The storm suddenly stopped.
The rain froze in mid-air, suspended like millions of glass beads. The thunder cut out. The only sound was a low, digital hum that vibrated in the fillings of my teeth.
Seraphina turned.
The edge of the village was gone. The blacksmith’s shop across the street—gone.
In its place was a wall of white void. And standing at the edge of the void, hovering inches above the mud, was the Red Ink.
It had taken a shape this time. It looked like a knight, but wrong. It was a jagged, scribbled mess of red polygons, constantly shifting. It had no face, just a single, vertical cursor blinking where a head should be.
[Entity: The Editor]
[Mode: Revision]
[Target: Narrative Inconsistencies]
"What is that?" Seraphina whispered. She didn't back down. She raised her sword.
"That's the spellcheck," I said, struggling to my feet. "And we are the typos."
The Editor raised a hand made of jagged static. It pointed at the blacksmith—the one still pantomiming near the anvil.
A beam of red light shot out. It didn't explode. It just... erased.
The blacksmith vanished. The anvil vanished. The ground beneath them vanished. A perfect sphere of white nothingness appeared in the middle of the street.
[Object Deleted.]
The Editor turned its blinking cursor toward us.
"Seraphina," I said, my voice rising in panic. "I can't fight that. My powers barely work. I have 1 HP and a severe case of guilt. But you..."
I looked at her.
"You have Plot Armor."
She glanced at me, confused and angry. "I have armor of steel, Author. Not plot."
"No! Listen to me!" I grabbed her shoulder—she flinched, but didn't stab me. "You are the Protagonist! The System needs you. It can't delete you without crashing the story! You're the only thing in this world with a file permission set to 'Read-Only'!"
The Editor shrieked—a sound like a dial-up modem screaming in pain—and lunged.
It moved impossibly fast, a blur of red destruction. It aimed straight for me.
I flinched, waiting for the end. Waiting to be archived.
CLANG.
A shockwave of golden light blasted the rain away.
I opened my eyes.
Seraphina stood in front of me. She had caught the Editor's strike on her shield. The red static was hissing against the holy steel, trying to eat through it, but the metal held. Sparks of gold and red flew everywhere like fireworks.
[System Alert: Protagonist Intervention.]
[Deletion Blocked.]
She gritted her teeth, her boots sliding backward in the mud. "It... is... heavy," she strained.
"It's trying to erase your existence!" I yelled over the roar of energy. "Push it back!"
With a roar of pure fury, Seraphina shoved her shield forward. The golden light flared, blindingly bright. The Editor was knocked back, its form destabilizing into a cloud of red mist.
It wasn't defeated. Just delayed. It began to reform, knitting itself back together.
Seraphina grabbed my arm. Her grip was painful, but this time, it was grounding.
"Where?" she demanded.
"The Capital," I shouted. "The Narrative Core! I can rewrite the ending! I can fix the code!"
"You will not fix it," she snarled, dragging me toward the edge of the village, away from the red cloud. "You will not 'fix' us, Arthur."
She looked back at the monster, then down at me. Her expression was a mix of hatred and desperate resolve.
"You are going to take me to this Core. And then I am going to decide how this story ends."
"Fine!" I agreed, stumbling after her as we ran into the dark, twisted woods. "You want the pen? It's yours! Just get me there alive!"
Behind us, the village of Oakhaven dissolved into white silence.
We ran into the horror-filled night—the Creator who hated his job, and the Heroine who hated her Creator. It was the worst buddy-cop dynamic in literary history.
But as Seraphina slashed through a vine blocking our path, and I saw the red health bar over the Editor flickering in the distance, I realized something.
I had finally written a scene with genuine tension.
"Don't slow down," Seraphina ordered, not looking back.
"Wouldn't dream of it," I muttered, clutching my glitching chest.
We headed toward the mountains, and for the first time since I fell into this world, I wasn't just watching the story. I was surviving it.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.