Chapter 3: Erevos, the Living Code
When Noah opened his eyes, the world was upside down.
Not metaphorically — literally. The horizon curved above him like the inside of a bowl. Shattered buildings floated in the air, some vertical, some sideways, all wrapped in golden light that bled from invisible cracks.
The Entropy Zone.
He was inside it now.
Aisha lay beside him, unconscious but breathing. Her pulse flickered faintly, like static beneath her skin. He tried to move, but gravity refused to obey; his body slid sideways, then downward, as if pulled by unseen hands.
"Come on…" he muttered, bracing himself on a cracked metal beam. The moment his hand touched it, the beam vibrated — and began to float.
Noah froze. His veins glowed faintly silver again.
[Singularity Protocol Active.]
Entropy Alignment: 37%.
Warning: Reality density unstable.]
A hiss of energy passed through the air. The beam bent around him, pulled by invisible force fields that rippled with every heartbeat. He exhaled sharply, focusing his mind like he was running a simulation.
"Vector… inverse," he whispered.
The beam froze midair.
The pull of gravity inverted — his feet found solid ground again.
It worked.
He had control.
Sort of.
Noah looked down at his trembling hands. The metal around him still quivered, like it feared him. Every pulse of the Protocol made the world shiver — as if the universe itself recognized him as a glitch.
He turned to Aisha, crouching beside her. Her eyes opened slowly, glowing faint blue beneath the dust.
"You're… alive," she whispered.
"Barely."
"What happened to the observatory?"
Noah hesitated. The memories flashed — the sun splitting, the scream, the light. He shook his head. "Gone. Everything's gone."
They sat in silence, the air thick with static.
Around them, the sky glowed like broken glass. In the distance, he saw fragments of the old city — buses hanging midair, rivers flowing upward, the ruins pulsing with faint red light.
Then they heard it.
A low, rhythmic thud.
It wasn't footsteps. It was too heavy, too precise.
Each sound distorted the space around it, sending ripples through the floating debris.
Noah's instincts screamed — danger.
A shape emerged from the mist ahead.
Human-like, but wrong.
Its body flickered with code — strands of binary light crawling under translucent skin. Its eyes burned white, its expression stretched into something almost curious.
[New Entity Detected.]
Designation: Fragment Host – "Erevos."
Entropy Core: 81%. Status: Unstable.]
The name struck him instantly — the same one he saw before blacking out.
The figure tilted its head. "You're new," it said, voice layered, mechanical yet eerily human. "A newborn protocol. You reek of the Singularity."
Aisha staggered behind him. "Noah… what is that?"
"I don't know," he murmured. "But it's not human anymore."
Erevos smiled — a too-wide, fractured grin. "Not human? Humanity was an equation that failed. We are its correction."
Then it moved.
In an instant, the world folded around it.
One blink — and it was in front of Noah.
He barely had time to react. Erevos's hand sliced through the air, and the shockwave that followed ripped the ground apart. The gravity around them twisted, debris flying in reverse, light bending sideways.
Noah raised his arm, instinct taking over.
[Gravitational Field Expansion – Partial.]
The world cracked.
Every particle of matter near him bent inward, forming a shimmering bubble of distorted space. Erevos's attack hit it and curved, the energy spiraling off harmlessly into the air.
But Noah felt it — the pull, the burn, the taste of iron again.
His blood was boiling. His cells screamed as if the force he wielded was tearing him apart from within.
He roared, pushing outward.
The gravitational field exploded.
A shockwave burst from him, hurling Erevos back through three floating buildings. Glass and metal shattered into spirals of molten code. For a moment, even the sky froze.
Aisha gasped. "Noah…"
He dropped to his knees, chest heaving. His eyes burned white now, light leaking from his skin like cracks in porcelain.
[Warning: Host integrity—critical.]
[Humanity: 82% → 71%.]
"What—what does that mean?" he rasped.
No response. Only static.
Erevos climbed out of the rubble, half its body missing, then reforming from particles of light. "Impressive," it said. "The Singularity responds well to emotion. Fear, anger, guilt — the perfect fuel."
Noah rose again, fists clenched. "You talk like this is a game."
"It is," Erevos replied, spreading its arms as if to embrace the twisted horizon. "The universe is rewriting its code. You and I — we're just new functions. Evolution doesn't care who breaks first."
The words struck deep. Something about them rang true — painfully true.
Aisha stepped forward. "What do you want from us?"
Erevos's grin widened. "I want him to remember."
Noah blinked. "Remember what?"
"The moment you stopped being human."
Then Erevos vanished.
Not teleported — deleted. The space it occupied simply ceased to exist.
Noah barely had time to react before pain shot through his skull, images flooding his vision — the sun cracking, a wave of light tearing through satellites, a hidden signal pulsing through them all.
A voice whispered through the static.
"The Singularity was not born. It was chosen."
He gasped, clutching his head. The gravity field burst again, this time uncontrolled. The debris around them flew in every direction. Aisha screamed as the force pushed her back.
"Noah! Stop!"
He tried. He really tried. But the Protocol didn't listen anymore.
The air thickened, bending, warping — a storm of collapsing physics.
And then, a single word echoed inside his mind, overriding everything:
[ALIGNMENT REQUIRED.]
In a flash, all motion ceased.
Time froze.
Even sound vanished.
Noah stood alone in a world of suspended particles — raindrops frozen midair, dust hanging like stars.
A voice, calm and deep, spoke within the silence.
"You can't fight entropy, Noah Mensah. You are entropy."
His breath caught. "Who are you?"
"Your reflection. Your destination. Your first choice."
The world resumed — and Noah collapsed.
When he woke again, Aisha was beside him, shaking him gently.
The horizon was normal again, or at least more stable. Erevos was gone.
She looked terrified. "Noah… your eyes."
He touched his face. His vision flickered between colors, a thin ring of light circling his pupils like a digital iris.
[Singularity Synchronization: 48%.]
[Entropy Field Stabilized.]
[Host Evolution — Phase 1 Complete.]
He exhaled shakily, the metallic taste fading just a little.
Aisha looked around the floating ruins, the fractured sky, and the still-glowing sun fragments above.
"What do we do now?"
Noah's gaze hardened. "We find out what caused this."
He looked toward the horizon, where a distant glow pulsed in the darkness — a signal.
"And we find the others before they find us."
End of Chapter 3.