**Chapter 2: The Glitch in the Simulation**
"Okay, for my next trick," Tonmoy announced, "I'm going to introduce a little something I call… a meme virus."
He fired a single, glitchy-looking bullet from his toy blaster. It sailed through the air and exploded against the Monitor System, not with a bang, but with a cascade of pixelated, nonsensical code. The entire Aetherial Crucible jolted.
"What is this mockery?!" Gringo's hologram flickered, snarling as the simulation itself began to corrupt.
"That's my meme magic, Gringo!" Tonmoy grinned. "The readers demanded a plot twist!"
The effects were instantaneous and absurd. Everyone's abilities were randomized.
Void swung his mighty blade, intending to perform *One With Singularity*. Instead of slicing reality, a tiny, sentient black hole with googly eyes popped into existence. It waddled over to Void's leg and nuzzled it.
"Woof! Bad dialogue tastes yucky!" it chirped, before nibbling on a lingering trace of Gringo's overwritten line.
Void stared down at the creature. *"My gluttony is… cursed. I am a babysitter now?"*
Kaelith raised her scepter to restore order, but it spat out a stream of tapioca pearls. Her ultimate attack, "Despair's Lament," now only made enemies cry about receiving the wrong boba order. "Why am I a tea vendor?!" she cried out in frustration.
Aetherion tried to use his *Power of the Author* to fix the mess, but the meme virus had other plans. With a soft *poof*, everyone turned into a duck.
"Quack?!" Aetherion Duck flapped his starry wings, his void-forged quacks echoing through the Crucible. Kaelith Duck frantically scattered bread crumbs, Void Duck waddled with shadowy feathers, and Rin Duck strummed a tiny, diamond-encrusted lyre.
*"Oi, readers, someone vote to fix this duck fest!"* Rin quacked telepathically.
All pulsed. "A 4th-dimensional gag. Narrative integrity is… questionable, but stable. Proceed."
Seizing the chaos, Gringo's hologram launched pixelated tendrils. "Time for a hard reset!"
Tonmoy, who had somehow remained human, fired a *Jest Round* that turned the tendrils into rubber chickens. "Plot twist! Readers, we need to nerf him, now!"
The team of ducks waddled into action. Kaelith Duck served distracting boba, Void Duck wrangled his new pet—whom he had decided to name Steve—and Aetherion Duck pecked a command for a *Giggling Rupture*. The glove honked, unleashing a wave of seltzer that stabilized a small part of the Crucible. The duck war had begun.