Chris dove through the heavy oak doorway, a desperate, scrambling leap for safety. He landed with a thud on the other side as the door groaned shut, the sound of the ModBot Librarian's final, furious "SHHHH!" cut off abruptly. He lay there for a moment on the floor, catching his breath, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He had survived. He had solved the puzzles, dodged the book-bats and the decimal sprites, and outmaneuvered the cosmic librarian. He had made it to the final chamber.
He pushed himself to his feet and looked around. The change was instantaneous, absolute, and breathtakingly horrific.
The cozy library was gone. He was standing on the edge of a vast, cavernous, and completely unrecognizable space. The high ceiling of the main atrium was no longer there. In its place, a swirling, chaotic vortex of raw data churned endlessly. Shimmering lines of blue code, fragments of text from the library's digital catalog, and thousands of fluttering, disembodied book pages all swirled together in a cyclone.
The floor below was not solid. It was an unstable, shifting sea of giant, glowing Facebook reaction icons, each one the size of a small car. Massive thumbs-up icons drifted lazily past, their light a placid blue. Enormous, cackling laughing faces bobbed and weaved, their joyful expressions deeply unsettling in the environment. And angry red faces, their brows furrowed in perpetual rage, sizzled and popped violently whenever they collided with another icon, sending out showers of corrupted, red sparks.
And in the center of this chamber, in the very heart of the data storm, a massive figure was coalescing. A whirlwind of swirling, angry text—comments from the #MusketGate thread—was pulling inward, drawing in corrupted code and glittering distortion. The text was wrapping itself around a central point, solidifying, rising, taking shape.
The figure solidified, rising to its full, terrifying thirty-foot height. It was a distorted, corrupted mockery of the Lewis County High School Minuteman statue, a warped nightmare brought to life. The statue's bronze texture glitched constantly, shifting between a sharp, metallic focus and a blurry mess of distortion. Its face, however, was unnervingly clear. It was a sneering, arrogant caricature of Mayor Bob Thompson.
In one massive, glitching hand, the construct held not its iconic musket, but a glowing, oversized coupon for fabric softener. The other hand was starkly, accusingly empty, held out in a grasping pose where the stolen musket should have been.
The Glitched Minuteman, this monster born of gossip and a seventy-nine-cent injustice, turned its massive head with a grinding, metallic screech. Its eyes, glowing like a malicious, hard-drive-error red light, fixed upon the only living thing in the room. They fixed upon Chris.
The boss had aggroed.
The Glitched Minuteman opened its mouth, a jagged, distorted maw in the center of Mayor Thompson's sneering face. A deafening, soul-shredding roar filled the atrium. It was not the sound of a living creature. It was the agonizing, high-pitched screech of a hundred PC cooling fans seizing up and dying at once. It was a sound of pure, nerve-shredding, annoying squealing.
The squealing then shifted, twisting and modulating until it formed a distorted, booming version of Mayor Thompson's voice. It was the voice from the press conference, amplified to a deafening volume, shouting broken phrases that echoed around the chaotic chamber.
"BASELESS ACCUSATIONS! A… A… A SLANDEROUS ATTACK! MALICIOUS ONLINE TROLLS! COWARDLY KEYBOARD WARRIOR!"
Reacting on pure instinct, Chris dodged, diving behind a large, stable-looking "Like" icon as the Minuteman swung its massive, glowing coupon in a wide, sweeping arc. The coupon passed through the space where he had been standing, leaving a trail of corrupted, shimmering data in its wake.
He couldn't just hide. He had to go on the offensive. He looked up at the data-vortex ceiling. A large, ornate chandelier, a relic from the library's original construction, was flickering in and out of existence, caught in the swirling chaos. He could use it.
He focused his will on the chandelier, activating his [Minor Probability Manipulation] ability. He didn't try to control it directly. He just nudged the probability of its anchor point failing.
[EP: 1.25/5.00]
The chandelier, which had been flickering, suddenly detached completely from the swirling vortex. It plummeted downwards, a direct hit on the Minuteman's head.
But it did nothing. The chandelier passed harmlessly through the boss's distorted form as if it were a hologram, shattering into a million pieces on the icon-strewn floor below. The Glitched Minuteman didn't even flinch.
It retaliated. It lowered its giant coupon, pointing it directly at Chris like a cannon. The coupon glowed with an intense, angry red light. It fired a volley of glowing red text, the actual angry comments from the Facebook thread, which materialized in the air and shot toward him like fiery projectiles.
"LIAR!"
"GET A LIFE TROLL"
"My grandpa served in Korea and you're disrespecting a statue of a veteran??"
Chris scrambled out of the way, but one of the comments clipped him. A short, vicious comment from "BucNuts82" struck him in the leg. He didn't feel a physical pain, but a wave of psychic dread washed over him. A notification appeared in his HUD.
[DEBUFF APPLIED: [Crippling Self-Doubt]. User's Motivation stat -10 for 60 seconds.]
A sudden, crushing wave of despair and hopelessness flooded his mind. What was he even doing here? This was insane. He was going to fail. He was a loser who lived with his mom, playing hero in a public library. His movements felt sluggish, his thoughts turned to mud. The debuff was devastating.
He scrambled away from another volley of slanderous projectiles, the negative thoughts making his every action feel pointless. He hid behind a large, floating "laughing face" icon, the joyful, cackling visage a stark contrast to the misery churning in his gut.
He knew, with a certainty that cut through the fog of the debuff, that conventional attacks were useless. He couldn't fight it. He couldn't damage it.
He did the only thing he could think of. The one thing that had given him an advantage this entire time. He peered around the edge of the laughing face, focused on the colossal, glitching figure, and activated his most powerful ability. He initiated a deep scan with [INSPECT (Tier 2)].
The blue progress circle appeared, filling slowly. The Minuteman roared again, "FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW!", but it didn't attack. It seemed to be gathering its energy, the swirling text around it growing denser and angrier.
Ding.
The scan was complete. The data window was a wall of text, but Chris's eyes were immediately drawn to the most critical sections.
[ANOMALY: Probabilities Construct - "The Accused"]
[HP: ?????]
[ATTRIBUTES: Composed of revealed information, gossip, and misinformation, powered by public outrage.]
[VULNERABILITY: Cannot compute verified, contradictory truths when presented simultaneously.]
[DESCRIPTION: A metaphysical manifestation of a well-hidden secret publicly revealed. The construct is anchored by the core event of the 'Minuteman Musket Heist' and fueled by the resulting social media chaos.]
The debuff of [Crippling Self-Doubt] vanished as if it had never been there, burned away by the white-hot flash of understanding. The construct's vulnerability hit him like a lightning bolt.
Cannot compute verified, contradictory truths when presented simultaneously.
He couldn't fight the boss. He had to debug it. He had to crash it. The boss wasn't a monster to be slain with brute force; it was a piece of broken reality, an argument with a fatal logic flaw. It was powered by the story he had unleashed, the story of the musket heist. To defeat it, he had to introduce a new story, a new piece of data that the construct's core couldn't handle.
He looked up at the Glitched Minuteman, its sneering Mayor Thompson face glaring down at him. His terror was gone, replaced by the focused, analytical calm of a gamer who has just read the change log and found an exploit. He knew what he had to do.
The quest log in his HUD updated, the old, vague objective replaced with a new, specific one.
[OBJECTIVE: Defeat the Probabilities Construct by locating and presenting the construct with incontrovertible, conflicting data points.]
The battle had changed. It was not one of brawn. It was a puzzle. A logic bomb. And Chris, standing in a maelstrom of the very secret he had revealed, now had to use the truth to survive.