Chapter 59: Fractureborn

The silence after the Paradox Duel was not peaceful—it was unnatural. Too quiet. As if the universe itself was holding its breath.

Steven stood atop the last remaining shard of the Paradox Arena, floating in a sea of fractured nothingness. The Codex hovered at his side, its glow dimmed, flickering like a dying star.

Azariel stepped forward slowly. "The Prism's collapse should've sealed the timelines. Why hasn't reality stabilized?"

Steven didn't answer right away. His eyes were locked on a distant rupture—an unnatural crack in the void, pulsating like a heartbeat. Colors bled from it, shifting between realms not meant to touch. Space screamed in silence.

"That's not just a wound," Steven said at last. "It's a birth canal."

"A what?"

The rupture widened with a shudder, and from it… something crawled forth.

It had no defined form—just limbs that bent impossibly, skin made of broken timeglass, and a core that glowed with fractured starlight.

The creature's presence distorted the air, twisting memory, identity, and gravity itself. Steven staggered back as flashes filled his mind—visions of lives he'd never lived, of deaths he'd never died.

"The Weaver's punishment…" he murmured. "This is what happens when time itself rejects a timeline…"

Azariel's eyes narrowed. "What is it?"

Steven raised the Codex Staff, summoning what strength remained. "A Fractureborn. A creature born from rejected paradoxes. Every broken future, every aborted possibility, made flesh."

The Fractureborn let out a soundless shriek—its mere presence collapsing a nearby floating island into a singularity.

Azariel gritted his teeth. "We can't let it reach the Prime Realm."

Steven nodded grimly. "It doesn't want to destroy timelines. It is a timeline. A malformed one. And it's trying to overwrite everything."

The Fractureborn lunged.

Steven and Azariel moved as one.

Magic and steel collided with temporal flesh. Spells sparked and collapsed, distorted by the creature's paradox aura. It absorbed logic and spat out chaos.

Steven blinked—and suddenly found himself in a warped moment where he was the Fractureborn, hunting his friends.

"No," he growled. "Get out of my head."

He drove the Codex Staff into his own shadow, anchoring himself back to the present.

Azariel had been struck—bleeding from his side, barely able to stand. "I can't… hold on much longer."

Steven gritted his teeth. "Then we don't hold on."

He raised the Codex again—but instead of attacking, he opened its final sealed chapter.

A page that had no writing, only a mirror.

He stared into it—and saw every version of himself that could have existed. The kind. The cruel. The coward. The savior.

And then, he chose.

He wrote one word:

"Unity."

The mirror shattered.

Power surged.

The fractured selves fused into one—the true Steven Lethal.

He rose anew, radiating balanced magic: part shadow, part light, part chaos, part order.

The Fractureborn hesitated.

Steven lifted his hand. "You were born from broken stories. I am the one who tells them."

With a single pulse, he rewrote the Fractureborn's core—turning it from chaos to clarity.

The creature let out one last warping scream… then collapsed into stardust, returning to the Codex as a sealed memory.

Steven dropped to his knees, gasping. "It's done…"

Azariel knelt beside him. "What did you become?"

Steven looked at the Codex, its cover now gleaming with every color of time.

"Something new," he whispered. "Something whol

e."

---

(To be continued...)