The portal to the Black Market glowed at the back of the throne room, an electric purple tear in reality that made the air vibrate. But Leo didn't move. He remained seated on his obsidian throne, his new scythe resting against the armrest, the two skulls on the weapon whispering muffled insults to each other.
"Why me?"
The question played on a loop, more haunting than the hum of the portal. Leo closed his eyes and, for a moment, he didn't see the dark stone of his dungeon. He saw his nine-square-meter studio again. He smelled the dust that had accumulated on his keyboard, felt the harsh light of his screen burning his retinas at three in the morning, and felt that abysmal emptiness every time he clicked "Send."
He had exhausted himself bringing other people's dreams to life. He had designed gleaming armor for heroes he would never be and palaces he could never afford. He had been a cog, a consumable resource for clients who saw him as nothing more than a pixel-producing machine.
"Master?" Vark asked softly, stepping out of the shadow of a column. "The portal is unstable. If you don't cross the threshold now, the cost in Essence to reopen it will be... prohibitive."
"I know, Vark," Leo replied in a voice that sounded like it was grinding stone. "I was just thinking about the price of rendering. About what a life is worth when you spend it correcting other people's margins."
Leo stood up. The weight of his armor no longer bothered him; on the contrary, it gave him a structure, a solidity he had never had in his human form. The System had not chosen him by chance. The Grimoire of Source had not been entrusted to a bloodthirsty warrior or a cunning politician. It had been given to a creator.
Why? Because a warrior only knows how to destroy what already exists. An artist, on the other hand, possesses the most terrifying power there is: the power to rewrite the foundation. To change the perspective. To remove what is ugly and replace it with his own vision.
"They worked me to death," thought Leo, a violet glow lighting up in the depths of his pupils.
"Giga-Corp, algorithms, endless revisions to satisfy mediocrities... I was already a slave. This dungeon is not my prison. It's my studio. It's my revenge."
He glanced down at the bottom of the stage. Kaelas was desperately trying to sort her fish by size. Barnabé had fallen asleep against a wall, a trickle of drool running down his stained robe. Maurice was polishing his monocle with disturbing fervor.
"We are a gallery of design flaws," he murmured with a predatory smile. "A team of computer bugs in a world of perfect lines of code. And that's exactly why we're going to win. No one can predict what a bug will do to the matrix."
Leo grabbed his scythe. The black metal pulsed beneath his hand, an extension of his own will.
"Vark," he said, stepping toward the curtain of energy that distorted space. "In my old world, we used to say that the customer is always right. "
He stopped just in front of the portal, his demonic reflection grimacing in the magical distortions.
"Here, I am the customer. And I have no intention of giving any discount on the pain I'm going to inflict. "
With a heavy, decisive step, he crossed the threshold. The introspection was over. The production phase, the one where the final product is delivered to the world, had just begun. And the world was not ready for the result.