Chapter 14
She remembers now.
The fifth arc of Flo Viva Mythology was not merely about battles or the gathering of power.
That arc was about a silent invasion that had never been invited.
Characters from beyond—from novels, from short stories, from obscure games that had never gained popularity, from every literary work ever written by human hands or any other living being—suddenly found themselves inside a game world already in chaos.
Nirmala imagines what it must have felt like to be one of them.
A fictional character suddenly aware that their world was no longer paper or screen, but a foreign and terrifying digital reality.
"Theo solved it," Nirmala murmurs, her voice like someone who has finally found a missing piece of a long-lost puzzle.
"He sent them all back. One by one. To their respective universes. And among that crowd of fictional beings, he found her—the woman who would later become his ninth wife."
Nirmala smiles faintly at the irony.
A writer whose work inspired destruction finding love amid the chaos he resolved.
But the smile quickly fades as she recalls the next part of the story, the part rarely spoken aloud.
The return was never perfect.
Not because of Theo's mistake, not because he failed his mission, but because the original worlds of those characters had already vanished.
Behind her closed eyelids, Nirmala sees again the images recounted countless times.
The real world, ninety-nine percent of it consumed by Flo Viva Mythology, left behind nothing but fragments of concept and Theo Vkytor struggling alone.
All literary works—every novel written in ink upon paper, every short story typed on old machines, every film script scribbled in notebooks, every imagination ever poured into any medium by living beings—disappeared along with ninety-nine percent of the population.
Not because they were deliberately destroyed, but because nothing remained to preserve them.
Libraries burned.
Hard drives were shattered.
The collective memory of those fictional characters was drawn into the same digital vortex that swallowed nearly all of humankind.
And when Theo succeeded in restoring everything at the end of the sixth arc, when ninety-nine percent of the population returned safely to the real world, something did not return with them.
"Arya," Nirmala whispers, though she knows he will not answer, "they no longer had a home."
Her voice trembles, not from sorrow, but from the understanding of the true scale of what occurred.
All the fictional characters Theo returned in the fifth arc—those who were meant to go back to their respective novels, their respective short stories, their imaginary worlds—found nothing.
Their original worlds had perished along with ninety-nine percent of reality.
There were no pages left to hold them.
No screens to frame their existence.
No intact memory within the minds of their creators, for those creators themselves had only just returned from mass absorption with fractured and incomplete recollections.
As a result, when ninety-nine percent of reality was restored to its former state, those fictional characters had no choice but to remain—assimilated, absorbed, fused into a world that was not their own.
In that layered silence, Nirmala feels her chest tighten with a newly completed understanding.
She remembers now—she remembers why her world feels so strange, so different, so filled with things that should not exist.
It was not merely one fictional universe blending into her reality.
Not just a handful of lost characters to accommodate.
But every universe, every layer of existence, each absorbing one literary work in its entirety.
Like a colossal puzzle whose pieces were forced into the wrong places, like millions of books torn apart and scattered across the sky before falling upon worlds that never asked for them.
One universe swallowed a single novel whole.
Another consumed a short story.
Yet another absorbed a stage script perhaps once read by only a few.
And all of it happened without choice, without resistance, without negotiation.
"And we," Nirmala murmurs, her voice nearly breaking, "we received Abnormality."
She speaks the word with a mixture of awe and resignation, as if invoking the name of a specter she has chased without ever fully grasping its shape.
Behind her eyelids, she sees again fragments of reports she once read, pieces of investigations she once conducted, accounts of a woman named Sinta Melina Ningsih who lived in the same world as her yet seemed to exist on a different layer of reality.
Sinta Melina Ningsih, member of the Society of Abnormal Secret—SAS—a special unit whose duty was precisely as its name implied.
To hunt abnormal secrets gnawing at the edges of reality, to confront absurd forms of life invisible to ordinary sight, to battle the madness born from the fact that their world was in truth a fusion of reality and a particular literary work.
Nirmala imagines Sinta standing amid chaos visible only to the trained—shadows whispering in unknown tongues, corridors appearing and vanishing between blinks, beings whose forms shift each time someone attempts to describe them.
That is Abnormality.
The remnants of literature assimilated into their universe, fragments of narrative not fully dissolved, shards of stories persistently attempting to rewrite themselves upon a canvas of reality never designed to contain them.
And Sinta Melina Ningsih, with all her flaws and strengths, stands as the final line of defense between that narrative chaos and the semblance of normal life they strive to preserve.
Nirmala draws a long breath, feeling the layers of time around her ripple gently with the exhale.
She knows well what people say about Theo Vkytor in the real world where she lives.
They call him the God Who Creates Problems—a title born of disappointment, bitterness, and pain that refuses to fade.
To them, Theo is someone who could fix everything but chose not to.
A creator who left his creation in disarray.
A savior who neglected to clean up the final chaos before departing.
Nirmala has heard it all countless times—from elders, from young students just beginning to study history, from the grumbling of her enemies in the Temporal Cross-Police when they must deal with endless anomalies.
"But I have never been able to see him that way," Nirmala murmurs, her voice soft yet firm within the silent space that holds everything without judgment.
"Because when I read the reports about the fifth arc and the sixth arc, what I see is not failure.
What I see is a man who completed six main arcs alone.
A writer who did not merely create Last Prayer, but entered the game world born from his work and conquered it layer by layer, obstacle by obstacle, until ninety-nine percent of humanity could return home."
Her closed eyes tremble, and behind her lids she sees once more the images etched into memory.
Theo Vkytor standing at the threshold of the final gate of the sixth arc—perhaps exhausted, perhaps alone, yet still finishing what he had begun.
"He fulfilled his duty as the creator of Last Prayer. He did what a writer is meant to do: he finished his story to its very last point."
To be continued…