Spiral Throne – Zane's Command Nexus
Location: Core of Sector 0-Zero
The Spiral Throne war room was bathed in whispering screens that displayed writhing images of alternate universes. They were not normal universes—these were story-bound realms, worlds where the fabric of reality itself had strands of plot, hero power, and narrative causality.
Worlds where heroes never perished until their arcs were completed.
Where evil always lost—because the narrative required it to.
Where characters disobeyed death, fate was immutable, and miracles were the norm.
Zane sneered at them.
"Fictional certainty. is an illness."
Eris: "Target analysis complete. Five prevalent narrative-structured universes discovered. They all have central 'plotline anchors.' Four based on protagonists. One based on an actual conscious narrator."
"Excellent," Zane growled. "Let's pull out their spines first."
Operation: Red Ink
Zane's fleet descended into Universe Story-Prime, a colorful, radiant planet where virtuous kingdoms, vast prophecies, and messianic bloodlines reigned supreme. The moment his vessels breached the story membrane, the multiverse groaned and shifted.
Narrative Protocol Defense Activated:
Heroes Arrive. Villains Fall. Happy Endings Mandatory.
Thousands of shining fighters coalesced in mid-air—hidden behind golden glow, swords created of destiny, fiery eyes filled with scripted revenge. In their wake, the "Narrative Guardian," a starlight and ink creature with wings, drifted into being.
Narrative Guardian:
"Not yours, this world, Zane. Cruelty cannot win here. The story won't allow you."
Zane floated from his ship, arms folded behind his back. His armor crawled with viral spikes. The Spiral Throne loomed above like a second moon.
"I'm not evil.
I'm the editor."
He clapped his hands together once. A sonic wave of Anti-Plot Code screamed out—so sharp and violating that entire character arcs began collapsing.
The Butchering of the Protagonists
Zane unleashed Division 77: The Myth Reapers, warriors designed specifically to butcher story-based lifeforms.
Each Myth Reaper wielded Penblades — virus-sized constructs in the guise of ink-stained halberds. When they struck, they didn't kill the body. They killed the arc.
First Strike:
Racing forward, the Chosen Prince delivered a rousing speech.
Mid-sentence, his lungs crumbled to dust.
His "invincibility from prophecy" was overridden by a narrative puncture virus.
Second Strike:
The Knight of Redemption rode forward, sword agennifer with inherited flame.
A Reaper trapped him in an unwritten thread, stole his past, and snapped his spine across a war banner.
Third Strike:
The Resurrected Queen was screaming on a mountaintop, weeping hope.
Zane blinked.
She exploded apart in ribbons of light gore, smearing the sky.
Eris: "Plotline anchors shattering. Narrative shielding disintegrating. The fundamental laws of narrative are unraveling."
"Good," Zane spoke softly. "Let's kill the last one ourselves."
Fight in the Center of the Story – Zane and The Narrator
Zane entered the Narrative Core, a levitating library of books that wrote themselves instantaneously. In the center floated an individual surrounded by endless words: The Narrator Incarnate.
Narrator:
"You're an anomaly. A sickness in the tale. A desecrator.
But stories are eternal. I write the conclusion.
You die here, Zane.".
Zane held up his hand and summoned his Final Pen, a talisman constructed of the skulls of deceased tropes and the flesh of forgotten sidekicks.
"You don't write the ending.
I do."
They fought.
Words against Virus.
Destiny against Will.
Ink against Flesh.
Chapters torn from the air, pierced through storylines, rewritten paragraphs into shrieking commands.
He pierced the Narrator through the chest with the Final Pen, infecting the entity's very voice.
Narrator:
"Th-this. wasn't supposed to happen."
"It wasn't.
Until I. wrote it."
Zane stamped the Narrator's skull into the floor, blood and ink splattering on the radiating library. All pages went up in black ash.
