The Root Library had erupted into a storm of glitch-light and rogue variables. Syntax curled into claws. Punctuation marks spun midair like shuriken.
The plot threads trembled violently, overloaded by the convergence of six awakened systems, each warping narrative physics in its own unique dialect.
Rafael crouched low behind a column of hardbound paradoxes, the air around him flickering with corrupted tooltips. His M.O.T.H.E.R. interface jittered beside his eyes like a nervous editor, pinging warnings in seven fonts at once.
> ALERT: Enemy presence detected. Hostile Subroutine: [Mirror Daemon - Rafael.v1.2] HP: 320/480 | MP: 91/250
Across the shattered floor, a version of himself strode forward. Sharper. Paler. Wearing the old, pre-crisis trenchcoat Rafael had burned three Loops ago. This Mirror Daemon's eyes were void sockets filled with cascading code.
"So," the daemon sneered, voice dripping with disdain, "still improvising without a narrative map? Pathetic."
Rafael's heartbeat echoed in his skull. His palms tingled with code static. He rose slowly, eyes narrowing.
"I get better endings when I don't read ahead."
He lunged.
—[Skill: Improvised Syntax]
A broken bookshelf launched toward the daemon, pages screaming open with hostile citations. The clone ducked and retaliated with a barrage of redacted slashes, literal cuts through the world. Sentences unraveled. Paragraphs imploded.
—[Skill: Footnote Erasure]
Rafael's health bar blinked: [HP: 270/480]. Blood and narrative integrity leaked from his side as an entire appendix vanished from his memory.
Meanwhile, Bryn was in a raw melee brawl with her mirrored self. Her gauntlets sparked with grammar-heavy fury.
"How about a PERIOD!" she roared, driving her fist downward. The impact cratered the floor with a resonant thud, echoing like the end of a chapter.
> [Skill Activated: Punctuated Impact]
But her clone didn't stop.
> [Skill: Run-On Sentence] — Clone-Bryn
Her doppelganger launched into an unbroken flurry of jabs, elbow strikes, and flying knees, chained without pause. Every attack blurred into the next like a page with no line breaks.
Bryn growled, forced to backpedal. "She's not giving me a comma to breathe!"
Oren hurled a glowing quip at his adversary, a dull-eyed version of himself encased in passive-aggressive parentheses.
> [Skill: Witty Reprisal — MAX CHARGE]
The line of humor struck like a critical review, causing the Mirror-Oren to flinch and stutter. Sarcasm particles scattered into the air.
"Yeah, I'm hilarious," Oren muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "Too bad my evil twin reads like a Yelp reviewer with a vendetta."
Mira ducked beneath a sweep of glowing exclamation points hurled by her duplicate. Her eyes flicked left and right, scanning geometry overlays as her V.I.S.A.G.E. system fed her thousands of possible escape vectors.
—[Skill: Frame Skip]
Reality snapped. Mira vanished for a microsecond, then reappeared above her opponent, mid-spin. Her boot caught the mirror version in the jaw, sending it cartwheeling into a floating oxford comma.
Lira hovered nearby, glyphs orbiting her arms as she chanted rapidly.
> [Skill: Syntax Bomb]
A glowing sentence exploded behind her, shredding the mirrored Lira's protective barrier of academic references. Shards of shattered grammar clinked across the floor like broken lexicons.
"This is a misinterpretation of semiotic warfare," she hissed.
"Then let's make it a typo massacre," Mira called back, diving into another warp.
Juno stood still, surrounded by instability. Her clone refused to form—a twitching, blurry question mark flickering in and out of phase.
"I think my opposite is still buffering," she muttered.
> SYSTEM: NULL RESPONSE - Undefined Exception persists
Suddenly, the ceiling split open. The Anchor overhead groaned as strings of floating metadata began raining down like burning editor notes. One smacked Rafael's clone, overwriting a chunk of its logic mid-sentence.
> Narrative Instability: Recursive Loop Detected Global Glitch Level: Rising
"EVERYBODY MOVE!" Rafael bellowed. "We're being overwritten!"
The floor began to fracture in typographic fault lines, opening sinkholes into unwritten chapters. Plot ghosts (failed drafts, deleted arcs, beta-tested character versions) began clawing their way out, screeching in obsolete dialects.
"Split and regroup!" Rafael shouted again. "This entire instance is collapsing into multiple edits!"
His M.O.T.H.E.R. system pinged furiously:
> [Multi-Branch Divergence Triggered. Choose Narrative Fork: Survival | Revelation | Regression]
"Dammit, MOTHER, pick all of them!"
The team scattered.
Oren tossed a final insult grenade, [Skill: Verbal Bombast], into the enemy ranks as he dashed left.
Mira used Frame Skip again, blinking out of the page entirely.
Lira clutched her lexicon and dove after Mira, muttering spell-translations midair.
Bryn and her clone crashed through a subchapter wall, exchanging blows between collapsed plot points.
Juno leapt into the unknown, her shadow fracturing into static.
Rafael turned one last time to face his clone. The Mirror Daemon's coat flared dramatically as it opened a corrupted Table of Contents.
"Next time, Rafael," it whispered. "We finish the rewrite."
Rafael didn't respond. He just raised his hand.
> [Ultimate Skill: Plot Armor — EXECUTE]
The daemon blinked.
The scene reversed for two seconds.
And then exploded into ink.
***