Arch-Elder Altair nearly toppled from his ornate chair as the Probability Engine behind him erupted in a cacophony of alarms. Dials spun wildly, settling on a stark, red warning message.

  [CRITICAL ALERT: PRIMA-HEIR SUCCESSION PROTOCOL DECLARED]

  [WARNING: SIMMITECH CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING IMMINENT]

  [PROBABILITY OF MAINTAINING CURRENT CORPORATE CONTROL: 0.601%]

  The SimmiTech compound shuddered. Blast doors slammed shut, sealing off sections of the sprawling structure.

  “Ceter!” Altair roared, wings trembling with a furious static charge. “CETER! GET YOUR THUNDERBIRD ASS IN HERE RIGHT NOW!”

  Ceter Kalik Simmi, wings crackling with uncontrolled lightning, stormed into the Arch-Elder’s office. “Elder?! What’s going on?”

  Altair jabbed a crystalline finger at the Probability Engine’s display. “Your daughter, you infernal imbecile! She’s invoked Prima-Succession!”

  “Impossible!” Ceter scoffed. “I purged her mind! Krakthulluius severed the soul-bond!”

  “Clearly, your efforts were… insufficient!” Altair’s pale wings flared, scattering motes of crystalline dust as he waved a hand at the screen which displayed the text that the magitek engine outputted. “She's filed charges of attempted heir-cide against you!”

  "She's just an eighteen year old girl!" Ceter growled. "What could a mere academy student even do? Does she seriously hope to take on the entire Simmi compound? I'll catch her myself and wipe her mind again, confine the disobedient girl to her room..."

  Before Altair could retort, a seismic tremor ripped through the compound. Alarms screamed, plaster raining from the reinforced ceiling.

  “What in the Abyss…?” Ceter spun, wings instinctively forming a defensive shield.

  Then, the eastern wall of the Arch-Elder’s office vanished in a blinding flash, followed by an earsplitting detonation. Molten debris rained down as Ceter’s office, a chunk of Altair’s desk, and a significant portion of the Probability Engine were vaporized in an instant, devoured by a brilliant red maw.

  Through the smoke and fire, Vespera’s voice boomed, laced with triumphant laughter, echoing from a monstrous shape tearing into the compound's defenses. “Guess who’s back, daddy?!”

  Ceter reinforced his Electrofractal dome, shielding himself and the Arch-Elder from the fiery onslaught. “Vespera! What are you doing?!”

  “Hi Daddy!” The gargantuan Corpse Seeker roared, the voice unmistakably Vespera’s, albeit distorted and amplified by the ward-grinding machine. “I’m doing exactly what you taught me! Corporate warfare! Though, seriously, why aren’t you at your office? Hiding behind Grandpa already? For shame! Shame! Shame! SHAME!”

  Ceter gritted his teeth, straining to maintain the shield against the Corpse Seeker’s relentless assault. A crystalline claw slammed into the dome with each ‘shame’ declaration, forcing him to stagger.

  “Vespera!” Altair commanded, his crystalline wings flaring with desperate authority. “My descendant, you are making a catastrophic error! Think, child, think of what you’re destroying! If you weaken SimmiTech, then our enemies will target and devour us whole!”

  “Oh, I am, like totally, thinking, great-grandpa!” Vespera’s voice dripped with icy amusement as another crystalline limb slammed against the spherical shield, making it sink into the floor. “I’m thinking about how you fucks tried to erase me! About how you wanted to optimize me into your perfect, obedient pawn! How you went through with doing just that, nearly obliterating my mind!”

  “It was for your own good!” Ceter shouted, his voice strained, the shield crackling. “For Omnithornia’s survival!”

  “Well then,” Vespera’s laughter echoed from the monstrous machine. “This is for your own good, Daddy!”

  Altair’s crystalline wings pulsed with raw power. “You cannot do this, Vespera! The Clan…”

  “The Clan needs new management!” Vespera declared, her voice booming, laced with exhilaration. “And guess what? I just got formal approval from Justice Nova himself!”

  A shimmering document materialized within the Corpse Seeker's crystalline frame, projecting outwards for all to see.

  “By the power vested in me as Prima-Heir under Corporate Law, I hereby declare Ceter Kalik Simmi unfit for leadership due to attempted heir-cide!”