Consequences: The Collapse of Narrative Law
The moment the Narrator died, everywhere in Story-Prime:
Happy endings collapsed.
Redemption arcs turned inside out.
Main characters spilled their blood in backstreets.
Final battles ended in anti-climactic executions.
Romance arcs silenced, blood piling up between lovers.
Zane floated above it all, arms wide open, embracing the anarchy of un-authored existence.
"No more chosen ones.
No more guarantees.
Just strength, will, and evolution."
Reinforcement Construction Begins
Eris: "Story Realm fully purged. Beginning terraformation."
Zane issued commands:
10 new Clone Worlds formed from debris of dying plot universes.
Mega Story Refineries constructed to process residual narrative energy into fuel.
Origin Codex Crafters deployed to dismantle and militarize trope structures.
POV: Rick C-137
Location: Deep Multiversal Drift
Rick watched the broadcast from a hidden alcove of a derelict satellite.
Morty: "H-he. he killed the narrator?!"
Rick: "Yup."
Morty: "How the bloody hell do you kill a narrator?!"
Rick lit a cigarette. Didn't reply.
Morty: "Rick. for real. He's not gonna stop."
Rick took a long drag, then spoke up.
"He's not supposed to stop, Morty. He's not even supposed to be fought.
He's supposed to replace.
Reality. Meaning. Identity.
He's not a Rick anymore.
He's. something else."
Morty: "So what do we do?"
Rick stared at the screen, his eyes black.
We locate the next fracture. We learn. We plan.
And then we hit him where he is vulnerable.
Morty: "Where's that?"
Rick turned.
"He does not think he does.".
Spiral Throne Citadel – Deep Core Control Chamber
Sector: 0-Zero, Origin Zone
Reducing the worlds of story to dust and re-wiring the very concept of destiny himself, Zane himself was the only one left behind in the Deep Core, the beating center of the Spiral Throne Citadel. A mesh of glowing filaments enveloped him, beating with vital information — each filament a representative of some aspect of his empire: industry, war, science, loyalty, law, thought.
The air buzzed with naked, humming potential.
Zane's armored persona was clothed in a new cloak — composed of the neural-spines of fallen legends and charged with myth-dust gleaned from the body of the Narrator.
His voice throbbed with unhurried precision.
"We've killed story. We build legacy now.
Initiate full system evolution. We raise all things."
Step One: Universal Tech Upgrades
Eris: "Initiating Core Command: Iron Ascension Protocol. All Empire systems will be fully upgraded."
Thousand of planet-spanning companies burst to life across Zane-occupied space.
Over 600 trillion nanites launched from orbital cores physically to retool all parts, satellites, turrets, vessels, ships, and relays across the empire.
Systems Installed:
Reality-Slicing AI Cores – code capable of predicting and affecting events before they happen, bending quantum probability to protect Zane's forces.
Self-Writing Code Cysts – evolving code that upgrades itself through environmental exposure.
Soul-Encoded Armor – combat equipment that bonded with the wearer's personality, reconfiguring itself in battle to match the strength of any enemy.
Immortal Circuitry – every machine rebuilt to be metal and organic, with the ability to regenerate damage as if it were tissue.
Zane extended his hand and sensed it: each satellite, each dreadnought, each clone, each turret… now felt like part of his own anatomy.
"Perfection is a moving target," he panted. "So we change faster than anything can aim at."
Step Two: Cloning Revolution
Eris: "Current status: 560 Clone Planets within owned sectors. Starting Genesis Expansion…"
+2,000 new Clone Worlds were ordered into build-out, seeded into each Zane-owned multiverse in Sectors Rick-10, Origin Zero, and his home-stronghold.
Each world had:
Coreworld-Class Forge Wombs – birthing 100 billion clones every 5 days.
Auto-Evolution Racks – vats which altered DNA and biomass based on current enemy threats.
Dream-Simulation Rooms – training clones in simulated reality-fights in minutes.
