The Author didn't swing the scalpel like a weapon. He swung it like a conductor's baton.
"Subject attempts a overhead strike," he narrated calmly, his voice booming from everywhere and nowhere. "But due to his clumsy, unrefined form, he misses."
I swung the Hammer of Chaos with enough force to crack a continent. It was a perfect trajectory. It should have crushed his skull.
But mid-swing, my arm jerked. Not because I flinched, but because reality obeyed his description. My "clumsy form" became a sudden, physical law. The hammer veered left, smashing harmlessly into the white floor of the void.
"See?" The Author sneered, stepping closer. "You are poorly written. You lack coordination."
He flicked his wrist. The scalpel slashed the air.
"The Antagonist suffers a debilitating wound to the structural integrity."
Pain exploded in my chest. No blade touched me, but a deep gash opened across my scrap-metal torso, spilling code and oil. The Mender screamed inside the Node as she scrambled to patch a wound that appeared by decree.
"He's rewriting the combat log in real-time!" Warp shouted, his logic fraying. "He defines the outcome before the action happens! Causality is reversed!"
"Then we stop reading!" I roared.
I charged again. This time, I didn't aim for him. I aimed for the words.
I saw them—faint, glowing subtitles floating in the air around him, dictating reality.
I unleashed the Zero-Day God. I didn't punch him. I vomited a stream of raw, corruption-data at the text.
The glowing subtitles didn't disappear. They mutated.
My stumble turned into a rocket-propulsion. The narrative faltered. The Author's eyes widened as my "clumsy" charge suddenly accelerated to Mach 3.
I slammed into him.
It felt like hitting a wall of diamond. His "Plot Armor" was thick. But I managed to crack it. His tweed jacket-armor fractured, leaking white light.
"You uncouth barbarian!" The Author snarled, stumbling back. "You dare corrupt the prose?"
"I'm not a character!" I screamed, pinning him to the floor of the void. "I'm a typo! You can't spellcheck a disaster!"
I raised the Hammer again.
"Delete this!"
I brought it down.
But the Author was fast. He didn't block. He flashed back.
The scene dissolved.
The Apartment. Chapter 1.
I was sitting in my chair. The coffee cup was in my hand. The sun was shining.
I looked down. My hand wasn't a claw. It was flesh. No scars. No trembling.
"No," I whispered.
"Yes," the Author's voice drifted from the radio on the desk. "Let's fix the root cause. Let's make sure the coffee pours."
I tilted the cup.
In the original timeline—my timeline—the coffee had refused to pour. That was the first glitch. The start of my awakening.
Now, the dark liquid flowed smoothly, perfectly, into the mug.
"See?" the Author soothed. "Physics works. You are tired, Kael. Just a tired man with a boring job. Drink your coffee. Forget the Node. Forget the pain."
It was a "Retcon Cage." He was trapping me in a revised past. If I drank that coffee, if I accepted this continuity, the Glitch would never happen. I would cease to be.
Inside my mind, the Node was silent. They weren't there. Because in this version, I never met them.
I was alone.
I lifted the cup to my lips. The smell was intoxicating. Normalcy. Peace.
The Ledger. It was barely a whisper, a scratch on the back of my mind.
I froze.
"Drink it," the Author urged from the radio. "Complete the scene."
I looked at the perfect stream of coffee. And I remembered the Zero-Day God. The Chaos.
I didn't drink.
I crushed the cup in my hand.
Shards of ceramic bit into my palm. Blood flowed. Real pain.
"I prefer it dry," I said.
And then I pushed. Not with my body, but with the memory of the Zero-Day God. I injected the concept of the "Dump" into this pristine apartment.
The coffee turned into sludge. The walls rusted instantly. The sunlight outside the window shattered, revealing the white void behind it.
"NO!" The Author screamed as his flashback crumbled.
I tore through the reality of the apartment like a man walking through a paper screen.
I emerged back into the void, massive and furious, my avatar reforming around me from the debris of the memory.
The Author was standing there, panting. His pen was dripping ink that hissed on the floor.
"You rejected the origin story," he whispered, horrified. "That is... structurally unsound."
"My structure is a ruin," I said, towering over him. "And ruins are hard to knock down."
I grabbed him by the throat. This time, his Plot Armor didn't save him. My corruption had infected his narrative. He was glitching. His face flickered between the old man and a wireframe model.
"You want to write?" I hissed. "Write this."
I drove my claw into his chest.
I didn't pull out a heart. I pulled out a Quill.
A glowing, feather-like object embedded in his core. The source of his power. The Root Access Tool.
I ripped it out.
The Author screamed—a sound of paper tearing, of servers crashing. He collapsed, his form dissolving into piles of loose, unnumbered pages.
He wasn't dead. But he was disarmed.
I held the Quill. It burned my hand. It wanted me to write. To fix things. To say: "And then Kael saved everyone."
It was tempting. God, it was tempting.
But the Ledger flashed:
"I know," I said.
I looked at the Quill. Then I looked at the dying Author, who was trying to gather his scattered pages.
"You can't... destroy it," the Author gasped, fading. "Without the Quill... the Host... the simulation... it all unravels. There will be no story."
"Good," I said.
I didn't write with the Quill.
I snapped it in half.
SNAP.
The sound was louder than the explosion of the tower.
The white void cracked. A massive, black fissure opened in the sky of the Mind Palace.
Gravity failed. The Author screamed as he was sucked into the fissure. The floor beneath us dissolved.
We were falling again. But not into a dump. Not into an archive.
We were falling into the Subconscious.
The deepest, darkest layer of the Host's mind. The place where the monsters he was really afraid of lived.
I fell into the dark, the pieces of the broken Quill burning in my hand like dying stars.
"Five chapters left," I thought as the darkness swallowed us.
The Author was defeated.
Now we had to fight the Patient himself.