Chapter 6: Fractured Reality
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The world felt… off.
Riven stood in the abandoned factory, fists clenched, heart pounding. Something had changed. He could feel it in his skin, in his bones—like the fabric of reality no longer recognized him the same way.
His breath came short and uneven. The Hollow Monarch had touched him. And now something inside him was unraveling.
Vex was still shouting, but the words came too late.
Because the world was breaking.
---
The First Glitch
A sharp, icy pain lanced through Riven's skull. His vision **split—doubling, tripling—**until the factory around him blurred into shifting fragments.
He stumbled, catching himself against a rusted metal table. His hand went straight through it.
Not like a ghost. Not like phasing. Like he wasn't meant to be there.
"Riven!" Vex's voice sounded distant, distorted—like a transmission from a dying signal.
Riven looked down. His fingers were flickering.
Not fading. Not disappearing. Shifting.
One second, they were flesh. The next, they were something else—echoes of himself overlapping, splitting into multiple versions. He saw his own hands in different moments, slightly ahead or behind reality. Versions of himself that shouldn't exist.
His mind reeled. This wasn't teleportation. It wasn't phasing.
It was unraveling.
The Monarch's touch had left something inside him. A scar. A fracture. A seed of erasure that hadn't bloomed—yet.
But if he didn't fight it…
He might become just another echo. Another forgotten ghost.
---
The Panic Sets In
"Riven, talk to me!" Vex grabbed his shoulder, shaking him hard.
The touch anchored him, snapped the world back into place.
For now.
Riven exhaled sharply. "I'm—I'm fine."
"Bullshit," Vex spat. He pulled up his console, scanning Riven's vitals. His face darkened. "Your readings are unstable. You're—hell, I don't even know what you are right now."
Riven's stomach twisted. Neither did he.
"Whatever the Monarch did to me," he muttered, flexing his fingers, watching them flicker in and out of sync with time, "it's not done yet."
Vex's jaw tightened. "Then we need to fix it. Fast."
But how do you fix something reality itself is trying to erase?
---
They left the factory before anything else could go wrong.
The city outside was worse than before.
The skyline had shifted again. Buildings that had been there earlier were… different. Some taller, some missing entirely. The streets weren't the same.
Like the world was constantly rewriting itself, trying to cover up the cracks.
And Riven?
Riven was one of those cracks now.
As they walked, he noticed it happening again. Little things.
- His shadow moved a second too late.
- His reflection in a storefront window wasn't quite right.
- A streetlight flickered as he passed—but in the reflection, it stayed dark.
His body was out of sync.
Like he was caught between different versions of himself, existing in multiple timelines at once.
And then—the whispering started.
---
At first, it was a faint hum.
Then, words.
Soft, distant, desperate.
"Don't forget us."
"Please, we were here."
"Help—"
Riven stiffened, turning sharply. The street was empty.
But he could still hear them. Faint echoes of people who had been erased.
He saw glimpses—half-formed silhouettes standing in doorways, flickering in and out of existence. Names and faces the world had lost.
Vex noticed his tension. "What?"
Riven swallowed hard. "I think… I can hear them."
Vex frowned. "Who?"
Riven exhaled. "The ones who were erased."
Vex's expression darkened.
"That's not normal," he said quietly.
Riven let out a sharp, humorless laugh. "Yeah, no shit."
Vex was already pulling up scans, typing furiously. "If the Monarch's touch did this to you, maybe it left something behind—some kind of imprint. A connection to whatever reality it comes from."
Riven clenched his fists. His knuckles flickered again.
If that was true, then the Monarch hadn't just touched him.
It had marked him.
And that meant one terrifying thing:
The next time the Hollow Monarch came back… it wouldn't need to erase him.
He might erase himself.
---
Riven wasn't going to let that happen.
"I need to control this," he said. "Before it gets worse."
Vex hesitated. "We don't even know what 'this' is yet."
"Then we find out."
Vex ran a hand through his hair. "How? We don't exactly have a manual for 'What to Do When a Reality-Warping Entity Glitches You Out of Existence.'"
Riven exhaled. "No. But I know one thing." He looked at his flickering hand, his fractured reflection in the window.
"This… whatever this is… is connected to the Monarch." His jaw tightened. "If I can tap into it, maybe I can find it first. Before it finds us."
A dangerous plan. A reckless one.
But right now, it was their only shot.
Vex sighed. "Alright. But if you start phasing out, I'm shocking you back to normal."
"Deal."
Riven flexed his fingers, forcing them to stay solid.
Forcing himself to stay real.
The Hollow Monarch thought he was fading. That he was already lost.
But it was wrong.
Riven Steele wasn't going down that easy.
He was going to use this. Turn it against the Monarch.
And when the time came—
He'd make the Hollow Monarch regret ever touching him.