The Titan Who Asked Me to Kill God

Chapter 6

The silence in the interrogation room was a physical weight, thick with the revelation Iris had just whispered into Cassian’s mind. Director Rian’s grey eyes were predatory, fixed on Cassian’s face as if trying to read the very thoughts Iris was transmitting.

"What’s wrong, Director?" Cassian asked, his voice a rasping challenge. "You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Or maybe you're just looking at one."

Before Rian could respond, the cool white light of the room flickered violently. A sharp, rhythmic chirping erupted from the consoles behind the one-way mirror.

"Cassian, now!" Iris’s voice cracked in his head, distorted by static. "I’m overloading the local suppression grid. Your wrist guard—it's going to blow!"

The device on Cassian’s left wrist suddenly shrieked, a high-pitched whine that set his teeth on edge. It didn’t just deactivate; it buckled. Blue sparks showered his lap as the internal dampener succumbed to the external hack. The oppressive fog that had muzzled the symbol on his palm vanished instantly. Heat—furious, incandescent heat—surged through his arm.

[SUPPRESSION TERMINATED. SYSTEM REBOOTING... 10%... 40%... 100%.]

[CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED: AXIOM DIRECTORATE CONTAINMENT. INITIATING ESCAPE PROTOCOL: KINETIC BURST.]

"Get down!" Cassian roared, though he wasn't sure if he was warning Rian or himself.

He didn't wait for the Director to move. He slammed his left palm onto the metal interrogation table. The crimson symbol flared with the intensity of a dying star. A shockwave of pure spatial force erupted from the point of contact. The heavy table didn't just move; it disintegrated into shrapnel, flying outward and smashing into the one-way mirror, which shattered into a million glittering diamonds.

Director Rian was thrown backward, his chair tumbling as he hit the far wall with a dull thud. Cassian didn't stick around to check his pulse. He leapt through the jagged frame of the shattered mirror into the observation room. Two technicians were scrambling to their feet, their eyes wide with terror.

"Sorry, guys, I'm checking out early," Cassian muttered. He didn't use the symbol; he just used his momentum, shoulder-checking the first man and sending him sprawling into a rack of servers.

"Cassian, turn left!" Iris commanded. "The main door is locked, but I’ve opened the ventilation access in the server room. Go, go, go!"

He sprinted. The facility was no longer a silent tomb; it was a hornet’s nest. Red emergency lights bathed the corridors in a bloody hue, and the klaxon's roar was a physical assault. He reached the server room just as the heavy blast doors began to hiss shut. He slid beneath them, the metal grazing his chest, and scrambled up a rack of blinking processors toward the open vent Iris had flagged.

The crawl was a frantic blur of dust and galvanized steel. He emerged ten minutes later in a maintenance garage on the facility's upper levels. Waiting there, behind the wheel of a nondescript grey SUV, was Iris. She looked frazzled, her hair a mess and her fingers dancing across a ruggedized laptop on the passenger seat.

"Get in! Move it!" she yelled, swinging the door open.

Cassian dived into the seat, and before he could even click his belt, Iris floored it. The tires shrieked against the polished concrete, and they roared up the exit ramp, smashing through a security gate that Iris had remotely shorted.

"How did you get here?" Cassian gasped, his chest heaving.

"I've been living in their firewalls for three hours," Iris said, her voice tight with adrenaline. She didn't look at him; her eyes were glued to the road as they swerved onto a rain-slicked highway. "I tracked the transport to this base. It’s an old Cold War bunker they retrofitted. Cassian, look at this."

She shoved a tablet into his hands while one-handing the steering wheel. On the screen was a dossier labeled PROJECT REWRITE: PHASE 4.

"I pulled this from their internal archive while I was waiting for you," she said. "It’s not just a cover-up, Cassian. They aren't just hiding the Titans. They’re managing 'versions' of the city."

Cassian scrolled through the files. His heart plummeted. There were maps—dozens of them—of the very city they were driving through. But they were all subtly different. Parks that didn't exist, subway lines that ran through solid rock in his memory, and entire residential districts that were marked as "Pruned."

"Pruned?" Cassian whispered.

"Deleted," Iris clarified, her voice grim. "Look at the population logs. Tens of thousands of people... just gone from the records in the last fifty years. Not dead. Just never existed."

