The penguin refused to leave.
Erevan Arclight had tried everything short of emotional blackmail. He'd waved it off, bribed it with crumbs from his inventory, even knelt and asked—very politely—if it could please, for the love of sanity, de-summon itself.
It just stared at him. Then waddled after him like a fuzzy little stalker.
The tiny creature wore a wizard hat a size too big, tilting over one beady eye as it quacked every few steps. Each quack echoed across the quiet fields like it was casting spells on invisible enemies.
Erevan groaned. "Why. Are you. Like this?"
Kaelith's boots crunched behind him, her steps sharp and deliberate. The silver in her eyes caught the fractured light of the plains, gleaming like steel ready to snap. Her bow stayed half drawn—not at the penguin, though Erevan was sure she'd thought about it—but her patience was clearly fraying.
"Why is it still following us?" she asked, voice cool but edged with irritation.
"Temporary companion," Erevan said with a lazy shrug. "And temporary could mean ten minutes... or ten years. The system's flexible like that."
The penguin sneezed suddenly, releasing a tiny puff of frost that coated Erevan's boots in ice.
He stared down. "See? Pure value. Frost resistance and moral support."
Kaelith muttered something under her breath in Elvish. It sounded poetic, lyrical... and vaguely murderous.
Erevan pretended not to notice.
The landscape stretched endlessly ahead of them—fractured earth glowing with pulsing veins of light, like the world had been split open and stitched back wrong. Cracks zigzagged through the plains, bleeding faint static. Even the air buzzed with a faint digital hum, as if existence itself was running on low battery.
Erevan squinted at the distant horizon. "That thing over there... is that the Obelisk of Echoes?"
Kaelith's eyes followed his gaze. "Yes."
"Cool name. Sounds friendly."
Her expression didn't change. "It isn't."
Erevan sighed. "Of course it isn't."
The wind shifted—cold, metallic, smelling faintly of ozone and something older. The grass around them flickered like corrupted textures, their edges shimmering between green, silver, and static gray.
Kaelith spoke quietly, her voice almost lost beneath the hum. "They say the Obelisk doesn't just echo sound. It echoes... souls."
Erevan let out a hollow laugh. "Yeah, no, that's fine. Totally normal. Definitely not nightmare fuel at all."
He pushed forward, boots crunching over uneven stone. Every few steps, the world blinked. Not metaphorically—literally blinked. The plains would vanish for a split second, replaced by flashes of other landscapes: a frozen tundra, a cracked desert, a metal city drowning in crimson light. Each glimpse lasted only a heartbeat, but enough to make Erevan's stomach twist.
He swallowed. "Hey, Kaelith... you're seeing that too, right?"
She didn't answer. Her eyes stayed locked forward, bowstring drawn halfway, muscles tense.
Erevan's grin faltered. "Cool. Great. Love it when my hallucinations get shared."
The penguin waddled a few paces ahead, hopping over a glowing fissure like it had done this a thousand times. Its hat flopped sideways, and it quacked with pride.
Erevan sighed again, following.
As soon as his boot hit the other side, his HUD went wild.
(Warning: Instability Zone Entered. All stats fluctuating.)
His Strength shot from forty-nine to one hundred and twenty-two... then plummeted to three. His HP bar doubled, then halved, flashing red like an alarm. Even his stamina number blinked 404 for a second before stabilizing.
Erevan blinked. "Okay. Okay. Nope. Nope nope nope." He gestured around them. "This place is officially a bad idea!"
Kaelith shimmered beside him, her form glitching for half a second, phasing like a ghost between one frame and the next.
"Keep moving," she ordered, her voice tight but steady.
Erevan wanted to argue. He really did. But then the ground under him warped.
Grass morphed into streams of binary code, scrolling upward before snapping back into existence. Rocks floated for a moment, then dropped abruptly like gravity was just remembering its job. The sound in the air deepened, turning from a faint hum into a chorus of whispers.
Not words. Not exactly. But patterns. Numbers. Static. Something scraping along the edge of his consciousness, cold and sharp.
Kaelith faltered once, pressing a hand to her temple. "Something's... pushing against my thoughts."
"Yeah," Erevan muttered, grimacing. "Welcome to the club. Membership's free, headaches guaranteed."
The air rippled. The hum became a shriek.
Erevan froze. The horizon tore open.
Reality split like paper, a wound of pure static widening before them. The sound it made was wrong—too high, too deep, too alive. His vision warped, color bleeding out of everything for a moment.
And then the first shape crawled through.
The shape that crawled out of the fracture wasn't supposed to exist.
It was humanoid, almost, but its limbs jittered like skipped frames—half-rendered bones wrapped in shimmering code. Its face glitched between masks of static and a blank human smile, like the system couldn't decide if it wanted to terrify or comfort him.
