Chapter 44: My Home Is Falling Apart. I Feel Like Crying (8)
The world of Fixer could be divided into three major factions:
The human forces, centered around governments and corporations; the non-human forces, led by beings from other worlds; and the Invader forces, focused on dimensional invaders.
Explaining their relationships in a lengthy, textbook-style manner felt tedious, so here’s the simplest way to sum it up:
"Humans and non-humans were at odds, locked in conflict, until they belatedly realized the existence of Invaders. They formed a temporary alliance out of necessity, just to prevent their mutual destruction."
Imagine two people viciously pulling each other's hair and fighting to the death, only for a deranged psychopath, incapable of reason, to show up. Suddenly, they’re forced to band together against the greater threat.
Humans couldn’t handle the Invaders without information, and the non-humans lacked the strength to confront them alone. So, they shelved their old grudges and agreed to cooperate for survival.
But the emergence of the Invaders, which once brought a sense of urgency, was already several years ago by this point. Naturally, as time passed, the patched-up conflicts from the temporary alliance began to surface again, and tensions rose. By the time the original story began, the factions had once again started pointing guns and swords at each other.
It was only after several large-scale incidents involving the entire city that the real threat of the Invaders came to light. The true enemy, still lurking in the shadows, hadn’t disappeared—they were merely lying in wait, biding their time.
And that led me to my current predicament:
“This... shouldn’t be here right now.”
The fragment in my hand was unmistakably connected to the dimensional Invaders—something that wasn’t supposed to appear at this point in the timeline.
Of course, I couldn’t be 100% certain. I could only sense a similarity between the fragment and the Tesseract. There weren’t any actual Invaders nearby, and nothing explicitly confirmed their presence.