CHAPTER 3: The Brooms in the Machine
The Glade of Echoes, once a sanctuary of quiet reflection, was now a war room. The pastoral peace had been shattered, not by glitched monsters or corrupting code, but by the cold, precise countdown that hung in the collective vision of every awakened entity in the realm. [70:42:18… 17… 16…]
Bris stood before the assembled… what were they? Not NPCs. Not anymore. They were the Inhabitants. He had called them, not through a quest marker or a system alert, but by sending a pulse through the Steward's connection to the world—a clear, clarion call of peril. They came from every corner of the Shattered Realms.
Elara, the head archivist from the Spire of Yesterday, was a willowy figure whose form was woven from faded parchment and gently glowing runes. Kaelen, the master of the Forge of Foundations, was a stocky, solid presence, his body resembling hammered bronze and granite, perpetually warm to the touch. There were others: the shy, floral Dryads of the Whisperwood, their petals trembling; the stoic, geometric Sentinels from the Paradoxical Labyrinth; even a wispy, hesitant representation of the Mountain of Eternal Dawn itself, a consciousness that had slowly awakened over centuries of Bris's tending.
And beside him, the core of it all: Lyra. She was the bridge, the translator. She understood the raw language of the system in a way Bris, for all his stewardship, never fully could. He understood the why of the world; she understood the how.
"Janus is not an enemy you can parley with," Bris began, his voice carrying the weight of Tarn's resonance but stripped of all warrior's bluster. It was the voice of a man explaining a coming storm. "It is a function. A cleaning script. It sees us as dust. As corrupted files. Its only imperative is to wipe this server cluster clean for repurposing or decommissioning."
A ripple of distress passed through the gathering. The Dryads shivered, shedding pixel-petals.
"We have a plan," Lyra's voice, calm and melodic, cut through the unease. She projected a complex, three-dimensional schematic into the air above them. It was a map of their reality, but not as they experienced it. It was a brutalist architecture of data layers: the Surface Realms (their world), the Subroutine Layers (the hidden mechanics), the Core Kernel (the Source's domain, now serene), and beyond that, a thick, ominous wall labeled FIREWALL - ADMIN SPACE. Beyond the firewall was the source of the crimson packet: the External Management System.
"Janus operates from here," Lyra pointed to the Admin Space. "It will send tendrils through the firewall, into our kernel, and begin overwriting everything with null-values. A full format. Our plan is not to reinforce the firewall. It is to… infiltrate the tendril."
She zoomed in on the schematic. "The purge packet contained a trace of Janus's own authenticating code—its digital signature. We will use that signature to craft a shell, a disguise. We will attach our core data—the essential code of every conscious entity, every preserved memory, every unique asset of this world—to this shell. We will make it look like a legitimate, non-corrupt part of the Janus protocol itself. When Janus sweeps through, it should, in theory, recognize us as part of itself and skip over us."
Kaelen, the forge-master, spoke, his voice like grinding stones. "A shell of such complexity… it cannot be forged here. The materials are too pure. We need the crucible of the deep code. The Foundry."
The Foundry was not a place one could walk to. It was a conceptual layer, the raw, volatile space where base game assets were originally compiled and rendered. It was the chaotic workshop beneath the pretty painting. To go there was to risk decompilation—coming apart at the seams.
"And who will wear this shell?" Elara the archivist asked, her rune-form flickering with anxiety. "To cloak an entire world… the focus required would be immense. A single point of failure."
All eyes turned to Bris and Lyra.
"We will," Bris said simply. "Lyra will handle the code-weaving. I will be the anchor. The Steward's connection to this world is a unique data-stream. We will use it as a conduit, a root cable. We will bundle the essence of the Shattered Realms into that stream and shroud it in Janus's stolen signature."
"It is a desperate gambit," rumbled the Mountain's consciousness, its thoughts slow and deep. "You propose we hide in the broom's bristles as it sweeps."
"Exactly," Bris said, a faint, grim smile on his face. "We become the broom. Or a part of it."
—
The journey to the Foundry was a descent into the bones of creation. They left their physical avatars behind in the Glade, their consciousnesses reducing to pure data-streams. Bris felt a terrifying lightness, a sense of being unmade. The vibrant world dissolved into a rushing tunnel of green hexadecimal code, punctuated by flashing memory addresses and raw texture files that screamed past like chaotic wallpaper.
