The floating chunks of data beneath their feet seemed to surge and convulse as though the whole world was being yanked by some vast, cosmic hand. Blue lines of corrupted code streaked across the fractured landscape, and a harsh, metallic hum filled the air, drilling directly into the crown of Riko's skull. He stumbled backward, reaching instinctively for Kaze and Luna, but the world moved faster than he did, responding first with a chaos all its own.
A glitch wave ripped through the terrain.
Not just a tremor.
Not a quake.
But a complete digital distortion-as if the reality itself had suffered from a fatal error and had gone offline.
The ground ripped along jagged, pixelated seams; the digital floor tore as if someone had ripped a sheet of paper at the speed of light. Riko felt gravity flip and twist-sideways, then downward, then backward-all at once. One moment he stood beside Kaze and Luna; then the next, the floor beneath him folded inward like collapsing code.
"RIKO!" Luna shouted.
"Don't fall," Kaze commanded, his focus sharpened, and instead of reaching for him, he analysed every little detail as the world broke around them.
There was, however, no safe option labeled "don't fall."
The ground disappeared.
Riko dropped.
His stomach leaped into his throat as he fell between separating platforms, the world above him distorting like a buffering video. Data chunks surged upward past him-floating fragments of what used to be floor and stairs, chunks of wall, even strips of sky texture ripped from their proper places.
Riko reached out for one, but it flickered out of existence the very instant his fingers brushed against it.
This place did not follow rules.
Not gravity.
Not physics.
Not sanity.
He fell through a layer of shimmering blue code and hit another floating platform with a bone-jarring thud. The air exploded from his lungs. He rolled, gasping, vision white for a heartbeat as pain flooded his ribs.
When he could raise his head, the surface he lay on was not really a platform. It felt more like a giant tile of digital matter, as though it had been ripped from the floor of some virtual world and abandoned, free-flying in space. It hung at a slight angle, humming with unstable energy.
He could see, high overhead, Kaze and Luna's silhouetted forms on another fragment of terrain, drifting away, splitting further apart, swallowed by the advancing glitch storm.
"LUNA! KAZE!" Riko yelled, but his voice barely carried. The void bended the sound, stretching and shrinking it like it didn't know which way to travel.
He pushed himself up, his legs trembling.
Yet another glitch pulse rolled through the broken dimension. His platform shook and jittered violently between textures—stone, dirt, metal, grid lines—then snapped back to stone.
Riko swallowed hard. "Okay, cool. Great. Awesome. Definitely not dying today. Totally fine."
He peered over the edge. Below him, there was nothing but shimmering blue-black emptiness. It wasn't darkness, precisely-it was the absence of data, a churning sea with no name.
A chill crawled up his spine.
This place wanted to tear them apart.
Not metaphorically.
Literally,
Riko took a shaky step toward the highest edge of the platform, hoping-praying-that there would be some kind of path upward. But the moment he neared the border, a stream of pixel dust drifted upward, dissolving in front of his face. There was no path. The platforms were drifting farther apart with every passing second.
He was alone.
"Luna!" he yelled again. "Can you hear me?!"
It sounded strange, his voice bouncing—forward, then backward, then sideways—as if the sound didn't know in which direction it should travel.
Once more, the blue sky-glitch above them rumbled, and another shockwave raged across the void. Riko instinctively ducked as fragments of broken textures rained down like shards of glass. One piece struck the platform near his feet and shattered into blue static.
"Come on system," he muttered. "Anything. Give me something."
But the Level Screen flickered at his side, its display unreadable. Lines of corrupted symbols scrolled across it; at one moment a flashing error message appeared only to crash into static.
Useless.
"Great," Riko groaned. "Cool. Perfect timing."
He tried to steady his breathing, but fear wrapped around his ribs like a tightening band. He wasn't just separated from Luna and Kaze; he was isolated in a place that defied reality. If the platforms kept drifting, he might never reach them again.
Another platform drifted in, hovering about thirty feet above him. He jumped, waved, anything—yet it did not slow, did not acknowledge him, did not even bear anyone on it.
He wasn't even sure that it was solid.
He paced the length of his own tiny platform--barely large enough to be a floor tile in a classroom--searching for any kind of connection. Every few seconds the north side flickered, revealing a transparent underside like geometry that was never finished. The whole thing might collapse at any moment.
The void hummed again.
A low, eerie noise.
Not wind.
Not machinery.
Not an animal.
Something else.
Something watching.
Riko froze, all of a sudden very aware of just how exposed he was. His heart pounded in his ears as he slowly turned, surveying the edges of the platform, the shifting sky, the drifting fragments of the broken world. Nothing visible-yet the impression of being watched clung to him like static.
"Don't freak out," he whispered to himself. "Freaking out makes it worse. Just breathe."
But then he heard it.
A voice.
Soft. Echoing. Warped through the glitching air.
"Riiiii—kooooo…"
He spun so rapidly he almost slipped from the platform.
"Luna?!" he called. "Luna, where are you?!"
The voice echoed again.
"Rii—ko…"
Definitely Luna's voice.
But wrong.
Too stretched.
Too distant.
Too everywhere at once.
He ran to the nearest edge and peered over: nothing but void below. He turned, and nothing but fragments were drifting overhead; he checked the sides—empty space twisting like a broken screensaver.
Yet he heard her.
Close.
Desperate.
Calling his name.
"Riko! RIKO!"
He whipped around, his eyes raking across every inch of the platform, then out toward the fractured horizon. "Luna! I'm here!" Riko shouted. "Where are you?!" No answer. Just the shifting hum of the glitch dimension. He tried again, louder. "LUNA! I HEAR YOU—WHERE ARE YOU?" Again, the world pulsed. This time, the platform beneath him flickered precariously. Riko clenched his fists, heart hammering. He knew he had heard Luna calling his name, yet she was nowhere near him.