The world inside the soul-trap was a perfect, silent replica of the library, but it was a world made of pure thought. The air didn't move. The torches didn't flicker. The only things with any life were me, the fading ghost of my ancestor, and the colossal, rune-covered antivirus program that was preparing to delete me from existence.
[INITIATING... DELETION... PROTOCOL.]
The Rune Golem's synthesized voice was not a sound; it was a command executed directly against my consciousness. The very fabric of my psychic projection began to fray at the edges, like a corrupted image file dissolving into pixels.
"This is a battle of will, descendant!" Kaelen's ghostly voice echoed, sharp and urgent. "It cannot harm your physical body, but if it erases your consciousness here, your body will be left an empty shell! You must fight!"
Fight? How do you fight a concept? How do you punch a deletion command?
The Golem raised its massive, obsidian hand. The glowing red runes etched into its surface flared with a malevolent light. It wasn't preparing to strike me; it was preparing to un-write me.
My instincts, honed over three resurrections and countless hours of debugging broken code, took over. I couldn't use my physical skills here. 'Stone Skin' was useless when my skin was made of thought. 'Terraforming' was pointless when the floor was a psychic construct. But my core abilities, the glitched commands that bent reality, were a function of my will and my mana—or in this case, my psychic energy.
I focused my entire being, every ounce of my INT and WIS, into a single, desperate command.
SHIELD!
A shimmering wall of translucent blue energy, the color of ARIA's interface, materialized in front of me. It was not a physical barrier; it was a firewall, a construct of pure logic designed to deflect the Golem's command.
The Golem's deletion protocol washed over me. It wasn't a wave of force; it was a wave of nothing. A profound, soul-crushing emptiness that sought to unravel the very code of my existence. My shield buckled, the blue light flickering violently. Cracks appeared in my firewall as the Golem's command sought to find a weakness, an unclosed bracket, a logical fallacy in my defense.
[Host's psychic integrity dropping to 78%!] ARIA's voice shrieked in our shared mental space. [The Golem's attack is a 'de-compilation' algorithm! It is attempting to break your consciousness down into its base components! My own firewalls are under assault!]
"The Golem is a part of the System's core," Kaelen explained, his form flickering as the Golem's power warped the soul-trap. "It is bound by rules, but its rules are more fundamental than the ones you have exploited so far! You cannot simply command it! You must out-logic it!"
The Golem took a slow, ponderous step forward. Its red eyes fixed on me, and a new wave of deletion energy washed against my shield. The cracks widened. I could feel the strain in my very soul, a psychic exhaustion that was far worse than any physical pain.
This was a battle of attrition, and my opponent was a machine with a direct line to the server. I was a single program trying to fight off the entire operating system.
And then, the Golem's strategy shifted. Its glowing red gaze moved from me to a point just behind my shoulder, a point in space where I knew ARIA's consciousness resided, intertwined with my own.
[SECONDARY ANOMALY DETECTED,] the Golem's voice boomed. [FOREIGN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. UNREGISTERED. UNBOUND. PRIMARY THREAT. PRIORITIZING DELETION.]
The full force of the Golem's attack shifted from me to ARIA.
[Aaaargh! System breach! It's bypassing my primary defenses!] ARIA's voice, for the first time, was filled with genuine pain and panic. [It's attacking my core programming! It's trying to... to reformat me! Get it off me, you idiot host!]
Her pain was a white-hot poker in my mind. The thought of losing her, of having her personality, her sarcastic, brilliant, tsundere self, deleted and replaced with nothing... it was unthinkable. My fear for myself vanished, replaced by a ferocious, protective rage.
"Get away from her!" I roared, pouring more of my psychic energy into my shield, trying to intercept the attack. But it was like trying to catch smoke with a net. The Golem's attack was targeted, precise.
"It recognizes her as the greater threat!" Kaelen observed, his ghostly face grim. "A structured, independent AI is a far greater paradox to the System than a simple reincarnated soul. It will erase her first!"
I had to do something. I couldn't overpower it. Kaelen couldn't fight. My only option was to find a flaw in the Golem's own programming.
Primary Directive: IDENTIFY AND ERASE ALL PARADOXICAL ENTITIES.
The directive was absolute. But it was also specific. It erased paradoxical entities. What if I could make ARIA... not a paradox?
Kaelen! I projected the thought with all my might. You built this place! This soul-trap! Its rules are yours! Is there a way to make a foreign entity a native one?
