The Titan Who Asked Me to Kill God

Chapter 8

The muzzle flash of the energy rifle was a searing strobe light in the decaying hallway, but to Cassian, time had become a viscous, slowing liquid. As the soldier’s finger squeezed the trigger, Cassian’s left palm didn't just glow; it roared. He slammed his fist into the air, not hitting the soldier, but punching the very concept of weight in front of him.

[LOCALIZED GRAVITY WELL INITIATED. MAGNITUDE: 10G.]

The air groaned. The high-velocity energy bolt didn't hit Cassian; it plummeted, dragged down by an invisible, titanic force, scorching a hole in the rotted floorboards inches from his feet. The soldier wasn't so lucky. The sudden, localized spike in gravity didn't just knock him down—it crushed him. His tactical armor shrieked as the servos buckled, slamming him into the floor with a bone-shattering thud. The floorboards beneath him disintegrated, and he tumbled into the crawlspace below like a discarded weight.

"Cassian, behind you!" Iris screamed, her voice barely audible over the sudden, rhythmic thrumming that began to vibrate through the entire house.

Two more soldiers rounded the corner, but they didn't fire. They stopped, their rifles lowering as they clutched their helmets. One of them began to stagger, his modulated voice replaced by a raw, human sob. "Maria? Where’s Maria? I was just... we were at the park. Why am I here?"

The other soldier didn't speak. He simply dropped his weapon and began to claw at his visor, his breathing coming in frantic, jagged gasps.

"What are they doing?" Cassian shouted, his hand still crackling with crimson energy.

"It’s not just them," Iris said, her eyes fixed on her laptop screen as they backed away toward the obsidian door. "Cassian, look at the sensor readings. There’s a wave—a massive, high-frequency ripple—spreading out from this location. It’s hitting the whole city."

[WARNING: MEMORY DOMAIN FRACTURE DETECTED.]

[TYPE: CHRONOLOGICAL OVERLAY. RADIUS: GLOBAL CASCADING.]

The house shuddered. The twilight gloom outside was replaced by a blinding, white static that seemed to eat the horizon. Cassian felt a sharp, icy needle slide into his brain. For a split second, he wasn't standing in a rotted house; he was sitting in a boardroom, a man in a sharp suit, discussing quarterly earnings he didn't understand. Then he was a child again, but the mother in his mind had a different face.

"Get out! We have to get out of the fold!" Cassian grabbed Iris’s hand, pulling her back through the obsidian doorway.

The transition was violent. Instead of the quiet, empty field of the Oakhaven outskirts, they emerged into a world of absolute pandemonium. The "ghost neighborhood" had collapsed, but the "real" world they had returned to was broken in a new, terrifying way.

The capital was in the grip of a waking nightmare. As they scrambled back to the grey SUV, Cassian saw a pile-up on the highway. Drivers had simply let go of their steering wheels, some wandering into traffic with expressions of profound, vacant horror. A man in a business suit sat on the hood of a smoking car, weeping and calling for a daughter who, according to the panicked woman standing next to him, had never existed.

"The Directorate’s dampeners must have failed when you hit that door," Iris said, her fingers flying across the keys as she accelerated away from the Oakhaven perimeter. "The memory of the 'previous' version of the city is bleeding into the current one. People are remembering lives they never lived—or lives that were erased."

"We need to find the source," Cassian said, his head throbbing. "The system is flagging a hospital. St. Jude’s. It says the 'fracture' is deepest there."

"I'm on it," Iris grunted, swerving around a bus that had drifted into a storefront. "But Cassian, look at the streets. This isn't just a few people. It’s everyone. The whole city is losing its grip on who they are."

The drive to the city center was a gauntlet of chaos. People were fighting in the streets—not out of malice, but out of a confused, territorial panic, claiming houses that weren't theirs based on memories that shouldn't exist. By the time they reached the hospital, the facility was a fortress of misery. Emergency lights strobed against the glass facade, and the sound of screaming was a constant, low-level drone.

They pushed through the crowded lobby, Cassian using the subtle weight of his gravity manipulation to part the sea of frantic people. His system interface was a chaotic mess of scrolling blue data, pointing him toward the psychiatric ward on the fourth floor.

"The dream," Cassian muttered, reading the system prompts. "They’re all talking about the same dream."

"A girl in a silver field?" Iris asked, looking up from her tablet. "I’m seeing it in the local social media feeds. Everyone who’s 'turning' is dreaming of a girl standing in a field of silver sand, holding a bell."

