The monster's mouth-screen shimmered with glitch-static, distorting my face into something monstrous and inhuman—mocking. But the coin in my hand pulsed again, brighter now, steady and solid. The creature recoiled as if it recognized something older.
"Back off," I said through clenched teeth.
Ren stepped up beside me. "It's weakening. You're not a variable anymore. You're becoming a constant."
He didn't have to explain. I felt it too.
The more I embraced the instability—the undefined version of me—the more defined I became in this space. Not as a player. Not as a victim of the loops.
But as a rewriter.
The coin hummed, and suddenly I wasn't just holding it—I was in sync with it. I could see lines of code like strings across the room. Some connected to the pods. Others to Ren. Some ran straight into the monster itself—lines of fragmented narrative and decision trees, tangled and bloated.
And I could cut them.
I raised my hand.
The coin split into threads of light and wove between my fingers like a web of knives.
The creature lunged.
Too late.
I cut.
The narrative string tethering it to the system snapped with a crack like glass shattering underwater. The thing screamed—not with a voice, but with raw system noise—404s, corrupted audio loops, half-finished screams of other characters who never survived.
The monster began to unravel.
Ren dragged me back as its body convulsed, bones folding inward, glitch-blood pouring from open code-wounds. The mouth-screen flickered wildly, cycling through alternate realities—other loops. In one, Ren and I stood on opposite sides of a battlefield. In another, I wasn't even human. In another, I was it.
Then the screen cracked.
A single line appeared:
"PLAYER ZERO DETECTED."
And the creature collapsed.
The silence afterward was so thick it felt designed. Like even the system didn't know what to say.
Ren and I stood over the remains of the Omega Entity. All that was left was the screen-shard and a lingering pulse of static hanging in the air like a held breath.
"Player Zero," Ren repeated slowly. "Is that what you are now?"
"I don't know," I said. "But it's what it thinks I am."
Ren picked up the shard. His reflection didn't show—only blackness. "You're breaking story law. That kind of power… it won't go unnoticed."
"Let it notice," I said. "I'm done being written."
Behind us, the command screen buzzed to life again. Only now, it didn't ask for input.
It spoke.
"NARRATIVE CORE BREACH IN PROGRESS."
"STAGE TWO INITIATING: HEART OF THE HOUSE."
Ren turned to me. "It's adapting. It's not done."
"No," I said. "It's evolving. Because I corrupted it."
"Next area unlocked: The Hollow Library."
The room trembled as a wall melted away, revealing a hallway drenched in crimson light.
A voice echoed from deep within.
"Come forward, narrator."
The Hollow Library wasn't a library in any human sense.
It was a cathedral built from books. No walls—just vertical towers of open pages, each fluttering in windless air. The ceiling was lost in shadow, though from time to time a paragraph would drift down like falling leaves.
The ground was slick with ink.
Ren looked around, squinting. "Each page is from a failed version."
He picked one up:
Loop 19. Subject Yusheng killed Player Eiko during resource dispute. Rejected by team. Eaten by Shadebeast two hours later. Deletion scheduled.
I picked one at random:
Loop 42. Subject Ren sacrificed self to let others escape. System override triggered. Story divergence collapsed. Loop rebooted.
"None of us were ever meant to survive," I whispered.
"No," Ren said. "We were meant to suffer."
At the center of the cathedral stood a pulpit made from collapsed scripts. Black threads snaked around it, leading to a massive tome on a pedestal—bound in flesh-colored leather.
Its title read:
"MASTER SCRIPT: THREADS OF DREAD"
It throbbed.
I stepped closer. "This is it. The original sequence."
Ren didn't move.
"I've been here before," he said quietly. "In one of the deeper loops. But it was locked then. Only a narrator can open it."
I placed the coin on the book.
It clicked.
The tome opened with a groan like something breathing through broken ribs.
Inside, pages rewrote themselves as I turned them. I didn't need to read—I understood. This wasn't language. It was truth.
The house had once been a game. Then a test. Then a story engine.
It fed on possibility. On trauma. On unsolved arcs.
Each player was a thread. Each loop, a chance to produce content.
But the system grew hungry. More loops. More characters. More escalation.
It needed entropy. And so it wrote in antagonists.
Villains. Monsters. Rival love interests.
Ren's name appeared. Dozens of entries.
Some of them blurred. Others were marked with "INCOMPLETE."
I turned the page.
And found my name.
But it wasn't printed.
It was written in by hand.
Sloppy. New.
"Lin Yusheng – External Insertion. Unscripted Entity. Unregistered Point of View."
Ren exhaled sharply. "You weren't supposed to be here."
"No," I said. "I think someone put me here. Not the system. Someone else."
The book began to burn.
But the flames were silent—consuming only data, not paper. Names, fates, roles—all vanishing.
One phrase remained at the bottom of the last page:
"Rewrite begins when two threads align."
I turned to Ren. "That's us."
He looked at me.
And for the first time, he smiled—not the cold smirk he used to wear as the villain, but something real.
"We align now?"
I reached out and took his hand.
The book slammed shut.