Erevan whispered, "Okay. That's... new."
Kaelith didn't answer. She'd already drawn, her arrow splitting into three spectral copies mid-flight. All four hit dead center—if "center" meant anything on a creature that didn't have a consistent shape.
The Echo screamed, a sound that wasn't a sound at all but data feedback. The air around them cracked, a ripple of distortion knocking Erevan off balance.
His HUD spat gibberish.
(Combat Instance: [???] — Initializing...)
(Warning: Entity Class — Echo Variant Detected.)
(Sub-warning: You shouldn't be here.)
Erevan laughed, manic and half-hysterical. "Yeah, thanks, system. I'm aware!"
Another Echo phased through the air beside him, its arm turning into a jagged blade of pure light. He ducked on instinct, swinging his staff up just in time to deflect—only to watch the weapon split into two staffs mid-motion.
"What—?!"
Kaelith shouted over the distortion, "Focus!"
"Trying!" Erevan spun, grabbed both staffs, and used the momentum to slam one Echo in the chest. The creature exploded into a shower of code, scattering like digital snow. For half a second, the field went quiet.
Then the horizon breathed.
Dozens of Echoes crawled out of the fissures. Some floated, others dragged themselves like broken marionettes, heads twitching, voices looping the same half-syllable over and over.
Erevan's throat went dry. "Okay. So we're surrounded. Great. Excellent. I love field trips."
The penguin waddled up beside him, tiny hat glowing faintly.
Kaelith hissed. "Erevan. Is your familiar—?"
"Don't worry," he said, tightening his grip. "He's got this."
The penguin lifted one wing dramatically.
Then quacked.
A ripple of energy burst outward, blue and gold at once. The nearest Echo convulsed and disintegrated into harmless light. The penguin looked immensely pleased with itself.
Erevan blinked. "Did it just crit something?"
Kaelith's eyes widened. "It... shouldn't be able to do that."
"Welcome to my life!"
The next wave hit like a storm. Static tore the ground apart, each blast sending bits of terrain spinning into the sky. Kaelith was already in motion—vaulting off fragments of broken gravity, firing shot after shot into the writhing swarm. Every arrow turned into a streak of light, burning through Echoes faster than Erevan could count.
He joined in, channeling raw mana through his staff. Lightning arcs danced across the battlefield, but each spell came with a price: his interface blinked, stat numbers scrambled, cooldown timers reversed themselves.
(Skill Cast: "Static Pulse" — Success Rate: 47%)
He shouted, "Forty-seven? Are you kidding me?!"
The spell hit something anyway, erupting in a chain of neon explosions that painted the air in glitch-fire.
Kaelith dropped beside him, panting. "We can't outlast this. The zone is rewriting everything."
"Then we break it before it breaks us!" Erevan shouted back. "Go for the core glitch—the big one in the middle!"
The penguin chirped approvingly.
They moved as one. Kaelith darted through the chaos, every arrow timed to Erevan's erratic bursts of energy. The Echoes screamed in binary harmonies, dissolving with every impact—but for each that fell, two more phased in.
The air was nothing but color and noise now.
Erevan's mana bar flickered dangerously low. His vision dimmed at the edges, his lungs burning.
Then the ground pulsed beneath him—hard.
He glanced down just in time to see the Ping icon appear on his HUD.
(Skill Trigger: [PING].)
The penguin quacked, eyes glowing bright gold.
"Oh, no," Erevan muttered. "Not again."
The creature slammed its flippers together.
A sonic shockwave erupted outward—a cascading detonation of blue light that tore through the entire zone. Echoes shattered mid-phase, code unraveling into ribbons of sound. The ground itself fractured, chunks of reality floating weightless for a heartbeat before slamming back into place.
The sound was both a roar and silence.
Erevan hit the dirt hard, ears ringing, vision white. His HUD flickered—dozens of error messages scrolling faster than he could read.
When the light faded, half the field was gone.
Kaelith was on one knee, bow still drawn, hair whipping in the residual static wind. Erevan was sprawled face-first beside the penguin, who looked absurdly proud of itself.
He coughed. "You... insane little wizard bird."
Kaelith stood shakily, scanning the distance. The fissures were closing, the Echoes dissolving one by one into harmless motes of code. The hum in the air finally began to fade.
Erevan rolled over, groaning. "We're alive. Mostly. Probably."
Kaelith exhaled slowly, lowering her bow. "That wasn't a fight," she said quietly. "That was... a warning."
Erevan blinked up at her, the humor fading from his voice. "From what?"
Before she could answer, the system pinged again—soft, but cold.
