Flickering veins of dark and white static spit across the endless darkness, like a shattered screen refusing to die. Kaine floated through it. Around her, fragments of past lives spun around. A city collapsing, a young girl laughing with blood on her cheek, a universe being destroyed, smiles of her loved ones.
She was every single one of them. Yet she wasn't them. She couldn't even remember which life came first or which one came second.
"Hm?.. w-where am I?" her eyelids started twitching as she opened her eyes behind that blindfold of hers.
[Welcome back, host. It's been 2 months since you've fallen asleep.]
A cold robotic voice drifted inside her head, startling her. "Two years? Wasn't I with Athena? And Alice?" She yawned lazily while floating in a pitch-black chaotic spatial realm.
[You've finally achieved 10,000 alternative endings. The fractured crack is to blame for this…]
"W-what?" It took her several hours to piece things together. She'd been asleep in this Ashfall fracture—a large crack in the sky that appeared two years ago, declaring the start of the apocalypse.
Everything she'd been experiencing all this time was not real. Merely an illusion created by the Ashfall fracture to—
[WARNING!!! WARNING!!! Host has received too much shock!! Personality breaking apart...FAILED.]
[RETRYING....]
[FAILED] [FAILED] [FAILED]
[PIECES OF THE FRACTURED MIND HAVE BEEN ADDED TOGETHER. UNSTABLE...FAILED TO REPAIR]
"So all this was fake? Everything??" Tears fell down her cheeks as she started clapping her hands in a grin.
"Bullshit... pfft heeheehee." She closed her eyes and concentrated. A thin yet warm feeling rose inside her heart, pointing her toward a certain direction.
"Found her, see Mr. Crack? She isn't fair—I can sense her. Hehe, though I have to wonder..." Kaine placed her index finger on her face with an innocent expression.
"Maybe I was the dream and you were the girl?"
The crack blinked. Or maybe glitched.
Suddenly a memory of one particular girl flashed inside her mind briefly.
"Alice...your the one I keep dreaming about. Over and over, your voice, your eyes and your hands..."
She reached into the void and pulled a glitching black rose. Made of static and bone. It Whitered instantly causing her to giggle.
A smile curled on her lips. Wide, curious and cruel.
Kaine twirled in the nothingness. Her blindfold wrinkled at the edge, a vein of light leaking through. Her Doloréa Eyes itched. Always itched, like they knew too much.
"I died 9,999 times. Question is, what happened with the 10,000th life? Does it even matter? I'll find her again and kill whoever stops me," she said to herself, legs crossed in midair.
Her voice drifted for a moment. Then came the laughter. Soft at first—childish, pure. Then deeper, cracked, layered. Like a child remembering the shape of a knife.
Her body spasmed briefly. Twitching as if she were glitching. She was glitching.
She bit her finger and smeared the blood into a heart in the air.
"I'm curious," she sang softly. "Is Alice just a pretty word I made up to keep myself from chewing my own thoughts?"
Her smile and hands trembled. Then she went still.
"No," Kaine said gently. "I remember her heartbeat. She's definitely real." She hugged herself and curled slightly, like a comma in a sentence never finished.
"Alice... dear wlice, are you waiting for me? Or did you throw me away like the rest of them?"
The system stuttered. Glitches spun around her in perfect spirals. Reality was trying to spit her out now—she was too loud, too real, and too wrong for the fracture.
And Kaine?
She yawned.
"Oh no no no, sweet fracture... not yet." She snapped her fingers, and the air cracked like eggs.
"You don't get to end my dream just because I started talking back." Ash flew around her like fireflies.
Kaine stood on nothing, her messy clothes filled with holes stitching themselves from ash and blood. As if they were merging with her.
Her blindfold peeled back slightly—just a little—enough to let her red eyes grin.
"Let's play a game," she said, holding out her hand.
The fracture hissed. Her command pulsed through it like a virus.
"First of all: find Iris. Second: don't die. Third: hehehee... break every rule."
Her body glitched violently once more—and she vanished. The fracture shook slightly.
Kaine, the girl who lived 10,000 fake lives in the fracture, smiled softly for the last time to the fracture. Her final words echoed in this endless realm of darkness:
"Thank you for the nightmares."
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The 50 chapters thing is hard asf well still gonna upload more chapters today in the hospital
I'll add the 9999 ending chapters soon today you'll understand