Chapter 59: The Shatterwalkers
POV: Ereze
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The world didn't fall apart.
It just… reloaded.
The sky flickered in a way I couldn't explain. One moment, it was red — a deep, unsettling crimson, the color of ancient blood spilled on the pages of forgotten histories. The next, it was something else entirely — a dull grey that stretched out forever, too wide, too empty.
Glitched. That was the only way I could describe it.
The horizon shifted, then reformed. Time seemed to skip between frames, not sure whether to keep moving forward or rewind everything back to the beginning. I thought I could hear the faint hum of some long-forgotten machine, the hum of something that had died long before we'd even started playing this game.
We were still standing — but not in the same place.
Everything was… wrong. Not broken, not destroyed. Just unmade. Like everything we knew had been scattered, pieces floating in the void, waiting for a hand to pull them back together.
The thrones were gone. The echoes of kings and their claims disappeared into thin air, leaving no trace behind.
And the rules… those too. Gone. No more trials. No more systems. No more guidance.
Just us.
"Where even are we?" Jiwoon's voice, as sharp and unsettled as ever, cut through the silence.
I looked around, my eyes searching the void. The colors of the sky — red, swirling and shifting — bled into each other like some kind of cosmic ink stain. Something ancient had fractured in the air. It wasn't the sun. It wasn't the stars. It was something much deeper, something I couldn't grasp. The whole sky seemed… alive, but not in the way it should have been.
I didn't know what this place was.
But I had a feeling. And I wasn't sure I liked it.
"We're between narratives," I said, finally understanding what my gut had been trying to tell me. "No system. No trials."
Jiwoon blinked, as if the words didn't quite land right. "Then what's keeping us alive?"
I turned my gaze to ⬜⬜⬜, who stood ahead of us, unmoving. His figure was static, like a still life held in place by some invisible force. It was as if something had been taken from him. He looked… absent. Like he wasn't quite here, or wasn't meant to be. A thread had been pulled from him, and there was nothing left to fill that gap.
"He is," I said, quietly, and even I wasn't sure I believed my own words.
The air shifted.
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The sky broke open.
A new system prompt appeared in front of us:
[SYSTEM OFFLINE]
[You are no longer in Trial Space.]
[Welcome to: The Forgotten Bridge.]
For a second, I thought I misread it. The Forgotten Bridge? What the hell was that?
I turned to look at Jiwoon, whose hand was still resting on his weapon, poised as if waiting for something to jump out of the shadows.
But nothing did.
Instead, what we were left with was worse.
A long, stretching path laid out before us — inkstone and shattered glass underfoot. The remnants of everything we had lived through. Bits of Murim, pieces of the Throneworld, broken fragments of timelines, and even echoes of the modern world — they were all stitched together here in some horrifyingly disjointed mosaic.
"This isn't a place," Jiwoon said, his voice barely above a whisper, as if afraid to say it too loud. "It's a mess."
I nodded. "A place where stories go when they're forgotten."
The edges of reality were fraying, unraveling around us like a storybook someone had carelessly torn to pieces. The bridge beneath us wasn't a solid thing, but a ghostly pathway stretching across the rift. We weren't walking through a reality anymore. We were walking through brokenness.
The fracture hadn't erased us.
It had unbound us.
But with that freedom came something new. And much more terrifying.
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We heard them first.
The faintest sound — footsteps without owners, breaths that didn't belong to lungs. The air grew cold, and I knew then that whatever was coming wasn't just a consequence of this place. It had been waiting. Watching.
The Shatterwalkers.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
Jiwoon's sword flickered — a brief moment of glitching data. "Shit," he muttered, the blade shaking in his hand. "They're off-script."
My mind reeled, trying to understand the implications of those words. Off-script. No rules. No system. No boundaries. Not just enemies — anomalies.
They shouldn't exist.
And yet, here they were, crossing the void toward us.
I glanced at ⬜⬜⬜ again, but this time, there was something different about him. He blinked, as if snapping out of some trance, and then… he walked forward. Quietly, deliberately.
"Wait!" Jiwoon shouted, his hand reaching out to grab him, but I held him back.
"Let him do this," I said.
I didn't know what it was about this place. I didn't know what was happening to ⬜⬜⬜. But I knew one thing: He wasn't the same person anymore. Not since we walked into this fractured world.
He reached out, palm open. The Shatterwalkers advanced, their movements unnaturally smooth, like shadows stretching into form. But they didn't seem to notice him at first. Their attention was focused on us.
He didn't hesitate.
He rewrote his own wound.
With a single, smooth motion, he touched his chest, his fingers brushing against the wound that had once opened there. And as he did, the blood vanished. The hole in his chest closed. The reality around him seemed to bend in response, his own self-healing almost rewriting the very fabric of his existence.
It was beautiful. Terrifying.
The Shatterwalkers froze, their hollow eyes narrowing, as if sensing something they couldn't comprehend.
"Then we don't fight with logic," ⬜⬜⬜ said, his voice low, almost a whisper.
I understood then.
We weren't fighting for survival anymore.
We weren't fighting for the system, or for the throne, or for any of the broken rules that had once bound us together.
We were fighting for continuity. The right to keep existing when everything around us had fallen apart.
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The Shatterwalkers charged.
For the first time, we fought not for a king or a throne — but for our own place in the story.
No longer bound by the system. No longer following someone else's script.
We were rewriting it. Together.
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