The multiverse shimmered like stained glass in a cathedral of chaos, barely holding its shape after the last conflict. Most worlds were stabilizing. Heroes had aligned with their arcs. The Editors had paused their erasure, curious more than cruel—for now.
But peace, in this narrative, was never a destination. Only a beat before the drop.
Deep in the veiled corridors of Layer Zero—a place below all known realities, where rejected ideas and forbidden lore congealed into shadows—something stirred.
Not an Editor.
Not a hero.
Something... unwritten.
Julius stood on the edge of a floating spire within the interverse capital, where the last convergence had ended. He could feel it—a vibration beneath the seams of existence. Time itself had developed a pulse. Not rhythmic. Desperate.
Madara approached from behind, eyes scanning the unstable horizon.
"It's starting again, isn't it?" Madara asked without ceremony.
Julius nodded. "Something's trying to enter from beneath all lore. A breach is forming. But it isn't coming from the Editors. It's something they sealed away."
Madara's expression didn't change, but the silence that followed was sharp.
He remembered the old whispers—rumors of characters so broken, so wild with contradiction, that even the Editors couldn't rewrite them. They were locked away in Layer Zero, a vault of chaos where logic, pacing, and canon were meaningless. Characters abandoned by creators, corrupted by fanon, warped by algorithmic misunderstanding.
One of them had just torn open a hole.
Down in the Archives, the Template sat with Superman and Goku. The boy—still unnamed, still unanchored—watched glowing threads of connected realities pass overhead like northern lights.
Goku stretched, cracking his neck. "So, what's next? Are we training again, or...?"
Superman leaned in, voice low. "Something's wrong. Julius hasn't returned from the Rift Watch."
"Think we should check it out?" the Template asked.
Before anyone could answer, alarms pulsed across the Archive's walls. Reality strands flickered red. Error messages coded in every known language spiraled across space.
Superman was already airborne.
Goku was next, locking into Ultra Instinct with a nod of shared instinct.
The Template followed, a bit slower. But when he moved, the entire Archive adjusted around him—reality reacting to his presence like ink to water.
They met Julius and Madara at the edge of the breach.
It wasn't a tear. It was a wound—bleeding metadata, dripping broken lore, screaming with soundless contradictions.
Then it stepped out.
A figure. No face. Just shards.
One piece was a knight's helm.
Another, a school uniform.
Part of it looked like a mecha frame.
Another, a giant muscular arm that twitched with overpowered fan-service logic.
It had no name. No backstory.
It was Algorithmia.
The Broken Concept.
A being born from everything wrong with an overengineered multiverse—merged tropes, inconsistent powers, broken timelines, forced romances, and undeveloped stakes. A walking paradox of every trend gone wrong.
Goku raised his guard instantly. "That... doesn't belong anywhere."
Madara activated his Rinnegan. "It doesn't want to."
Algorithmia didn't speak. It glitched forward—one moment standing still, the next in the center of the group, surrounded by gravity distortions and UI overlays that didn't belong.
System messages exploded into the sky.
[UNRECOGNIZED ENTITY: LAYER ZERO BREACH DETECTED]
[REWRITING DISABLED]
[ANCHORS IN DANGER]
[WARNING: CANON DECOHERENCE IN 00:03:47]
Time magic collapsed in its presence.
Julius staggered. His grimoire fluttered wildly. "My spells… they aren't reading properly. It's overriding genre boundaries!"
Algorithmia attacked.
Not with energy.
Not with fists.
But with genre shifts.
Goku was the first to feel it—suddenly, his surroundings turned slice-of-life. His Ultra Instinct vanished, replaced with a school bag and homework deadlines.
"What the—!?"
Superman staggered as his body morphed into a gritty noir detective version of himself. His powers were narrative-locked behind a case he hadn't solved yet.
"Madara!" Julius shouted. "Don't let it rewrite your archetype!"
Madara didn't answer. He let it come.
The glitching wave hit him—and shattered.
Madara remained unmoved.
His lore, built across cycles of war, pain, betrayal, and evolution, held firm. His arc, as twisted as it was, was complete. Rooted.
"I am contradiction," Madara said quietly. "But I earned it."
He activated Limbo clones, striking Algorithmia from realities it couldn't even perceive.
The monster staggered.
The Template, seeing his moment, launched forward. "I can do this."
Julius tried to warn him—too late.
Algorithmia surged, wrapping the boy in code, data corruption, false flags, unfinished stats.
And something horrifying happened.
The Template didn't resist.
He adapted.
His body flickered, but instead of vanishing, it stabilized.
He had no set arc, no completed narrative.
Which meant Algorithmia couldn't break what wasn't finished.
"Wait," Julius whispered. "He's the perfect counter."
Goku re-emerged from his slice-of-life prison, punching through the false setting with sheer will.
Superman broke his noir lock, rewriting the story with sheer moral certainty.
One by one, the heroes adapted.
They didn't overpower Algorithmia.
They refused to lose identity.
And then Julius, realizing the last piece, activated his Chrono Rune: Echo Memory.
He broadcasted the truth of Algorithmia to the Editors.
They responded with silence.
Then a single command appeared in the sky.
[ERASURE: DENIED]
[CONTAINMENT: INITIATED]
[ANCHORING NEW NARRATIVE STABILIZER…]
The Template stood in the glow of collapsing contradictions.
And a name appeared above him.
[KAIROS]
A name born of conflict, of broken canon stitched into clarity.
The boy—now Kairos—looked up, eyes shining.
"Did I pass?"
Madara smirked. "You didn't die. Close enough."
Julius smiled as the breach sealed behind them.
But far away, deep in the forbidden layers, other movements stirred.
Algorithmia was only the first.
Other anomalies had felt the breach.
And now, they were watching.