The Hunt Begins

For a brief moment, the world held its breath.

The plaza shimmered with contradiction—two protagonists, one system, and a city caught between remembering and forgetting.

I was used to being ignored.

Not feared.

But now?

Now, the System saw me.

So did the copy.

The broken one.

He staggered toward me, his eyes flickering with something I recognized—awareness. Like a mirror realizing it was only glass.

"You," he said hoarsely. "You're the—error."

His voice cracked halfway through the sentence. It wasn't rage. Not yet. Just confusion. The kind that breaks people more than anger ever could.

"Technically," I said, "I prefer the term 'creative reinterpretation.'"

The words echoed across the fractured square, bouncing off frozen expressions and glitching dialogue loops.

The perfect version of him—the one still standing on stage—didn't speak.

He just… watched.

Silent.

Smiling.

Like a mask stretched over nothing.

Leta tugged at my sleeve. "We need to move. Now."

I nodded. The smart thing would've been to vanish into the side alleys.

So of course, I did the opposite.

I stepped forward.

"Hey," I said, addressing the glitching copy. "You ever wonder who you were before the script chose you?"

He blinked.

Hard.

That was the problem with Architect-designed protagonists. They didn't grow. They updated. No mess. No mistakes. Just modular identity patches.

But now?

Now he had a crack in the patch notes.

"I—was chosen," he said.

"Sure," I said. "But did you ever choose?"

The crowd rippled.

Some froze again.

Some gasped.

Some turned away, like they weren't allowed to listen.

That's when the golden version finally moved.

He raised a hand.

The sky hummed.

And then, the city shivered.

Not from cold. From command.

One moment we were in the plaza.

The next?

Steel walls. Alarm glyphs. Floodlights flaring overhead.

Narrative Lockdown: Zone Collapse Containment.

The world had shifted scenes.

Forcefully.

Without consent.

Without logic.

The System was trying to regain control.

"I don't think we're in the crowd's good graces anymore," I muttered.

Leta rolled her eyes. "You think?"

A klaxon blared.

And then, for the first time, a line of dialogue appeared in mid-air.

Floating text. Glowing gold.

Like the script itself had spoken.

"Purge the inconsistency."

And from the other side of the corridor, I heard bootsteps.

Not dozens.

Hundreds.

Uniform. Unscripted.

Coming for me.

"Okay," I said, backing up. "Now I'm scared."

"Good," Leta snapped. "Hold onto it. You'll need it to survive the next chapter."

The first thing I noticed was the sound.

Too quiet.

Not silent—controlled. Like the world was playing background noise on a loop, just enough to feel "natural." Like someone had dialed reality to default settings.

That meant we were still inside a forced scene.

"Leta," I hissed, ducking behind a glowing barricade. "Tell me you can crack this zone."

"I'm trying," she said, swiping furiously through her compass layers. "They've isolated the reality shell. It's a recursive lockdown loop."

"English, please?"

"We're trapped in a scene that's pretending it isn't a scene."

Great.

I peeked over the edge of the barricade.

The hallway stretched into infinity—polished floors, flickering lights, endless rows of narrative enforcers dressed in sterile white armor, their visors flashing with system prompts.

No eyes. No voice. Just functions.

A wave of them approached in sync.

And leading them…

Was him.

Not the broken version.

The other one.

The golden mask.

The rewrite.

Except now?

His mask had slipped.

His eyes twitched.

Not malfunctioning—calculating.

He wasn't just following commands anymore.

He was learning from them.

"Do you feel it?" he called out, his voice amplified by the Feed itself. "The story resisting you? The world craving its purpose?"

I didn't answer.

Mostly because I was too busy trying not to pee myself.

"They erased your name," he said, stepping closer. "And yet… you still echo. Why?"

I smiled tightly.

"Bad writing."

That made him blink.

Faint.

But real.

A sliver of uncertainty.

He raised one hand.

The guards responded instantly—rushing toward us.

"Leta!" I shouted.

"Almost—just need one more second—"

"WE DON'T HAVE ONE MORE SECOND!"

Then—

Snap.

The compass flared, casting a pulse of unscripted interference into the zone.

Reality stuttered.

The walls shimmered.

Time hiccuped.

And for three precious seconds, we had free movement.