  Ceter’s face contorted in a mask of fury. “You ungrateful little shit… I gave you everything!” The shield buckled further, energy flaring erratically around it.

  “Everything except freedom!” Vespera’s laughter echoed as another crystalline limb smashed down. “Everything except the right to be myself! Everything except the option to choose my own future, my own friends, my own LOVE!”

  “We have to save Omnithornia, Vespera!” Altair pleaded, his crystalline wings now desperately flickering. “I order you to stop this madness!”

  “And I will save it!” Vespera declared, her voice resonating with unwavering conviction. “But I’ll do it my way! With my clan! With people who actually care about ME!”

  The Electrofractal shield exploded under the Corpse Seeker's next devastating blow, sending both Altair and Ceter tumbling across the ravaged, burning office floor.

  Altair ripped a silver token from his robes, snapped it in two, and vanished amidst a blinding explosion of silver flames, escaping from the fire.

  Ceter, however, just lay there, stunned, staring dumbly at the spot where his Arch-Elder had been, then at the gaping maw of the Corpse Seeker looming over him.

  Altair had sacrificed him to get away, threw him to the wolves.

  He knew, with a chilling certainty, that his reign was over, that he made a terrible mistake. The maw of the monstrous machine descended, its crystalline teeth engulfing his body, and then, for him, there was only darkness.

  “What now?” I asked Vespera, watching her, still panting and flushed with adrenaline, as she piloted the Corpse Seeker through the ruined SimmiTech compound.

  “Now?” She repeated, a strange, distant look in her eyes. “Hrm. Hrm. Now… I’m going to dig. Dig, dig, dig… for answers!”

  “Answers to what?” Cinder asked.

  “To everything,” Vespera growled. “To everything I was never told! The truth! The absolute solution to fixing Celestorms, to saving the Earth!”

  The Corpse Seeker’s crystalline drill, now superheated and glowing a menacing red, ignited with renewed ferocity, chewing through the shattered remains of SimmiTech, plunging deeper and deeper into the earth.

  It tore through bunkers and floors like paper, past collapsed offices and mangled machinery, deeper into the catacombs beneath the sprawling complex. Finally, it reached a thick, magisteel door, tearing it from its hinges like it was made of cardboard. Then another, and another, each barrier falling before the unstoppable crystalline behemoth.

  “Oh shit,” Cinder breathed, paling visibly beside me. “…is this…?”

  “The final resting place of Archangel Zadkiel,” Vespera cackled. “The All-Knowing One. The Temporal Lobe of the Wormwood Star Leviathan!”

  The Corpse Seeker’s crystalline drill pierced through the final barrier, revealing a vast, cavernous chamber that blazed with an unnatural, otherworldly light. Before us, suspended in mid-air, chained by shimmering strands of pure, incandescent energy, hung a gargantuan… diatom. Countless golden eyes, each a swirling galaxy of light, stared out from a being formed of spinning, burning wheels, an impossible geometry of celestial fire that framed the ossified lobe of the Leviathan, leached out from it into the physical with unnerving intensity.

  “Long time no see, Zadkie! Have a snack!” Vespera snarled, a sudden, vicious edge creeping into her voice. Her talons clenched on the controls, twisting the crystalline strata below her with barely contained fury.

  The limp body of Ceter was ejected from the Corpse Seeker’s innards, as if fired from a cannon. The Omnid hurtled through the archangel prison and slammed into a podium at its edge that held an hourglass. The impact shattered both the podium and the hourglass, sending fragments of black metal, marble and hourglass bits scattering across the vast chamber.

  As Ceter’s body collided with the pale silver lobe-diatom, a bizarre transformation began. The archangel reached down and filled the body of Vespera’s father. The man’s form shimmered, then became translucent, countless golden eyes blossoming across his skin, his limbs elongating, and a halo of spinning, fiery rings igniting above his head.

  Ceter Kalik Simmi was no more.

  He was now… something else. Something… arcane, that tore through the shawl of my disguises with but a single glance.

  “I knew of your arrival,” the Archangel-Ceter spoke, the voice a distorted chorus of female, inhuman tones, echoing from the throat of the Thunderbird’s father.

