The thrill of the kill faded as quickly as it had come, replaced by the crushing weight of reality.
Kaelen sprinted down the narrow corridor of the upper stacks, his boots thudding softly on the carpeted floor. The [Echo Step] skill had deactivated, and its cooldown timer was ticking down in the corner of his vision—a slow, agonizing red circle.
58 seconds. 57 seconds.
Behind him, the main atrium was chaos. He could hear the roar of flames. Valerius wasn't just searching for him anymore; he was burning the haystack to find the needle. The smell of smoke—ancient paper and dry leather turning to ash—began to fill the air, stinging Kaelen's eyes and clogging his throat.
"Seal the stairwells!" a voice shouted from below, distorted by distance and fire. "Force him to the lower levels! The gas will finish him!"
Kaelen skidded to a halt at the end of the corridor. The spiral staircase leading up to the roof was blocked. A heavy iron grate had dropped down, sealing it off. Red emergency lights pulsed above it, casting the hallway in a bloody, rhythmic glow.
They're herding me, Kaelen realized, his stomach tightening into a knot. They don't want to catch me. They want to corner me.
He checked his map.
[ MAP DATA: CORRUPTED ][ SECTORS AVAILABLE: Atrium, Archives (B1), Deep Storage (B2) ]
The roof was blocked. The atrium was burning. The only way out was down.
He saw a service door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY: ARCHIVE MAINTENANCE. The paint was peeling, revealing gray, rusted metal underneath that looked like diseased skin.
He didn't hesitate. He kicked the door open and threw himself inside, slamming it shut and spinning the locking wheel just as a burst of machine-gun fire stitched a line of holes across the wall where he had been standing.
CLANG.
The door locked. The heavy steel muffled the gunfire into dull pops.
Kaelen slumped against the cold metal, sliding down to the floor. He gasped for air, his lungs burning. The air in this stairwell was different. It didn't smell like smoke. It smelled of damp earth, ozone, and something... sterile. Like a hospital room left abandoned for a century.
He checked his status.
[ HEALTH: 62% (Infection Spreading) ][ AUTHORITY: 15% (Critical Low) ][ FATIGUE: High ]
He was running on fumes. Using [Denial] twice in the fight upstairs had drained him mentally. His head pounded with a migraine that felt like a rusty nail being driven behind his left eye.
He pushed himself up, his knees protesting. "Down it is."
He descended the stairs. The emergency lights here were flickering, buzzing like angry hornets. With every step deeper, the temperature dropped. By the time he reached the bottom landing, he could see his breath misting in the air.
He stood before a massive circular door, like the vault of a bank.
[ ARCHIVES: SECTOR B1 ][ WARNING: VOID DENSITY HIGH ][ SYSTEM ADVISORY: TURN BACK ]
Kaelen ignored the warning. He had no choice. He pushed the release lever. The hydraulics hissed—a sound like a dying breath—and the door groaned open.
He stepped through.
The darkness was absolute.
Kaelen blinked. He mentally triggered his sight.
[ OBSERVER EYES: AC... ZZZZT... ]
A spike of pain shot through his skull, far worse than the migraine. White static filled his vision, blinding him. It was like tuning a TV to a dead channel at max volume.
[ SYSTEM ERROR ][ CONNECTION UNSTABLE ][ INTERFERENCE DETECTED ]
Kaelen ripped the interface away mentally, gasping as he fell to one knee. He rubbed his eyes. The blue HUD, his constant companion since the factory, was gone.
He was blind.
"No," he whispered, the panic rising in his chest. "Not now. Not down here."
He tapped the side of his head, a human reflex, as if he could fix the Divine System by hitting it like an old radio.
Nothing. Just the static hiss in his ears.
He was in the Deep Archives. The Void here was so thick, so condensed, that it was jamming the signal from the Gods. He was no longer an observer. He was just a man in the dark.
Kaelen fumbled in his pocket for the chemical flares. His hands were shaking. He cracked one.
HISSS.
A sickly green light flooded the room.
Kaelen froze.
He wasn't in a room. He was in a maze.
Rows of tall, black metal shelves stretched out into the gloom, filled not with books, but with glass cylinders. Thousands of them. Inside each cylinder floated a scroll, preserved in some kind of amber liquid.
