The second day blurred into dust, sweat, and the steady clop of hooves on packed earth.
We pushed harder than yesterday—Elara leading, me trying not to look like the city boy who'd never ridden anything more stubborn than a danfo in traffic. The four volunteers trailed behind in loose formation: two brothers named Torin and Kael (both built like brick walls, both quiet), a wiry scout called Mirae (not to be confused with the creepy yandere witch from my earlier daydreams), and a lanky archer named Dax who kept humming off-key tunes to calm his nerves.
The trade road eventually gave way to the Whispering Copse.
No one had warned me properly about the name.
The trees closed in gradually at first—tall silver-barks giving way to darker, twisted trunks whose leaves shimmered like oil on water. The canopy thickened until sunlight came through in thin, shifting spears. Sound changed. Footsteps muffled. Voices dropped. Even the horses walked softer, ears flicking.
Then the whispering started.
Not words, exactly. More like wind carrying fragments of voices—half-heard conversations, laughter, arguments, sighs—all overlapping, none clear enough to understand. It crawled under my skin like static.
Elara reined in her mare.
"Stay close," she said. "The Copse remembers. It echoes what it has seen. Do not answer it."
I glanced around. "So it's haunted?"
"Not haunted. Listening. And sometimes… repeating."
Torin muttered something under his breath that sounded like a prayer.
We kept moving.
The path narrowed. Branches brushed our shoulders. The whispers grew louder—louder but still unintelligible. Snatches of children laughing. A woman crying. Metal clashing. A man begging.
I felt the red button pulse once in my vision, almost curious.
*Delete the noise?* I thought idly.
The button didn't respond. But the whispers did.
They sharpened. Focused.
One voice cut through the rest—clear, calm, female.
*You should not have come here, child of errors.*
I froze in the saddle.
Same voice as the anchor spirit.
Elara shot me a look. "You hear it too?"
"Yeah. Old friend."
The voice again, closer now, like someone standing right behind my left ear.
*The fracture widens with every breath you take. You carry entropy like a cloak. Turn back. Or silence me forever.*
I clenched my jaw.
"Not today, lady. We're on a deadline."
A soft laugh—sad, tired—rippled through the trees.
*Then listen to what the Copse has kept.*
The whispers coalesced.
Suddenly I was hearing fragments I recognized.
My own voice.
"…I'm just Kai. Twenty-something dropout who once tried to make jollof rice in a microwave…"
Elara's voice.
"…he refused to delete the anchor spirit that offered itself…"
Tiro's small, excited shout.
"Did you delete them? Did you delete the glowy rocks?"
Then older things—things I hadn't said yet.
My voice, future-sounding, exhausted.
"I deleted the keep. I deleted him. I deleted… everything."
A chill ran down my spine.
The volunteers had stopped moving. All of them staring at the trees like they'd been slapped.
Mirae whispered, "It's never spoken so clearly before."
Dax's knuckles were white on his bow. "It's showing us what will be."
Elara turned in her saddle. "Kai?"
I stared straight ahead.
"It's not prophecy. It's possibility. The Copse is just a really creepy mirror."
The anchor voice returned, softer.
*Delete the Copse. Delete the echoes. Delete me again. Each choice narrows the paths. Each refusal widens them. You are running out of wide paths.*
I took a slow breath.
"I'm not deleting anything until I see the rift-anchor with my own eyes. You want to help? Show me the fastest way through this creepy forest."
Silence.
Then the path ahead shimmered—faintly, like heat haze. The branches pulled back just enough to widen the trail. The whispers dropped to a low murmur, almost respectful.
Elara exhaled.
"It… listened."
"Yeah," I muttered. "Or it's leading us into a trap. Either way, we're moving."
We rode on.
The Copse didn't speak again.
But the silence felt heavier than the noise.
By late afternoon the trees began to thin. Sunlight returned in full force. Ahead, the land rose into low hills. Beyond them—still distant but unmistakable—the jagged black silhouette of Blackspire Keep rose against the sky like a broken tooth.
We stopped at the edge of the tree line to rest the horses.
I dismounted, legs wobbly from two days of riding. Elara joined me, handing over a waterskin.
"You're pale," she observed.
"Forest gave me existential dread. It's a new debuff."
She almost smiled.
Torin approached, voice low. "We can camp here tonight. Scout tomorrow at first light. The keep's patrols are thickest near the walls."
I nodded. "Good. I need sleep. And maybe a plan that doesn't involve deleting half the continent by accident."
We set up a cold camp—no fire, just blankets on the ground, rations eaten in silence.
As night fell, the keep's lights flickered on in the distance—tiny orange pinpricks like predator eyes.
The blue box appeared while I lay staring up at the stars.
```
[Travel Log – Day 3 Post-Transmigration]
Distance covered: 41 km
Current administrative ETA: 4 hours 19 minutes
Nexus strain: 8.3% (rising steadily)
Threat assessment: Moderate (patrol activity detected 2.1 km north)
New passive observation: The Whispering Copse has marked you. Echoes of your future deletions now linger in local memory fields.
Recommendation: Proceed with minimal deletions until rift-anchor is confirmed destroyed.
Or… delete everything and be done with it.
Your call, anomaly.
```
I closed my eyes.
"Not helping, Glitch."
But the box was already gone.
Elara lay a few meters away, sword within reach.
"Kai," she said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"If tomorrow goes wrong… thank you. For everything."
I stared at the dark shape of the keep.
"If tomorrow goes wrong, I'll probably delete the wrong thing and none of this will have mattered anyway."
A long pause.
Then she said, "I believe in you."
I laughed—short, bitter.
"That's the most terrifying thing anyone's said to me since I got here."
She didn't reply.
I pulled Tiro's little wooden figure out of my pocket, rolled it between my fingers.
Four hours left on the clock.
One keep to infiltrate.
One anchor to delete.
And one very real possibility that I was about to become the villain of my own story.
I tucked the figure away.
Closed my eyes.
And waited for morning to decide whether I'd save the day…
…or accidentally end it.