The central stairwell of St. Jude's had ceased to be a physical structure. It was now a screaming spiral of translucent geometry, suspended over a bottomless pit of violet static. The "Exit Node" pulsed at the very apex—a jagged white tear in the fabric of the nightmare, smelling of fresh rain and ozone.
Between them and the exit stood the Enforcer.
Principal Merrick, the man who once gave Arthur detention for a tucked-out shirt, was now a ten-foot-tall juggernaut of polished, liquid mercury and black hydraulic pistons. His "face" was a featureless mirror that reflected Arthur's own battered image, distorting it into something monstrous.
[BOSS ENCOUNTER: PRINCIPAL MERRICK – SYSTEM ENFORCER (LVL 20)]
"Arthur Vance," the Enforcer boomed, the sound vibrating through the bones of Arthur's feet. "You are an unoptimized variable. You are a 'bug' in a perfect script. You will be... deleted."
[The Final Stand]
"Sarah, go high! Elena, the gravity anchors!" Arthur commanded, his Spirit Vision highlighting the Enforcer's structural weak points in flickering orange.
Sarah didn't hesitate. She used a floating, twisted locker as a springboard, launching herself into the gravity-defying air. Her Ghost-tuned 9mm barked, the white tracer rounds carving deep, glowing gouges into the Enforcer's chrome shoulders. Elena followed, her dual daggers vibrating at a frequency that shattered the liquid metal before it could harden.
But the Enforcer was a "Failsafe." Every wound they inflicted simply flowed back together like water.
"It's no use!" Elena shouted, dodging a massive fist that shattered the platform she had stood on a second prior. "He's drawing power directly from the collapsing Node! As long as the school is dying, he is immortal!"
Arthur looked at the HUD flickering in the corner of his eye.
[00:02:14 UNTIL NODE COLLAPSE]
If the school collapsed while they were inside, they wouldn't just die—they would be erased. No history. No memory. A total permanent deletion of their existence.
[The Taboo Edit]
Arthur felt the Core Fragment in his pocket burning with a cold, blue fire. He knew what he had to do. The last "Edit" had cost him his hearing. This one... this one might take his soul.
"Sarah! Elena! Get to the stairs! Don't look back!"
"What about you?" Sarah yelled, slamming a fresh magazine into her pistol.
"I'm rewriting the end!"
Arthur stepped forward. He didn't use a weapon. He reached out with both hands and literally grabbed the concept of the space between him and the Enforcer.
[SKILL: REALITY EDIT (RANK: F) – OVERCLOCKING...]
[SYSTEM DEBT WARNING: IRREVERSIBLE SENSORY DAMAGE IMMINENT]
[TARGET: KINETIC INERTIA]
[EDIT: INVERT MASS]
"No!" the Man in White's voice echoed from the void, sounding genuinely panicked for the first time. "You'll tear the node's core! You'll kill us all!"
"Then we'll be erased together," Arthur growled.
Arthur twisted his hands with a sickening sound of snapping reality.
The world turned inside out. The Enforcer's massive mass, which made him an unstoppable tank, suddenly became his greatest enemy. Instead of anchoring him to the earth, the gravity within his chrome body reversed its polarity. The liquid metal began to pull itself apart, expanding outward in a violent, silent explosion of shimmering mercury.
CRACK.
The Enforcer didn't die; he disintegrated into a million silver needles that vanished into the violet abyss.
[The Price of the Exit]
[WARNING: SYSTEM DEBT CRITICAL]
[CONSEQUENCE: TEMPORARY VISION LOSS (30 MINUTES)]
Arthur's world went black instantly.
The violet HUD, the glowing stairs, the screaming students—all vanished. He was standing in a roaring vacuum of total darkness. He could feel the floor beneath him beginning to tilt into the pit.
"Arthur!"
A strong, calloused hand grabbed his collar. It was Sarah. She dragged him toward the top of the stairs by sheer instinct. He felt the searing heat of the Exit Node—the white tear in reality—getting closer.
"Jump!" Elena's voice was distant, muffled by the sound of the school finally imploding behind them.
They leapt into the white light.
[The King in the Mirror]
Arthur hit hard pavement. The air was cool and smelled of street exhaust and wet asphalt. His sight was still gone, but his hearing had returned with a sharp, painful clarity.
"We're out," Elena panted, her voice trembling. "The school... it's gone, Arthur. It's just a crater. The news will call it a gas leak, but the neighbors... they saw the purple lightning."
Arthur sat up, his hands shaking as he touched the cold ground. "Sarah? Elena?"
"We're here, Boss," Sarah said. But there was a new note in her voice. Terror. "But... Arthur. You need to know. When the portal was closing... something else looked through."
"The Man in White?" Arthur asked, staring into the void of his blindness.
"No," Elena whispered. "It was a man. He was wearing a crown made of the same chrome as the Enforcers. He was sitting on a throne of dead servers, and his eyes... they were the exact same shade of violet as yours. He looked at us like we were insects. And then he smiled at you."
Arthur felt the Fragment pulse in his hand, a warm, rhythmic beat that matched the heartbeat of the man Elena described.
He wasn't just fighting a "System." He was fighting a future version of himself that had already won and that version was bored.