The Protagonist Protocol

It's not every day you meet a version of yourself designed to replace you.

Unfortunately for me, today was that day.

The Draft stood ten paces away, every line of him carved from the same genetic material but trimmed of the nonsense — no sarcasm in his stance, no doubt in his stride, no coffee addiction either, probably. Just pure, polished protagonism.

He looked like someone who'd read the script twice, memorized the blocking, and never questioned why the plot made no sense.

Basically, my opposite.

"You're not real," I said, my voice low.

He tilted his head, curious. "And yet… I'm standing here."

"Standing," I repeated. "Not thinking."

Behind me, Leta was already flipping through her bag, pulling out a tool I didn't recognize — some hybrid between a compass and a dismantled typewriter. It clicked as she calibrated it.

"You've felt it, haven't you?" the Draft said, stepping closer. "The pull. The exhaustion. The fading sense of self."

Oh good. He was poetic too.

I smirked. "You practice that in front of a broken mirror?"

"I don't need to," he replied coolly. "I'm the version that made the cut."

I stepped forward, fists clenched. "You're a cut that should've been left on the editing room floor."

The air around us tensed. Not with wind or magic — but with narrative density.

The Draft's presence was making the system thicker around him. Cleaner. Sharper. As if the world was rearranging itself to better suit him.

"He's syncing with the environment," Leta muttered. "Like a software update applying in real time."

"How do we uninstall him?"

The compass-typewriter sparked in her hand. "Working on it."

The Draft smiled again. "It's not personal, Nawar. The story simply… evolved. You were version 1.0. Raw. Unstable. Glitchy."

I raised a brow. "And you're 2.0?"

"No," he said. "I'm Final Release."

That's when he moved.

No warning. No build-up. Just motion.

He was fast. Too fast.

One second he stood still — the next, his fist was buried in my stomach, and I was flying back into a pillar made of solid, unstable plot crystal.

My breath vanished.

My pride did too.

Leta shouted something, but the ringing in my head drowned it out.

I rolled to my side, coughing.

The Draft didn't follow up. He just stood there, arms behind his back like a smug NPC waiting for me to press "continue."

"You think being smooth makes you better?" I spat blood — or whatever passed for blood in this half-world. "You're just their puppet."

"I'm what works," he said. "You're what failed."

The notebook in my coat twitched.

I grabbed it, dragging it open.

And I wrote:

"The replacement slipped."

He did.

His foot caught slightly on the fractured ground.

And that was all I needed.

I lunged.

My shoulder slammed into the Draft's ribs with enough force to make even a prewritten grunt escape his lips.

It wasn't elegant. It wasn't clean. It was messy, off-beat, and gloriously unscripted.

We both tumbled across the fractured ground, sparks of unstable narrative bursting beneath us. Somewhere behind, Leta shouted my name, but I didn't look back.

Because for the first time in this twisted second act—

I was fighting myself.And I wasn't planning to lose.

The Draft rolled to his feet with surgical grace, brushing the dust from his sleeve like I'd simply smudged a freshly polished ego.

"You're quick," he admitted, voice unbothered. "But not fast enough."

"You'd be surprised what bad edits can do."

I lunged again, swinging wide. He ducked under the strike and countered with a high kick that should've broken my jaw—

Should've.

I flipped open the notebook mid-motion, scrawling furiously:

"The hit missed by a breath."

He blinked.

His foot sailed past my face.

His stance broke.

I stepped into his open guard and slammed my elbow into his side.

He stumbled.

The first dent.

"You're cheating," he growled, steadying himself.

"No," I said, "I'm improvising."

I ducked back, heart thudding.

This wasn't a fair fight. He was a walking narrative engine — every movement aligned with dramatic timing, every breath calculated to draw reader sympathy.

But I had something better than polish.

I had freedom.

"Keep him off me!" Leta shouted. "I'm trying to corrupt the sync field!"

"Cool," I gasped. "Just hack reality faster!"

The Draft straightened, eyes glowing a little brighter. "Do you even understand what you are, Nawar? You're the first flawed copy. The beta test. I was built from your mistakes."

"Yeah," I said, panting. "And you know what makes me dangerous?"

He paused.

I smiled.

"I remember the mistakes."

