"Was this path always like this?" Sera asked, stopping abruptly.
I stopped too. The dirt trail we had followed from the ghost town now forked in an impossible way. To the right, a scorched forest I didn't remember. To the left, a cave I was sure I had sealed off days ago.
"No," I replied. "This isn't part of the script."
Leaves didn't crunch under our steps. The wind felt cut, like sound itself was being edited in real time. And the shadows… the shadows were wrong. Sera's moved with a slight delay, as if it no longer wanted to follow her.
"Ryouhei," she whispered, tightening her grip on her staff. "Something's watching us. Not from the woods... but from the air."
I looked up. The moons were still. Too still. And for the first time since I came to Eclipsia, they didn't cast any shadows.
"He's already here," I muttered, as the ability I had stopped using suddenly activated without my consent.
A vision invaded me:
Me, kneeling. Sera, eyeless. A figure with no outline, just a void where light refused to enter. The voice: "Do not resist. Correction is inevitable."
I cut the vision with a strangled breath.
"Don't let him in, Sera. Don't think of him. Don't name him. Just act like... you still have free will."
She looked at me with genuine terror. Not the kind you feel for monsters, but the kind you feel at the thought of ceasing to be yourself.
"What do we do?"
"We play his game," I said, taking her hand. "But by our rules."
---
The scorched forest was a trap, we knew that. But the cave... the cave had changed. Its walls now bore inscriptions—choices we never made, words we had spoken in alternate futures, moments we had avoided... now staring at us like open wounds.
One inscription read: "Sera accepts the pact and betrays Ryouhei." Another: "Ryouhei chooses to save the village and dies alone."
"I didn't do that," she whispered.
"But you could have," I answered.
"And you?"
"I didn't die... yet."
The echo inside the cave returned our own voices to us, but altered. With different tones. Rewritten words. Like the world was showing us discarded drafts of our story.
And in the middle of the passage, a figure appeared.
It had no face. No shadow. But it cast the absence of both.
"Don't look at it," I said.
But Sera already had. She staggered back, as if gravity had shifted for her alone.
I attacked. A makeshift trap of gunpowder and runes.
Nothing.
The Shadowless Man didn't fight back. He didn't even react. He simply watched us without existing.
And then, he vanished.
Leaving behind a single word carved into the stone:
> "Incorrect version."
---
We left the cave in silence. The trees outside were no longer scorched. Everything was back to how it had been... but we knew it wasn't the same.
"He's testing us," Sera murmured.
"No. He's editing us," I corrected.
And as she clutched her arm, still trembling from an unchosen path, I understood that the true enemy didn't come from hell, or the system, or chance.
He came from the untold versions of ourselves.