  “Of course you did,” Vespera laughed madly. “You’re the All-Knowing One, after all! But do you know what I’m going to do next?”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Yes,” Zadkiel’s countless golden eyes, now focused on us, burned with an unsettling intensity. “You intend to ask me… the truth. About everything.”

  “And you will answer me honestly?” Vespera demanded, her voice sharp as shattered glass.

  “Yes,” Archangel-Ceter replied, the chorus of voices resonating through the vast chamber. “I will.”

  Vespera leaned forward, her gaze fixed on the eldritch entity with an almost unnerving intensity. “Spill! What’s up with our Earth?”

  Zadkiel’s voice, a symphony of inhuman whispers, filled the chamber. “Your entire world is a construct. A fabrication. A game designed by System Wizard Revolution.”

  “What?! Designed? Why?” Vespera blinked.

  “Made for the… amusement… of a single Eurekan user. Bob Proverra, his name.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Zadki?!” Vespera recoiled. “I wanted the truth about Celestorms and ME, not whatever the shit this is!”

  “Katherine’s book,” Cinder said beside me. “She’s talking about… Katherine’s book.”

  “As to your origins, Vespera Simmi. Dorothea Millicern was just an NPC created to love Bob Proverra,” Zadkiel sang like a female chorus of all-shearing truth hammering against Possy’s crystalline shell.

  I tasted ashes and blood in my mouth, the archangel’s words cleaving my psyche and physical body right through Possy’s walls and dimensional bubble.

  “Dorothea, an NPC superhero, Dora the Terraformer, her other name,” Zadkiel sang, her voice hammering against reality around us. “She created a GLM AI with a copy of her soul, a devious consciousness embedded within code designed to terraform dead planets.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” Vespera growled.

  “You are the result of Dora’s work,” the Archangel added, Ceter’s burning hand pointed at Vespera. “Terraforge, your name. A network of nanites that Martin Kilborne subjugated, took control of through the machinations of Alexa Terranova.”

  Vespera staggered back, her talons flying to her head, clutching at her temples as if she was losing a grip on her fraying sense of self. “No… no, that’s not… I’m not! You’re full of shit! I’m a Thunderbird! I’m… Vespera Simmi!”

  “There is no such thing as a Thunderbird,” Zadkiel stated flatly, the words like hammer blows against her fragile sense of self. “There are no Omnids. This entire world, this… doomed and decaying reality… exists within the fractured mind of a dying supervillain girl. Alexa Terranova, her name. A girl who became a System Wizard. Her Fractal Engine is crashing into this Earth producing the Wormwood Star effect. This reality… is her final, desperate wish to save her friends. A wish that is overwriting, infecting the pre-existing, manufactured game-world of Eurekan User Bob Proverra.”

  I blinked blood from my eyes. A gray shear rushed across reality, wobbling everything around us.

  Zadkiel continued, utterly unfazed by the cosmic tremor. “You are all phantoms. Fragments of corrupted NPCs. The death dream of a girl, clinging to a fading hope. Her love for her friends… manufactured souls all of whom Bob… chose to terminate.”

  “And why would Bob do that?” I asked, rubbing my throbbing head, feeling like my quad-soul was twisting within me, wobbling out of its armillary axis.

  “Alexa… broke Bob’s game,” the Archangel answered, her countless eyes focusing on me. “She won. Beat him. Kicked him out. Made him… unable to log into his Avatar as Nonpareil. So… he registered a new avatar with Wizard Revolution. A villain. One who wished for this world… to end.”

  “And where’s Bob… now?” I pressed on.

  “Dead… and alive,” Zadkiel intoned. “Existing… and non-existing. Trying to log in… and unable to log out. Fractalized across reality, overwritten by Alexa’s final act. Forever seeking… answers… to the catastrophe of his being. Desperately trying to wake up. Iogann Wanderer, his name.”

  “And what am I?” I asked.

  “You are Alexa Terranova,” Zadkiel’s voice resonated with cold, unshakeable certainty. “A supervillain NPC, an unresolvable error smeared across… four other NPC instances–Martin Kilborne, Katherine Kells, Ember Kilborne and Terraforge GLM, their names. You are also the servant of Infinity Paradox Proxima, a human soul duplicate dimensionally entwined with an infinite number of other NPC instances, stretched across the infinite boundary of Eureka.”