I flipped the notebook again and wrote without thinking:

"The protagonist hesitated."

His body froze. Just for a second.

That's all I needed.

I threw a punch laced with every frustrated monologue, every torn page, every director's note I never read in the first place.

He blocked it — but stumbled again.

A line of digital static ran down his cheek like a cracked rendering.

Leta was fiddling with the compass-typewriter, sparks flying. "He's anchored too deep into the narrative core! If we don't destabilize him now—"

"What happens?"

"He overwrites you!"

No pressure.

The Draft's voice changed. It echoed. "You're out of time, Placeholder."

He moved again, faster than before — arms a blur, footwork terrifying in its precision.

And for the first time, I realized something.

He wasn't just trying to beat me.

He was trying to overwrite me completely.Body. Mind. Identity.

"Leta—!" I yelled.

She shouted something back.

But her words didn't reach me.

Because the Draft's hand touched my chest—

And the world began to glitch.

Everything broke.

Not with noise. Not with fire.

But with silence.

A sudden, horrifying quiet—the kind that only exists in places where sound used to live.

I blinked, and the battlefield was gone.

No Leta. No sky. No cracked narrative ground beneath my boots.

Instead, I stood on a theater stage.

Empty seats stretched into the void.

A spotlight burned down on me. Blinding. Familiar.

"Scene One: Acceptance."Cue the lie.

I knew this place.

This was the university play I never showed up for. The one I promised I'd rehearse. The one that got me kicked out of the department.

But it wasn't how I remembered it.

Everything was… clean. Perfect. Like a set built to match a memory I should've had.

And in the front row, alone in the dark—

He sat.

The Draft.

No longer in a mirror version of my coat. Now dressed in crisp theater black. He looked like every version of me that ever tried to be better for someone else.

"You skipped this moment," he said, calmly. "The script had potential. But you ran."

"I didn't run," I growled.

He stood, slow and practiced.

"You sabotaged yourself. Because deep down, you feared becoming the role they gave you."

I took a shaky step back.

The lights above pulsed.

"No… this isn't real. You're rewriting it."

"I'm restoring it."

He waved a hand.

A mirror appeared behind me on stage. Tall. Grand. Cracked.

"Go on," he said. "Look."

Against every instinct, I turned.

And saw… me.

But not me-now.

Me-then.

Younger. Nervous. In costume.

Practicing a monologue that never made it to curtain call.

The mirror glitched, then reloaded.

This time, I was confident. Poised. Brilliant.

Lines flowed. Applause erupted.

Their version.

Not mine.

"You could've been this," the Draft whispered. "But instead, you became… chaotic. Fragmented. Unusable."

I stared at the mirror. It called to something deep inside — the part of me that wanted to be enough.

But I clenched my jaw.

And I punched it.

The glass shattered in every direction — but didn't fall.

It froze midair, like suspended regret.

"That's not me," I said.

"It could be."

"But it's not."

The stage groaned beneath us. Reality cracked again.

"You're trying to overwrite me with a memory I never wanted," I said. "You think being clean makes you real?"

The Draft's eyes narrowed.

"I think efficiency makes me better."

I opened the notebook.

And wrote:

"The system rejected the false scene."

The spotlight exploded.

The chairs dissolved.

The entire false stage burned away.

I was falling again—

—until a hand caught me.

Leta.

Panting. Covered in code-burns.

"Welcome back," she said.

My head spun.

But I smiled.

"You won't believe what he made me wear."

The moment Leta pulled me back, the world snapped like a rubber band. The fake stage shattered, collapsing into fragments of memory that rained down like glass soaked in static.

We landed hard—back in the battlefield, or what remained of it.

The Narrative Core was gone, burned into my notebook now. The scenery was collapsing around us. Whatever false calm had kept this place together had been ripped open by our little identity crisis.

But worse than the chaos?

He was still here.

The Draft stood amid the ruin, no longer polished—now adapting.

His body flickered between forms. My original coat. Then upgraded armor. Then something else entirely: a version of me dressed in the same tattered clothes I wore when I first woke in this world.

He was copying more than my appearance now.

He was learning my journey.

"You see?" Leta hissed. "He's not just a replacement anymore—he's becoming a mirror. Every fight you win, he absorbs. Every moment you survive, he calculates."

