Elio gasped, his body jolting awake as if he had been drowning moments ago. His vision blurred, his heart still hammering from the adrenaline of the last moments he could remember—running, slamming the doors shut, watching the city overrun by the undead.
But now? Silence.
A sterile, white-tiled floor. Dim lights humming overhead. A group of familiar faces, surrounding him.
"Elio, wake up!" someone called.
His head pounded. His limbs felt weak.
"Guys, he's awake!"
A breath caught in his throat. He turned his head, looking at them—Noa, Ren, Lucian, Aria. All of them. Alive.
His mind reeled. This… this wasn't right. They were just in the middle of the zombie outbreak. How the hell did they get here?
He forced himself upright, blinking away the dizziness. His throat was dry. His entire body ached like he had been tossed around like a ragdoll.
"Guys… are we out of the apocalypse?"
Silence. The others exchanged uneasy glances.
Then, Ren spoke. His voice was quiet. Tense.
"Yes, we are… but as much as we discussed with each other…" He hesitated. Then:
"We weren't together when the apocalypse was happening."
Elio's blood turned cold.
"What?"
A sharp laugh—more out of disbelief than humor. Noa's voice cut in, eyes wide.
"Wait. What do you mean? We were literally there."
Ren shook his head. "Not together. I mean… I remember being in the outbreak. But I don't remember any of you there."
Elio's breath caught. A sinking feeling spread in his stomach.
Noa's face darkened. "That doesn't make sense. We were all—"
"—in different versions of the game."
The voice that interrupted them wasn't one of theirs.
A presence materialized.
A Higher Being.
Its form flickered—glitching, shifting, its shape both humanoid and utterly incomprehensible at the same time. Like something that existed beyond their perception but was forcing itself into their reality.
Elio's hands clenched into fists. His pulse pounded.
"The first game has ended," the Being said, voice layered and reverberating, as if a thousand voices spoke at once.
"You may process your individual experiences, but the outcome remains the same."
Elio's heartbeat roared in his ears.
This wasn't over.
"Proceeding to the next game in a few hours."
Elio turned to Noa, his chest tightening. "How are you alive? Lucian—he killed you!"
Noa's face twisted in confusion. "What? I was wondering how Lucian survived, because I killed him."
Silence.
The words felt like a heavy weight dropping onto all of them at once.
Ren's voice was barely a whisper. "Wait… you two killed each other? That's not possible. I never even saw either of you in the game."
Aria's fists clenched. "I… I don't remember seeing anyone either. Just me, alone, fighting to survive."
Elio exhaled shakily, realization dawning in her eyes. "No. No, no, no—"
Kai swallowed hard. "You're saying… we weren't in the same world?"
The Higher Being's laughter echoed in the space.
"Your perceptions were merely threads in a greater tapestry, woven separately yet destined to align."
Fizz's face paled. "You're saying… we were playing alone? The entire time?"
The Being smiled. Or at least, something akin to a smile twisted across its impossible face.
"Every world was tailored to the Observer. Each of you were placed in your own, individual game. Controlled, watched, studied. The choices you made, the emotions you felt, the despair you drowned in—all of it was data."
Ren took a sharp step forward. "So what? None of it was real?"
The Being tilted its head.
"Oh, it was real. But your realities were separate. Entangled, yet detached. Each of you played your part… alone."
Elio's hands trembled. "Then why does it feel like we were together?"
The Being let out a low, amused hum. "Because, dear players, that is the nature of the Observer's Paradox."
Their stomachs dropped.
Because they all knew the term.
It was the same phenomenon used in quantum physics.
When something was unobserved, its outcome was uncertain. But the moment someone looked at it—the moment the reality was observed—the result was locked in.
Their memories… their interactions… were they even real?
Or had they simply collapsed into existence once they were here?
There were questions.
But they didn't have enough energy to think for an answer.
They took the rest time to take a proper rest before the next game started.
ALL there was, was just their school and the whole surrounding was empty, no land, nothing. Just their school and void, and 39 students who were still alive.
While they were resting…
The library was one of the few places in this nightmare that still resembled something normal. High wooden shelves stretched toward the ceiling, filled with books that no longer had readers. Dust floated lazily in the dim light, the chandeliers above swaying slightly even though there was no breeze. The survivors had gathered in the back corner, where Elio stood, still shaken.
"I swear, I saw something," Elio said, his voice barely above a whisper. "There's a path... I tripped and fell through a gap in the floor. And on the other side... there was something watching me."
