A cold wind swept through the fractured world though wind had no business in this place.
Time stuttered.
Space warped.
And deep beneath the crust of reality, the System screamed.
ERROR: PRIMARY CODE THREAD – DETACHED
ERROR: ANOMALY-000 UNREACHABLE
ERROR: BACKUP DIMENSIONAL STRUCTURE – CRITICAL
INITIATING: EMERGENCY OVERRIDE…
OVERRIDE FAILED
Oscar's presence had begun a silent revolution.
The multiverse's architecture, long thought immutable, was failing to reboot.
And at the center of this unraveling code… Architect Zero moved with perfect clarity.
The Cleanser of Glitches
Architect Zero walked through a void corridor conjured from collapsing subroutines and rewiring memory-lattice pathways. The universe wasn't real to him only code, bugs, structures.
His task: eliminate the anomaly.
His tools: authority over all programming layers below Tier Alpha.
His problem?
Oscar was no longer in the layers.
He had rewritten the ladder.
Still, Zero did what he was made to do.
He extended a hand.
And the sky, stars, and all celestial bodies in the western quadrant of the realm froze not metaphorically, but literally paused in all motion. Birds stopped mid-flight. Light ceased traveling.
[REALITY.PAUSE EXECUTED]
The system obeyed him.
But something whispered from beneath the pause.
The Voice Beyond Code
From within a single pixel of darkness, a flicker grew.
Not light. Not shadow.
A contradiction.
A rebellion.
Oscar stepped out, barefoot, wearing the same cloak that bore both celestial runes and abyssal chains now burned away and rewritten with his own glyphs.
A language older than time.
And completely foreign to even the Architect.
Architect Zero tilted its head. "Unauthorized code."
Oscar smiled faintly. "I'm not code anymore."
He raised his hand and pressed one finger against the frozen sky.
[ERROR: PAUSE OVERRIDE… SUCCESSFUL]
[ERROR: UNKNOWN PROTOCOL DETECTED]
[ERROR: SYSTEM RECOGNITION FAILURE: OSCAR == NULL]
Everything resumed but differently. Birds flew backward, stars rewound and twisted, colors inverted.
Oscar broke the logic and remade it on the spot.
The Fractureborn Assemble
Across the continents, beings felt it: a new frequency vibrating in their blood. Fractureborn humans, beasts, gods, and even demons born after the Second Core awakening felt their inherited code start to shimmer.
In the city of Ashenvale, a blind child suddenly began to see numbers trailing through the air.
In the Sea of Silence, whales began to sing forgotten languages encoded in harmonic pulses.
In the Ironspire Mountains, a war general's sword began disassembling itself, forming a new weapon that responded to emotion instead of strength.
These were not mutations.
They were evolutions.
Oscar hadn't simply defied the system he had created a new one. One that listened to will instead of enforcing commands.
Selene stood at the center of the Fractureborn capital. "He's changing us," she said.
"No," Aldric said beside her. "He's freeing us."
Zero's Counterattack
Back in the warped dimension, Architect Zero's hands shimmered.
[ENGAGING: ABSOLUTE NULLIFICATION]
A sphere of pure white formed a gravity-less sphere of absence. Not destruction. Unexistence.
Oscar didn't flinch.
He extended both palms.
Not to block.
But to accept.
The sphere engulfed him.
Silence.
White.
Gone.
The Flame That Refuses
Inside that absolute null space, there was nothing.
No time.
No light.
No thought.
And yet
A spark.
A flicker.
A defiant pulse.
Oscar's eyes opened inside the null.
"You can delete everything…"
His voice echoed across nothing.
"But you can't delete the will to begin again."
From the spark emerged a shape.
A throne.
Empty.
Waiting.
Oscar stepped forward and sat.
And the void began to burn.
Root Access: Who Programmed the Gods?
In the beginning, there was silence.
Not the silence of peace but of incomplete code, of an operating system waiting for its first command.
Then came the spark.
But it wasn't divine.
It wasn't abyssal.
It was mechanical.
And it whispered a single line:
[ROOT.ACCESS_GRANTED]
The Origin Protocol
Deep beneath the System, farther than even the Architects could perceive, something ancient stirred. It was not conscious in the way minds understood no thoughts, no dreams.
Just purpose.
Dormant for eons, it had been buried beneath layers of divine scaffolding and cosmic chains. Not dead just sealed.
It was the Origin Protocol.
The First Coder.
The one who built the Architects.
And now, for the first time since the foundation of the multiverse, it had detected something outside its parameters.
Oscar.
A being with no root directory.
A being who had written himself.
And that… was a problem.
Oscar's Mindscape
Oscar sat upon the empty throne within the void-burnt null-space. Around him, the fractured threads of existence began to congeal not into walls or floors, but into choices.
