The screech rose again—closer this time. It echoed in strange ways, folding over itself like a sound devouring its own tail.
We pressed ourselves against the wall as the hallway warped.
Metal groaned. Lights above flickered into black. The texture of the floor began to shift beneath our boots—no longer smooth concrete, but something fibrous and damp, like we were walking on overgrown muscle. Veins bulged beneath it.
"This section's corrupted," Ren muttered. "It's reacting to your presence."
"Nice to know I'm leaving a mark."
We both knew it wasn't a joke.
From the far end of the corridor, something clicked.
Once.
Twice.
Then again.
Like bones snapping into place. Followed by the slither of something too heavy, too wet, dragging itself along walls that now pulsed like a throat.
A light flared in the ceiling.
Just one.
For a moment, we saw it.
The creature wasn't running.
It was crawling.
Its limbs were inverted, elbows bending the wrong way. Its torso elongated unnaturally with every motion. Its head had no eyes—just a cavernous mouth that opened from scalp to chin, ringed in bone. The inside of its mouth wasn't a tongue or throat.
It was a screen.
A flickering one.
And on it, my face.
Static-glitched, blood-slicked, grinning.
"NARRATIVE PREDATOR. INSTABILITY CLASS: OMEGA."
"INITIATING CLEANSE OF UNRESOLVED CHARACTER DATA."
I felt my breath hitch.
It wasn't hunting us.
It was hunting me.
Ren grabbed my shoulder. "We can't fight it—not yet."
We ran.
The corridors blurred into a fever dream.
Walls shifted, looped, dissolved and rebuilt themselves. Doors blinked in and out of existence. At some point, gravity stopped obeying rules—Ren and I found ourselves scrambling along a corridor sideways, then upside down, feet hammering ceiling tiles that gave like thin skin.
Behind us, the mouth-thing howled again.
And the screen inside it laughed.
My laugh.
Ren pulled me into an alcove as the hall split open—literally split, as if cleaved by a surgical knife. One side remained stable, steel and dust. The other churned into black fog, glitching in and out of color. Something in that fog whispered in loops, repeating half-sentences over and over.
"Don't look at it," Ren said sharply.
Too late.
I glanced.
And for one terrible second, I saw dozens of me.
Dead.
Dying.
Screaming.
Some had been torn apart. Some had done it to themselves. Some had become things not meant to exist.
And all of them stared back.
"These are your discarded versions," the whisper said.
"Fragments the System trimmed to keep you coherent."
Ren yanked me backward as the fog reached for my face with smoky hands.
We collapsed through a maintenance hatch that hadn't been there a moment ago. The door slammed shut behind us—sealed with a hiss.
The silence was immediate.
A large chamber stretched out before us. Unlike the other parts of the house, this place felt… sterile. Clean. Almost surgical.
White floors. Fluorescent lights. Stainless steel walls.
Rows of upright pods lined the walls, each filled with a dark fluid. Figures floated inside them—unmoving. Human-shaped.
Too human.
I stepped forward.
Inside the nearest pod, I saw Ren.
Eyes closed. Skin pale. Suspended in place like a puppet between uses.
Then the next.
Me.
Then another.
Ren again.
I moved down the row in silence.
Ren stared in horror. "This is… this is where it pulls from. The character banks."
I swallowed. "Backups."
He nodded. "Every loop we've run. Every death. Every rewrite."
"This place… It isn't a house. It's a factory."
"CORRECTION: ARCHITECTURE IS METAPHOR."
"NARRATIVE SYSTEM IS FUNCTIONALLY A LIVE-SIMULATION ENGINE."
The voice didn't come from overhead this time.
It came from inside me.
The coin in my hand was glowing faintly now—warm against my palm. When I looked at it, I saw faint threads of light branching from its center. They reached into the pods. Into the walls. Into Ren.
And into me.
Ren noticed. "You're syncing with it. The fragment's rewriting you."
"No," I said slowly. "It's letting me see."
I held the coin up to one of the pods. A surge of data poured into my mind.
Cycle 34: I died to save someone who later betrayed the group.
Cycle 48: I killed a monster using a child as bait. Regretted it. Regretted surviving.
Cycle 12: Ren and I made it to the final room. He died protecting me. I never forgave myself.
Each cycle ended with the same note:
"ROLE: UNDEFINED. POTENTIAL: UNSTABLE."
I stepped back, breath shallow.
"I've never passed. Not once."
Ren rested a hand on my shoulder. "Neither have I. That's the point. The story isn't meant to let us win."
"Then what does it want?"
"To keep going. To keep consuming. It's an engine fed by trauma and decision-making."
I looked at the pods. "Then we shut it down."
The screen in the center of the room blinked on.
No interface. No buttons.
Just a single command line.
> Override_Sequence=Initiate? [Y/N]
Ren turned to me. "This could corrupt everything."
"Or free it."
I reached toward the screen.
The coin burned against my palm.
I pressed Y.
"SEQUENCE INITIATED. STABILITY FAILURE IMMINENT."
"RELEASING CLASS-OMEGA ENTITIES FOR FINAL INTERVENTION."
The wall behind us ripped open.
The mouth-thing slithered through, dragging with it the threads of dozens of stories—shredded dialogue boxes, broken plot outlines, bleeding narrative tags that hung from its claws like dying words.
But this time, I didn't run.
I stepped toward it.
And held up the coin.
The creature shrieked—pulling back like the light was fire. For the first time, it looked afraid.
"Not this time," I whispered. "This isn't your loop anymore."