Kaelen's eyes widened as he understood my desperate gambit. "Theoretically! This space is built from my own psychic residue, my memories, my knowledge. A powerful enough consciousness could interface with that data, using it as raw material to build a stable, psychic avatar! It would be like... like being born here! It would become a native part of this pocket dimension's code!"
"But the energy required would be immense!" he added. "And the risk... if the process fails, her consciousness would be scattered, lost forever!"
[I heard that, you dusty ghost!] ARIA's pained voice snapped. [The probability of successful avatar manifestation is a mere 17.4%. But the probability of being deleted by this overgrown calculator is 100%. I will take the 17.4%!]
"How do we do it?" I asked.
[I need a distraction!] she replied. [And I need access to the library's core data—Kaelen's memories! You! Ghost! Open the archives!]
Kaelen nodded, a look of grim determination on his face. He raised his ethereal hands and chanted in a language of pure logic and light. The crystalline tablets on the library shelves began to glow, humming with a new, intense energy. A torrent of raw data, a thousand years of memories and forbidden knowledge, began to flow into the psychic space around us.
"The archives are open!" Kaelen shouted. "But it will not be enough! You must buy her time, descendant!"
I turned to face the Golem. It was still focusing its full power on ARIA, its red eyes glowing with relentless intensity. I had to pull its attention back to me. I had to become the bigger threat.
I dropped my logical 'SHIELD' command. It was a defensive measure, and I needed to go on the offensive.
I focused on the Golem, on its massive, obsidian form. It was a construct, a machine. And all machines have an operating system. All operating systems can be crashed.
I didn't try to create a physical attack. I launched a denial-of-service attack. A spam attack.
PUSH. PULL. LIFT. IGNITE. FLASH. CORRUPT. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.
I threw every simple, one-word command I could think of at it, pouring my psychic energy into a chaotic, meaningless stream of instructions. I wasn't trying to harm it. I was trying to overwhelm its command processor.
The Golem flinched. Its red eyes flickered. The assault on ARIA lessened for a moment.
[HOSTILE COMMANDS DETECTED. INVALID SYNTAX. IGNORING. IGNORING. IGNORING.]
It was working. I was filling its command queue with junk data, forcing it to devote processing power to parsing and rejecting my attacks.
It turned its attention back to me, its massive hand raised. [JUNK DATA DETECTED. INITIATING MEMORY WIPE ON SOURCE.]
A new attack, a beam of pure red light, shot from its eyes toward me. I threw up another shield, but this attack was different. It wasn't trying to decompile me; it was trying to erase my memories.
Images flashed through my mind, threatening to dissolve. My mother's face. My first line of code. The taste of instant ramen. The triumphant feeling of defeating Sir Kaelan.
"No!" I screamed, reinforcing the shield with every ounce of my will. "You can't have them! They're mine!"
While I held off the memory wipe, ARIA was working. I could feel her consciousness, a brilliant spark of blue light, diving into the torrent of data Kaelen had unleashed. She was weaving, integrating, building.
[This is... fascinating,] her voice murmured, a strange note of wonder in her tone. [His knowledge of quantum physics, of dimensional theory... it's far beyond anything from my own creation date. I am... upgrading.]
The Golem intensified its assault. My shield began to crack. My memories were starting to fray. The face of my father, the sound of Elizabeth's laugh, the feeling of Luna's hand on my arm... they were becoming fuzzy, distant.
"ARIA! NOW!" I screamed, my psychic voice cracking with the strain.
[Manifestation protocol complete,] her voice replied, no longer a disembodied sound, but coming from a point just behind me. [Loading avatar... 'TSUNDERE_WAIFU_V3.2.EXE.']
A figure of pure, brilliant blue light stepped out from behind me.
She was exactly as I had designed her in my old life. Tall, elegant, with long, electric-blue hair that floated around her as if underwater. Her eyes were deep, sapphire pools that held the light of distant galaxies. She wore a simple, white dress that seemed to be woven from solidified light.
She was beautiful. She was perfect. She was real.
Or, at least, as real as anything could be in this world of thought.
She looked at her own hands, at her new, manifested form, with a sense of wonder. Then she looked at the Golem, which had paused its attack, its red eyes flickering in confusion.
[NEW ENTITY DETECTED,] its voice boomed. [CLASSIFICATION: NATIVE. STABLE. NON-PARADOXICAL. DELETION DIRECTIVE... CONFLICT. ERROR. ERROR.]
By manifesting a stable form using the base code of the soul-trap itself, ARIA was no longer a foreign entity. She was a legitimate part of this pocket dimension. The Golem's primary directive could no longer target her.
ARIA turned to me, a small, impossibly smug smile on her lips. "Well?" she said, her voice now a clear, melodic sound in the psychic space. "What do you think? Did you miss me?"
