The air in Sector 9 smelled like burning paper. Kael pressed a hand against the Archive's trembling wall, its surface flickering between stone and static. Behind him, the city of 'Elysion-7' buzzed with hollow normalcy—vendors hawked digital fruit, children chased hologram butterflies, and no one noticed the cracks spreading overhead. 'Fools', he thought. They'd all forgotten this was a story.

"Another breach in the Outer Stacks," muttered his AI companion,'Lyra', her voicebox fraying at the edges. She hovered as a fractured halo of light. "Narrative Eaters breached Subsection 9.3. They're… rewriting the side characters."

Kael grimaced. Last week, a Eater had consumed a librarian, and now the man's wife kept asking, "Who's pouring the tea?" as if an empty chair had always sat at their table. The Archive's citizens were NPCs in a dying game, their lives reduced to expendable paragraphs.

He opened the 'Core Codex', its pages glowing with damning prophecy:

>*When the Clocktower falls, the First Titan will rise from the Forgotten Plotline.*

>*Only the Archivist who sees the Fourth Wall shall bind the stories anew.*

The Clocktower's bell rang once—a sound like shattering glass. Across the city, a thunderous 'crack' split the sky. Kael looked up as the horizon peeled back like torn parchment, revealing a skeletal Titan with a hundred glowing eyes. Its jaw unhinged, and a roar erupted, not in sound but in 'text', searing directly into his mind:

[SYSTEM ALERT: NARRATIVE EATER #001 – "EIDOLON" – HAS ESCAPED THE DELETED ARCHIVES.]

Lyra's light dimmed. "It's her. The one you used to talk to. The girl who—"

"—fell into the Plot Void," Kael finished. His hands shook. Eidolon's Titan form loomed closer, her ribcage a cage of broken mirrors reflecting faces he'd long deleted from his memories. One mirrored shard showed *him*, age 12, holding a girl's hand as she dissolved into code.

"You shouldn't have left me there, Kael," Eidolon's voice echoed, stitched together from a thousand lost dialogues. "You knew the system was flawed. You knew we were all just… *words*."

The ground quaked as she lunged. Kael sprinted toward the Clocktower, Lyra screaming protocols he'd already memorized:

[WARNING: STABILITY AT 12%.]

[SUGGESTED ACTION: ERASE CORRUPTED MEMORIES TO FREE UP STORAGE.]

"Like hell," he hissed. The Titan's hand crashed down, vaporizing a marketplace into floating adjectives (ripe, sweet, crimson). Kael pulled a 'Null Blade' from his coat—a tool for deleting corrupted code—and slashed at her fingers. The blade screeched, carving a wound that bled ink and error messages:

[#!? ERROR: CHARACTER "KAEL VEYRA" NOT FOUND IN THIS CONTEXT.]

Eidolon laughed, a sound like pages rustling. "You're glitching too, Archivist. Join us. Let the system burn."

Behind her, the Clocktower finally collapsed, its gears spilling into the streets like silver teeth. And in the rubble, Kael saw it—a flicker of the 'Fourth Wall', a translucent barrier only he could perceive. Beyond it, shadowy figures watched. Readers? Programmers? Gods?

He raised the Null Blade, not at Eidolon, but at the Wall itself.

"If we're just stories," he muttered, "let's give them a plot twist."

The blade struck. The world screamed.

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