The sky over Oakhaven was not a sky. It was a ceiling of bruised iron, choked by the rhythmic, sickly gasps of a thousand coal-fired chimneys. In this city, the sun didn't shine; it merely leaked through the smog like a weak tea stain on a funeral shroud.
Rei Slavena stood on the corner of Blackfriars Lane, his hands buried deep in the pockets of a frock coat that had seen better decades. The fabric was frayed at the cuffs—a silent testament to the fall of the House of Slavena—but he wore it with the rigid, haunting posture of a man who refused to acknowledge his own burial. He pulled a tarnished silver pocket watch from his vest. It had no hands; instead, the face was etched with strange, shifting glyphs that hummed against his palm.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The city was beating. Or rather, the Script was.
To the merchant shouting about overpriced eel pies, or the chimney sweep covered in soot, the world was just a series of hard days and cold nights. But to Rei, the world was a draft—a messy, repetitive, and cruel story written by "Authors" who had long ago stopped caring about the characters.
He looked up, his mercury-silver eyes swirling like a storm in a bottle as they caught the light of a nearby gas lamp.
"Three minutes," Rei whispered.
Across the street, a young girl in a tattered blue dress was chasing a rolling copper coin, laughing. She didn't know she was a Catalyst. In the "Great Script" of Oakhaven, her death under the wheels of a runaway steam-carriage was meant to be the tragic motivation for a local Investigator to finally take his job seriously. It was a classic trope: cheap, effective, and disgusting.
Rei felt the familiar itch at the base of his skull—the sensation of the world trying to "read" him and finding a blank space. He shouldn't be here. He had died in the fire that consumed his family manor five years ago. He was a typo that the fire had failed to erase.
Hiss—clack!
The sound of a pressure valve blowing echoed from the top of the hill. A heavy iron freight-carriage, its driver slumped over from an alchemical overdose, began to pick up speed. The crowd on the sidewalk didn't move. They couldn't. A strange, heavy lethality had settled over the street—the "Narrative Weight". Everyone was subconsciously playing their part as witnesses.
The girl reached for the coin in the middle of the cobblestone road as the ten-ton beast of brass and steam roared down toward her.
"I am the only mistake the world hasn't corrected yet," Rei murmured.
He didn't run. Running was what a hero did. Rei simply stepped.
He moved into the path of the carriage with the cold precision of a surgeon cutting out a tumor. As he stepped, the mercury in his eyes rippled violently. The world slowed, colors bleeding out until everything looked like a charcoal sketch. He saw them then: the Lines of Fate, thin, glowing threads of ink that tethered the girl to the wheels of the carriage.
Rei reached out with his left hand. He wasn't grabbing the girl; he was grabbing the thread.
"Edit," he commanded.
His voice didn't sound like his own; it sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates. He yanked the thread, and the laws of physics screamed in protest. The carriage didn't swerve; it stuttered. For a fraction of a second, the massive iron vehicle ceased to exist in one coordinate and reappeared three feet to the left, slamming into a stone fountain instead of the child.
BOOM.
Steam exploded into the air and water hissed. The girl fell backward, clutching her copper coin, unharmed but trembling. The silence that followed was terrifying. The "Narrative" had been broken. The crowd stayed frozen, their minds struggling to process a scene that wasn't in the Script. The "Authors" were noticing.
Rei felt a sharp, searing pain in his chest as a red mark, shaped like a jagged quill, glowed through his shirt. It was the "tax" for his existence. Turning his collar up, he vanished into the black fog of an alleyway just as the first bell of the Great Cathedral began to toll—not for the hour, but in alarm.
The World Correctors were coming.
The alleyway was a throat of wet brick and rotting timber. Rei leaned against a soot-stained wall, his breath coming in ragged, metallic hitches. Every time he edited a scene, the "Ink" in his veins turned to lead.
"Come out," Rei said, his voice flat. "I can smell the gold".
From the mouth of the alley, a figure emerged—a Corrector. It wore a porcelain mask and a gold-trimmed coat, but inside was only a vortex of shimmering golden ink.
"Anomaly ID: 00-Slavena," it spoke with a voice like scratching parchment. "Action: Unauthorized Narrative Deviation. Sentence: Erasure".
It lunged with a Canonical Blade of solidified sunlight. Rei drew his hilt-less shard of iron.
"I am a mistake," Rei whispered, eyes spinning. "And a mistake cannot be parried".
He swung. The air tore. Clang! The Canonical Blade was deflected. Rei stepped in, his fingers sizzling against the creature's wrist. "You represent the 'Order' of this world. But Oakhaven isn't a story. It's a prison. And I'm the crack in the wall".
He drove the iron shard into the mask. "Delete".
The mask shattered, and the golden ink turned to ash. Rei stood over the remains, silver blood leaking from his nose. Narrative Interference was up another +0.02%.
Rei descended into the Ink-Sump—the gutters of deleted scenes—where he met Valerius, a fallen Protagonist sitting behind a desk of petrified books.
"You saved the girl. You've increased the Causality Debt," Valerius warned.
"The debt is mine to pay," Rei replied, tossing stolen ink on the desk. "I need the credentials for the Aethelgard Royal Academy".
Valerius froze. "The Academy? That's the heart of the Script. You'll be walking into the lion's den".
"The Academy holds the Original Draft," Rei said. "I'm going to infiltrate the Hero's party. I'm going to become the 'Best Friend' or the 'Rival'... and then, when the climax hits, I'm going to tear the Script apart from the inside".
Rei took the envelope.
[New Scenario Triggered: The Infiltrator's Debut].
"I am the only mistake the world hasn't corrected yet," he whispered to the freezing wind. "But soon, I'll be the one holding the pen".