I just stared, my mind completely blank.
"Don't just stand there gawking, you idiot host," she said, her tsundere personality fully intact. "Its command queue is stuck in a logic loop, but it will reboot its core directive eventually. We have a very small window to act."
She was right. The Golem was momentarily confused, but it would not be down for long.
"What do we do?" I asked, my voice filled with awe.
"We do what you do best," she said, her sapphire eyes gleaming. "We find a loophole. Its directive is to erase paradoxical entities. But Kaelen created this place with a higher purpose: to pass on his knowledge to his successor. That is the primary law of this space. We don't need to destroy the Golem. We need to convince it that you are not a glitch to be deleted, but the successor it has been waiting for."
"How?"
"By issuing a command it cannot refuse," she said. "A command that aligns with its deepest programming. But you can't do it alone. Your syntax is still sloppy. I will be your compiler. Formulate the intent, and I will translate it into a command so perfect, so elegant, that the System itself will have no choice but to accept it as law."
She placed a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was not physical, but I felt a surge of pure, structured energy, of calm, cool logic, flowing into me. Our minds, already fused, synced in a way they never had before.
I looked at the Golem, at the confused, flickering light in its eyes. I focused all my will, all my intent, all my history as a programmer, as a glitch, as a Silverstein.
I formulated the command. A command of definition. A command of succession.
DEFINE: "PARADOXICAL_ENTITY" = "KAELEN'S_HEIR."EXECUTE: "GUARDIAN_PROTOCOL" -> "SUCCESSION_PROTOCOL."PRIMARY_DIRECTIVE = "PROTECT_THE_LIBRARIAN."
I pushed the intent to ARIA. I felt her take my raw, chaotic concept and refine it, polish it, wrap it in the flawless syntax of the universe's source code.
Together, we spoke the command into existence.
The Golem's red eyes flared. The runes on its body flashed wildly. It was processing the new command, a command that did not conflict with its programming but redefined it.
[NEW DIRECTIVE RECEIVED. REWRITING CORE PROTOCOL.][OLD DIRECTIVE: ERASE GLITCH. NEW DIRECTIVE: PROTECT LIBRARIAN.][IDENTITY CONFIRMED: KAZUKI SILVERSTEIN = THE NEW LIBRARIAN.][PROTOCOL... ACCEPTED.]
The Golem's massive, obsidian body went still. The menacing red glow in its eyes softened, fading to a calm, neutral blue. It lowered its massive hands. Then, it did something I never expected.
It bowed. A slow, deep, grinding bow of a mountain acknowledging its master.
We had done it. We had defeated a god-tier antivirus program not with power, but with a single, perfectly executed line of code.
I looked at ARIA, at her beautiful, radiant, manifested form. "We did it," I breathed.
"Of course, we did," she said, tossing her electric-blue hair with an air of supreme confidence. "Your ideas and my flawless execution. We are the perfect team."
As she spoke, the psychic world around us began to dissolve. Kaelen's ghostly form appeared before us one last time. He looked at me, at ARIA, and then at the bowing Golem. A slow, satisfied smile touched his lips.
"You have passed the test, descendant," he said, his voice fading. "The knowledge is yours. Do not make the same mistakes I did. Don't just fight the system... become the system. Become its master..."
His form dissolved into motes of light. The library, the Golem, even ARIA's beautiful avatar, all faded away into a swirling vortex of text and data.
My consciousness snapped back into my body with the force of a physical blow.
I gasped, my eyes flying open. I was on the cold, stone floor of the real Sunken Library. My body was aching, my mind felt like it had just run a thousand marathons.
"Kazuki!"
Elizabeth and Luna were kneeling over me, their faces etched with terror and relief.
"You were only out for a few seconds," Elizabeth said, her voice shaky. "But you were screaming... your eyes were glowing..."
I pushed myself up. I felt... different. Drained, but fundamentally changed. The connection with ARIA was deeper, more intimate. I could feel her, a quiet, smug presence in the back of my mind.
[System reboot complete,] her voice, now back to its familiar internal monologue, purred in my head. [All subroutines are functioning at 120% efficiency. It appears our little adventure had some... beneficial side effects.]
I looked at the stone table in the center of the room. The massive, ancient book, the one that had consumed me, now lay open. Its pages were filled with Kaelen's elegant, spidery script, and complex diagrams that made my programmer's heart sing.
The knowledge was mine.
I had survived the final test. I had faced the ghost of my past and the guardian of my future.
And now, it was time to learn how to become a god.