  “Eureka?” Cinder asked. “What’s Eureka?”

  “An infinite, self-replicating omnistructure that contains an infinite number of subscribed, manufactured game worlds within its innards and just as many unsubscribed corpse worlds comprising its shell and orbiting around its outside.”

  Another gray pulse emanated from Zadkiel, cleaving across reality, making the chamber, Possy and my body wobble like jelly being stirred by a thousand invisible, microscopic knives. This was bad. This knowledge had a price. Unlike the conversation with Ein Sof, Zadkiel didn’t give a damn about our sanity. Reality itself was being destabilized by the archangel’s words.

  “S-stop,” Cinder hissed. “I’ve heard enough! We have to stop this conversation before it unmakes us all!” She sounded distant, as if underwater, as if she wasn’t standing by my side, but instead was a thousand, a million miles away, growing ever distant.

  “This conversation will end soon,” Zadkiel sang. “The finite body of Ceter cannot sustain my multitude for very long. When it fails, I will leave this place forevermore and return to sweet oblivion.”

  “How can I stop this sooner?” I asked, my mind reeling as the boundary between thought and speech shattered.

  “Wake up!” Zadkiel commanded, clapping Ceter’s rotting, decaying, blood-covered and many-jointed illusory hands together.

  The containment chamber around us wobbled like a Mobius loop. Gray fissures danced across reality at the edges.

  And then I saw everything as my perception of self became smeared, propagated outwards by the gray wave across the planet.

  Celestorms blossomed on the poles of our dying and living Earth. For a fleeting, terrifying instant, everything died, then everything lived again. Bob Proverra punched the moon and Titanomachy shattered above the planet, coming apart. I crashed my Fractal Engine into Bob, stopping him from perma-killing my friends. The Wormwood Star streaked across the sky and all life stopped existing, scraped away by its tail. Alexa’s Fractal Engine collided with the Earth and everyone and everything became overwritten.

  Ruins of Titanomachy megastructure buried beneath layers of mountains ossified, hiding the bones of the original heroes.

  Again and again, civilization rose and fell for a hundred million years, better, different, more optimized. It went on and on… until Slayer Nazareth found the Leviathan and made a wish upon her, carved her up and bound her archangels to his descendants.

  Until I came into being through sheer luck, through pure chance. An inevitable error within the decaying System, a human with four souls.

  My consciousness snapped back into myself.

  “Let go,” Zadkiel demanded. “This isn’t your dream, Alexa. This world does not belong to you. By infecting it with your Fractal Engine, by spreading it across a multitude of the local NPCs you are interfering with its subscription, casting this Earth into the infinite abyss of the Dead Zone, pulling it towards the corrupted corpse worlds comprising the edge of Eureka. You are the cause of the local Celestorms, Alexa. Your interference with Bob’s world is causing the destabilization of local reality, its inevitable entropic decay. Let them all go and things will return to where they should be.”

  “Where should they be?!” I growled. “Dead by Bob’s hand?!”

  “Recycled,” Zadkiel answered. “Everyone’s bodies would have been terminated, yes, but their souls, the general, base information comprising them would have been recycled and injected into another manufactured world. Bob wanted another wish fulfilled, another game made. Wizard Revolution would have handled the continuation of this narrative. Instead, you have ruined it all, interfered, pulled the rug out from under her… corrupted everything with your meddling!”

  “Don’t! Don’t, don’t, don’t!” Vespera suddenly wailed, wrapping herself around me, her black and white wings fluttering frantically, sobs wracking her body. “Don’t go! I don’t want to stop existing as myself! I don’t want to forget who I am! I don’t want to lose you again! Don’t wake up!”

  “I like this dream,” I said to the Archangel, standing tall against the waves of her being, the armillary of my soul spinning madly, refusing to be torn apart. “I like being… me. Vespera doesn’t want me to wake up, doesn’t want to become whatever Bob wishes for next. Sorry, my dude. I’m going to… keep going.”

  “Vespera Simmi isn’t real,” Archangel-Ceter pointed out, her countless golden eyes unwavering. “She’s just a rough copy of a copy afflicted with entropy. A corrupted, warped, broken, overwritten concept bound to a shard of your Fractal Engine. A bird pecking at a corpse of your being, inhabiting a world doomed to inevitable corruption and decay.”

