The silence after the battle was deeper than any before.
No one spoke. Not Vera, who had shed blood with her blades. Not Azarion, who now stood as both shield and sword. And not Yui—who had just defied the Editors and lived.
The campfire crackled.
The stars returned to the sky, but none of them twinkled.
Because something had changed. Not just in Yui, but in the world.
She'd felt it.
When she used Author's Defiance, it wasn't just a skill—it was her voice. Her choice. The code around her had listened.
Azarion sat beside her, his cloak heavy with scorched ash. He looked at her not with awe, but with… grief.
"You shouldn't have had to do that alone," he said.
"I wasn't alone," Yui whispered. "You were here."
"I will always be," he said simply.
But before she could reply—
A system alert echoed in her mind:
> [New System Thread Available]
"Would you like to access Fragmented Character Archive?"
Warning: Accessing archived characters may reintroduce corrupted or deleted plotlines.
Yui hesitated.
Azarion frowned. "What is it?"
She explained, briefly.
He stiffened. "No one has accessed that in centuries. The Archive isn't just sealed—it's forgotten. It's where discarded characters go to die."
"I know," Yui said quietly. "But I have to see."
She accepted.
The world went white.
---
Inside the Archive, Yui stood on a bridge of broken letters. Around her, fragments floated—pages half-written, moments cut short. Cries and laughter echoed from a thousand stories that never got their endings.
And in the center—
A lone figure sat on a throne of rusted prose.
He looked up.
His hair was silver like frostbitten parchment. His eyes glowed faint blue—the color of unfinished dreams. He wore noble robes, torn by time, with the crest of a kingdom that had never existed.
Yui's breath caught in her throat.
"…Kale?"
He blinked. "You… remember?"
"I wrote you," she whispered. "You were the Crown Prince of Lysandor. But I… I erased you."
Kale stood slowly. "They made you erase me. When you rewrote the first arc, the Editors forced the system to delete characters that 'slowed the pace.' I was one of them."
She trembled.
"I never meant to forget you."
He smiled, and it wasn't bitter.
"Then remember me now. I've survived in echoes. I waited because… I believed you'd return. That one day, you'd fight to reclaim your world—not just from the Editors, but from your own edits."
Yui stepped forward. "Can you help us?"
He nodded once.
> [System Update: Deleted Character – Kale, the Forgotten Prince – has been Restored.]
Alignment: Unknown
Skills: Shadow Diplomacy (S), Archiveblade (A), Memory Bind (SS)
Title: He Who Was Erased
Azarion's voice broke into her mind via their bond: "You brought back a deleted character? That's… dangerous."
"He's not a glitch," Yui replied. "He's my mistake. And I'm going to fix it."
As the Archive faded and Yui returned to the real world, Kale stood beside her.
And for the first time in a long time, the war against the Editors no longer felt like a losing battle.
It felt like the real story had just begun.