The ground changed before the air did.

  Forge felt it beneath his boots first—a subtle vibration, like breath moving through stone. The grass didn’t bend. It pulsed. A slow rhythm, syncing with something deeper than motion. Something watching.

  Ash stepped beside him, then stopped. His eyes flickered in that way that wasn’t blinking—more like the system couldn’t decide which model to render.

  “This place…” Ash’s voice drifted. “It remembers pain.”

  His tone wasn’t scared. It was familiar.

  Karna said nothing. Her weapon hand was twitching. The back of her neck, tight. Soldier tension, but hollow. She didn’t look afraid. She looked like she’d been here before in a dream she wasn’t supposed to remember.

  Forge stepped again. The grass browned, then blinked green. Off to the left, a tree bloomed inward and died backward. Another split open, revealing bark shaped like a hammer. It was his—but older. Worn.

  He blinked. It was gone.

  Ash dropped.

  No warning. No cry. Just a full collapse. His knees hit first, then his elbows, then his face, pressed against soil that twitched under him like code trying to hold shape.

  Forge dropped beside him.

  “Ash—Ash, stay with me—”

  The boy’s eyes opened, wrong. Reflective. Mirrors, not irises. They flickered—frames of people. None of them him. All of them familiar.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “Too loud,” he whispered. “I can feel what this place is trying not to say.”

  The terrain pulsed. Like a breath held too long. Then it opened.

  No wind. No teleport effect. Just a fault-line in the air where the Wilds tore themselves apart—and something stepped through.

  The glitchbeast didn’t walk. It declared. Limbs that flickered in and out of format. Skin made of broken UI and bloodcode. Its face wasn’t a face. It was a loop of static and an almost-smile, shaking inside a corrupted memory template.

  Karna drew her blade and stepped into stance. The blade glitched, shuddered, stayed. She didn’t falter.

  Ash curled into himself, twitching. Static licked around his shoulders like a fever.

  The beast moved.

  Forge didn’t think. He moved like the Wilds already knew what he’d do.

  The hammer met it mid-leap. The sound it made wasn’t impact—it was echo. A bell struck underwater. A funeral tone for something that hadn’t died right.

  The beast staggered, flickered, split.

  Three forms: one wore Ash’s face. One wore Forge’s. The last was a child with no eyes, mouth stitched in raw code.

  The world pulsed—then realigned.

  And for a second… Forge was watching from behind his own face.

  He didn’t feel the hammer anymore. He saw it.

  He watched himself swing—from the eyes of the glitchbeast wearing his skin.

  The strike landed. He felt the pain from the wrong side.

  Then he snapped back, gasping, as if memory itself rejected the perspective.

  Karna moved.

  Her blade came down in silence—and passed clean through the beast.

  Not blood. Not armor.

  A tree behind it screamed.

  Its bark split open and bled lines of script: looping logs, rejected dialogue, a dev’s test string from years ago. The air flickered. A child’s laughter echoed once, then went still. Karna didn’t flinch.

  But her hand trembled.

  The glitchbeast tried to lunge again.

  Forge met it with the hammer—not with rage, but with grief. Not to kill. To end what couldn’t heal.

  He swung.

  The hammer came down like a ritual finishing stroke.

  The world cracked. The Wilds recoiled. The glitchbeast unraveled mid-motion, mid-scream.

  Not deleted. Released.

  It fell into code ash.

  Ash coughed. The glitch flickers around him dimmed.

  Forge stepped forward. Something glowed in the ruin.

  A bone.

  Darkened. Twisted. Still warm. Not loot. Not reward.

  Memory.

  He picked it up. It pulsed in his palm.

  A flicker. Karna, screaming. Ash, younger, hiding in a server hallway.

  Then a moment he couldn’t place. A child laughing. A flower offered. His hands taking it. He didn’t know when it happened. He didn’t know if it happened.

  But he missed it.

  The bone whispered through feeling, not sound:

  You were real there.

  He didn’t breathe. He didn’t need to.

  Karna stood still, watching the terrain reset around them—slow, cautious, like the Wilds were considering their next move.

  Ash was breathing again. Too fast, but steady.

  Forge closed his hand around the bone.

  The trees didn’t lean. They listened.

  And somewhere beneath the roots, the Wilds asked—not aloud, not in words:

  What will you do with what you’ve kept?