Chapter 36 – The Margin of Error
The space around Grand Scribe Nero was not empty; it was Justified.
In a ballroom crowded with hundreds of laughing, drinking nobles, there was a perfect, ten-foot circle of silence around the man in white. No one stepped into it. It wasn't a rule; it was an instinct. Like animals avoiding a cliff edge.
Uzo finished his cheap wine, placed the glass on a passing tray, and stepped into the circle.
The chatter in the ballroom didn't stop, but the temperature seemed to drop.
High Lord Vane watched from his couch, his eyes narrowing. He wasn't helping. He was smiling.
Uzo walked up to the Grand Scribe.
Up close, Nero was even more unsettling. His robes were so white they hurt the eyes. There wasn't a single crease, a single speck of dust. He looked like he had been cut out of a different, cleaner reality and pasted into this messy one.
Nero didn't blink. His white eyes, filled with scrolling microscopic text, were fixed on the chandelier.
To him, Uzo was less than a person. He was a smudge on the wallpaper.
"Excuse me," Uzo said, stopping three feet away.
Nero sighed. It was the sigh of a man who had just found a grammatical error in a masterpiece.
"You are standing in my margin," Nero said softly. His voice was smooth, cultured, and utterly dismissive.
"I didn't see a line," Uzo replied.
Nero finally lowered his gaze.
He looked at Uzo's battered trench coat. He looked at the mud on his boots. He looked at the gray stain of the Void on his fingertips.
"That is because you are illiterate to the laws of propriety," Nero said.
He raised his right hand. He was holding a long, crimson quill.
He didn't swing it at Uzo. He casually drew a horizontal line in the air between them.
HISS.
A floating, glowing red line appeared, suspended in space like a laser beam.
"Cross it," Nero challenged. "If you can touch me, I will listen to whatever barbaric sentence you are trying to form. If you cannot... then you are a run-on sentence, and I will cut you short."
Uzo looked at the Red Line. It looked simple. A magic barrier.
I broke a shadow, Uzo thought. I can break a line.
He surged forward. He channeled the Null-Ink into his fist, aiming to punch through the magic.
He moved faster than the speed of a thousand sounds.
SNAP.
Uzo gasped.
He was back where he started.
He hadn't been pushed back. He hadn't hit a wall.
He had simply... reset.
One second he was crossing the line. The next, he was standing three feet away again.
"What?" Uzo whispered.
"You didn't edit your movement," Nero said, looking bored. "You simply repeated it."
Uzo gritted his teeth.
Again.
He lunged. This time, he used the Shadow Pin technique to anchor himself, trying to drag his body across the line.
He crossed it. He felt the heat of the red magic.
His hand was inches from Nero's chest.
SNAP.
Uzo stumbled.
He was back at the starting line.
But this time, his nose was bleeding.
The "Reset" wasn't gentle. It was jarring his brain, like a video game glitching him back to a spawn point.
"Distance is a narrative choice," Nero lectured, twirling the quill. "In my margin, I choose the distance. Between you and me, there are infinite pages. You could run for a thousand years, Glitch, and you would never reach the next word."
The room was watching now. The music had died down. Nobles were snickering behind their masks.
"Look at him," a woman whispered. "Like a fly hitting a window."
Uzo wiped the blood from his nose.
The power gap was immense.
Nero wasn't fighting. He was formatting. He was treating Uzo like a typo that kept trying to insert itself into a locked document.
"You're not blocking me," Uzo realized, his chest heaving. "You're undoing me."
"I am the Editor," Nero said, his white eyes flashing. "And you are unnecessary."
Nero raised the quill.
"You have bored me. I think I will remove you from the paragraph entirely."
He slashed the quill downward.
The Red Line didn't stay still. It rushed toward Uzo.
It wasn't a beam of light. It was a wave of erasure. The floor tiles it touched vanished—not broken, just gone, replaced by white nothingness.
Uzo scrambled back, dodging the wave.
The line sliced the tip of his trench coat.
The leather didn't cut. It vanished. The edge of the coat was perfectly smooth, as if it had never been longer.
Uzo hit the wall of the crowd. He was trapped.
Nero walked forward, the Red Line floating ahead of him like a guillotine.
"Run along, little typo," Nero whispered. "Or be corrected."