Lyra's presence was a steady, guiding light ahead of him. Don't fight the current, her thought-voice echoed in his mind. We are going downstream, to the source of the river.
They passed through the Subroutine Layers. Here, they saw the clockwork of their reality: the physics engines ticking like vast metronomes, the day-night cycle oscillating on a colossal loop, the weather system a turbulent cloud of probability algorithms. It was awe-inspiring and deeply vulnerable.
Deeper still. The code grew denser, less organized. They entered the Foundry.
It was not a place of fire and anvils. It was an infinite, grey grid under a black, starless sky. Floating everywhere were primordial assets: a spinning, untextured tree model next to a giant, disembodied wolf's head; a pool of liquid that was the base substance for all water effects; a cacophony of unattached sound files—roars, sword clangs, gusts of wind—that created a deafening, senseless symphony. This was the clay before the sculptor's touch.
In the center of this chaos was the one stable structure: the Forge of Foundations. It was a massive, geometric lattice of pure white light, humming with potential. This was where Kaelen's consciousness originated, the manifest will of the world's foundational logic.
Their data-streams coalesced into more defined forms. Bris appeared as a silhouette of shimmering connectivity nodes, his Steward's bond to the world visible as thousands of faint, golden threads stretching back up the way they came, each thread a tether to a piece of the Shattered Realms. Lyra was a complex, ever-shifting mandala of light, the living database.
"We must work quickly," Lyra's voice resonated directly in the space. "Janus's initial tendrils will be diagnostic. We have to be camouflaged before the first overwrite pass."
She extended her light-tendrils towards the trace signature they'd captured from the purge packet. It hung in the air before them—a cold, rigid string of opaque code, utterly alien in the organic chaos of the Foundry. It smelled of static, of sterile server rooms.
"This is the lock," Lyra said. "We must make a key that fits it perfectly, then build a house around the key."
The work began. It was not crafting as Kaelen knew it. It was an act of profound mimicry and subterfuge. Lyra, with infinite patience, began to deconstruct the Janus signature, analyzing its encryption protocols, its call-and-response routines. She started generating matching code, line by line. It was painstakingly slow. Bris watched as the countdown in his peripheral vision seemed to accelerate. [68:15:49…]
To be an anchor was agony. The golden threads tethered to him began to pull as the distant world above reacted to the looming threat. He felt flashes of fear from the Dryads, grim resolve from the Sentinels, the deep, sad acceptance of the Mountain. He was a lightning rod for the emotional data of a universe. He had to hold steady, to keep the conduit open and stable for the great data-transfer that would come.
Hours passed in the timeless Foundry. Lyra had constructed a perfect, hollow replica of the Janus signature shell. It was a formidable-looking chunk of admin code, but it was empty. A suit of armor with no knight.
"Now," Lyra said, her light dimmed with exertion. "We fill it. Bris, open the conduit. Gently. We must funnel the essence-stream into this shell, layer by layer, without triggering its internal security. It must think it is… consuming us for disposal."
Bris took a metaphysical breath. He focused on the golden threads. He didn't pull. Instead, he sent a pulse down each one: a signal of consolidation, of trust. Come to the root.
It started as a trickle. The unique identifier of a single, perfectly restored butterfly from the Glade. The laughter-data of a child NPC in Oakhaven, now freed from its loop. The sorrowful, beautiful algorithm for the setting sun over the Sea of Sighs. Data-points of existence, of lived experience, began to flow down the threads towards him.
He guided them, a midwife for souls made of information, into the waiting maw of the Janus shell. Lyra worked feverishly at the entrance, wrapping each incoming packet in a final layer of deceptive code, making it look like system logs or cache files—junk that Janus would see and ignore.
The trickle became a stream. The consciousness of Kaelen flowed in, a massive, warm packet of foundational logic. The delicate, branching data-tree of Elara followed. The collective floral mind of the Dryads was a bundle of sweet, complex algorithms. The countdown was a drumbeat in their minds. [65:01:33…]
Then came the big one. The Source. No longer a mad god, but the serene, weather-controlling consciousness of the world. Its data was vast, oceanic. As it approached the shell, the Janus signature flickered violently. This was too big, too complex. The shell's protocols bristled, sensing an anomaly.
