The bridge of light hummed under Han Jin's sneakers.
Behind him, the Factory had vanished, replaced by the silent, white-noise void of the Tower's upper reaches.
In front of him stood the obsidian door.
It wasn't a gate of fire or a portal of skulls.
It was a heavy, mahogany-finished door with a frosted glass pane and a brass nameplate that read:
CEO - THE DEVELOPER.
"A corporate office?" Fatty Wei wiped cold sweat from his forehead.
"After all those monsters and digital hellscapes, the final boss is an accountant?"
"The most dangerous monsters always wear suits, Wei," Han Jin said, his hand hovering over the brass knob.
He turned to Lin Xi. "If things go sideways, use that Universal Restore token on the world, not me. Understand?"
"Han Jin..."
He didn't wait for her protest.
He pushed the door open.
The room inside was impossibly large, yet felt stiflingly intimate.
Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a panoramic view of Earth, but the planet was covered in a grid of glowing green lines...a global progress bar at 98%.
At a massive desk made of polished starlight sat a young man.
He looked no older than twenty, wearing a hoodie with a faded logo and drinking a neon-blue soda.
He didn't look up from his three floating monitors.
"Just a second," the Developer said, his fingers flying across a holographic keyboard.
"I'm almost done with the Free Will patch. It's been causing way too many memory leaks."
[Entity Identified: The Developer (Origin: ???)]
[Level: N/A]
[Evaluation: He is the Programmer.
You are the Code.]
"The Free Will patch?" Han Jin walked to the center of the rug, the Dragon Bone Cleaver appearing in his hand.
"You're deleting the very thing that makes this world worth observing."
The Developer finally looked up.
His eyes weren't eyes; they were scrolling lines of binary code.
"Observing? Han Jin, you've been an Emperor.
You know how it is.
You start a project with high hopes, but then the NPCs start doing things you didn't script. They start... feeling things.
It's inefficient."
He leaned back, gesturing to the window. "Earth was a failed beta.
I'm just cleaning up the drive for Earth 2.0. But then you showed up.
A legacy save file from a deleted universe. You're a magnificent bug, Han Jin."
"I'm the one who's going to crash your system," Han Jin said.
"With a paperclip?" The Developer laughed. "I literally wrote the logic that allows that paperclip to exist.
Watch."
The Developer pressed a Delete key on his holographic desk.
[BING! Item Removed: The Rusty Paperclip has been moved to the Trash Bin.]
Han Jin felt his pocket go light.
The weight he had relied on, the tool that had bent reality to his will, was simply... gone.
"And the Cleaver?" The Developer snapped his fingers.
[BING! Item Removed: Dragon Bone Cleaver has been uninstalled.]
The golden blade in Han Jin's hand dissolved into harmless pixels.
Lin Xi and Fatty Wei gasped, reaching for their own weapons, only to find their inventories empty.
"You see?" The Developer stood up, walking toward Han Jin.
"In this room, I don't have to fight you.
I just have to edit you.
I can make your Charm a zero.
I can make your Strength a negative number. I can make it so you never existed."
He reached out a finger to touch Han Jin's forehead.
"You fought well for a piece of data.
But the update is..."
Crunch
The Developer froze.
He looked down.
Han Jin's hand was gripped tightly around the Developer's wrist.
His grip wasn't powered by the System.
It wasn't a stat.
It was a raw, physical force that shouldn't be possible in a world of code.
"How...?" the Developer stammered, his binary eyes flickering.
"I deleted your stats!
I cleared your cache!"
"You forgot one thing, child," Han Jin whispered, his eyes glowing with a gold that was deeper and older than any digital screen.
"I didn't become an Emperor because of a System.
I became an Emperor because I conquered the Void before you were even born."
Han Jin pulled something from his pocket.
It wasn't the paperclip.
It was the Golden Marble...the spirit of the Grand Marshal.
"You can delete my items," Han Jin growled. "But you can't delete my History.
And history is the only thing that can't be rewritten."
Han Jin didn't attack the Developer.
He slammed the Golden Marble into the holographic keyboard on the desk.
"Old Man! Manual Override!"
The Marble shattered, but instead of a warrior appearing, a wave of golden History data flooded the Developer's monitors.
It was the ten thousand years of Han Jin's life...every battle, every loss, every lesson.
It was a "memory leak" so massive that the Admin Office began to smoke.
[BING! CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERLOAD!]
[The Developer's local server cannot process 10,000 years of Emperor-tier trauma!]
"Stop it!" The Developer screamed, falling to his knees as his hoodies began to pixelate. "You're crashing the whole Tower! If I go down, Earth stays in beta forever!"
"No," Han Jin said, standing over him.
"If you go down, Earth belongs to the humans again."
He looked at Lin Xi.
"Now! The Universal Restore Token!
Target: The Source Code!"
Authors Note:
Next? WTF....big boss....more to come ..... Aura is oozing.....
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