The accusing glare of his boss froze him in place, pinning him harder than a blow ever could. His breath caught between his ribs and throat. He did not dare to move, not even an inch. The air vibrated with tension, fear, with something else neither he nor the monster could name.
Above them, the glitch in the sky pulsed.
The jagged tear widened further, light pouring through the cracks like a spotlight aimed straight down the spine of the world. The shadow creature wedged inside it writhed, distorted, like it was stitched together from corrupted animation frames and error messages.
Then—
A spike of static shot downwards.
It wasn't slow. It wasn't dramatic. It was instantaneous, like a line of broken pixels snapping across the sky and stabbing into the earth with a sound like every TV in the world turning on at once.
Riko ducked instinctively.
The beam didn't hit the junkyard.
It shot past the zone—straight toward the distant outskirts of the city beyond the fence.
There was silence for a moment.
Then the ground lurched.
Everything beneath Riko's feet lurched with the violent shudder of an earthquake mixed with a glitch. Whole piles of metal rattled like dice being shaken, sending miniature avalanches of garbage to slide down their sides. Screws rolled. Springs bounced. Panels clattered.
Riko stumbled and braced himself against a rusted engine block. "What—what was that?!"
The boss monster staggered too, claws scraping across the dirt as it tried to steady itself. Its tail whipped behind it, knocking over a tower of gutted appliances. The entire mountain of junk trembled like a beast waking from a nightmare.
But the real horror wasn't the quake.
It was the city.
Far beyond the fence, past the haze of dust and heat shimmer, the skyline flickered.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
The towers blinked, like dying computer screens, their outlines jittering between frames; whole floors cut in and out, as if someone was erasing and redrawing them at random. The lights across the city flickered in impossible patterns, some brightening too fast, others freezing mid-glow.
Riko's eyes blinked rapidly, his eyes wide. "No, no, no-this isn't real-"
A skyscraper in the distance warped sideways for half a second, as if the entire building had momentarily forgotten what shape it was supposed to be. Then it snapped back into place with a rubber-band recoil that sent a shockwave of light rippling outward.
The horizon pixelated.
The city stuttered.
The world juddered, like a corrupted file trying to load.
Riko's guts twisted. His hands shook. Something inside his bones buzzed painfully, as if whatever power had awakened in him could feel the distortion spreading across the environment.
"This is bad," he whispered. "This is so bad. This is—this is impossible."
The boss monster snarled in a confused, furious sound which echoed over the junkyard, and yet even its fury seemed smaller now, swallowed by the enormity of what was unfolding above and ahead of them.
The sky tear pulsed once more.
A second beam flickered downward, thinner this time, like a warning shot. It didn't hit the city-it fizzled halfway, dissolving into crackling pixels. But the ground still shook from the attempt.
The junk piles rattled again, and something metallic snapped overhead. Riko leapt backward as a broken satellite dish fell from a heap and slammed into the dirt beside him.
His heart hammered.
His breathing quickened.
Every single instinct inside him was screaming to run, but where could he actually go? The city was flickering. The sky was ripping open. A boss monster was staring him down, like he'd personally summoned apocalypse.exe.
And then—
The screen on her wrist flashed.
Just once.
A dim, pulsing blink-like it needed to catch its breath.
Riko froze.
The screen had been screaming warnings beforehand, flashing violently, glitching in bright red. Now it dimmed, almost like it was whispering.
Static crawled across the display.
Riko leaned closer, swallowing hard.
"Hey," he said unsteadily. "If you got anything helpful to say, right now's a really great time.
The screen flickered again.
Symbols jittered across the glass, like panicked insects. Numbers scrambled. Letters rearranged. It was as if, for a second, the device fought itself-like it didn't want to show him what it was trying to output.
Again, the world rumbled.
Riko steadied himself against the pile of pipes, staring down at the display flickering in his hand, heartbeat thudding in his ears louder than the quake.
The text finally stabilized.
Dim.
Soft.
Almost… afraid. The words appeared slowly, one painful segment at a time, as if the system itself was hesitant to reveal them. "This world is unstable now."