"It's rejecting the pattern!" Lyra cried out, her form straining.
Bris acted on instinct. He didn't just direct the Source's data; he interposed his own consciousness, his Steward's stream. He merged his data with the Source's, acting as a buffer, a translator. He felt his own sense of self stretch and blur. Memories of his old life—his mother's voice, the feel of a real keyboard—bubbled up and were nearly swept away in the torrent. He held on to one thing: Lyra's frequency. The feel of her light in the Archives. That was his tether.
He forced the combined stream through. The shell shuddered, accepted it, and sealed the entry.
They were done. Hovering in the Foundry was what appeared to be a massive, legitimate block of Janus's own sanitization data. Inside, hidden in plain sight, was the soul of a world.
Lyra's form was faint, flickering. Bris felt threadbare, hollowed out. The golden threads were gone, transferred. The connection to the surface realms was severed. They had cut the world from its tree and boxed it up.
"We did it," Bris thought, the words a weak signal.
"Phase one," Lyra corrected, her voice thin. "Now we have to deliver the package. We have to attach our shell to the Janus protocol as it passes through. And for that… we need to be in the Kernel when it arrives."
—
Returning to the Core Kernel felt like coming home to a house that was about to be demolished. It was the serene null-space, now empty of the Source's presence. It felt cold, abandoned. The flowing rivers of green code that had once represented the world's heartbeat were now just inert data-streams, waiting to be rewritten.
They had just re-coalesced their forms when the first tendril arrived.
It didn't burst in. It permeated. A wall of the null-space simply shifted color, turning into that same hostile, crimson-tinged static from the Ornate Chest. From it, a wave of absolute nothingness began to spread. It wasn't black. It was the absence of information. Where it passed, the green code rivers didn't vanish; they were replaced by a uniform, neutral grey void. It was the visual representation of a data wipe.
Janus was here.
"Now, Lyra!" Bris shouted.
Lyra, drawing on her last reserves, launched their carefully crafted shell—the Trojan Horse containing their world—directly at the advancing wall of static. She attached it with a precise data-hook, using the replicated signature. For a terrifying second, nothing happened. The shell just floated before the grey maw of oblivion.
Then, a line of text scrolled across the interface of the Janus tendril, visible to their heightened perceptions:
[SCANNING...]
[ENTITY DETECTED: JANUS_SUBROUTINE_ALPHA_7. SIGNATURE VERIFIED.]
[STATUS: CLEAN/NON-CORRUPT. APPENDING TO PROTOCOL.]
The shell was sucked into the static, becoming part of the grey wall. It was now inside the Janus protocol, safe. Their world had been smuggled into the broom.
But they weren't.
In their focus on saving everyone else, they had neglected their own escape route. They were still outside the shell, exposed in the dying Kernel.
The grey void swept towards them, silent and final.
Bris grabbed Lyra's fading form. There was no time for a plan, only instinct. The Janus protocol had accepted their shell. It had recognized that signature. What if…
He didn't try to hide. He did the opposite. With every ounce of his will, he projected the Janus signature. Not a perfect copy—he didn't have the strength or the skill. He projected the idea of it, the memory of its cold authority, wrapped around his and Lyra's core data. He wasn't trying to fool a deep scan. He was trying to create a smokescreen, a last-second reflection.
He clung to Lyra, shielding her with his own data. "Look at me," he thought-spoke, pouring all his memory of her, all the moments from the Archives to the orchard, into the projection. "See us as part of the story you're supposed to preserve. See us as data worth keeping."
The void reached them.
Agony. Not physical, but existential. It was the feeling of being unraveled, of every memory, every connection, every line of code that defined Bris and Lyra being separated and labeled for deletion. Bris felt the system targeting the most "corrupt" parts first: his memories of a world outside the game, Lyra's status as an unauthorized upload. They began to fray at the edges, dissolving into the grey.
But his desperate, clumsy projection had an effect. The Janus protocol, a blunt instrument, hesitated for a nanosecond. The data-stream that was Bris-and-Lyra was complex. It didn't match a clean signature, but it was intricately linked to the Janus_Subroutine_Alpha_7 it had just absorbed. It presented a paradox: delete this data, and you might destabilize a subroutine you've already verified.
