The device didn't just explode—it unfolded reality.
One moment, they were standing on a quiet city street, surrounded by the mundane: flickering lamplight, the distant blare of sirens, the rush of adrenaline. The next?
There was nothing.
No sound. No weight. No breath. For a moment, Tobias couldn't even remember who he was. Just a void. Not black, not white. Just... absence.
Then existence snapped back like a rubber band.
It hit them hard. Each one landed roughly on the moss-covered ground of a forest that smelled too clean, too sweet. The sky above them pulsed with soft shades of purple and blue, as if it couldn't decide what time of day it was. There was no sun. Just a long, glowing curve stretching across the horizon like a half-buried ring light.
Zik groaned, sitting up and clutching his chest. "I—I think we just died. Like for real."
Aiden was on his knees, gagging. "No… we didn't. But I felt it too. Like… we stopped existing for a second. I forgot what breathing was."
Jack stood shakily, eyes darting. "Where the hell are we?"
Nobody could answer that.
The trees were the right shape—but wrong in color. Gray bark with a reddish shimmer. The leaves too thin, almost transparent. Everything felt like it had just missed being real. Close—but off.
They wandered through the warped forest for hours. The silence was heavier than they expected—no birds, no insects. Only the distant rustle of wind that sounded like it was whispering in reverse.
Eventually, their muscles screamed. The hunger hit. The fear followed.
Then—just as their morale was cracking—they saw him.
Slumped against a twisted tree, the man from earlier looked nearly unrecognizable. His hoodie was shredded, his jeans caked in dust and strange pollen. His face had grown a patchy beard, jaw thinner, eyes sunken—but alert.
He looked up, blinking as if they were hallucinations.
"You're… here." His voice cracked like dry wood. "It brought you too."
Zik stepped forward, heart pounding. "What is this place? What happened to you?"
The man tried to rise but winced, clutching his ribs. "How long has it been? Since the alley… since I used the Quantum unstable?"
"The what?" Tobias asked, stepping closer. "That silver device?"
The man's face brightened for a fleeting moment. "You have it?"
They exchanged looks.
"No," Aiden said carefully. "You dropped it. It was pulsing. And then we… ended up here."
The man's hopeful smile cracked into something hollow. His eyes lost focus, and for a moment, he looked like someone who'd already lost.
"It stayed behind…" he whispered. "Then the tether's gone. No way to recalibrate. We're stuck."
Jack leaned in, cautious. "Hey, hey. What do you mean stuck? What is this place?"
The man looked up, his gaze glassy but intense.
"It's like our world. But it's not. We're between… timelines, between quantum locks. This isn't another world—it's a forgotten version of ours. One that shouldn't be."
Zik's stomach dropped.
"And you're telling me," Tobias said slowly, "that we're in the equivalent of… a deleted save file of reality?"
The man's laugh was short and bitter. "Welcome to the ghost layer. And if we don't find a way out…"
He didn't finish.
He didn't need to.
They could already feel it. The trees too still. The sky too quiet. Their bodies… lighter. Not in a good way. As if the world wasn't finished remembering them.
And in the man's tired, haunted eyes—they saw something worse than confusion or panic.
They saw regret.
Whatever brought them here—it had gone wrong.
And now?
It was up to them to fix it… or fade from the memory of the universe altogether.
Everything was falling apart.
Voices rose. Branches snapped under pacing feet. Zik's hand tightened on the man's collar, lifting him just enough to keep him from slumping completely. His eyes—sunken, rimmed red, beard grown wild—blinked slowly, like every second took effort.
"Where did you get it?" Zik hissed. "That device. What the hell did you do?"
The man didn't struggle. He just breathed shallowly and said, "I didn't mean for this…"
Tobias stepped forward. "Talk. Now."
The man coughed, dry and weak. "I was… a janitor. Just a janitor. Worked in a big fancy lab building downtown. Smart people came in every day with white coats and quiet voices. I cleaned the floors. Took out the trash. Listened."
He closed his eyes for a moment, like the memory hurt. "My kid… my son got sick. Real sick. I thought insurance would help, but they didn't. They said no coverage. Said the treatment was 'experimental.' That it was too expensive, too new."
Aiden's jaw clenched.
"I was desperate," the man went on. "I used to empty the tech labs late at night. I overheard them talking about that thing—the device. Dimensional distortion, I think they called it. Sounded like it could… bend space. Make shortcuts."
He met Zik's gaze. "I thought if I could figure it out, I could get in and out of a bank. Just one job. Just enough money for treatment."
Zik's grip loosened. The man dropped to the dirt.
"So you're not a villain," Jack muttered. "You're just a janitor who made a bunch of really dumb calls."
The man gave a crooked, bitter smile. "Story of my life."
Everyone fell quiet. Even Thor.
Aiden broke the silence. "Insurance companies really are the villain half the time, huh?"
Zik glanced at him, surprised.
"I mean it," Aiden continued. "People don't just wake up and say, 'I think I'll break reality today.' They're pushed. Bit by bit. Until they crack."
Nobody answered, but they all knew he was right.
Around them, the world still shimmered strangely. Trees looked almost normal—but their leaves bent the wrong way. The sky was too smooth. Time itself felt… jittery, like the air was skipping frames.
And the man—this broken, tired man—looked up with wide eyes.
"So! you didn't bring the device with you, did you?"
Everyone froze.
Zik's mouth went dry. "No. Why?"
The man's expression twisted into something between panic and grief. "Because if it's out there… and still on… this place isn't done shifting."