But it wasn't the scrolls that made Kaelen's skin crawl.
It was the sound.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
It sounded like dry paper sliding over stone. Or a quill scratching frantically on parchment.
It was coming from the darkness ahead.
Kaelen stood up slowly, the green flare casting long, dancing shadows that looked like grasping fingers. He held the Void-Glass dagger in his right hand. The pistol was in his left hand, but he didn't raise it. Gunshots would be deafening in this echo chamber.
Scritch. Scritch.
"Who's there?" Kaelen whispered.
The scratching stopped.
Silence. Heavy, suffocating silence.
Then, a voice drifted out of the dark. It didn't sound human. It sounded dry, papery, as if the vocal cords were made of old parchment rubbing together.
"The Editor... comes."
Kaelen's blood ran cold.
"Show yourself," he commanded, trying to inject authority into his voice. But without the system, his voice was just sound waves. It carried no power. It carried no weight.
Movement in the shadows. To his left.
Kaelen spun, raising the flare high.
A figure stepped out from behind a row of cylinders.
It was humanoid, but wrong. It wore the tattered, gray robes of a librarian, but the robes seemed fused to its skin. Its hands were elongated, the fingers ending in sharp, ink-stained quills instead of nails. Its face was a blank sheet of skin—no eyes, no nose. Just a mouth that was sewn shut, not with thread, but with metal staples.
But the most terrifying part was what it was doing.
It was writing on the air.
Its quill-fingers moved frantically, leaving trails of black, smoking, glowing text floating in the space between them.
[ ERROR: CANNOT IDENTIFY ][ SYSTEM OFFLINE ]
Kaelen backed away. "What are you?"
The creature tilted its head. The staples in its mouth tore open with a wet ripping sound.
"We are the Scriveners," it rasped. "We record the End. We document the Rot."
It lunged.
It moved unnaturally fast, a blur of gray rags and sharp ink.
Kaelen fired the pistol.
BANG.
The muzzle flash was blinding in the dark. The bullet hit the creature in the shoulder, blowing off a chunk of gray flesh.
It didn't bleed. It leaked black ink.
The creature didn't even slow down. It slammed into Kaelen, knocking the wind out of him. The flare flew from his hand, skittering across the floor and spinning wildly.
They hit the ground. The creature was surprisingly light, like a bundle of dry sticks, but its strength was wiry and desperate. It raised a quill-hand, aiming for Kaelen's eyes.
"Be erased!" it shrieked.
Kaelen caught the wrist. The quill tip hovered an inch from his pupil, dripping black sludge that sizzled when it hit his cheek.
Kaelen gritted his teeth. He couldn't overpower it. He couldn't use [Denial]—his Authority was dead down here.
He only had the dagger.
The Void-Glass dagger in his boot.
He let go of the pistol and scrambled for the knife. His fingers brushed the cold, vibrating handle.
He ripped it free.
He jammed the blade into the creature's ribs.
The effect was instantaneous.
The scrivener didn't scream. It glitched.
Its body seized up. The gray skin turned transparent, revealing a skeleton made of black wireframe geometry. The area around the wound began to pixelate, dissolving into white noise.
"Format... error..." The creature garbled, its voice distorting into electronic static. "Data... corrupted..."
Kaelen twisted the blade.
The creature exploded.
It wasn't a gore explosion. It burst into a cloud of black ink and ash.
Kaelen rolled away, coughing, waving the cloud away from his face. He scrambled to his feet, grabbing the flare before it rolled under a shelf.
The creature was gone. Only a stain of ink on the floor remained.
Kaelen stood there, chest heaving, wiping the black sludge from his cheek. It burned like acid.
He looked at the Void-Glass dagger in his hand. The black blade was pulsing with a faint purple light now. It felt heavier. It felt satisfied.
"Weaponized entropy," Kaelen whispered. "It kills the glitch by crashing it."
He looked deeper into the Archives. The scratching sound had started again.
Scritch. Scritch.
There were more of them.
Kaelen picked up his pistol. Two bullets left.
He was blind. He was tired. And he was hunting ghosts in a basement that wanted to rewrite his DNA.
But he had learned something important.
The System wasn't the only way to edit the world.
He walked forward, stepping over the ink stain.
"Time to rewrite the script," he muttered.