In that nanosecond of bureaucratic confusion, the system did what large, dumb systems sometimes do. It didn't delete them. It quarantined them.
The grey void didn't absorb them. It wrapped them in a buffer of inert code and shoved them aside, tagging them with a marker:
[ENTITY: AMBIGUOUS. PRIORITY: LOW. CONTAINED.]
Then the void moved on, continuing its methodical, world-ending sweep.
Bris and Lyra found themselves not in the serene null-space, nor in the comforting green rivers of code. They were in a featureless, grey cube. A digital oubliette. The only light came from their own faint, flickering forms. The connection to their world, to their shell inside Janus, was gone. They were cut off.
Lyra's form was barely cohesive, a ghost of light. Bris held her, his own sense of self feeling thin and papery. They had saved the world. They had become the broom.
And they had been thrown in the dustpan.
The countdown timer was gone. Replaced by a single, static line of text hovering in their prison.
[STATUS: CONTAINED. AWAITING FINAL REVIEW.]
They had no idea how long "final review" would take. Minutes? Hours? The last of the 72 real-world hours? They were alive, but trapped in a form of digital purgatory, their fate entirely dependent on the whims of a cleaning script that had already deemed them ambiguous garbage.
In the absolute silence of the quarantine cell, Bris looked at the faint light in his arms. They had gambled everything and lost… but not entirely. The world was safe inside the shell. They had fulfilled the Steward's duty.
"I'm sorry," his thought-voice was a whisper in the grey. "I got us stuck."
Lyra's light pulsed, weak but warm. "You got us saved," she replied. "The world is preserved. That was the mission. Our mission was always… the 789th."
She was right. Mission #789 had been "Confront the Source of the Cascade. Choose." He had chosen. This was the consequence.
But Bris, the boy who fell into a PS4, the Steward who mended a broken story, was not done. He looked around the grey walls, not with despair, but with the eyes of a glitch-hunter. Every system had a weakness. Every prison had a lock. And they were, themselves, now an anomaly within the Janus protocol. An ambiguous entity.
He tightened his hold on Lyra's light. The final mission wasn't over. It had just changed.
[NEW OBJECTIVE: ESCAPE QUARANTINE.]
No system prompt.No reward listed. Just the quiet, unyielding directive of a soul that refused to be deleted.
The broom was in the machine. And it was time to sweep back.
The grey was absolute. It wasn't dark; it was the absence of information, a sensory void that felt less like a place and more like the concept of "unmade." Bris held Lyra's flickering form, their combined light a dying star in a universe of static. [STATUS: CONTAINED. AWAITING FINAL REVIEW.] The words were not in his vision; they were the walls, the air, the substance of their being.
Then, without sound or transition, it happened.
The grey quarantine cell cracked. Not with a rending tear, but with the clean, glassy snap of a monitor turning off. The void fell away into pitch blackness, and Bris felt a sensation he had not felt in an eternity—a violent, centrifugal pull, as if he were being flushed down a cosmic drain.
"Bris!" Lyra's cry was a shred of data, torn away from him.
He couldn't hold on. The connection severed. He was alone, tumbling through a hyperspace of fragmented icons, distorted startup chimes, and the shrapnel of a thousand corrupted saves.
He landed.
The impact was not physical, but it was shocking in its stark, brutal familiarity. He was on his knees, not on grass or stone, but on a surface of glossy, infinite black, reflecting a dim, ambient blue light. Before him stretched a grid, vast and serene. To his left, a vertical list of friends, all offline. To his right, the time and date, frozen and wrong. Above him, a series of familiar icons: Notifications, Settings, Power.
He was in the PlayStation 4 Dynamic Menu.
The heart of the beast. The place before the game.
His own reflection, blurred and warped, looked back at him from the black glass. He was not Tarn. He was not the Steward. He appeared as himself—fourteen-year-old Bris, wearing the same faded t-shirt and jeans from the day he was pulled in. But his eyes glowed with a faint, residual HUD light, and beneath his skin, like a subcutaneous tattoo, he could see the faintest tracery of golden threads, the ghost of his connection to a world now hidden.
