The slasher's knife hummed in Alex's grip, its pixelated edge warping the air like a corrupted file. The cliffside crumbled beneath them, plunging them into the siege below. Tanks fired at dragons. Elves hacked at demons. And Alex? They landed hard on the turret of a Panzer, its crew screaming about "glitch-witches."
"Not my weirdest Monday," they muttered, rolling off as a dragon's tail obliterated the tank.
The ground split open where the Demon King's blood had spilled, revealing a staircase spiraling into a pulsating, fleshy dungeon. The walls throbbed with veins of glowing text:
WELCOME TO THE TROPE VAULT
OBJECTIVE: DESTROY THE PROTOTYPE
"Prototype?" Alex hissed, their cybernetic arm flickering between sci-fi circuitry and thorned vines. The dagger on their thigh (now a hybrid of romance's cursed blade and horror's glitched knife) pulsed impatiently.
They descended.
***
The dungeon was a factory. Conveyor belts carried half-formed characters: a brooding vampire missing fangs, a shōnen hero with a placeholder grin. Vats bubbled with tropes—[Tsundere.exe], [Tragic Backstory (Basic)]. And at the center, hooked to a tangle of IVs pumping liquid clichés into its veins, floated…
Them.
A flawless Alex clone: symmetrical face, tragic-but-heroic posture, and eyes shimmering with uncomplicated resolve. Its voice oozed marketable relatability: "I'm everything you failed to be. The Storyweaver's perfect protagonist."
Alex's stomach churned. "Great. I've been downgraded to a Mary Sue."
***
Boss Fight Initiated: [Alex Prime]
Weakness: Subverted Expectations
The clone attacked with tropes made manifest:
- A power-of-friendship beam (summoning spectral allies from Alex's discarded worlds).
- A tragic monologue that numbed their limbs (system alert: [Emotional Damage] 75%).
- A plot armor shield glowing with invincibility.
Alex's glitching arm seized. The Storyweaver's curse hissed: "Surrender. Let the better you win."
But Alex remembered the slasher's forest, the romance ballroom, the way every genre broke when they broke its rules. They lunged, not at the clone, but at the factory's control panel—a relic from a 1950s sci-fi B-movie.
"Let's reboot this draft."
They smashed the panel. The dungeon shuddered. Conveyor belts reversed, spilling half-baked heroes and uninstalled tropes. The clone's plot armor flickered.
"You can't win!" it screamed, voice glitching into Alex's own snarl. "The Storyweaver owns you!"
"Yeah?" Alex jammed their dagger into the clone's chest, where a heart should've been. "Tell it to stop recycling antagonists."
The clone dissolved into ink, its final scream a distorted echo of Alex's laugh.
***
Achievement Unlocked: [Meta Critical Hit]
Reward: "The Fourth Wall" (Tier 3)
—Temporarily overwrite a genre's rules (1x per arc). Warning: May cause existential recoil.
***
The dungeon collapsed. Alex fell again—but this time, they chose the void.
CHAPTER 5: THE LITRPG MURDER MYSTERY
GENRE: MYSTERY/LITRPG // TROPE GOAL: SOLVE YOUR OWN MURDER
They awoke in a neon-noir city, their body pixelated into a Player Avatar, stats floating overhead:
[Alex Veyra: Level ??]
Class: Genre Drifter
HP: 78% SANITY
Skill: [Fourth Wall Crack] (Charging…)
A corpse lay at their feet. Their own.
"Oh," Alex said, kneeling to inspect the bullet wound. "This'll be fun."