The sword did not merely cleave the air; it cleaved destiny.
Its silver metal gleamed, reflecting sunlight that appeared too yellow, too ideal, as if someone had oversaturated the colors of this world with a brush that was too wet. Before him, the Demon King, a faceless shadow known only as The Antagonist, roared. His voice was not like the scream of a living being, but rather like the sound of paper being forcibly torn.
With a single horizontal slash forming a perfect arc, The Protagonist ended the hundred-year war. The Demon King's head fell, and when it touched the ground, it did not spill blood. It turned into a plume of black dust resembling the ash of an old manuscript that had been burned.
"It is over," whispered The Protagonist. His voice was baritone, steady, and full of authority, a voice deliberately designed for a hero.
Then the commotion came.
Thousands of townspeople poured out from the shattered fortress gates. They cheered. They wept. Roses were thrown into the air, falling like raindrops arranged in careful choreography. A beautiful woman, the Princess, ran toward him in a gown that remained pristine despite standing in the midst of a battlefield.
"You did it!" the Princess cried, her eyes glistening. "You saved us all!"
The Protagonist smiled, an automatic smile that felt correct upon his face. Yet when the Princess embraced him, a small thought slipped through the cracks of his awareness. A thought that was not in the draft.
"Who?" The Protagonist asked softly.
The Princess released her embrace and looked at him in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"What is my name?"
Silence.
Not ordinary silence. This was absolute silence. The cheers of thousands behind them stopped in perfect synchronization, as if someone had just pressed the mute button on the universe. The wind ceased to blow. The rose petals that had been falling now hovered motionless in the air, suspended within a broken gravity.
The Princess's eyes widened, yet her pupils were empty. Her lips moved, trembling violently as though attempting to process data that had never been input into her mind.
"You..." the Princess began, her voice distorted like a damaged cassette recording. "You are... the hero. You are... the decider... You are The Protagonist."
"Not my title," the hero pressed, his heart beginning to pound rapidly, the only thing moving within this frozen world. "My name. My given name. The name you whispered when we danced in the castle hall. Speak that one word."
The Princess remained silent. Her face began to fade, losing the details of its texture, becoming a rough, unfinished sketch. In the perfectly blue sky, The Protagonist saw something terrifying.
The sky was no longer blue. Above, a long white line appeared, as though a gigantic hand had just torn the paper of the horizon. From behind that tear, it was not outer space that was visible, but thick inky darkness and the rhythmic sound of metal tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of a typewriter.
Suddenly, the world resumed. The uproar erupted once more as though nothing had happened. The Princess smiled sweetly again, ignoring his question as if the dialogue had never been spoken.
"Let us go home, our Hero!" the villagers cried in unison.
The Protagonist looked at his own hand. There, beneath the skin of his wrist, he did not see veins. He saw fine fibers resembling paper fibers, and there, faintly written in indelible black ink, were the words: Property of The Author.
He had not won. He had just realized that his victory was part of a monotonous routine. And far at the edge of the horizon, where the boundary of the world should have been, he saw the shadow of eight long necks beginning to coil around the sky, ready to swallow the entire story.