The others exchanged wary glances. Ren Nakamura folded his arms, skeptical. "And you got out alive?"
"It didn't see me," Elio replied. "Or maybe it did, but it didn't care. I just crawled out as fast as I could."
There was silence. Then, Aria spoke. "If there's a path, we should check it out. This whole place is a mystery—we have no idea what's coming next. If there's even a chance that we can learn more, we should take it."
Lucian rubbed the back of his neck. "Or we could be walking straight into a trap. Just saying."
"Everything here is a trap," Noa Williams muttered.
In the end, they couldn't ignore it. They had to see for themselves. They needed answers.
The library felt colder as they moved deeper in. The twenty-four survivors, quiet and tense, followed Elio through the maze of towering bookshelves. Their steps were nearly silent against the thick carpet. The deeper they went, the more warped the space felt—like the angles of the shelves weren't quite right, like the walls weren't staying in the same place when they weren't looking.
Then they reached it.
A seemingly ordinary section of the floor had shifted slightly. Between the shelves, just barely visible, was an opening—a dark void, not just absence of light but something deeper, something wrong.
"You fell through that?" Aria whispered, peering down.
"I didn't fall all the way," Elio said. "I caught myself on the edge. But I saw a room. And something was in it."
Aria Vaughn knelt, running her fingers over the edges. The floorboards weren't broken. They simply... stopped existing past a certain point.
"No way this is normal," Luncian muttered.
"Of course it isn't," Ren said. "But if Elio saw something, we need to know what. We're already trapped in their game. The more we understand, the better."
One by one, they lowered themselves through the gap. There was no sensation of falling—one second they were in the library, the next they were somewhere else.
The Void Room
There was no floor. No walls. No ceiling. Just an endless, stretching abyss. A black void that felt neither empty nor full—it simply was.
And in the center, impossibly large yet confined, lay one of them.
A high being.
Its form was indistinct, shifting between something vaguely humanoid and something utterly alien. It did not move, but it's breathing was slow and deep, a sound that rumbled through the abyss. It was asleep.
They had walked into its resting place.
Luc stepped forward, his voice barely a whisper. "We should not be here."
But their eyes had already found the structure in the void. A mechanical construct, intricate and humming with an unseen power. Its screens flickered, flashing incomprehensible symbols and shifting numbers. And there, clear as day—
A list.
A list of all the games yet to come.
Before anyone could process what they were seeing, before Elio could fully comprehend the words in front of him—
The being stirred.
A deep inhale. A shift in the air. A presence awakening.
And then reality broke.
Sound distorted. Vision blurred. Space itself twisted. They were no longer standing in the same place, no longer together.
The library was gone.
The void had shattered, spilling them into fragments of other worlds. Burning ruins. Frozen wastelands. Cities swallowed by endless night. Screams echoed from the distance—some from their own group, some from voices long lost to time.
Elio tumbled through a world of fire and ash. His vision swam, and for a moment, he saw the words again—the game's instructions. The way out.
It burned itself into his mind, clear, unshakable.
He was the only one who saw it.
The others had been thrown into chaos. But Elio knew. He knew what he had to do.
The moment the void collapsed around them, everything turned to static.
Game 2 – The Fractured Realities
This game was unlike anything before. It was designed to test perception, memory, and causality. The high beings had created multiple fractured realities—shattered pieces of broken worlds, each holding remnants of history that should have never existed together.
Each player was sent to a different reality, isolated from the others. These weren't just parallel worlds; they were fragments of events that could have been.
To win, they had to find the anchor—the one event that linked all these fractured realities together. There was one event in history that affected all these worlds, an event so significant that removing it would cause the timelines to collapse back into one.
Each player had a piece of the puzzle, but they didn't know that. Some were in post-apocalyptic wastelands, others were in worlds where the government ruled everything, and some were in worlds that seemed normal but had something... off.
Elio was the only one who had seen the list of games, and he had read that the key to winning was to find the one moment that connected all these broken timelines.
They were supposed to observe the past, find out the exact moment when everything collapsed, and figure out a way to change it or expose the truth to the others.
But they didn't have to interfere with the past, they just had to observe it.
It wasn't like the previous games. This time, there was no explanation, no structure—just raw displacement. The survivors were thrown into different realities, scattered across ruins, nightmares, and twisted timelines. Some awoke in burning cities, others in empty streets where whispers crawled through the air. A few landed in strange places that defied physics—floating islands of rubble, endless corridors leading nowhere, reflections of places that never existed.
