Chapter 10: The Starving Script
> "Some anomalies are born. Others are rewritten."
---
The morning after Ereze shattered Minho's faction, the forest felt wrong. Not in the way nightmares do, not with screams or flickers of red. It was wrong like a sentence missing its verb—a kind of emptiness that didn't just feel quiet, but unfinished.
The usual system messages—daily quests, warnings, updates—never came.
Just stillness.
Jiwoon sat on a moss-covered log, chewing a piece of stale bread we'd saved from the last floor.
"Is it just me," he said, glancing up, "or does the sky look... wrong?"
I followed his gaze.
The sky was too blue. Not the kind of blue you see on postcards, but a deep, ink-drenched hue that made the air feel heavier. There were no clouds. No birds. No wind. Even the leaves didn't rustle.
A pause settled between us, thick and watchful.
That's when the whisper came.
---
> [The Tower recognizes a Distortion.] An Unwritten has awakened. Initiating: Script Correction Protocol A new Floor Guardian is descending.
---
I froze. Floor Guardians weren't supposed to appear until Floor 10.
We were only on Floor 3.
"Everyone—get your gear. Move!" I barked, louder than I meant to.
Arien blinked. "What? What the hell is that?"
And then it started raining.
Not water.
Pages.
Charred, blood-stained, some with handwriting etched into the margins. Names. Descriptions. Dialogues.
Mine.
Jiwoon's.
Arien's.
Even Minho's, now crossed out.
It was raining the rejected drafts of our lives.
---
A tremor ran through the ground.
Not a quake. More like a... vibration. A crawling. A sense that something buried deep beneath the floorboards of the world was stirring.
We heard it: the dry, dragging grind of bones against stone.
The trees began to tilt away, as if fleeing whatever was approaching. Even the air recoiled.
Ereze stood near the treeline, still as a statue. Her hair clung to her face in damp strands, and her notebook was nothing but ashes now.
I approached her slowly.
"What is it?" I asked, my voice quiet, half afraid the answer would hear me.
Her eyes stayed locked on the mist building in the distance.
"The Tower's hunger," she said. "When you change the story, it doesn't forget. It sends its first draft to kill you."
"The first... draft?"
She pointed through the veil of rising fog.
And we saw it.
---
A man-shaped figure stumbled into view. But it wasn't a man.
It was pages. Thousands of floating, fluttering fragments spinning around a broken spine. Its chest was bound in binding thread. Its fingers were sharpened quills, dripping ink. Its face was a burnt manuscript. A single glowing eye flickered from the center of its torn cover.
The Guardian opened its mouth, and its voice wasn't one voice—it was hundreds.
Every narrator I'd ever heard. Every story I'd read aloud. Every plot twist and trope and tragedy, recited at once, broken and overlapping:
> "The Reader must obey. The Unwritten must return to silence."
---
> [Floor Guardian (Corrupted Draft) Appeared] Level: ??? Condition: Hunger Level – MAX Objective: Devour the Divergent Storyline Weakness: UNKNOWN
---
The ground around us blackened.
Every tree it passed curled in on itself, bark crumbling like paper left in the sun. Roots bled ink. Even the sky above it seemed to blur, as if the Guardian's presence distorted the rules of light itself.
Arien stepped back, panic on her face. "We can't fight that. We don't even know what it is."
"No," Ereze said.
She turned to me.
"But he can."
Me.
I stared at her. "Why me?"
She looked at me with an intensity that made the air crackle.
"Because you're the Tower's mistake. The first draft it abandoned. The protagonist who failed."
My heart dropped.
The dreams.
The constant feeling of deja vu.
Remembering parts of the Tower no one else did.
It wasn't luck.
It was memory.
The memory of being a failed version of the story.
---
Pain exploded in my hand.
I gasped and looked down.
Letters burned across my skin like a brand. A sentence forming in fire and ink:
> "Take it back."
Then, from nothing, a quill appeared in my hand.
Sleek. Black. Alive.
> [You've obtained: The Forgotten Pen] Description: The right to overwrite your own fate. Once per floor.
Ereze's voice was quiet now. "It only works if you believe the rewrite is stronger than the original."
"And if it isn't?"
"Then it eats you."
The Guardian moved.
It didn't walk.
It rewrote space.
One second it was fifty feet away.
The next, it was two.
Its fingers reached out, ink trailing like smoke.
I gripped the Pen and wrote.
In the air.
A sentence.
> "The Guardian faltered, tripped by the weight of its own forgotten lore."
Reality paused.
A glitch in the Tower. A crack in the page.
The Guardian stumbled.
And screamed.
Not in pain. In rage.
The Tower recoiled.
And I kept writing.
---
> "The protagonist remembered every draft. And with each memory, the Pen grew stronger."
The Pen pulsed in my hand.
Lightless. Infinite.
Jiwoon cried out from behind. "It's coming again!"
The Guardian recovered, charging forward.
I raised the Pen.
And this time, I didn't write a defense.
I wrote truth.
> "This story never needed a perfect hero. It needed a stubborn one."
My body surged with heat.
Not fire.
Conviction.
I lunged.
Not as a warrior.
Not as a chosen one.
As a writer reclaiming his narrative.
The Pen sliced through the Guardian's chest. Not cutting paper or ink—cutting meaning.
Pages burst from the wound, spiraling into the air, screaming lines of aborted dialogue and broken arcs.
It clawed at me, muttering:
> "Return to the outline..."
> "Conform to your trope..."
> "You are not allowed..."
I stabbed again.
And again.
With each blow, a sentence.
A rejection.
A defiance.
> "No fate but the one I choose." "No script but the one I write." "No god but the pen."
And finally—
> "The Guardian fell, not with a roar, but a whimper. Unwritten. Unremembered. Undone."
---
The figure collapsed.
The fog lifted.
And the pages scattered like dust.
Jiwoon stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
Arien whispered, "What... are you?"
I dropped the Pen.
It disappeared into light.
Ereze walked to my side.
"You're not just a reader anymore," she said. "You're a Rewriter."
I looked at the ashes of the Guardian and realized...
The Tower had changed.
It knew we were anomalies now.
And it would come again.
Not to test us.
But to erase us.
I clenched my fist.
Let it come.
---
To be continued...