The sky cracked.
Not metaphorically—like, literally. A glowing fault line ripped across the upper atmosphere of Ark Nexus, shimmering like the universe was running a bad update. Somewhere far off, a cosmic "error 404" beeped into the void.
"I think we broke something important," Ryke muttered, sitting up and brushing mech shrapnel off his jacket.
"You detonated a core reactor with your bare hands," Juno snapped, still holding her gravity blade. "Reality is not designed to handle that kind of idiocy."
"It was tactical!" Ryke defended. "And emotionally satisfying!"
Above them, Protocol Prime hung midair—frozen in a T-pose of defeat—while dimensional static flickered from his fractured neural core.
A moment of peace.
A rare, golden moment of not dying.
Then Mox opened his mouth.
"Hey, guys? Why is the sky… blinking?"
They all looked up.
The crack widened, yawning like a ripped stitch. Through it poured a… thing. Not a ship. Not a being. A concept. An enormous abstract lifeform made entirely of numbers, paradoxes, and smug superiority.
THE PATCHMASTER.
"OH NO," Susan's voice shrieked from Ryke's wrist communicator. "It's the universal bug-fixer. You broke the simulation too hard! This thing patches glitches in causality!"
"Irony," the Patchmaster boomed, its voice a multiverse of librarians. "Must be eliminated."
It raised a limb made of binary stars and whipped it at them. The air warped. Time looped. For a split second, Ryke was a carrot.
"WE'RE FIGHTING A PROGRAMMING GOD?!" Mox screeched, hiding behind a crater. "I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR POST-REALITY BOSS FIGHTS!"
"You signed a verbal waiver," Ryke shouted, sliding under a temporal slash.
Juno leapt into the air, slicing its limb—but the wound stitched itself back instantly with an error log.
[WARNING: Player Action Invalid. Retconning.]
She blinked.
And found herself back at the start of the fight.
"What the—? It just rewound me!"
"It's rewriting our decisions," Ryke realized. "Like we're characters in some kind of—"
"Don't say it," Susan warned.
"—story."
"YOU SAID IT," everyone groaned.
Combat: Ultra Illegal Mode
Ryke activated the Ashen Core again—this time, purple fire licked the edges of existence. The Core wasn't just glowing now. It was… growling?
"Hey, Toasty?" Ryke whispered to the AI inside. "You still in there?"
Toasty.exe crackled.
"Not really. I'm kind of busy holding back the big bang inside your spleen."
"Well, let's uncork it."
Ashen Core: Emergency Override. ACCESSING DEBUG MODE.
Reality stuttered.
Gravity forgot how to work.
Mox was now twenty feet tall and had three elbows.
"I FEEL WEIRD," he screamed.
Juno kicked through a thousand probability threads, each punch echoing across potential timelines. "We're in debug mode! Do something broken!"
Ryke screamed, punched the sky, and summoned a GIANT LASER-CHICKEN FROM DIMENSION 6.
It pecked the Patchmaster directly in the face.
The Patchmaster reeled. Actually reeled.
Lines of code unraveled across its form. "Corruption... detected... Illogical resistance... escalating..."
Ryke grinned. "Yeah, you better escalate. We just unlocked cheat codes."
Final Blow
Juno twirled her blade, leapt, and yelled, "Mox—project distraction!"
Mox chugged an energy drink the size of a bus and belted the loudest, most off-key opera note in existence.
The Patchmaster flinched.
In that moment, Ryke jumped into the air, channeling the full, unstable power of the Ashen Core. Purple lightning surged around him.
He drove his fist into the Patchmaster's core.
And said the most sacred words in the galaxy:
"Ctrl + Alt + DELETE!"
BOOOOOM.
The sky folded.
Time coughed.
The Patchmaster exploded into a thousand lines of spaghetti code and unresolved emotional trauma.
Aftermath 2: Electric Boogaloo
Smoke. Silence. Slight humming.
The Ashen Core powered down, sparking.
Ryke lay on the ground, bleeding from his nose, ears, and probably other places he didn't want to check.
"Is it over?" Mox asked, now back to normal size and crying into a taco shell.
Juno sat beside them, too exhausted to glare. "For now."
Above them, the stars flickered normally again. No cracks. No cosmic librarians. Just quiet.
Ryke coughed. "You know what I've learned today?"
"That you're a cosmic hazard?" Juno offered.
"That too. But also… that sometimes, the dumbest ideas actually work."
Mox nodded, wiping his face. "And sometimes, the universe just gives up and lets you win."
They lay there a while, under the recovering sky.
But far above, unseen...
Something else watched.
Something older than logic.
And it had noticed the Ashen Core