I left the clearing with my hands stained in burning code and my eyes full of questions.
I didn't know if "S" was still alive.
But I knew something more important:
The system feared them.
---
Over the next few days, I wandered along the fringes of the Forest of Echoes, looking for similar traces.
Places where the system failed to fully render the environment,
where NPCs stuttered when passing by,
where the moons seemed to ignore their orbit.
I found three more.
Each one hid fragments—scattered phrases left by "S":
> "Language creates limits. Change your words, change your cage."
"Heroes aren't human. Just patches with pretty names."
"The first lie was 'this is a world.'"
---
I started noting patterns.
Every node had:
A specific kind of temporal distortion (2.4 second lag from the central clock).
A stone marked with similar glowing symbols.
An echo, a sound that didn't repeat... but anticipated itself.
As if the world was reacting before I acted.
That terrified me.
Because it meant someone else was watching.
---
And then, one night, the world stopped glitching.
It became too stable.
That wasn't normal.
Nothing in Eclipsia was perfect.
Then I knew: the system had detected me.
Not directly. It still couldn't flag me as a threat.
But it could label me a persistent anomaly.
And when that happens, they don't send guards.
No warnings.
They send embedded narrators.
NPCs whose only job is to get close... and document.
---
I noticed them by the third day.
An old man who "just happened" to appear in three different villages.
A little girl who offered me the same cake even if I changed routes.
A merchant who never remembered seeing me before… but always knew my name.
They all had one thing in common:
> They looked at me like they were waiting for me to say something narratively important.
---
What scared me wasn't that the system was watching.
It was that it had started to write around me.
As if it was trying to absorb my story before I could finish it.
And that… that meant I had to move faster than the plot.