The closer they drew to the engine’s heart, the less the world resembled anything Jason could call reality.The scaffolding warped into spirals, beams curling back upon themselves, ladders twisting into Möbius strips. Light no longer traveled in straight lines—it bent, refracted, broke apart into prisms that floated like ash.Jason gritted his teeth as his boots struck a stair that shouldn’t have existed yet carried him upward. “Stay focused. Don’t look too long at what doesn’t make sense.”Callen stumbled behind him, sweat streaming down his pale face. “You’re asking me to ignore the fact we’re walking through equations that shouldn’t solve.”“Then treat it like a broken puzzle,” Jason snapped. “Step. Breathe. Keep moving.”Yara brought up the rear, blades drawn, eyes locked on every flickering shadow. “If either of you start seeing cracks in the air whispering your name, say it out loud. I’ll know if you’re lying.”Jason almost smiled at that. Almost.***They emerged into a chamber

The plaza was a wound cut open by silence.Hundreds of eyes darted between Jason’s team and the Raven lieutenant, the air heavy with the weight of a city’s future condensed into one standoff. Smoke curled from broken stone, from shattered spire, from the wreck of what once held the city together. The lieutenant’s scorched armor gleamed faintly in the firelight as he raised a broken blade, pointing it at Jason like a curse.“There!” his voice cracked raw with fury, “These traitors ended the Ravens’ reign. They killed your brothers and sisters. They destroyed the engine that could have lifted us above the chains of ruin!”A surge of voices followed him—rage, grief, the desperate clinging of those who needed an enemy more than truth.Jason’s pulse pounded, but his stance held steady. He kept his rifle level but unfired. “The engine wasn’t salvation. It was the end of everything. You felt it—every collapse, every tear in the sky. Do you think the mastermind cared for you? He used you, all

The plaza didn’t sleep that night. Not because of hunger, or cold, or the fear of Ravens regrouping. It was the air. It carried that rhythm still—the faint rise and fall, as though somewhere deep in the bones of the city, the breath of another world hadn’t fully exhaled.Jason stayed awake with it. He stood at the perimeter wall, watching the broken skyline. Each flicker of fractured light made him feel as though he were being watched back.By dawn, he didn’t need Callen’s warning to know something new had stirred.The hum was different. Not the ocean breath they’d faced before. This was thinner, sharper. Almost like the ticking of glass teeth.And it was close.***They found the anomaly at the edge of the plaza itself. No need to scour half the district this time. It had already come to them.Where a collapsed clocktower once sprawled in rubble, the stones had shifted. Not by hands. Not by time. They had simply… rearranged themselves. As though something remembered their shape diffe

They thought the splice in the plaza was singular. A wound. A mistake.By dawn, they knew better.Jason stood at the overlook, and across the districts below, a dozen new fractures burned. Each one shimmered like heat over stone, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t theirs. Whole streets warped in and out of shape—sometimes rubble, sometimes restored. Survivors screamed as houses folded into copies of themselves, only to split apart again.Callen’s voice rasped over comms, ragged and thin. “It’s not localized anymore. Whatever fed that first splice—it spread. Like infection.”Yara’s blade hissed as it left its sheath. “Then we cut it out.”Jason didn’t answer right away. He watched as one of the new splices tore through a district square. On one side of it, fighters scavenged the ruins. On the other, echoes of their younger selves laughed in markets that hadn’t existed in years. One scavenger tried to step through—only for his body to flicker, and two versions of him fell at o

The fires didn’t burn out.They were swallowed.By morning, the river sector was gone. Not collapsed. Not bombed. Gone. The bridges ended in nothing but a haze of silver light, like the whole district had been folded out of existence.Jason stood with Yara and Callen on the cracked embankment, staring at the void where warehouses, homes, and thousands of lives had been. In its place, faint shapes shimmered—people walking streets that no longer existed, their movements repeating like actors on broken reels.Callen’s voice was hoarse. “It’s not destruction. It’s replacement. They’ve started rewriting land the way they rewrite people.”Yara spat into the dust. “Then they’re not taking districts. They’re taking reality.”Jason didn’t answer. He kept watching the false riverfront shimmer and breathe, as if daring him to step in and admit that this—this reflection—was now the truth.Behind them, soldiers whispered in disbelief. Some swore they saw family members waving from the mirage. Othe