The Unraveling

The walls trembled, shifting between solid and static as the sirens wailed. Ravi's breath came in sharp gasps as he watched Rana—or what was left of him—glitch and distort. His body flickered like a broken screen, his face twisting between confusion and cold calculation. "Vihaan…" His voice barely carried over the chaos. Then, his eyes hardened. "You need to leave."

Aarav stepped forward, trembling. "We're not leaving without you." But Rana's expression twisted into something unreadable. "You don't understand," he whispered. "I'm not just me anymore." The moment the words left his mouth, the space behind him rippled. A force, unseen but suffocating, pushed outward.

Ravi staggered, shielding his face as the energy roared. "What is that?!" Raj shouted. The answer came in the form of a voice, layered and unnatural. "The experiment is incomplete. The subject cannot be restored." The words weren't coming from Rana—but from something inside him. His body jerked violently, his form flickering between the boy they once knew and something else.

Meera's hands flew over the controls, trying to override the system. "They're trying to erase him!" Her voice was panicked. "They're rewriting him again—turning him into something worse!" The screens filled with error messages, lines of code deleting themselves. "If we don't stop this now, we lose him forever!"

Aarav's grip tightened around the book, his knuckles white. "Tell us how!" Meera hesitated, then slammed a fist against the console. "We have to break the connection. If we can force the system to crash—" The room shook, cutting her off.

Rana screamed. His body convulsed, arms outstretched as unseen forces tore at him. "GET OUT!" His voice was layered now—his own, but also something colder, something not him. "I CAN'T HOLD IT BACK—"

But Ravi refused to move. "We're not abandoning you!"

The shadows behind Rana split. Something began to emerge—something massive, pulsing with energy, an unfinished creation. A twisted mockery of what he was meant to become. A figure loomed in the darkness, its face shifting between a thousand stolen identities, its presence warping reality.

The system's voice crackled overhead. "Final Override: Initiating Subject Completion."

Meera's eyes went wide. "They're going to finalize him!"

"No," Aarav whispered. "They're going to erase everything that's left of him."

And then—Rana's body stiffened. The process had begun.

Raj turned to Ravi, urgency burning in his eyes. "We either break him free now…" He glanced at the creature looming in the darkness. "Or we lose him to that."

The decision was immediate. Ravi clenched his fists. "We fight."