The correction came on a Thursday.
Not through rumor. Not through bureaucracy. Not through the subtle, deniable mechanisms the Script had been using for the past two weeks — the whispered gossip, the protagonist's accelerated growth, the research access revocation that had temporarily blinded my strategist.
Through violence.
The shift was significant. Soft corrections operated in the background — the narrative equivalent of adjusting a thermostat. Hard corrections operated in the foreground. They produced casualties.
I felt it before I understood it.
At 3:57 PM, during Nihil's standard passive monitoring — the background awareness that the sword maintained while I went about the daily performance of being a student — a signature spiked at the edge of my range. Aggressive. Aerial. Moving with the particular velocity of a predatory creature in attack configuration.