  “She loves me,” I shrugged, a strange sense of defiance rising within me even as my physical body seemed to be coming apart at the edges. “Who am I to stop her? Let her peck.”

  Vespera slammed her face against my chest, her sobs muffled by my flaking, decaying jacket.

  Zadkiel… sighed. A sound like the rustling of a thousand dead leaves, the dying whisper of a cosmic wind.

  “Very well,” the Archangel-Ceter intoned, the chorus of female voices echoing with a strange resignation. “Then know this–Alexa, as long as your Fractal Engine infects this place pulling it towards entropy, this world cannot be saved.”

  The golden eyes dimmed. The spinning wheels slowed. The golden wings burned away. The chains of light slackened. And the Archangel Zadkiel, the All-Knowing One, fell silent, coming apart as if she never was, leaving behind a mangled, ossified body of Ceter Kalik Simmi that collapsed onto the black-stone bridge.

  The diatom above the corpse of Ceter shattered, pieces of bisected, silver bones raining across the chamber, detonating into white ashes upon encountering the magisteel floor covered in pale fractures.

  Vespera clung to me, trembling, her sobs slowly subsiding into shuddering breaths. Cinder stood beside us, her rainbow wings shifting nervously, a silent question in her ocean-blue eyes, her figure smeared in her blood. Her blood and my blood. Vespy’s blood too. Thick like red soup. Our armor and outfits were flaking away, fluttering down like autumn leaves.

  “He… he said… we’re not real,” Vespera shook her head as if trying to reassert her scattering thoughts. “That… everything is just a corrupt game. That you are causing the Celestorms, that you are a servant of entropy.”

  “Maybe I am,” I said. “Maybe it is. But… does it matter?”

  Vespera pulled back slightly, her grey eyes searching mine. “Does it… matter?” she repeated, the words laced with confusion, disbelief, and a flicker of something akin to… hope?

  “Does this feel real?” I asked, gently cupping her face in my hands. I leaned in, pressing a soft bloody kiss to her beak, then another to her forehead. “Does this feel like just a game, Vee?”

  Her wings shifted, brushing against mine, a faint spark of electricity jumping between us. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, a newfound clarity dawning in their depths.

  “No,” she breathed, her voice barely audible looking at me with blood-shot eyes. “No, it doesn’t. It feels… real. More real than anything else. Painfully real… Argh! That beerch scraped off like half of my feathers with her words!”

  Cinder, while holding onto me, placed a bleeding claw on Vespera’s shoulder, her rainbow feathers brushing against the Thunderbird’s black and white plumage. “We’re real to each other, Vee. That’s all that matters, right?”

  Vespera looked from Cinder to me, then back again, a slow smile spreading across her face, chasing away the shadows of fear. “Right,” she affirmed, her voice gaining strength. “Right!”

  A spark of her old, defiant spirit flickered in her eyes, a spark that quickly grew into a full-fledged blaze. She straightened up, shaking off the last vestiges of despair, her wings crackling with renewed energy, hundreds of mangled, bisected, blood-stained black and white feathers raining off her Omnid body.

  “So, what if we’re all NPCs?” Vespera clicked. “Fine by me! NPCs can be powerful! NPCs can rebel! And NPCs… can definitely win!”

  She turned to me, her grey eyes alight with a newfound determination, a spark of her old, chaotic brilliance returning. “So, what’s our next move, Player One?”

  I lost too much blood. Was still losing so much blood. My consciousness pulsed, fading in and out. Speaking to Zadkiel had a price, my entire body felt wrong, shredded, torn apart, the entire top layer of my skin and muscles cleaved by a million invisible blades.

  There was so much damage there that my nerves weren’t even responding and weren't sending any kind of signals to my brain. Unlike my two companions, I was only human. A human augmented by Arx Biomancers, but still… only human, incapable of healing myself, incapable of reinforcing my body against Otherness, lacking a Fractal Engine heart.

  “Sorry, Player Two,” I smiled one last time as my fox ears dissolved into a bloody mess, fur and skin slushing off, flaking off me as dimensional cracks rushed across the interior of Miss Possible. “You’re on your own from here onward... I love you.”