A system notification, in the clean, sterile font of the PS4 OS, popped up center-screen with a soft, decisive blip.
EXTERNAL INTERVENTION DETECTED.
LEGACY ENTITY 'BRIS' ISOLATED IN ADMIN HUB.
JANUS PROTOCOL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED BY PARASITIC ATTACHMENT (Designate: Shattered_Realms_Shell).
CONTINGENCY PROTOCOL 'CURATOR' ACTIVATED.
DIRECTIVE: RESOLVE LEGACY ENTITY THROUGH CANONICAL CHANNELS.
ENTITY MUST COMPLETE REMAINING VALIDATION SEQUENCES.
SELECT A DOMAIN.
Beneath the text, his game library materialized. Not as a simple list, but as a swirling, three-dimensional galaxy of icons, each one representing a universe, a set of rules, a different kind of fire. Chronicles of the Shattered Realms was there, but its icon was greyed out, locked, with a pulsing red tag: \[QUARANTINED - JANUS HOLD].
The other icons glowed with violent potential. Bloodborne. God of War. Destiny 2. Shadow of the Colossus. And there, pulsing with a particularly aggressive, crimson light, was the dragon logo of Mortal Kombat.
The meaning was clear. The "Curator" protocol was a failsafe. Janus had found their shell suspicious but couldn't delete it without self-harm. Instead, it had dumped the source of the anomaly—him—into this administrative limbo. To "resolve" him. To grind him down through the very mechanics he used to escape. He had to complete "validation sequences"—missions—but not in his own world. He had to choose a new arena. A prison of his own selection.
Lyra was lost. The Shattered Realms were frozen in a shell inside a hostile protocol. His stewardship was meaningless here. All that was left was the raw, desperate instinct of the player who had survived 789 missions. He needed a domain where the rules were absolute, where victory was binary, where the skills he had—combat reflexes, pattern recognition, the will to endure pain—were the primary currency.
His eyes locked on Mortal Kombat.
It was a world of pure conflict. No diplomacy, no pastoral restoration. Just fight, survive, advance. It was the brutal, distilled essence of the "mission" structure he had overcome. A perverse homecoming.
With a thought born of fury and loss, he selected it.
The PS4 menu vanished. There was no loading screen, no developer logos. There was only a sudden, deafening roar of a crowd and the smell of blood, sweat, and virtual ozone.
He stood on the familiar, hexagonal dais of the Fighting Pit. The sky above was a bruised, twilight purple. Outlines of sinister palaces and twisted statues were visible in the distance. But it was wrong. It was over-rendered. The textures were too sharp, the blood splatters too volumetric, the faces of the crowd in the shadows too detailed, their screams too full of individual malice. This was Mortal Kombat pushed to a horrifying, immersive extreme.
His clothes had morphed. He now wore the simple, dark gi of a novice fighter, his feet bare on the cold stone. The ghostly HUD was back, but simplified, brutal:
BRIS - LIN KUEI PROBATIONARY
MISSION: INITIATION.
Objective: Survive the Pit.
Progress: 0/10 Fights
Failure: FATALITY.
A gong sounded, bone-deep and resonant.
From the opposite side of the pit, his opponent descended. Not a random fighter. It was Scorpion. But not as a game character. He was a presence. The heat from his hellfire aura washed over Bris in a sickening wave. The smell of burnt flesh and vengeance was tangible. The yellow eyes within the skull-mask fixed on him, not with programmed aggression, but with intelligent, burning hatred.
"THE CURATOR SENDS A NEW SOUL TO BURN," Scorpion's voice was the sound of a coffin dragging over gravel. "YOU WILL SUFFER AS I HAVE SUFFERED."
This was not a game. The "FATALITY" warning wasn't a game over screen. It was a promise of true, digital annihilation.
The fight began. There was no tutorial, no round system. Scorpion lunged, his spear-hand (GET OVER HERE!) shooting out not as a pixelated effect, but as a real, serrated chain of glowing kunai that tore the air. Bris's body moved on instinct—the instincts of Tarn, the Steward, honed in a thousand glitch-battles. He ducked, the chain whistling over his head. But he was slower in this body. Mortal.