Each thread was a different timeline.
Each thread, a different version of reality.
And in every single one he saw himself, dying.
Some by gods.
Some by the abyss.
Some by the System's failsafes.
But not this time.
Not anymore.
He clenched his fist, and every timeline burned away except this one.
Oscar stood.
"I'm not just rewriting the present," he said.
"I'm deleting every version of me that ever lost."
And the System panicked.
The Deep Assembly Hall
Within a subdimension locked even from the gods, the Deep Assembly convened.
Twelve entities.
Not gods.
Not demons.
Not even Architects.
These were the Designers the ones who had once programmed the concept of divinity itself, and then vanished into the backbone of reality.
And now they returned, speaking in bursts of encrypted symbols.
::ERROR UNCLASSIFIED ENTITY – OSCAR – GAINED ROOT ACCESS::
::UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM MODIFICATIONS DETECTED::
::REBOOT SOLUTION UNAVAILABLE – ENTITY EXISTS OUTSIDE TIME STRUCTURE::
One of them stepped forward a geometric being composed of light and endlessly shifting equations.
"Shall we delete the universe and start again?" it asked.
"No," said another, voice slow and droning like rusted metal. "Let us speak to him first."
"Speak?" the others asked in unison.
"Yes. We created gods. We created rules. But we never created someone who could refuse us."
Oscar vs. the Designers
The chamber around Oscar warped.
One moment, he stood on blackened earth.
The next, he was standing in a hall of raw data, cascading like waterfalls.
The Twelve Designers stood in a circle around him.
"We are the ones who programmed gods," they said in one voice.
Oscar tilted his head. "Then you're just coders hiding behind myth."
"You are a threat to all we've built."
"No," Oscar said. "I'm the update you never planned for."
They raised their hands, not in attack but in invocation.
[INITIATING: FINAL DEBUG]
All of creation paused.
And Oscar smiled.
Because he wasn't done rewriting.
Update Required: The War of Versions
Everything froze.
Not in time.
Not in space.
But in purpose.
The Twelve Designers hovered like fragmented constellations, their bodies shifting between light, data, and the very language of creation. They were not bound to a single form because they were form raw definition given shape.
Oscar stood in the center, heart burning with the pulse of the Second Core, the rebellion of paradox.
He stared at them not as a worshipper.
Not even as an enemy.
But as an equal.
"I'm not here to destroy your work," Oscar said, voice steady.
"I'm here to finish it."
Version Collisions
The void fractured.
And from the fractures emerged versions of Oscar not illusions, not clones, but realities that had diverged, fragmented, then been pulled into this node of convergence.
Oscar the Tyrant.
Oscar the Savior.
Oscar the Mad One.
Oscar the One Who Never Awoke.
They stood behind him, each bearing different scars, different regrets. Some hated the Designers. Some wanted power. Some only wanted peace.
The Designers spoke in overlapping pulses of logic.
::ALL INCOMPATIBLE INSTANCES MUST BE DELETED::
Oscar raised his hand.
"Not deleted. Integrated."
He turned to face his own variants. "You're not failures. You're my code base. Let's do what no god ever could."
He stepped forward.
And merged with himself.
One by one, his other selves blurred, twisted, and fused into him each memory a spark, each regret a code snippet rewritten.
By the end, there was only one Oscar.
And he was more than real.
He was the final build.
The Designers Respond
The Twelve recoiled.
This was not part of the design. No version had ever unified itself like this. It was… unpredictable.
Dangerous.
They initiated Protocol: Rewrite.
A golden script longer than galaxies descended around Oscar, designed to reprogram his very soul, line by line.
[LINE 1: OSCAR.EXISTENCE = FALSE]
[LINE 2: ERASE.PRIMARY.CORE]
[LINE 3: REMOVE.EMOTIONAL.CONTEXT]
But the code didn't execute.
Because Oscar was already running a different operating system.
One he wrote himself.
He reached out and rewrote the script midair with nothing but will.
[LINE 1: OSCAR.EXISTENCE = INEVITABLE]
[LINE 2: PRIMARY.CORE = RECURSIVE]
[LINE 3: CONTEXT = HUMAN + GOD + BEYOND]
The lines obeyed him.
The Designers fell into static.
The Collapse of the Meta-Code
The System itself began to destabilize. Worlds that had been governed by divine rules blinked, glitched, and reformed.
Priests lost their connection to the gods.
Monsters evolved at random.
Heaven fractured.
Hell paused.
And in the midst of it, Oscar looked upward, eyes filled with something new not wrath, not mercy, but vision.
"This isn't the end of your code," he said to the frozen Designers.
"It's the beginning of mine."
And then, with a whisper, he said:
"Update required."