Novels by Soeltan Putra

The wooden bridge groaned under Ryan’s feet, its warped planks defying every known law of timber architecture as the dark, rushing water below flowed upward in a jerky, twenty-four-frame-per-second stutter. Ryan adjusted his crumpled tuxedo, clutching the shard of blue light like a commuter clutching a delayed subway pass. Ahead of him, blocking the narrow span, stood the regional toll administrator, a man whose face bore the permanent, soul-crushing scowl of a DMV worker who had been trapped in his booth since the Pliocene epoch."Halt," the administrator rasped, holding out a parchment ledger that looked like it had been chewed by digital rats. "Toll must be paid in coin bearing the current fiscal seal of the High Registry. Your currency is outdated."Ryan stared at the man, his eyes bloodshot from a sheer lack of cooperative physics. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of miscellaneous metal, dropping a tarnished coin onto the wooden desk."Look, my guy," Ryan said,

The shard of blue light in Ryan’s hand hummed with the frequency of a corrupted hard drive, casting a strobe-light effect over the dissolving bridge. The knight made of static lunged, his blade, a jagged strip of broken pixels, slicing through the air where Ryan’s head had been a millisecond before.Ryan rolled, his dress shoes screeching against the now-invincible stone. He didn’t feel like a hero. He felt like a guy who’d just realized his rent was going to skyrocket because the landlord was literally deleting the building."Yo, watch the suit, man!" Ryan yelled, scrambling back as a chunk of reality behind him turned into a rain of harmless zeros and ones. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to get dry-cleaning in a dying dimension? This is a premium tuxedo!""The tuxedo is a construct, mortal," the static-knight boomed, his voice a distorted, multi-track recording. "Like your existence. You are a patch that has failed to stabilize. The Architect demands a full system scrub."Ryan

The white void stretched out like a blank canvas waiting for a bad artist to ruin it. Ryan clutched the shifting, chromatic letter, his heart hammering against his ribs. The silence wasn’t just quiet; it was deafening, the kind of stillness that made his ears ring with digital static."Admin privileges? Is this a joke?" Ryan muttered, his voice sounding thin in the infinite nothingness. "Bruh, I’m literally trying to figure out if I can get a decent meal, and you’re dropping 'Architect' level lore on me? That’s some serious main character trauma I didn't opt into."The letter pulsed in his hands, the ink flowing like a liquid LED display."Read it, you absolute clown," a voice boomed. It didn't come from behind him; it vibrated inside his teeth. "You’ve been a test subject. A lucky, messy, glitchy test subject. We wanted to see what happens when a bottom-tier variable gets 'Protector' status. It’s been comedy gold."Ryan scanned the shifting text, his eyes widening. "Comedy gold? You’

The tavern’s silence was heavy enough to crush a man, but Ryan didn't care. He walked past the frozen patrons, his boots clacking against the wood like a funeral march. He slid into a booth, ignoring the way the air seemed to vibrate with sheer, unadulterated awe."Yo," Ryan called out to the barkeep, who was currently holding a mop in a state of catatonic shock. "You guys serving, or are you just here for the NPC roleplay? I need pancakes. Like, a stack the size of a small skyscraper, with extra syrup."The barkeep blinked, then dropped the mop. It hit the floor with a wet thud that echoed like a cannon shot. "The... the pancake. The circular emblem of the sun he brings to the dawn of battle."Ryan groaned, burying his face in his hands. "It’s breakfast, my guy. It’s not an emblem. It’s flour, eggs, and a lack of better options. Can we skip the lore and get to the batter?"A woman at the next table, wearing a bonnet that looked like it had been through a shredder, stood up. She start

The sky above the forest stuttered, flickering like a dying fluorescent bulb in a basement that hadn’t been cleaned since the dawn of time. Ryan stood in the middle of the path, watching the world glitch into jagged shards of static."Bruh, are you serious right now?" Ryan shouted at the flickering horizon. "I just wanted a quick nap, and now the whole render distance is acting goofy? This is literally the worst service ever."He turned to stomp back toward the inn, his dress shoes clicking sharply against the gravel. A hunched figure huddled in the shadows of an ancient oak, draped in rags that looked like they had been salvaged from a dumpster fire. As Ryan approached, the beggar didn't move, but a pair of eyes—eyes that shimmered with a sickly, subterranean violet—fixed onto him."You there," the beggar rasped, his voice sounding like gravel being crushed in a blender. "The one who walks between the light and the static. The King of Aethelgard is a fool, but I seek to know... what

The mountain air was thin and biting, but it wasn't the cold that made Ryan shiver. It was the fact that five men in heavy, ink-stained robes were currently shoving parchment and charcoal under his nose, their eyes wide with a terrifying, scholarly hunger."The trajectory, Hero!" the lead scholar gasped, his quill scratching furiously against a scroll. "When you propelled the mineral fragment at the stalactite, you didn't calculate for wind shear. How did you compensate for the lack of arc? Was it a sensory prediction, or did you manipulate the very air currents?"Ryan stared at the man, his face a mask of profound, hungry exhaustion. "Bruh, it was a rock. I threw it. Gravity did the rest. Can y’all like, chill with the vibe check? I’m literally starving."" 'Gravity did the rest,' " the scholar repeated, scribbling frantically. "A dismissal of physics! He treats the fundamental laws of nature as mere suggestions. Such hubris! Such... efficiency!""It’s not hubris, it’s just me being