A low rumble trembled beneath their feet.
And in that moment, no one had time to ask what he meant—because the forest began to change.
The air cracked like broken film, looping fragments of sound and thought in the windless silence.
"Where's the device?" Aiden asked, voice lower than usual, his gaze darting between the glimmering tree trunks that bent the light all wrong.
"Yeah," Jack added, turning in place like a compass without north. "Did it blow up? Get vaporized? Or is it still out there… somewhere?"
No one answered immediately.
"Guys…" Thor finally said, voice just a bit shaky, "Do any of you remember how we even got to the clearing where that guy was? Like… clearly?"
Zik's brow tightened. "We were following—wait…"
Silence. They all stood there, searching the fog of their own minds.
Aiden cursed softly under his breath. "I remember running… but the details? They're just… gone."
"I think," the nameless kid said quietly, "we're forgetting things."
And that's when the man—hollow-eyed, still curled against a tree like a dying animal—finally spoke again.
"It comes in pieces," he murmured. "Your memories. They come… slowly."
Everyone turned to him.
Zik's eyes narrowed. Then, without hesitation, he opened his Hero System.
It flickered.
The interface loaded… lagging. Stuttering like a signal barely reaching from another world.
But there was a message.
> Uploading Character Data… Please wait.
"What the…" Zik's voice dried out.
He stared at the message, and then the realization slammed into him like a storm tide.
"We're not there yet," he whispered.
Everyone looked at him.
"We're still teleporting."
"What?" Tobias blinked. "What do you mean—"
Zik pointed at the trees, the sky, the ground that pulsed faintly underfoot.
"This… all of this… it's a halfway place. The loading screen. The buffering zone. We haven't fully arrived wherever the device was sending us. We're lagging, guys."
Jack looked down at his hand like it might be dissolving. "We're stuck in a… download?"
"More like the world is downloading us," Zik replied grimly.
And just as the words left his mouth—the man vanished.
Like a poorly rendered shadow wiped from the screen. No light show. No noise. He was just gone.
Zik took a step back. "He must've… finished loading. He's arrived."
"But he was injured!" Aiden snapped. "We didn't even ask him how long this takes! Or what's on the other side!"
Zik's eyes scanned the shimmering woods again, pupils narrowing. "And he looked like he'd been through hell. That means something's waiting. Something bad."
"We missed our chance," Tobias muttered.
"We need to hide," Zik said, pulling his cloak tighter. "Whatever's out there… it broke him."
Above them, the not-sky rippled like a sheet of metal. And the world around them twisted just slightly… like something breathing in the dark.
The loading wasn't done.
And they were still inside it.
The silence that followed the man's disappearance was thick and disorienting. No one dared to speak. Even the wind had gone still, like the forest itself was waiting.
Zik's words still hovered in the back of everyone's mind:
"He looked injured… there's something dangerous here. And we missed the chance to ask what it was."
They didn't wait.
"Hide," Aiden said, his voice cutting through the unease like a blade.
They stumbled into motion—Tobias took the lead, eyes scanning the twisted trees, Jack helping Thor navigate the uneven ground, and the nameless kid following in eerie silence. The woods bent around them like something half-dreamed, wrong in its proportions—trees too narrow, roots too wide, shadows that seemed to bend toward sound.
Then they found the cave.
It wasn't marked or obvious, but somehow, they all agreed on it at once. Dug low into a slope, surrounded by creeping roots like bone fingers, it was dry and cold, and—more importantly—quiet.
They crouched inside. Breathed. Waited.
No one spoke until their heartbeats settled.
"He didn't vanish," Jack murmured. "He was pulled. Like a rope went taut and snapped."
"Because he was fully synced," Zik said, eyes flicking to the strange notification still pulsing inside his vision:
Character Upload: 76%… Incomplete.
"We're not all here yet," Aiden said, brows tight. "No wonder we feel off."
"And this place…" Tobias looked around. "It doesn't feel… alive."
It didn't.
The forest outside was still. No birds. No bugs. Just the sound of distant groaning wood and breath that echoed too long.
Jack sighed and sat back. "We need to remember. Pull ourselves together."
So they did.
At first it was shallow memories. Little things. Zik talking about missing his bed, Thor making fun of the pizza, Tobias remembering the first day of training, Aiden muttering something about a scarf he lost.
Slowly, the memories trickled in. Heavier ones. Real ones. The kind that anchored them.
Upload: 84%… 89%… 91%
That's when they heard the sound.
Scratch. Snap. Rustle.
Tobias tensed.
"Something's out there," he said.
Zik crept toward the mouth of the cave and peeked through the vines.
Movement.
They were small. No taller than a child, with wiry limbs, hunched backs, and faces that were too still. Green skin, dull eyes, jagged claws dragging across stone. Their movements were aimless, shambling in a daze—like broken toys, wandering.
"Goblins…" Zik whispered.
"Like… fantasy ones?" Aiden asked, peering over his shoulder.
"Sort of," Jack said. "But older. Like they've been here forever."
Forgotten things.
Creatures lost in the folds of time. Left behind in a limbo nobody returned from. Wandering without purpose—until now.
One of them froze.
Its head turned sharply toward the cave.
Zik stepped back. "I think they saw us."
Upload: 94%…
The goblin hissed—a low, croaking sound—and then the others joined in. In an instant, they snapped out of their haze. Claws scraped against stone. Eyes lit with dull hunger.
They charged.
And the kids, still half-remembered, still incomplete—had no choice but to fight.