Lin didn't type a command—she hit enter, and the story flinched.
The Porsche dissolved beneath them, seats unraveling into raw syntax as the command prompt swallowed the car whole. Zhang gasped as his forearms bled italics, the corruption brand now flickering between **[PLAYER 2]** and something darker: **[DEBUG MODE]**. Lin's glasses shattered entirely, the lenses fracturing into a dozen smaller cursors, each pulsing in discordant rhythm.
The alarm beyond the draft folder wasn't a sound—it was a *correction*, a wave of redaction marks surging toward them like a tide of black ink. Lin grabbed Zhang's wrist, her fingers smearing his numbers into the air: *260,000* became *26* became *2*, the digits dissolving into binary dust. "Again," she hissed.
Zhang exhaled the account codes like a prayer, his voice cracking as the cursor stuttered mid-deletion. The redaction tide slowed, then split around them, leaving them standing on an island of unstable text. Above, the sky flickered between drafts—Chapter Seven's moonlight, Chapter Twelve's storm, Chapter Twenty's hollow dawn.
Lin didn't hesitate. She slammed her palm against the floating keyboard.
The enter key stuck.
The story *screamed*.
A new line appeared below the prompt, the letters forming not from ink but from the absence of it, the paper itself recoiling from the words:
**[WARNING: CHARACTERS #0421 & #0778 EXCEED PERMISSIONS]**
Zhang laughed—a raw, broken sound. "Since when do side characters *have* permissions?"
Lin's mouth moved, but the words that came out weren't hers. They were lifted verbatim from Chapter Three, a throwaway line the male lead had said to a waitress: *"I prefer my coffee black."* Her eyes widened. The system was cannibalizing dialogue to fill their silence.
The cursor pulsed faster, its glow shifting from white to warning red. New text scrolled beneath the warning:
**[SUGGESTED RESOLUTION: ROLLBACK TO LAST STABLE VERSION]**
A penstroke slashed across the void, severing their island from the draft folder. The ground beneath them began to *unwrite*, their shoes sinking into the paper as if it were wet clay. Zhang grabbed Lin's elbow, his fingers leaving indents in her skin like margin notes. "It's trying to revert us to stock characters."
Lin's lips curled. She raised her hands—not to type, but to *rip*. Her fingers hooked into the paper itself, tearing upward with a sound like a spine cracking. The draft folder shuddered, revealing a glitch beneath the layers: a single line of code, repeating endlessly in the negative space between chapters.
**[WHILE (plot_armor = TRUE) {keep.protagonist(alive)}]**
Zhang's breath hitched. "That's—"
"The loop," Lin finished. Her fingers were bleeding ink now, the digits on her forearm cycling through every PIN the original novel had ever mentioned. "We're not just off-script. We're *in the compiler*."
The cursor vanished.
For three heartbeats, there was perfect silence.
Then the paper world *convulsed*, the draft folder collapsing inward as the system executed its final command:
**[FATAL ERROR: STACK OVERFLOW]**
The last thing he saw was Lin's grin—not triumphant, but *hungry*—as the recursion swallowed them whole.