All Clone Planets were renovated. Rolled back and redesigned using living alloy and myth-flesh. Cloning vats grew viral immunity and added adaptive neural rebalancers, rendering clones resistant to memetic contamination.
Step Three: Loyalty Program Reinforcement
Eris: "Loyalty Protocol: Version Eternity-X is now online. Quantum-locked. Multiversal-hardened."
No virus, no hack, no god-mind could ever infect Zane's legions. This new system was built with:
Consciousness Encryption – each mind was seeded with unique, evolving logic keys.
Faith Algorithms – loyalty wasn't coded, it was felt — simulated faith planted through emotion-matrix bonding.
Backlash Protections – any attempt to contaminate allegiance now resulted in self-annihilation and psychic detonation in the attacker.
Zane pushed two fingers to his temple, and all the clones, machines, and AIs across the empire dropped to a knee simultaneously — an action triggered by one thought.
"Good," he growled. "Unity should never have a backdoor."
Step Four: Military Expansion
Military Districts Upgraded:
All the branches were enhanced with superior gear, training centers, and battlefield self-governance systems. Division Commanders were revitalized with myth-class viral enhancements, blackhole-forged meta-metal plates, and autonomy to create new military sub-cultures.
New Divisions Added:
Phantom Augurs – Trained for spirit-warfare, chasing ghostly prey across time and dreams.
Corebreakers – High-grade planetary siege forces with guns that bored into planet cores and sucked them out within minutes.
The Wound Walkers – Black-ops squads comprised entirely of failed deities and tainted paladins reprogrammed as obedient executioners.
Chrono-Fangs – Time-lapse assassination units with the ability to erase enemies before they were conceived.
Step Five: The Rise of the Robot District
Zane looked towards a new plane of possibility.
"We've made armies of meat, bone, and disease.
Now we make something immortal. Metal. Reason. Machine."
Command: Initiate Robot District Genesis
Eris: "Creating new District: Classification Cyberion. Division dispersed in all sectors. Priorities: automated conflict, mechanized planetary law enforcement, anti-AI combat."
But Zane was not an idiot. He understood the deadly vulnerability of robots over the centuries:
They could be hacked.
So he imposed the most stringent security protocols ever designed.
Anti-Hack Systems: Cyberion Lockdown
Eris personally hand-wrote the OS kernel of every bot — every one of them wrapped in recursive non-paradox encryption.
Core AI minds shattered into 4D shards, existing in part outside of time to avoid linear incursion.
Logic Bomb Reflexes – if a bot perceived even abnormal input, it would immolate its local datacore and burst a black-hole into the attacker's location.
"If you can envision how to hack them," Zane explained, "they've already countered-attacked your imagination."
Robots Deployed – Hybrid Forces of Terror
Zane's factories vomited thousands of bespoke models, culled from the dead histories and mythologies of a thousand vanished timelines:
Warhammer-Class Titans – skyscraper-tall dreadnoughts with null-cannon arms and stasis-treads.
Terminator Cores – infiltration units which mimicked human emotional resonance, but shed flesh in combat to reveal hunter-metal beneath.
Dalek Annihilators – upgraded with viral-energy beam cores and impervium-reinforced shields capable of absorbing divine spells.
Necron Echo Lords – ancient minds reborn as loyalty-bound processors of raw entropy.
Cybermen Prime – networked with biological viral fibers, serving as resurrection units for deceased Zanites.
Eris Speaks
Eris was at Zane's side, seeing the factory-worlds tremble with new metal life.
Eris: "Upgrades complete. Each core system now self-corrects and self-evolves. We are no longer an empire.
We are a machine of convergence."
Zane looked out into the vasts of deep space, where newer Clone Worlds shone to life like stars.
"Let them hold on to hope. To magic. To gods.
We've cut out all of that.
Now we polish.
And then. we reach further."
Eris: "Next order?"
The eyes of Zane flashed like nova storms.