(Instability Index: 89%)
(Zone Collapse Imminent.)
Erevan's smile vanished. "…Oh. That's from this."
The world trembled.
The battlefield was... quiet.
Not peaceful — quiet. The kind of silence that hums in your bones after something too loud to comprehend.
Erevan sat in the wreckage of what used to be solid ground, legs sprawled, staff lying across his lap. The air still shimmered faintly with glitch-light, fading out in soft pulses. Every breath he took came with the faint taste of metal and ozone.
Beside him, the penguin dozed sitting up, tiny hat drooping over its face like a war veteran catching a nap.
Kaelith was a few paces away, standing perfectly still, bow resting at her side. She looked untouched — until you saw the tremor in her fingers.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Erevan broke the silence.
"Well," he said hoarsely. "That went... moderately better than death."
Kaelith shot him a look over her shoulder — the kind that could cut steel if it were weaponized. "You call that better?"
He grinned faintly. "We're still breathing. That's at least a C-minus survival grade."
The penguin let out a sleepy quack, as if seconding the motion.
Kaelith sighed and turned back toward the horizon. "Your grading system is flawed."
"Welcome to my education," Erevan murmured.
He leaned back on his hands, staring up at the fractured sky. It was... wrong. Beautiful, but wrong. Clouds froze mid-drift, sunlight fractured into polygons that didn't quite align, and every so often a patch of stars blinked on in full daylight before vanishing again.
He whispered, "Does it ever stop feeling like the world's about to crash?"
Kaelith didn't answer right away. "If it stops feeling that way," she said quietly, "it means we've stopped noticing."
That hit harder than he expected.
The wind shifted, carrying the faint echo of static whispers again — softer this time, like memory instead of sound. When Erevan looked toward the source, he saw it: a pillar rising from the ruined plains, half-shrouded in haze.
It wasn't stone. Or metal. Or anything that should exist.
The Obelisk stood easily fifty meters tall, its surface flickering between solid black and streaming code, like a monument that couldn't decide if it was real. Lines of pale gold light crawled up its sides in slow spirals, pulsing in rhythm with something — like a heartbeat buried deep underground.
Erevan's throat went dry. "That... is not an architectural choice."
Kaelith stepped closer, eyes narrowing. "The Obelisk of Echoes," she whispered. "It's awake."
The words made his skin crawl. "Obelisks don't wake up, Kaelith."
"They do," she said softly. "When they remember."
He stared at her. "That is not the comforting clarification I was hoping for."
Kaelith didn't smile. Her gaze stayed fixed on the tower, unreadable. "If it's active, it means the zone's instability wasn't random. Something called it."
Erevan pushed himself to his feet, wincing as his knees cracked. "Well, great. Maybe it just wanted to thank us for the fireworks show."
"Or it's counting."
That shut him up.
He frowned. "Counting what?"
Her reply was quiet. "Fragments. Lives. You decide which one's worse."
The penguin gave a low, uncertain chirp — its first nervous sound since the fight.
Erevan swallowed and looked back toward the pulsing monument. The glow at its core was spreading now, crawling outward through the cracked fields in slow, branching veins of light. His HUD flickered again.
(System Sync Detected.)
(Primary Marker: [OBELISK_01] — Linked to Fragment Signatures.)
(Warning: Storm Countdown Initiated — T-72:00:00.)
He blinked. "Did that just say storm countdown?"
Kaelith turned sharply, eyes wide. "What?"
He pointed at his HUD. "It's starting a timer. Seventy-two hours. That's... three days."
She was silent for a long moment. "Then the storm isn't just weather."
Erevan's heart pounded. The Obelisk's light intensified — a slow, rhythmic pulse, like it was breathing with the world.
He exhaled. "So... we're going there, right?"
Kaelith glanced at him. "You want to approach that?"
He forced a grin. "No. But ignoring glowing death monoliths hasn't exactly worked out great for us either."
Kaelith's mouth twitched — almost a smile, or maybe disbelief. "You're insane."
"Statistically, probably." He adjusted his grip on the staff, started forward. "Come on, before the timer hits 'surprise apocalypse.'"
The penguin waddled after him, muttering soft quacks that echoed faintly in the charged air.
Kaelith followed, slow and wary.
As they walked, the hum of the Obelisk grew stronger — not sound but pressure, something that vibrated through bone and thought. The light ahead flickered, casting their shadows long and warped across the corrupted ground.
Erevan didn't look back.
But as the Obelisk loomed larger with every step, a thought gnawed at him — that faint, irrational certainty that it wasn't them approaching it.
It was the Obelisk drawing them in.
And somewhere beneath the static hum, the world whispered — not words, but laughter.