[ALERT: FRAGMENTS OF ERASED REALITY DETECTED IN DATA STREAM. COMPATIBILITY: 94%.]

The system prompt flashed in Cassian's vision. He tapped an image file at the bottom of the dossier. It was a photograph, old and slightly sepia-toned. It showed a woman standing in front of a modest two-story house with a white picket fence. She was laughing, her hand resting on a mailbox.

The moment Cassian saw her face, his world tilted. A memory, sharp and jagged, pierced his mind. The smell of lavender. The sound of a humming lullaby. A hand brushing hair away from his forehead.

"Mom?" he whispered, the word feeling alien yet profoundly right.

But as soon as the word left his lips, the image on the tablet shimmered. The woman’s face blurred, the features melting away like wax in a fire. The memory in his head didn't just fade; it was ripped out. He felt the vacuum where the thought had been. He stared at the photo, and within seconds, he couldn't remember what she looked like. He only knew that something important had just been stolen from him again.

"What just happened?" Iris asked, glancing at him. "You went pale."

"I... I think I remembered someone," Cassian said, his voice trembling. "But the system... or reality itself... it took it back. Iris, we have to go to where this photo was taken."

"I already cross-referenced the coordinates," Iris said, her expression hardening. "It’s a place called Oakhaven. Or it was. It’s not on any modern GPS. It’s a 'dead zone' now—an empty lot according to the city council, but the Directorate has it flagged as a 'High-Probability Anchor Point'."

They drove in silence for an hour, leaving the neon glow of the city for the encroaching shadows of the outskirts. They reached a perimeter of chain-link fences and "No Trespassing" signs. Beyond the fence was nothing but a vast, flat expanse of overgrown weeds and cracked asphalt.

"This is it," Iris said, stopping the car. "The map says there should be three streets here. It’s just... empty."

Cassian stepped out of the car. The air here felt different. It was heavy, stagnant, as if time had stopped moving altogether. His left palm began to throb, not with the searing heat of a fight, but with a rhythmic, low-frequency pulse.

"It's not empty," Cassian said. "It’s just folded."

[BOUNDARY DETECTED. SPATIAL OVERLAY IDENTIFIED: 'OAKHAVEN SUBDIVISION'. ACCESSING HIDDEN LAYER...]

He walked toward the center of the empty field. As he moved, the symbol on his palm cast a long, crimson shadow across the weeds. He reached out into the empty air, and his hand didn't pass through. It met resistance—a shimmering, translucent veil that felt like cold silk.

"Iris, give me your hand," he commanded.

She took it, her fingers trembling. Cassian stepped forward, pushing against the veil. There was a sound like a heavy book being slammed shut, a pressurized thump that popped their ears.

The world shifted.

The empty field was gone. They were standing on a street—a real, physical street. But it was a nightmare of decay. The houses were Victorian-style, their wooden skeletons rotting, their windows like sightless eyes. The asphalt was choked with grey, leafless vines that looked like frozen lightning. There was no sun here, only a perpetual, twilight gloom.

"Oh god," Iris whispered, clutching his arm. "It’s a ghost street."

Cassian didn't answer. He was looking at the mailbox directly in front of them. It was rusted, leaning at a precarious angle, but the name on the side was still legible in faded black lettering.

WARD.

He walked toward the house. It was the one from the photo, but the white picket fence was now a jagged row of broken teeth. He reached the front door, his breath hitching in his throat.

Carved into the dark wood of the door, right above the handle, was a date.

OCTOBER 14, 1972.

Cassian stared at it, the blood draining from his face.

"Iris," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I was born in 2002."

"Cassian, look at the mailbox again," Iris said, her voice shaking.

He looked down. Inside the rusted box was a single, yellowed envelope. He pulled it out. It was addressed to Cassian Ward. The postmark was dated thirty years before his birth.

[HOST STATUS: CONFIRMED.]

[REALITY VERSION: DEPRECATED.]

[WARNING: YOU ARE STANDING IN THE FOUNDATION OF THE PREVIOUS WORLD.]

A floorboard creaked inside the house. It wasn't the sound of settling wood. It was a footstep.

Cassian looked up at the second-story window. For a split second, a silhouette stood there—a woman with no face, her hand pressed against the glass in a silent, desperate plea. Then, with a flicker of static, she was gone, leaving only the cold, dead silence of a reality that had been erased, but refused to die.