The Reclaimer screamed.
Not like a creature.
Like a thousand deleted timelines clawing their way back into relevance.
Its body unraveled and rewove—pages torn from realities Kei never lived, stitched together by rage and desperation.
"Don't let it touch your thoughts!" Rin yelled. "It doesn't feed on power—it feeds on doubt!"
Kei's mind flickered—memories, failures, what-ifs—
No. No. He wasn't that boy anymore. He was the one who made the choice. The one who walked into the void.
He was the Author now.
And this?
This was his battlefield.
The Reclaimer lunged—ink tendrils lashing out like corrupted plotlines.
Kei spun, the Pen glowing black and gold, cutting arcs through unreality.
> "Rewrite: Fragment."
The creature shattered into chunks of half-thoughts—ghosts of moments that never happened.
A girl crying over a broken world.
A version of Kei who never found the Pen.
A timeline where Rin died screaming.
Kei gritted his teeth.
> "Delete: Despair."
The fragments blinked out.
Not vanished—healed.
Rin called out, summoning a sigil from her palm—a radiant glyph made of light-thread.
> "I remember you!" she shouted at the monster. "I remember the draft where you won. But this isn't that story!"
The glyph exploded in a spiral of light, carving silence into the chaos.
But the Reclaimer twisted, absorbing even her defiance.
> [REWRITING ATTEMPT DETECTED. COUNTERING WITH: NULLIFICATION.]
It launched a barrage of paradoxes—reversals, erasures, contradictions.
"Kei!" Rin shouted.
He didn't hesitate.
> "Author Field: Override."
The world went still.
Ink rose around them in a cyclone, obeying no gravity.
No reality.
Just him.
Kei stepped forward, his voice steady.
"I don't need structure to win."
The Reclaimer growled, growing wings made of broken chapters.
"I don't need rules."
The Pen in his hand flared with every word.
"I don't even need a plan."
And then—
He ran straight into it.
Not to attack.
To write.
Kei jammed the Pen into the creature's chest.
> "This is where your story ends."
The ink surged. The Reclaimer tried to overwrite him—tried to infect his thoughts, erase his soul.
But Kei was already writing:
> "A creature born of rejection, now read its final line—
The Author reclaims even what was never his to write."
The Reclaimer froze.
And for the first time—
It understood.
Kei didn't fight it.
He accepted it.
Gave it a name.
A purpose.
A final line.
And in doing so—he freed it.
The Reclaimer collapsed into stardust and silence.
Gone.
But not destroyed.
Written.
Rin fell to her knees, exhausted. "You… actually did it."
Kei looked at his Pen.
"It's not about power," he said.
"It's about authorship."
Thread Zero pulsed beneath their feet.
A new Canvas formed.
Not corrupted.
Not broken.
Just blank.
Waiting.
> [NEW THREAD AVAILABLE: THE UNWRITTEN PATH]
> [STAGE: ENDGAME PRELUDE]
And somewhere far beyond time—
The Architect flinched.
For the first time in eternity…
The system had no idea what would happen next.