They reached the fourth floor. The air here was thick with the smell of antiseptic and a strange, floral scent—lavender. Cassian froze. It was the same smell from the Oakhaven house.

In a corner bed, surrounded by flickering monitors, sat an elderly woman. Her hair was a shock of white, and her eyes were cloudy with cataracts, but the moment Cassian stepped into the room, she jolted upright.

"Arthur?" she whispered, her voice a fragile thread.

Cassian stopped. "I'm... my name is Cassian."

"No," the woman said, a sudden, terrifying clarity filling her gaze. She reached out a withered hand, her fingers trembling as they brushed toward his face. "I know those eyes. You’re Arthur Ward. You went to the store. You said you’d be back for the anniversary. It was 1979, Arthur. Where have you been?"

[LOCALIZED ANOMALY DETECTED: CRITICAL MEMORY ANCHOR.]

[THREAT LEVEL: TERMINAL COLLAPSE.]

"She's not remembering a life," Iris whispered, her face pale. "She’s remembering you. The 1970s version of you."

"I don't know who Arthur is," Cassian said, his heart hammering. But as he looked at her, a jagged fragment of memory tore through his mind—a woman’s laugh, a white picket fence, a sense of belonging so intense it made his chest ache.

"Arthur, the sky is breaking again," the woman said, her voice rising in panic. "The silver sand... the girl... she’s ringing the bell! Can't you hear it?"

Suddenly, the woman’s face began to distort. It wasn't physical; it was as if her image was being viewed through a broken screen. Static flickered across her features. Her memories were collapsing, liquefying under the strain of the two conflicting realities.

[FRACTURE EXPANDING. MEMORY DOMAIN LOSS: 88%.]

[INITIATE REPAIR PROTOCOL? WARNING: RESTORATION WILL LOCK THE CURRENT DEPRECATED VERSION. STABILIZATION WILL PRESERVE THE BROKEN TRUTH.]

Cassian stared at the scrolling text. If he "repaired" her, the system would wipe the memory of "Arthur" to match the Directorate’s version of the world. She would be "sane," but the truth of his past would be gone forever. If he just stabilized the fracture, she would stay broken, but the memory would remain.

"Cassian, her vitals are bottoming out!" Iris yelled. "The shock is killing her!"

The woman gripped his arm, her strength surprising. "Don't let them take it, Arthur. Don't let them... prune... the garden..."

With a final, violent flicker of static, the woman’s eyes went blank. Her grip loosened. The monitors flatlined.

Cassian slammed his palm onto the bed rail, the crimson light of his symbol bleeding into the medical equipment.

"Stabilize!" he roared.

[STABILIZATION PROTOCOL INITIATED. FRACTURE CONTAINED.]

The wave of chaos in the room subsided. The static disappeared. The woman lay still—not dead, but in a deep, unresponsive coma. The "bleed" had stopped, but the damage to the city remained. Thousands of people were now walking around with two sets of memories, a permanent scar on the capital's psyche.

"You didn't fix her," Iris said softly, checking the woman’s pulse.

"I couldn't," Cassian said, his voice hollow. "If I fixed her, I’d be doing the Directorate’s job for them. I’d be erasing the truth."

Iris stood up, her face grim. "Cassian, while you were... doing that... I found a hidden file in the hospital’s secure server. It was encrypted with a key that shouldn't exist. It’s a record of a Titan. But not Nemeor."

She showed him the screen. It was an image of a colossal entity made of shimmering, translucent glass, its body filled with what looked like floating book pages.

"Mnemos," Iris said. "The Titan of Memory. The records say it was 'Pruned' in 1982. But look at the energy signatures from this hospital. They’re identical to Mnemos’s baseline. The Directorate didn't kill it. They turned it into a battery."

Before Cassian could respond, his phone chimed. It was a private, encrypted channel. No sender ID. No metadata. Just a single string of text.

Cassian pulled the phone out, his hand shaking.

“THE TITANS ARE NOT DYING BECAUSE SOMEONE IS HUNTING THEM. THEY ARE DYING BECAUSE SOMETHING HAS DECIDED THEY ARE NO LONGER NECESSARY.”

He looked at Iris, the weight of the message settling like lead in his stomach.

"Who sent that?" she asked.

"I don't know," Cassian said, staring at the coma-stricken woman who had called him by a name from 1979. "But Nemeor told me he was an architect. He told me they were the laws of the world. If someone decided the laws are no longer necessary..."

He looked out the window at the shattered capital, where the lights of the Directorate’s black helicopters were already beginning to sweep the streets.

"Then they’re not just ending the world," Cassian whispered. "They’re replacing it with something else."