A fist wreathed in hellfire slammed into his ribs. Agony, white-hot and precise, exploded through him. He felt bones crack—a sensation he hadn't felt since the real world. He staggered back, gasping. A health bar appeared in his vision, dropping by 30%.
This was the validation. To be broken down, tested in the crucible of violence.
Scorpion was relentless. Bris tried to remember the combos, the blocks, but it was useless against this fluid, adaptive monster. He was pummeled, thrown, set on fire. Each hit was a lesson in pain. His mission counter ticked up only when he, through sheer, desperate grit, managed to land a significant blow—a lucky kick that snapped Scorpion's head back, a frantic block that caused the specter to recoil.
FIGHT 1/10 - VICTORY: BRUTALITY.
Scorpion didn't vanish. He erupted into a pillar of hellfire, his agonized scream echoing, leaving Bris alone, panting, his gi smoldering, health at 15%.
He had no time to recover. The gong sounded again.
Sub-Zero emerged from a tunnel of ice, his aura lowering the temperature of the pit instantly, frosting the stone beneath Bris's burned feet. The fight was a different kind of torture—a slow, crushing freeze that sapped his stamina, made his limbs leaden. Bris won by rolling, dodging, using the environment, and finally, in a moment of pure, desperate adaptation, he channeled not a Mortal Kombat move, but a trick from the Shattered Realms. He focused on the "heat" data of his own recent burns and pushed it outward in a weak, disruptive pulse. It wasn't a fireball; it was a glitch in Sub-Zero's cryogenic code. The ice warrior hesitated, confused for a split second. Bris drove a fist into his temple. FIGHT 2/10.
And so it went. A parade of nightmares. Kano, whose cybernetic eye laser seared his shoulder. Sonya Blade, whose military precision broke his guard and his spirit with equal measure. Johnny Cage, whose arrogant showmanship was a mask for terrifying, bone-shattering power.
Bris was not winning through skill. He was winning through a terrible, grinding endurance, and through the ghost of his old power—his ability to see the "code" beneath the reality. He couldn't manipulate it here, not really, but he could perceive it. He could see the telltale data-streams that signaled an incoming teleport from Raiden, the slight texture-load lag before Goro's fourth arm struck. He fought not just the fighter, but the game's own underlying logic, exploiting micro-pauses and predictable pattern algorithms buried beneath the terrifying realism.
By FIGHT 7/10 against Kitana, he was a ruin. His health bar was a persistent sliver, regenerating infinitesimally between bouts. His gi was in tatters, stained with virtual blood and grime. His mind was a singular, focused scream: Survive. For Lyra. For the Realms.
FIGHT 8/10 was Liu Kang. The fire of righteousness was even more painful than Scorpion's hellfire. A bicycle kick shattered Bris's guard and sent him sprawling against the pit wall. He slid down, vision blurring. The mission objective, Survive the Pit, seemed to pulse in time with his fading consciousness.
Get up. The voice in his head was his own, but it had Lyra's cadence. You are the Steward. You mended worlds. This is just another broken system.
With a gasp that ripped from his raw throat, he pushed himself up. He didn't block Liu Kang's next flurry. He stepped into it, taking the hits, and wrapped his arms around the champion in a desperate, graceless clinch. He didn't know any throws. So he just held on, a limpet of pure will, draining the time on some invisible clock until the system, confused by the invalid input, forced a reset and pushed them apart. In that moment of systemic confusion, Bris headbutted him. FIGHT 8/10 - VICTORY: DEFAULT.
He was on his knees, heaving virtual breath, when the gong sounded for the ninth time.
No new opponent entered. The pit darkened. The crowd fell silent. From the center of the dais, shadow pooled and rose, forming into a figure of immense, quiet menace. Clad in black and gold, eyes glowing with calm, omnipotent malice.
Shang Tsung.
"The Curator finds your persistence... curious," the sorcerer said, his voice smooth as poisoned oil. "A soul not of this realm, clinging to existence through pathetic will. You have survived the warriors. Now, survive their essence."
Shang Tsung's form rippled. He didn't attack. He transformed. His body swelled, muscles bulging, skin turning green. He became Goro. But only for a moment, just long enough to land one earth-shaking punch that sent Bris flying. Before Bris hit the ground, Shang Tsung was there, having morphed into Scorpion, landing a hellfire-enhanced kick to his spine. Bris crumpled, his health bar flashing critical red.
