> "The first city is always a tutorial. But tutorials sometimes bite back."
—Jiwoon, breathless
---
The air still vibrated with the echo of Kairoz's snap.
But even before the sound faded, something else began.
The city groaned.
No—not with metal or stone. It groaned with memory.
The cobblestones beneath us flexed slightly, like skin tensing before a scream. Buildings cracked—not from structural collapse, but like minds fracturing under pressure. Along every fracture, thick black lines oozed downward.
Not blood.
Ink.
And it wasn't random.
It wrote.
Letters dripped like they'd been imprisoned too long, finally escaping the cracks of forgotten architecture.
Sentences slithered from fountains. Words blinked in and out of shop signs. Ancient script poured down walls in language older than the interface.
Ereze's sword hand clenched tight. "What the hell is happening?"
Jiwoon didn't answer.
He was looking up at the highest tower.
Where, just for a second, the city itself blinked.
That was when we heard it.
A voice—not spoken, but written across the plaza.
> [YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO STAY.]
It didn't feel like a command.
It felt like a regret.
And then we realized:
This wasn't the city kicking us out.
This was the city trying to forget us.
---
We ran.
Because the countdown had started.
Script pulsed beneath our feet with each step. A wrong footfall triggered a sentence fragment. An alleyway bent sideways, looping us back with a whisper:
> [Incorrect input. Try again.]
Everything we touched was becoming reactive. The entire floor—this supposed "tutorial"—was unraveling, not due to failure, but because it couldn't process us anymore.
I had rewritten a scene before its anchor was placed.
The story couldn't hold it.
The path we took through the collapsing city felt less like navigation and more like dodging editorial notes coming to life.
Ereze brushed against a wall—text flared up her arm:
> [CHARACTER OUT OF PLACE.]
She hissed and yanked away.
Jiwoon kicked a crumbling door open. "Even the code hates us now."
"Not hate," I muttered. "It's fear."
---
We reached the plaza where the Guardian once stood. Only the crater remained now, but it was changing too—becoming something else.
Language spun where rubble should be.
A spiral of phrases formed midair—narrative syntax collapsing in on itself.
Then, a burst of clarity as the words fused into one coherent message:
> [EXTRA CHARACTERS DETECTED. DESTINATION: NEXT SCENE.]
A portal ignited from the crater's center.
No swirling light or gleaming runes.
Just pure white.
Unmarked.
Unnatural.
Unproofed.
Pages fluttered around the rim—pages from this very story, torn loose and unfinished. They floated like feathers trying to flee a fire.
"System override," Ereze said grimly. "It's deleting the scene before we can break anything else."
Jiwoon spat. "I hate when games do this. Skipping loot, skipping context. Just shove us forward like impatient hands turning a bad chapter."
But I wasn't listening.
Because I saw something hovering just above the portal's threshold.
My name.
Not typed in neat system font.
Handwritten.
Angled. Messy. Almost desperate.
As if someone had scribbled it at the last possible second to make sure I'd be dragged along.
No author signs a name like that by mistake.
---
"Let's go," I said.
Ereze nodded tightly and adjusted her grip on her sword. Jiwoon rolled his shoulders, then cracked his neck twice.
We didn't count down.
We jumped together.
---
The portal didn't feel like a doorway.
It felt like being yanked from a sentence with the period still missing.
I could feel the narrative strain as it tore me loose.
For a moment, my role flickered.
I wasn't just a Reader.
I was the edit itself.
A change forced into a story not yet ready to change.
---
In that split second between locations, between pages—
I saw two things:
1. The next floor.
A desert stretching farther than thought could reach.
Monoliths stood like forgotten punctuation marks on ancient parchment.
And above them all: a black sun, hanging motionless in the sky like a cosmic typo that refused to finish rising.
2. A figure.
Far beyond the desert, seated on a throne made of broken book spines.
Another Reader.
Watching.
Smiling.
Holding a book.
My book.
With my name across the cover.
And a pen in hand, still wet with ink.
---
We landed hard.
Wind. Grass. Warm. Everything real again.
But something had changed.
Ereze looked at me. "Who was that? In the sky."
Jiwoon blinked sand from his eyes. "This is not what heard from system?"
I didn't answer.
Because I finally understood—
This wasn't just about the story I was in.
This was about the story they were writing me into.
And I was no longer the only reader here.
---
End of Floor Four: The City of Beginning