Chapter 43 – The Red Margin
The rain falling into the ruined Archives was cold, but it wasn't what made Uzo shiver.
He stared up the massive, thousand-foot shaft they had just blown through the bedrock of the Eins Kingdom.
At the very top, the gray, fog-choked sky of the Capital was visible. Freedom was a tiny circle of light.
Then, the circle turned Black.
The rain stopped hitting them.
"Did the storm stop?" Uzo asked, his breath misting in the sudden, unnatural chill.
"No," Vane said, his gray eyes widening in rare, genuine terror.
"Damnnnnnnnnnnn, The King is awake."
High above them, the black circle of the sky ignited into a blinding, neon crimson. It wasn't fire. It was Ink. A perfectly flat, horizontal plane of glowing red light had materialized at the top of the shaft.
And it was descending.
It didn't make a sound. It didn't crush the stone walls of the shaft; it simply erased them. As the Red Margin moved downward like a massive, glowing elevator platform, the jagged rocks and broken pipes of the city's underbelly quietly ceased to exist, leaving perfectly smooth, featureless white walls in its wake.
"A Macro-Edit," Valerius whispered, his reptilian tongue flicking out anxiously. "A Kingdom-level formatting sweep. It is erasing the Plot Hole."
"It's going to erase us," Uzo realized. The descending red light was moving fast. They had less than a minute before they were formatted into nothingness.
"Not today," Vane gritted his teeth. "Hold on to something."
Vane threw his entire deck of cards onto the glass floor beneath them. He didn't just summon a shadow; he drained the darkness from the entire cavern. The shadows rushed toward the cards, weaving together into a dense, vibrating disk of solid black matter beneath their feet.
"Valerius, anchor us!" Vane ordered.
The doctor didn't hesitate. Valerius dropped to his knees, his scalpel flashing. He sliced his own palms, pressing them to the shadow-disk.
Purple, toxic veins of flesh-magic erupted from his hands, acting like biological seatbelts that strapped over Uzo and Vane's boots, fusing them to the platform.
"Going up," Vane snarled.
He snapped his fingers.
The shadow-disk didn't fly. Vane simply inverted its gravity. To the disk, "Up" was now "Down."
They shot upward like a cannonball.
The G-force slammed Uzo to his knees. His ears popped, and his vision blurred as they rocketed up the thousand-foot shaft. The wind tore at his trench coat.
But the Red Margin was still falling toward them.
They were on a collision course. The absolute erasure of the King coming down; the desperate shadow of Mystery going up.
"We're going to hit it!" Valerius shrieked over the rushing wind, his skeletal hands gripping the biological tethers.
"I can't stop!" Vane yelled, his nose bleeding from the effort of holding the massive shadow construct together. "If I drop the gravity, we fall a thousand feet! Uzo!"
Uzo looked up. The Red Margin was fifty feet away. Then thirty. The heat radiating off it wasn't thermal; it was the pressure of absolute, mathematical deletion.
If it touches us, we are gone, Uzo thought.
He didn't have time to cast a complex spell. He didn't have a weapon,
He only had the Glitch.
Uzo stood up against the crushing G-force. He channeled every ounce of Null-Ink in his body, pulling it from his veins, his heart, and his deaf ear.
His right arm turned completely gray, crackling with violent, chaotic static. The Null-Ink was so dense it looked like a black hole wrapped around his fist.
"PUNCH A TYPO!" Valerius screamed.
Ten feet.
Uzo threw his fist straight up into the descending ceiling of Red Ink.
CRACK.
The collision didn't cause an explosion. It caused a Syntax Error.
When the absolute Order of the King's Red Pen met the absolute Chaos of the Null-Ink, the magic screamed. A web of black, glitching cracks spider-webbed across the perfect crimson plane.
For a microsecond, the Red Margin couldn't decide what to do. It tried to delete Uzo's fist, but the Null-Ink redacted the deletion command.
The crimson plane shattered directly around Uzo's fist, creating a jagged, ten-foot hole of static in the center of the descending erasure.
Vane's shadow-disk shot straight through the hole.
A millisecond later, the Red Margin reformed behind them, continuing its descent into the Archives, sealing the underground world away forever.
They burst out of the shaft and into the rainy, fog-covered streets of the Capital slums.
Vane canceled the gravity inversion. The shadow-disk shattered into harmless mist.
They crashed hard onto the wet cobblestones, tumbling into a muddy alleyway behind a row of abandoned taverns.
"We made it," Vane gasped, rolling onto his back, the rain washing the blood from his face. "We actually made it."
Valerius was already on his feet, clutching the Flesh Codex with greedy, trembling hands.
Uzo tried to stand.
He planted his hand on the mud, pushing himself up,
Then, his heart stopped.
It wasn't a metaphor. It felt like a cold iron spike had been driven through his chest. Uzo gasped, his eyes rolling back in his head.
The gray stain of the Null-Ink didn't fade. It was aggressively spreading. It crawled up his right arm, branching out like dead, gray veins across his neck and chest.
"Uzo!" Vane yelled, scrambling over.
Uzo collapsed, convulsing in the mud. Blood poured from his left ear and his nose. His vision was tunneling into static. He was burning up from the inside.
"The Void is cannibalizing his biology," Valerius stated, his reptilian eyes locked onto Uzo's spreading gray veins. "He overexerted the Null-Ink against the Red Margin. His body can no longer contain the paradox."
"You said you could fix him!" Vane grabbed the doctor's toxic robes.
"I said I could stabilize him," Valerius corrected, opening the dark, wet leather of the Flesh Codex. The pages inside were made of thin slices of cured meat, written in black blood.
Valerius looked down at Uzo, who was choking on his own blood, the Glitch threatening to erase his entire body.
"Drag him inside that tavern," Valerius hissed, his scalpel sliding out of his sleeve. "Hold him down, Vane. We are going to have to do this without anesthesia. And it is going to be incredibly messy."