Among them, Elio fell through the distortion, knowing one thing: he had seen the answer. He knew how the game would end.
He fell into a world where an apocalypse took place, a zombie apocalypse. The land was dry, the sky was blood red and he saw nothing around him, except voices and dead bodies.
As he was watching all this...
something broke.
A glitch happened.
A crack in reality. A shift. He was falling again— He was moving backward, rewinding through time inside the same broken world. The ruined landscape around him rippled like a shattered mirror trying to mend itself. The screams of the present bled into silence. And suddenly—
The world was whole.
Elio landed hard on the damp forest ground, gasping as the weight of the past crushed his lungs. He wasn't in the game anymore. He was in a memory. A piece of history long before this world had become what it was.
And then, he heard them—
The soldiers.
Their boots thundered against the forest floor, branches snapping as they pursued a lone figure in a white coat. A man. He was panting, stumbling forward, clutching something to his chest—a small, fragile glass tube, glowing faintly under the moonlight.
Elio crouched behind a tree, watching as the scene unfolded. The scientist turned, his expression twisted in terror and desperation.
"Stay back!" the scientist yelled, voice raw. "One more step and I'll do it. I swear to god, I'll do it!"
The leading soldier, clad in dark government armor, took a single step forward. The scientist's hands trembled, but he held the glass tube closer to his own face.
"If you shoot me," he growled, "the impact will shatter this tube. The virus inside will be released. And then it's over—for all of us."
The soldiers hesitated. Their guns remained raised, but their fingers hovered over the triggers, uncertain. The forest held its breath. The air around them seemed to thrum with tension, as if the world itself was waiting for the next move.
Elio's heart pounded. He understood now. This wasn't just any virus—this was the virus. The one that had created the apocalypse. The one that had shattered civilization and led to the dystopian nightmare of the future in which he was summoned.
And the scientist was trying to stop it.
In that moment, Elio saw the path ahead of him. He saw the way to end everything—to truly win the game.
If he helped the scientist escape, if he took that virus into the present, he could use it against the High Beings. When they slept to regenerate, they would be vulnerable. He could infect them. He could destroy them at their core. He could win. And not only win, he could stop this world from getting ruined.
Elio acted on instinct. He lunged from the shadows, grabbing the closest soldier by the throat and wrenching him backward. The soldier gasped, caught off guard, his gun swinging wildly. The moment of hesitation was enough. The scientist broke into a sprint, and Elio followed.
"Give me the virus!" Elio shouted as they ran.
The scientist hesitated for only a second. Then he shoved the tube into Elio's hands. "Whatever you do, don't let it break!"
And then the glitch struck again.
A violent distortion ripped through the air, twisting everything into static. Elio felt himself being pulled, yanked back through time like a puppet on severed strings. He barely had time to react before his vision blurred—
And then he was back.
Back in the ruined world. Back in the nightmare. The air was thick, metallic, suffocating. The sky was fractured, bleeding artificial light through cracks that didn't belong. And when he looked down, his hands were shaking.
The tube was broken.
"No..."
He staggered back, horror dawning upon him like a tidal wave. The realization struck hard, violent, undeniable.
The virus had leaked in the past.
The past replayed in his mind—
The scientist, cornered, threatening to mix the antidote into the virus.
The soldiers, hesitating.
AND in that moment, as the soldiers shot him on his feet so that he wouldn't run, he quickly would have mixed the antidote inside the virus and killed it in an instant, while the soldiers shot him again, this time on head.
The moment that never came because Elio had interfered.
The scientist had never been shot. The antidote had never been mixed. Because Elio had taken the virus before he could do it.
He hadn't saved the world. He had doomed it.
Elio stumbled back, hands trembling. The ruined city around him groaned under its own weight. The world—the very world he had tried to erase—was his doing.
A glitch. A single mistake.
And now, he understood.
He was the reason the apocalypse began.
Elio was supposed to observe the past, find out the exact moment when everything collapsed, and figure out a way to change it or expose the truth to the others.
Elio wasn't supposed to physically enter the past. He was only supposed to witness it.
But something went wrong.
The system glitched, and instead of being a passive observer, Elio physically traveled back in time.
And in trying to stop the apocalypse, he became the reason it started.
14 students returned in the school, and Elio wasn't one of them.
He was trapped in that world.
End of Chapter 3 B-A.