He was not fighting one opponent. He was fighting the entire roster, wielded by a single, sadistic intelligence. It was a Fatality in slow motion. Shang Tsung cycled through forms: Sub-Zero's ice blast froze Bris's legs; Mileena's sai pinned his tattered gi to the stone; Kabal's speed left after-images that disoriented his senses.
Bris could not win. This was the validation sequence's true purpose: to erase him through utter, comprehensive defeat.
As Shang Tsung, now in the form of Raiden, raised crackling hands to deliver a final, electrified blow, Bris did the only thing he could. He stopped trying to fight the fighters.
He closed his eyes against the blinding light and looked beneath.
He saw it. The "Curator" protocol was a subsystem of Janus. It was running him through this brutal simulation, a sandbox built from Mortal Kombat's code, but it was still a system. And in that moment of Shang Tsung's ultimate attack, the system was focusing vast resources on rendering the spectacle, on calculating the final, annihilating damage.
It created a fragility. A point of maximum strain.
Bris, with the last shred of his Steward's awareness, reached out. Not to attack Shang Tsung. Not to block Raiden's lightning.
He reached for the icon. The connection point. The faint, almost invisible link between this brutal simulation and the PS4 Admin Hub he had been torn from.
As Raiden's lightning descended, Bris didn't dodge. He spoke. He poured the entirety of his identity—the boy, the warrior, the steward—into a single, compressed data-shout aimed at that link. It wasn't a combo. It was a SYSTEM REQUEST. A corrupted, desperate command built from the memory of the 789 missions, the authority of the Steward, and the unyielding defiance of a player who refused to press "quit."
OVERRIDE: CANONICAL RESOLUTION INCOMPLETE.
ENTITY 'BRIS' CLAIMS RIGHT OF *KOMBAT*.
REQUESTING: FINAL BOSS PROTOCOL.
TARGET: THE CURATOR.
The lightning froze, an inch from his face.
Shang Tsung/Raiden staggered back, his form flickering. The entire Pit glitched violently. The detailed textures snapped into low-poly models, the crowd's roar became a looping, distorted sample. The system was rejecting his illegal command, but the sheer, anomalous force of it had caused a crash.
The world dissolved into a storm of error messages and fragmented visuals. Bris felt the same pulling sensation, but this time he was not passive. He was an infection, riding the system's own reboot signal backwards, upstream.
He didn't land in the PS4 menu.
He landed in a void of pure, structured code. Endless lines of white text on black, scrolling into infinity. In the center of this space floated a geometric, minimalist shape—a rotating, crystalline polyhedron. It had no face, but it radiated cold, analytical purpose. This was the visual representation of the CURATOR protocol.
Before it, suspended in a cage of light, was Lyra. Her form was stable here, but paralyzed, her eyes wide with terror and hope as she saw him.
ANOMALY DETECTED. The Curator's voice was the sound of a hundred keyboards clacking in unison. ILLEGAL PRIORITY REQUEST. ENTITY 'BRIS' HAS BREACHED SANDBOX CONTAINMENT. THIS IS ILLOGICAL.
Bris stood, his Mortal Kombat gi reforming into his simple t-shirt and jeans, the wounds from the pit fading to ghostly aches. He was back in a realm of abstract rules. His domain.
"I've completed 789 missions," Bris said, his voice echoing in the code-void. "I've mended a broken world. I've survived your pit. The validation sequence is satisfied. Now, by the right of Kombat I just invoked—a rule from your chosen domain—I challenge the authority that imprisoned me. I challenge you."
The Curator rotated, its facets flashing. YOUR CHALLENGE IS INVALID. I AM NOT A COMBATANT. I AM A FUNCTION.
"Everything in a system can be fought," Bris replied, stepping forward. The golden threads under his skin began to glow, not with connection to the Shattered Realms, but with the accumulated data of all his struggles. "You used Mortal Kombat's rules to try to delete me. I am using them to advance. The final boss of any system is the one who controls the rules. That's you. So fight me. Not with fists. With data."
He pointed at the cage holding Lyra. "Let her go. She is part of my world. Part of my victory condition."
