. Shadows flowed from the hand, forming into a ghostly longsword. The silvery hue enveloping the blade like a mystical enchantment.
Before Cael could recollect his thoughts, the world shuddered again.
On one side, a humanoid monster made of shattered glass — reforming itself from countless faces and limbs every second — towered over the glitchy portals of distorted space.
One of its many arms had formed into a blade with a sharp edge capable of cutting space-time itself. The blade arm stretched unnaturally wide, flashing like a blur; when it moved, reality itself glitched.
On the other side, a tall figure — no less imposing than the amalgamated monster — stood strangely calm. Clad in a black cloak from head to toe with only mirror-like eyes showing beneath the hood.
In their right hand, a longsword made of shadow rested, glowing with the silvery hue of its wielder's eyes. Where the figure moved, distortions in space-time ceased to exist.
Soon after, the melodious ringing of steel filled the air. Space shattered like glass then reformed again; the glitches grew wilder, portals opening and closing as the two mystical beings clashed.
Cael watched the spectacle with wide, fascinated eyes, trying to understand what was happening.
If he hadn't thought it was the end of the world before, he certainly did now.
Both moved at an impossible speed. The monster left afterimages wherever it went, its limbs changing form as it suited the abomination. Sometimes scythe hands, then in the next second spears were growing from its legs.
In one moment, scissor-like blades extended from the chest of the abomination, aimed at the head of its opponent. But its opponent was in their own league entirely.
The impossible combination of light and darkness delivered fatal blows to the ever-changing limbs and faces of the abomination.
The mystical longsword flashed, leaving several afterimages in its path, slicing the glass-like diamond body of the abomination like butter.
The abomination's many limbs fell to the ground and disappeared in a rain of white sparks. The barrage of slicing attacks never ended, delivering blows from a distance to the sides of the abomination.
That was only what Cael was able to comprehend, somehow. Keeping up with the line of events happening in one day was stressful enough but this clash was beyond words, filling him with an indescribable longing he didn't know he possessed.
A wide grin appeared on his face, unknown to himself.
'This… is incredible!'
Clank! Clank!
Steel clashed again and again. Both figures blurred in and out of existence as they clashed. Their battle was too much for the mundane rooftop to handle.
Cael's eyes glowed with sparkle, produced by the epiphany of this battle.
'I want this battle to last longer. I want to watch it as much as I can. I want to…'
His thoughts died fast when the amalgamated monster suddenly crashed into the glitched space portals. It was electrocuted by the glitchy sparks, releasing ear-destroying shrieks from its terrifying maw.
Covering his ears in pain, Cael examined the abomination in detail. Its entire left side was torn, leaving horrifying trails of white dust. On closer look, that dust looked like strings of code similar to the fragment he had received after the Record Break. The right side had been cut like fine glass, too smooth to be real.
The black cloak flashed before his eyes. The figure appeared from thin air and landed between Cael and the abomination.
Their hood was still up and clear of any damage. The sword, however, was crumbling. The silvery hue lost from it while the shadows slowly liquified.
The monster pushed itself up with its blade-like arm. Its voice sounded like the high-pitched tone of an AI system:
[UNEXPECTED EXCEPTION.]
[ohOhh… UHHH..Scan…failed!]
[Override…anomaly…repair in progress…]
Cael was so immersed that he didn't hear what the black figure said.
"Sorry?"
They sighed and said again:
"Hhh… the seed has bloomed. Those radiant eyes don't lie."
Cael stared blankly at their back as they turned and studied the monster.
'W-what?'
He moved closer to the glitches in space, which acted like distorted mirror screens.
There, in his reflection, he saw the radiant azure spark in his eyes glowing like two outer rings of a planet around the pupil, while the pupil itself glowed lighter blue around its circumference.
'What?'