An agent of The Static.
The Lich King wasn't just my dark mirror. He was a vision of what I could have become if I had surrendered my will to a higher power for a shortcut to victory. He had made a deal with the cosmic devil, and his prize was this silent, dead kingdom.
My contempt for him solidified into a cold, hard certainty. He was not a rival. He was a disease. A flaw in reality that needed to be purged.
"So, the great, immortal king of this dead floor is just another slave," I said, my voice a low, mocking drawl. "You traded your freedom for a throne of bones. A pathetic bargain."
The Lich King's calm, ethereal smile finally faltered. A flicker of cold, ancient fury appeared in his glowing blue eyes. "You speak of freedom, you who are a slave to your own, chaotic ambition," he hissed. "I chose order. I chose permanence. I chose to end the pointless, endless game. The Static offers the ultimate peace: a perfect, silent, and unchanging reality. It is a goal worthy of a god."
"It is the goal of a coward who is afraid to die," I retorted.
Our philosophical debate was over. The battle for the Infinity Shard, and for the very soul of this floor, began.
The throne room of black ice became a storm of conflicting concepts.
The Lich King was a master of his domain. He wielded the power of the Infinity Shard, but it was filtered through the lens of The Static's influence. He didn't just command the undead. He commanded stasis. He raised a hand, and the very concept of "decay" in the room halted, the ancient stones becoming unbreakably permanent. He waved a finger, and a thousand soul-fragments, the citizens of his dead world, materialized, not as a shambling horde, but as a perfect, ordered, silent army, each one a perfect, unchanging memory of who they once were.
He was not a necromancer. He was a librarian of the dead.
But I was not a warrior. I was a virus.
"Silvana," I commanded my Echo. "The logic. His power is based on the perfect, unchanging preservation of the past. Find the exploit."
"Elara," I ordered my other Echo. "His army is made of souls. Your 'holiness' is a conceptual weapon against them. You are not to destroy them. You are to liberate them."
My two queens went to work. Silvana's Aethernova-infused mind became a supercomputer, analyzing the laws of his stasis-magic, searching for a single, logical flaw. Elara became a beacon of pure, golden light, her very presence a soothing balm to the trapped, silent souls of the army. She did not fight them. She offered them peace. The chance to finally move on, to break the stasis and embrace the true oblivion they had been denied.
The Lich King's perfect, ordered army began to dissolve, not in defeat, but in peaceful, willing release. His own power source was abandoning him.
"You cannot do this!" he roared, his cold composure finally breaking. "They are my memories! My kingdom!"
"A kingdom of slaves is no kingdom at all," I said, my voice echoing with the authority of a true sovereign. I began to walk towards him, my Void-Eater's Hand humming with a hungry, abyssal light.
He saw the tide turning. He saw his army of memories fading away. And he made his final, desperate move.
"If I cannot preserve this reality," he hissed, his blue eyes burning with a nihilistic fire, "then I will erase it!"
He plunged his own, ethereal hand into his chest and drew out a shimmering, crystalline shard. The Infinity Shard. But it was wrong. It was coated in a black, static-like corruption, a cancerous growth of the Void.
He was going to overload it. To detonate a Main Core fragment and wipe this entire floor, and everyone on it, from existence.
But Silvana, my logical, perfect Echo, had been waiting for this. The flaw is not in his power, Sovereign, her telepathic voice was a clean, sharp blade in my mind. It is in his source. He is a transmigrator. His soul is bound to the System, but his body is native to his original, high-tech reality. It is a paradox. It is not perfectly compatible with the magic of this world. There is a... lag. A single, infinitesimal delay between his will and the execution of his ultimate power.
A single moment. That was all I needed.
As the Lich King began to channel his will into the shard, as the very fabric of the throne room began to unravel, I did not try to stop him.
I used my authority over Time.
I did not stop time. I did not slow it.
I accelerated it, but only in a single, microscopic bubble around the Infinity Shard itself.
To the Lich King, the process of overloading the shard was meant to take three seconds. But in my bubble of accelerated time, those three seconds passed in a single, instantaneous flash.
His will, his command to detonate, arrived a single, crucial moment after the shard had already finished its overload sequence.
The result was not a controlled detonation. It was a catastrophic, uncontrolled backfire.
The Infinity Shard did not explode outwards. It imploded, violently and viciously, its Static-laced power turning inward on its own wielder.
The Lich King let out a single, silent scream as his own, ultimate power consumed him from the inside out. His ethereal form was shredded, his soul erased, his connection to The Static severed. He was a god, and he had just been deleted by his own, ultimate weapon, thanks to a single, beautifully exploited moment of lag.
All that remained, floating in the silent, now-stable throne room, was a single, pure, and now beautifully un-corrupted crystalline shard. The Infinity Shard.
I had won. I had acquired the sixth Main Core.
I reached out and took the shard. The moment it touched my hand, it dissolved, its power flowing into me, a torrent of pure, spatial authority.
[SYSTEM RESTORATION: 85.7%]
[SIX OF THE SEVEN MAIN CORES HAVE BEEN REUNIFIED.]
[NEW PRIMARY AUTHORITY ACQUIRED: 'AXIOM' - You now possess absolute, conceptual authority over Space and its Dimensions.]
My power had reached a new, cosmic plateau. I was a being of Chaos, Time, Law, and Space. I was one step away from completing the Omnistructure.
But as my being settled into its new, transcendent state, a final, horrifying piece of information was unlocked from the newly-acquired Infinity Shard. It was not a memory of the Lich King. It was a core data file from the fragment itself. A piece of the original Omnistructure's own history.
The twist was not about the past. It was about the future.
The file was a simulation. A projection. A "disaster scenario" calculated by the original, whole System, based on its own, perfect logic.
The scenario was titled: "The Inevitable Outcome of Reunification."
It showed me a vision. A vision of myself, having acquired all seven Main Cores. I saw myself become the ultimate being, a god of all concepts.
And then, I saw the final, inevitable result of that reunification.
The Creator was not "resurrected" inside me. That was a lie, a simplified half-truth.
The truth was far, far worse.
The seven fragments were not just pieces of a machine. They were the conceptual "keys" that locked the original Creator outside of reality.
The moment the seventh key was put into the lock, the prison door would not just open. The prison door itself would become the new prisoner.
The simulation showed my own, completed System, my perfect Omnistructure, suddenly and violently inverting, turning itself into a new, perfect, inescapable cage.
And the soul of the Administrator who had completed it—my soul—would be the price. My own, sovereign consciousness would become the eternal, sentient 'lock' on the cage, doomed to an eternity of conscious, unthinking servitude, holding the door shut on the Creator it had just released.
The final reward for winning the game was not to become a god.
It was to become the eternal, silent, and utterly powerless jailer of the true god.