The Corruption Within

Silence.

It had been too long since the System last attacked.

For the first time since my existence began, there were no pulses of warning messages, no execution protocols surging through the void, no attempt to erase me. The System had not attacked since the Nova Reaper.

It had only been watching.

Observing. Calculating. Waiting.

And yet—something was wrong.

This was not victory. This was not survival.

This was suffocating.

The silence wrapped around me, too heavy, too unnatural. Not peace, but a void within the void, an absence where something should have been.

I reached outward, stretching my senses beyond the abyss, searching for movement, for the subtle shifts in space-time that signaled an approaching threat. But there was nothing. Not even the faintest ripple of incoming destruction.

Yet, deep within me, the unrest remained.

I was no longer just myself.

Something inside me resisted, shifting like a fracture in the foundation of my existence. I could not escape it. It pulsed, unyielding, coiling in the depths of my being like a parasite that refused to dissolve.

I had consumed something unnatural.

The fragment of the Nova Reaper that had been severed and dragged into my singularity had not simply been erased like everything else. It remained. It lingered.

And it rejected me.

It was not a part of me, yet it existed within. A contradiction. A paradox. A disturbance that was neither separate nor whole.

I reached inward, focusing, attempting to do what I had always done—consume, assimilate, absorb. I commanded it to break down, to become part of the endless hunger that defined me.

The moment I tried, a violent repulsion tore through my being.

A shockwave of rejection spasmed through the abyss, sending ripples through the void. My event horizon shuddered. I recoiled instinctively, but the disturbance did not stop. It writhed. It pushed against me.

Something within me was not meant to be devoured.

I collapsed inward.

A sensation I had never known before—not pain, not hunger, but rejection. My core trembled, the fabric of my own existence warping, twisting, destabilizing.

I reached for stability, expanding my pull in all directions to counteract the collapse. The surrounding space bent chaotically, fluctuating as my gravity spiraled out of control. The once-absolute certainty of my existence flickered with instability, a paradox within my own being.

⚠ SYSTEM ALERT: UNSTABLE SIGNATURE DETECTED

⚠ ERROR_0001 STATUS: ANOMALOUS STRUCTURE COMPROMISED

⚠ CORE INTEGRITY: FLUCTUATING

I did not need the System to tell me something was wrong.

I could feel it.

The fragment inside me was not mass. Not light. Not even energy. It was something beyond the fundamental forces I understood. Something the System had created, something designed to exist within its rules—never to be consumed.

And now—I was bound to it.

Bound to something that was fighting against me.

I fought harder to contain the anomaly, to suppress its effects, but the more I pushed against it, the more it repelled me. It did not merely resist assimilation—it resisted me.

My own singularity trembled, my own gravity twisted against itself. Debris that should have fallen toward me shattered in mid-space, scattering instead of collapsing inward.

I was breaking apart.

But as the chaos rippled through my being, a new realization crept into my thoughts.

The System's silence was deliberate.

It was not attacking because it didn't need to.

It was watching.

Waiting.

Observing me fall apart.

Had it known?

Had this been part of its design?

Had it allowed me to consume the fragment, knowing it would destabilize me from the inside out?

Had I just played into its hands?

The answer did not matter.

I had to escape.

I had to disappear.

For the first time, I feared not an attack, but myself.

I reached outward—not for more matter, not for more mass, but for a way out. A way to become unseen. A way to vanish from the System's sight.

If I could disappear from its perception, if I could exist beyond its grasp, then perhaps I could stabilize before it was too late.

And just as I began to experiment—just as I reached beyond what I understood—

The void churned.

A ripple unlike any before.

A shift in the unseen fabric of the abyss.

A presence.

A hunger, not my own.

A force awakening from the darkness, drawn to my instability like a predator sensing wounded prey.

The emptiness twisted.

And then, it arrived.

The hunt had begun