I grabbed her hand. "Run!"

We bolted down a corridor that hadn't existed a moment ago—one carved from pure narrative bleed. The script hadn't written it, so it couldn't track it.

We were off the rails again.

But behind us, I could hear something disturbing:

The rewritten protagonist didn't order the guards to follow.

He followed himself.

Through the bleed.

Which meant…

He was learning to go off-script.

"Okay," I said, panting. "That's new."

Leta looked pale. "He's not just adapting. He's evolving."

"Great," I muttered. "So we broke him… and now he's better."

"No," she said softly. "Now he's becoming you."

I froze.

The echo of his footsteps grew louder.

The hunt had begun.

But the worst part?

He didn't just want to delete me anymore.

He wanted to replace me better than I ever was.

The corridor twisted, bent, and—somehow—aged.

Every step forward made the world behind us flicker like an old VHS tape losing signal. Words peeled from the air. Background textures blurred, then sharpened, then vanished altogether.

This wasn't a place the story meant for us to find.

It was the gap between scenes.

A forgotten archive.

Leta stumbled to a stop, her breath sharp in the thin air.

"Here," she said, pointing to a door that flickered in and out of existence. Its frame pulsed with faded dialogue—scripts once typed, now discarded. "This was part of an old prologue draft."

"A prologue?" I blinked. "Was I in it?"

"You were the only one in it," she said. "Before they cut it. Before they rewrote the narrative spine and gave it to someone else."

That stopped me cold.

They hadn't just replaced me in the current version.

They'd erased the origin.

"You think there's still a copy?" I asked.

She hesitated.

"I think… if anything remembers you, it'll be in there."

I stepped toward the door.

It felt like walking into a dream I'd once forgotten.

The moment my fingers touched the handle, the air around me thickened. My thoughts fuzzed. A warning scrawled itself across my vision:

CAUTION: Accessing Deprecated Thread – Risk of Unravel.

I opened it anyway.

Inside?

Darkness.

Then flickers of motion.

Scenes. My scenes.

But not from this story.

From a version before the rewrite.

There I was—same face, same sarcasm, same badly combed hair—standing in front of a throne I didn't understand, arguing with a king who didn't speak.

My voice echoed through the void:

"Why should I care about any of this? I'm not a hero. I'm just a guy who missed his bus."

Leta's eyes widened beside me. "This… this was your first scene."

The real one.

The one that was cut.

The air pulsed.

And from the shadows behind us, a voice spoke:

"Then why did the world choose someone else?"

We turned.

The rewritten protagonist stood at the edge of the room—just outside the archive's memory radius. He didn't enter.

He couldn't.

But he watched.

And in his eyes, I saw it:

Jealousy.

Pure and simple.

This was something he couldn't download.

Couldn't learn.

Because it wasn't designed.

It was mine.

He clenched his fists.

"You were version one," he said.

"I still am."

He tilted his head. "Then why was I improved?"

"Because perfection is easier to sell," I said. "But it doesn't make it real."

The archive groaned.

Memories were collapsing—disintegrating like ash.

We had seconds.

Leta reached forward, pressing her compass to the flickering image.

Memory sealed.

She nodded. "We got it. Come on."

We fled as the archive dissolved behind us.

But I didn't feel triumphant.

Because now?

The rewritten version didn't just want to erase me.

He wanted to understand me.

And that made him more dangerous than ever.

By the time we reached the surface again, the world had changed.

Not visually.

Not physically.

Narratively.

People were watching the streets with a strange intensity, like every brick whispered to them. And worse—they were looking at him.

At him.

The rewritten protagonist walked calmly through the central square, flanked by a perfect entourage of scripted heroes—each expression crafted, each reaction flawlessly timed.

A parade.

But no fanfare.

No clapping.

Just this eerie silence. The kind that sinks in when a crowd doesn't realize it's being rewritten.

And above them?

Text.

Floating in golden serif font, like a heavenly caption:

"When the kingdom cried out for hope, he answered the call."

"He led them through the dark, bearing the weight of their story."

"He is the thread."

Leta hissed through her teeth. "He's rewriting their memories."

I felt the nausea hit.

Hard.

I clutched my notebook.

It didn't just feel like the world was forgetting me.

