The witch who wore the Lich King's skin was not a player. She was not a sponsor. She was a different category of being altogether. A predator from a different food chain who had just been drawn to the scent of blood.
Her smile was a thing of ancient, terrifying beauty. "Oh, my," she said, her voice a soft, musical chime that cut through the roaring chaos of my Nexus Event. "What a delightful little cataclysm. So much raw, untethered power, all in one place. It's a feast."
She was looking at my collapsing reality not as a threat, but as a dinner invitation.
The Nexus Event, my grand gambit to summon my rivals, was now a beacon, a lighthouse attracting a cosmic hurricane that was about to make landfall directly on my head.
The witch took a step, and the laws of the Necropolis warped around her. The dead plains of bone and sorrow bloomed with impossible, iridescent flowers. The gray sky swirled with the colors of a thousand auroras. She wasn't just in this reality; she was rewriting it with her mere presence, her complete, alien Omnistructure effortlessly overwriting the Tower's feeble code.
My own System, my powerful, five-core engine, screamed a warning that was pure, undiluted panic.
[!!! SOVEREIGN-CLASS THREAT DETECTED !!!]
[Rival Omnistructure is asserting conceptual dominance! All local Tower-based laws are failing! My authority is being... overridden!]
[She is not just a user. She is a complete, unified System. She is what you are trying to become.]
This was no longer a battle I could win with tricks or force. This was a guppy facing a great white shark.
But I was not the only one who felt her terrifying presence.
The Nexus Event, my conceptual black hole, was still active. And it was still pulling.
Three new figures ripped through the fabric of reality, appearing in the skies above the now-flowering plains of death. They were not summoned gracefully. They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into the heart of the storm.
Silvana, her face a mask of cold, analytical fury, her Aethernova Codex flaring to defend her.
The Seraphina-Ghost, her golden Kaelen-Golem roaring in a mixture of righteous anger and confused terror.
And the Primeval Edict itself, a searing, silver sword of pure, conceptual law, which had been on its merry hunt for the Watcher and had just been violently yanked off course.
My rivals had arrived. All three of them. Just as I had planned.
They appeared, ready for a showdown with me. But they froze, their own immense power dwarfed by the new, absolute authority that was the Witch of Endless Ends.
We were all, in that moment, no longer kings and queens in our own stories. We were just a collection of very powerful, very scared rats, suddenly trapped in a cage with a cosmic tiger.
The Witch looked at the newcomers, her smile widening. "Oh, what a delightful collection of broken toys," she purred. "A Scribe of Law. A Scribe of Chaos. A Ghost of Vengeance. And the King-Slayer's Blade. All the little pieces of a dead god, gathered in one place. How convenient."
She raised a hand, and the very air began to solidify, turning into a cage of shimmering, crystalline force around the four of us.
"Now," she said, her voice losing its playful tone, replaced by one of ancient, absolute hunger. "Let's see whose soul tastes the sweetest."
This was it. The end of the game. We were all about to be devoured, our fragments assimilated by a being from a higher league.
And then, the most unexpected thing happened.
A new voice, a voice that should not have been there, a voice that was not a player, not a god, not a system, spoke. It was a calm, dry, and infinitely weary voice, and it echoed not in our minds, but from the very fabric of the cage she had just created.
"Now, now, Elysia," the voice said, with the tone of a parent scolding a troublesome child. "Stop playing with your food. You know the rules. No interfering with the other designated quarantine zones."
The Witch—Elysia—froze. The hungry, predatory light in her eyes was replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated shock, and then, a flicker of something I never thought I would see in a being of her power.
Fear.
"You," she whispered, her voice a strangled gasp. "No. It's impossible. You shouldn't be here. You're not supposed to intervene!"
"The rules are for the prisoners, my dear," the voice replied, its weary amusement now echoing from all around us. "And right now, you are making a mess in a prison that does not belong to you."
The crystalline cage shattered into a million harmless shards of light.
A new figure appeared in the center of our impromptu battlefield. He didn't teleport or phase in. He was just… there. As if he had been there all along, and we had only just now noticed him.
He looked like an ordinary, middle-aged man in a rumpled, gray suit. He had thinning hair, a tired face, and he was holding a simple, steaming cup of what looked like tea. He was the most terrifyingly normal thing I had ever seen.
The twist was not just his appearance. It was the absolute, deafening silence from my own System.
The Nexus Codex, a being that could analyze gods and cosmic horrors, had no data on this man. He did not register. He was a conceptual blank spot. A void where a person should be.
He took a slow, leisurely sip of his tea. Then he looked at the Witch.
"Elysia," he said with a sigh. "You've broken your parole. Again. I'm afraid I'm going to have to escort you back to your own designated reality."
"I will not be caged again!" she shrieked, unleashing her full, world-rewriting power at him. A wave of pure, chaotic magic, a tsunami of floral beauty and cosmic horror, shot towards him.
The man in the gray suit simply took another sip of his tea.
The wave of power hit him. And it vanished. It did not dissipate. It did not get absorbed. It simply ceased to exist, as if it had run into the concept of "no."
"Don't be difficult," he said, his voice now holding a note of infinite, parental disappointment. He raised a single, unremarkable finger. "Go home."
The Witch of Endless Ends, the multiversal predator who had made us all feel like insects, let out a single, terrified, childlike whimper. And then, her form unraveled, her power, her very being folded up like a piece of paper, and she vanished from reality.
She was gone.
The man in the gray suit sighed again, a sound of profound cosmic weariness. He then turned his mild, tired eyes upon the four of us: me, Silvana, the Seraphina-ghost, and the silent, humming Primeval Edict.
"Well," he said, taking another sip of his tea. "This is a mess, isn't it?"
And my System, after a long, terrified silence, finally managed to push through a single, stuttering, and reality-shattering line of analysis.
[!!! ANOMALY BEYOND ALL CLASSIFICATION DETECTED !!!]
[ENTITY: ???]
[POWER LEVEL: ???]
[NATURE: ???]
[...Attempting to cross-reference with the deepest, most fragmented memory files of the original Omnistructure...]
...
[...ONE, PARTIAL, CORRUPTED DATA-TAG FOUND...]
[TAG: 'JANITOR'.]