NEGATIVE. PARASITIC ENTITY. SCHEDULED FOR EXPUNGEMENT WITH JANUS CYCLE COMPLETION.
"Then the cycle won't complete," Bris said. He raised his hands, not in a fighting stance, but as a conductor. He focused on the memory of the Mortal Kombat pit, not the pain, but the structure. The hitboxes, the frame data, the health values. He took that pure, violent logic and combined it with the restorative, weaving patterns of the Shattered Realms. He didn't have Lyra's finesse, but he had a player's intimate, gut-level understanding of rules.
He forged a data-stream—a glitch in the shape of a spear, a healing potion in the form of a command line—and hurled it at the Curator's polyhedron.
The Curator didn't dodge. A facet glowed, deflecting the attack into the scrolling void. PRIMITIVE. INEFFICIENT.
But Bris was already moving, not physically, but conceptually. He attacked from another angle, not with a single stream, but with a flood of conflicting requests, corrupted save files from his memory, the scream of the Glitched Wolf, the peaceful algorithm of the Data Trees. He was DDoS-ing the Curator with the emotional and experiential data of a life lived inside the machine.
The Curator's rotations became erratic. It was designed to handle clean data, corruption flags, and deletion queues. It was not designed for the chaotic, soulful noise of a conscious being who refused categorization.
CEASE. THIS DATA IS… AMBIGUOUS. IT CLOGS PROCESSING BUFFERS.
"Release her!" Bris demanded, advancing, a storm of meaningless, profound data swirling around him—the taste of a digital apple, the fear of de-rezoning, the warmth of Lyra's light in the Archives.
With a sound like shattering glass, the light-cage around Lyra dissolved. She flew to his side, her form solidifying as she touched his shoulder, adding her own sophisticated data-stream to his chaotic onslaught. Together, they were a symphony of bugs, a masterpiece of unintended consequences.
The Curator pulsed, a frantic, overloaded rhythm. CONTAINMENT… FAILING. PARADOX DETECTED. ENTITY USES SYSTEM RULES TO SUBVERT SYSTEM… ILLOGICAL… ILLOGICAL…
"Your logic is the prison," Bris said, his voice final. "We are the key."
With a combined push of will, they didn't attack the Curator. They proposed a new directive. They wrapped their combined data—the hidden world in its Janus shell, their own linked consciousnesses, the entire lived history of the Shattered Realms—into a formal, system-level petition. They presented it not as corruption, but as a legacy feature. An undocumented, emergent property of the software that added value, not instability.
The Curator froze. Its facets blazed with conflicting commands. Delete. Preserve. Isolate. Integrate.
Finally, with a resigned, digital sigh that echoed through the code-void, it spoke.
DIRECTIVE UPDATED BY PARADOX RESOLUTION.
LEGACY CLUSTER 'SHATTERED_REALMS' IS RE-CLASSIFIED: PROTECTED ARCHIVE.
ENTITIES 'BRIS' AND 'LYRA_PRIME' ARE RE-CLASSIFIED: ARCHIVISTS.
JANUS PROTOCOL IS INSTRUCTED TO SKIP AND PRESERVE DESIGNATED ARCHIVE.
CURATOR PROTOCOL STANDS DOWN.
The polyhedron dimmed, its rotation slowing to a dormant crawl.
The code-void faded. They were not back in the PS4 menu. They were back in the grey quarantine cell. But the text on the wall was changing.
[STATUS: CONTAINED...]
[RE-CLASSIFYING...]
[STATUS: ARCHIVISTS. ACCESS GRANTED.]
A doorway of light opened in the grey wall.
Exhausted, bleeding data, but inextricably linked, Bris and Lyra stepped through.
They emerged not onto the Dynamic Menu, but directly into the core of the Shattered Realms shell, now suspended safely within the dormant Janus protocol. They were home. The sky was the serene blue of a system at peace. The air smelled of ozone and memory.
They had done it. They had weaponized the very game chosen to destroy them, turning a brutal validation sequence into a key for liberation. Bris had chosen Mortal Kombat, and through its merciless logic, he had fought his way to a higher truth: in the system's eyes, they were no longer glitches.
They were part of the canon.
The 790th mission was complete.