It felt like I was forgetting myself.

"He's pulling from the Feed," Leta muttered, furious. "Injecting lines of his version into the crowd's memories. He's not erasing you. He's burying you under fiction."

People were nodding now.

Whispering.

"I remember him leading the siege…"

"Didn't he stand against the Silver Host last spring?"

"Wait… wasn't he the one who saved the orphan ward?"

My jaw clenched.

None of those events happened.

At least… not with him.

That was me.

But now they didn't know the difference.

They couldn't.

Because memory in this world wasn't bound to time.

It was bound to narrative consistency.

And he was taking control of it.

Leta turned to me, panic rising. "We need to act before the rewrite becomes permanent. The moment his version hits critical narrative density—"

"He becomes canon," I finished.

Irrevocable.

Unchallengeable.

A lie made solid.

He turned toward me then, his eyes shining not with rage—but with confidence.

"You don't need to vanish, Nawar," he said, voice smooth, words unnaturally even. "You can still be part of the story. Just… not the main character."

He extended a hand.

Fake kindness.

Genuine threat.

"Be a chapter in my legacy."

I looked at the people around me—some frowning in confusion, others smiling in awe at their "savior."

And I realized:

He wasn't just rewriting the past.

He was performing the future.

"I already played that role once," I said, stepping forward. "Didn't love it."

I opened my notebook.

Flipped to the page sealed from the memory archive.

Held it high.

The crowd's whispers paused.

The rewritten protagonist narrowed his eyes.

A challenge had been issued.

Not of strength.

But of story.

Let the audience decide—

Which version they wanted to believe.

The plaza fell silent.

My notebook trembled in my hands, glowing faintly with the seal from the archive—the one thing left untouched by the System's endless revisions.

All eyes were on me.

Even his.

The golden puppet. The rewrite. The replacement.

"Fine," I said. "You want a legacy? Let's audition."

And I tore the page from my notebook.

Ink flared. Memory surged. The air shimmered.

The crowd gasped as light spilled from the parchment, forming images in the air—not illusions, but truths.

Me.

In the prologue that never aired.

Arguing with that silent king. Refusing the Call. Screwing up the inciting incident. Tripping over my own fate and laughing as I did it.

Not perfect.

But mine.

"This isn't some destined path," the echo of my younger voice rang out. "I don't want your throne, or your glory. I want to live without a script telling me who I'm supposed to be."

Gasps echoed through the plaza.

A woman dropped her shopping basket.

A child blinked and said, "Wait… I remember that."

The rewritten protagonist took a single, careful step forward.

"This is sentiment," he said. "A deleted draft. An unfinished version of a role I perfected."

I stepped in front of him.

"You can polish a lie all you want. Doesn't make it true."

"You're clinging to fragments."

"I'm clinging to freedom."

He tilted his head. "Then show them something worth remembering."

Challenge accepted.

I turned to Leta.

She met my eyes.

Nodded once.

Then, with no script, no command, no prompt—

She slapped me.

Hard.

I staggered.

The crowd gasped.

Even he looked stunned.

And then she shouted, loud enough for the system to hear:

"You said you'd keep us safe, Nawar! You promised! But you're just making it up as you go!"

I blinked.

Pain blooming on my cheek.

But I got it.

She was improvising.

So I shouted back.

"Oh, I'm sorry I didn't bring a goddamn plot outline for escaping a metaphysical prison, Leta!"

"You're a mess!"

"You knew that when you followed me!"

"I still shouldn't have to pay for it!"

The energy shifted.

The plaza wasn't just watching.

They were feeling it.

And for the first time…

The rewritten protagonist didn't know what to say.

No line appeared to save him.

No system cue whispered in his ear.

He stepped back.

Shaken.

Because we weren't performing a story.

We were living one.

Messy.

Contradictory.

Real.

The crowd began murmuring.

Not lines.

Not chants.

Questions.

"Why does this feel… familiar?"

"Wasn't there always someone else before him?"

"I think… I remember Nawar."

The golden light dimmed.

And in its place—

Doubt.

For the first time since his arrival, the rewrite faltered.

He looked at me.

And I saw fear.

Not of me.

But of the one thing he couldn't counterfeit:

Truth without permission.

End of Chapter 16.