The Fractured Code

The air around them rippled, reality distorting as the system pushed forward with its finalization process. Rana stood frozen, his body twitching as lines of glowing code crawled over his skin, sinking into his very being. His eyes flickered, trapped between consciousness and something else. The entity behind him—an incomplete, unfinished form—grew taller, its shifting faces warping in and out of existence.

"We don't have time!" Meera yelled, frantically typing into the console. "If we don't force a crash now, he's gone!"

Ravi's heart pounded. "How?!"

"We have to overload the system!" Meera's fingers flew across the keyboard. "If we feed it too much input, it'll break itself trying to process everything at once!"

Raj's gaze darted to the swirling darkness behind Rana. "And if that doesn't work?"

Meera didn't answer. Because they all knew the truth. If the system didn't crash, Rana would cease to exist.

Aarav gripped the notebook in his hands. "This book—it holds pieces of their erased history, right?"

Meera nodded. "It's fragmented memory. Too much for the system to process at once."

Aarav inhaled sharply, then without hesitation, threw the book into the core of the machine.

The system reacted immediately.

Alarms blared as the walls fractured, pieces of code unraveling in midair. The machine screamed—a digital, distorted screech—as its perfect records were corrupted. The entity behind Rana twitched, its form flickering uncontrollably, as if struggling to maintain its stolen identities.

"It's working!" Meera shouted. "The system is rejecting the contradictions!"

But it wasn't enough.

Rana's body was still frozen, locked in place. The code around him was unraveling, but not breaking.

"We need something more!" Raj yelled over the deafening noise. "Something to sever the connection for good!"

Ravi clenched his fists. "Then we take him back ourselves."*

Without hesitation, he ran toward Rana.

"RAVI, WAIT!" Aarav shouted.

But Ravi didn't stop.

He reached Rana just as the entity's shadows lunged.