The sky was on fire, and the fire was singing.
No — not singing. Compiling.
Lines of crimson code wove through the clouds, pulsing in unison with the countdown timer carved into the heavens.
[00:02:17]
I clutched the corrupted blade tighter, feeling its unstable energy shudder against my palm. It wasn't just a weapon — it was a scalpel for the script of existence itself.
"They're rewriting the battlefield," the girl said, her voice grim but steady. "This space will collapse into pure narrative void in under three minutes."
"Pure narrative void," I repeated, tasting the unfamiliar term on my tongue.
"A place where all possibilities die," she clarified. "A blank page before it's written, or after it's been erased."
My throat went dry.
The Choir of Final Scripts descended in slow, reverent formation, their hollow chants echoing inside my skull, stitching new laws into the fabric of the world.
[Editing Protocol: Lock Scene Variables.][Restrict Anomalous Movement.][Suppress Unauthorized Narrative Access.]
My knees buckled. Invisible chains cinched around my chest, wrists, ankles. I couldn't move.
"They're freezing us inside the story's syntax," the girl said. She bit her lip, drawing blood. "They've turned the rules against us."
Despair clawed at my insides — but beneath it, something sparked. An ember of rebellion. A glitch in the despair loop.
"What if I change the rules?" I rasped.
She blinked, then a shadow of a smile played across her lips.
"Then you'll survive."
Without thinking, I raised the blade to the crimson script searing the sky. Instinct — or maybe madness — guided my next move. I slashed through the command strings anchoring my body.
[Syntax Error: Undefined Variable.][Error: Target Anomaly Rejected System Constraints.]
The chains snapped.
Breath surged into my lungs. Blood thundered through my veins.
The Choir froze, their faceless hoods turning toward me in mechanical unison.
[Escalation Protocol: Tier II Editors Deployed.]
From the folds of warping reality, new figures emerged — Editors of higher order, cloaked in algorithmic cloisters, their quills dripping with liquid code. They weren't here to fight.
They were here to erase.
"They're rewriting you from existence," the girl warned, her voice sharp with urgency.
I should have been terrified.
Instead, I felt... alive.
More than alive.
Awake.
"I'll write faster."
With raw willpower, I stabbed the blade into the ground.
The world stuttered.
Code bled from the pavement like oil from ruptured veins. I seized it — not with hands, but with thought, with intention. Command lines unfolded before me like a neural map.
[Manual Override: Narrative Control Accessed.][Input New Directives.]
My fingers moved, trembling, but certain. I typed into the void:
[If protagonist ≠ defined: define protagonist = Ethan Kael.][Grant: Temporary Administrative Privileges.][Permission Level: Editor-Class.]
The world glitched.
The Choir recoiled, their scripts unraveling mid-recitation.
"Impossible," they chorused, voices splintering into binary screams.
But it was happening.
Authority rushed into me, scorching and divine. For the first time, I wasn't just reading the commands of my own fate — I was writing them.
I turned to the girl.
"What's your name?" I asked.
She hesitated. For the briefest moment, fear flickered in her eyes — not of me, but for me.
"...Call me Lys," she said.
Lys.
The Observer. The one who guided me to this moment.
"Lys," I repeated, tasting the name like a key slipping into a lock. "Then let's rewrite this apocalypse."
With a sweep of the blade, I cut through the nearest Editor's quill, severing its connection to the narrative thread. The being shrieked, imploding into fractured text fragments.
[Editor-Class Entity Eliminated.][System Stability: Critical.][Narrative Collapse Progression: Accelerated.]
The sky cracked.
The countdown reached its final minute.
[00:00:59]
"Where do we go now?" I asked.
She met my gaze, eyes alight with a dangerous, desperate fire.
"Into the backend," she answered. "To the source of the script."
"And then?"
Her smile turned razor-sharp.
"We rewrite the whole damn story."