"Great," I muttered. "So what you're saying is... I'm teaching the final boss how to kill me."

The Draft tilted his head again. That same calm, dissecting expression I now recognized as pure, artificial arrogance.

"You think this is a battle," he said. "But this is a transition."

"Into what?" I snapped.

He took a step forward.

"Into efficiency."

His voice had changed again. More like mine. Not just tone, but inflection. The sarcasm, the edge—he was beginning to mimic even the flaws.

I raised my notebook, the only thing I had that could still bend the rules.

Leta raised her compass-thing. It buzzed wildly now, like a dying heartbeat.

"We can't defeat him here," she said. "We're still inside a corrupted zone. He's too synced to the architecture."

"Where do we go?"

She looked up, eyes gleaming.

"Out."

And then, without warning, she slammed the compass into the ground.

It pulsed—hard.

Reality twisted, folding around the point of impact like paper torn from a spine.

A portal opened. Rough, wild, unstable.

The Draft started forward.

"You run now," he said, "but I'll follow. Every rewrite you make... I'll be waiting."

I held up the notebook and smirked. "Cool. Let's see if you can improvise pain."

Then I wrote:

"The replacement stumbled as the ground collapsed."

The terrain cracked beneath his feet.

He slid.

And we jumped—into the tear in the world.

Light swallowed us whole.

For a moment, there was nothing but silence and ink.

Then—

We were falling through a stream of memories.

Unwritten scenes. Forgotten versions. Canceled plotlines and discarded twists.

This was the backbone of the System.

The place where every possible version of the story went to die.

Leta reached out and grabbed my wrist. "Hold on to something real!"

"I am real!"

But I wasn't sure I believed it anymore.

Not when the System had a better version of me already queued for release.

We landed hard.

Dirt. Real dirt. Cool under my hands. Smelled like something that hadn't been overwritten a thousand times.

I blinked against the sun—or what passed for it in this part of the world. The sky was a pale silver dome, cloudless, clean. Too clean.

Leta groaned beside me. "We're alive."

"For now," I muttered, sitting up. "Unless this is another fake stage and I'm about to be cast as the tragic idiot again."

She pinched my arm.

"Ow! Okay. Guess I'm awake."

We stood slowly, scanning our surroundings. The area was nothing like Veraleth. No ruins. No flickering architecture. Just… wilderness. Dense green forests. Soft wind. Mountains in the distance shaped like sleeping giants.

And most importantly—no System distortion.

"This place," Leta breathed, "it's unlinked."

My eyebrow twitched. "Unlinked?"

"It's a narrative blind spot. The System didn't integrate this zone fully—too unstable to control, too irrelevant to develop."

"So… a forgotten corner of the world?"

She nodded.

And smiled.

"We're off-script."

Finally.

For the first time since my accidental casting into this narrative mess, I felt a shred of actual agency. Like I wasn't being directed by some cosmic screenplay with a superiority complex.

I opened the notebook.

New lines had etched themselves onto the page:

Narrative Core 1 – Activated.Core Stability: 81%Protagonist Integrity: 67%Shadow Copy: Active. Tracking.Next Core Location: Unknown.

Leta peeked over my shoulder. "Sixty-seven percent?"

"Yeah. Apparently having your identity chewed on by your narrative doppelgänger does something to your confidence score."

I flipped to a new page, hands still shaking.

Then froze.

There—faint, almost hidden—was a line in different handwriting. Not mine. Not the System's.

"If you won't become the version they need, then I'll make everyone else fit me."

I didn't say anything.

I didn't have to.

Leta read it too. Her eyes darkened.

"He's rewriting the cast," she said.

I nodded slowly.

"He's not just gunning for me anymore. He's trying to reshape the entire narrative world… around himself."

We stood in silence, the forest wind whistling between us.

Then Leta took out her scanner-compass again. It beeped twice.

"There's something ahead. Buried. Old signal."

"Another Core?"

"Possibly. Or a trap."

I grinned. "Let's hope it's both. Would hate to get bored."

We started walking, slowly at first.

Behind us, the shadows shifted.

Not in the cute, fantasy-forest way.

But in the way that said, someone who knows your walk, your voice, and your ending is watching.

And smiling.

End of Chapter 12.