A cold wind passed through the broken arches of Irasios Academy's Old Wing, tugging at torn banners and fractured glass. Despite Aeris's defeat, the world hadn't returned to normal. The dreamlogic still clung to reality like cobwebs—lingering, stubborn. The name that flashed in the air—[ERROR: AUTHOR ID NOT FOUND]—wasn't just a system glitch. It was a declaration.

Verena stared at it grimly. "Someone hijacked the narrative. Aeris wasn't the mastermind. Just the pawn."

Vivienne knelt beside a broken mirror gate, still pulsing with residual Arcane energy. Her fingers glided over the silver surface. "This isn't a simple rewrite," she said, voice low. "It's a hijack of authorship. They're overriding the world's code by replacing its story anchors."

"You mean the heroines," Clarina said. "The Dreamgates tethered to them... They weren't doors. They were edits. Patches."

"And if someone's patching the story," Beatrice added, dusting her gloves, "they're trying to reshape the entire narrative structure from the inside. This isn't conquest. It's authorship by force."

Verena turned, her gaze hard. "Then we find them. Whoever's at the top of this overwritten world. We cut through the lies and drag them into the light."

"But where do we start?" Evelyn asked quietly. "We've closed the trial. Aeris is gone. The Old Wing should've collapsed… but it hasn't."

Verena scanned the courtyard. Despite the corrupted magic weakening, the space was still whole—too whole. Stable, but not by natural means.

Saphira's tongue flicked out. "We're in a preserved plotline. A loop. That means someone still has admin rights."

Beatrice stepped forward and drew a blade across her palm. The blood didn't drip. It floated, like pixels, hovering in the air.

"It's not just a story," she muttered. "It's a game build now. One someone is patching in real time."

Vivienne's head snapped up. "Then maybe we don't need to wait for a portal. We hijack it back."

Verena blinked. "Meaning?"

"Meaning," Vivienne said, standing with a spark of defiance, "if someone's treating this world like a system… then we crash it. From the inside."

The group exchanged glances. Dangerous. Reckless. Exactly their style.

Vivienne continued, "We split. Each of us targets a point of narrative manipulation. Lore cores, rewritten locations, dream fragments. If they're trying to reauthor the world, then they've left fingerprints."

Clarina nodded slowly. "We trace them back to their source. Like following faulty code to the root."

"And if we find the author?" Evelyn asked.

Verena's eyes narrowed, her voice iron. "We give them a rewrite of our own."

---

The next day, they began the split.

Beatrice was the first to leave, heading toward the Forgotten Nidus beneath the Academy—a place where old character arcs and abandoned plotlines festered. A narrative graveyard. Her path was quiet but dangerous. Down there, unfinished stories turned hostile, desperate to be seen.

Clarina ventured toward the Eastern Watchtowers, where time no longer obeyed normal rules. Inconsistent flashbacks, alternate timelines, and "what-if" illusions blurred together. If the hijacker was testing rewrites, that's where beta versions of the story would leak.

Vivienne and Evelyn partnered up, following the scent of balance magic to a realm between sleep and memory—an Archive of Unwritten Scenes. Half-scripted dialogue floated like moths in the air. The place reeked of authorial hesitation. Someone was editing on the fly.

And Verena… Verena stood alone in the War Room. She stared at a map where borders no longer meant anything and arcs bled into one another. She felt it then—a pulse. Not from the stars, but from underneath. A heartbeat trying to sync with hers.

It wasn't the Thirteenth Constellation. It was deeper than that. Something older. Hungrier.

Saphira hissed in warning.

"You feel it too," Verena whispered.

The snake coiled tighter. "They're not rewriting the world just to control it. They're trying to wake something up. A story buried so deep it was sealed away."

Verena's heart pounded. "Then this isn't a retelling. It's a resurrection."

Somewhere, something ancient stirred in response to her words. A script forgotten for good reason. A character no author dared rewrite.

And it was coming back online.

Verena turned to the stars—and for the first time in weeks—they didn't answer.

Whoever the author was… they weren't mortal. And they weren't done.

Verena didn't flinch as the world trembled beneath her feet. The War Room's stained-glass windows flickered, cycling through motifs that didn't belong to this age—burning roses, inverted crowns, ink bleeding from severed quills. The console in front of her glitched again. Names of the living, dead, and erased flashed in an endless scroll. Then, the feed paused.

[ACCESS REQUESTED: CHARACTER ID—VERENA AURELIAN]

[WARNING: CONDUITOR AUTHORITY CONFLICT DETECTED]

[OVERRIDE IN PROGRESS...]

"Saphira," Verena murmured, "seal the room. We're under siege."

A ripple of golden scales flashed, and Saphira's body expanded, growing tenfold in a blaze of celestial light. She formed a protective ring around Verena just as the ceiling split open—not physically, but narratively. An eye appeared, pupil shaped like a quill's nib, iris made of shifting manuscript pages.

"You've resisted enough," said a voice that echoed without sound. "Step aside, little interloper. Your story ends here."

Verena stepped forward. "You've rewritten others. You've played god with our arcs. But I'm not part of your original draft, am I?"

Silence.

She smirked. "Didn't think so. You don't know how I end."

The eye narrowed.

[OVERRIDE FAILURE.]

[UNSTABLE CHARACTER THREAD.]

[AUTHORITY: UNKNOWN.]

She seized the moment. "You can't control what you can't understand. I'm not here because of fate. I'm here because someone regressed, and the world tried to bury it."

She reached toward the heart of the War Room—an orb of crystallized narrative energy, pulsing with multiple realities, unfinished drafts, shelved characters. Her hand hovered over it, and she whispered: "Let me in."

Saphira recoiled. "Verena—"

But it was too late. Her palm pressed down.

---

She fell.

Not through space, but through story.

Each second she dropped, a voice tried to assign her a role:

> Villainess.

Final Boss.

Cursed.

Redeemable.

Dead by Chapter 70.

Forgotten.

She tore them off like leeches.

She landed in a white room lined with mirrors, each reflecting a different version of herself. One was docile and weeping. Another wore a black veil, throned on bones. One reached out pleadingly—but her hand was shackled. Another bled ink from the eyes.

Then one stepped forward, unlike the others. She wore a smile too sharp and a dress stitched with apology letters. She spoke like a motherly narrator.

"I was the original," she said. "You're the corruption."

"No," Verena replied. "I'm the rewrite that survived."

The Original stepped aside, revealing a door. "Then face what you came to fight."

Verena walked through.

---

She emerged at the edge of a dream—Sera's Dreamgate.

Only it wasn't Sera anymore.

The girl that once swung swords and yelled about justice now sat silently on a marble throne. Her eyes were blank, and every breath she took echoed like a command.

Around her floated empty dialogue boxes. Unfinished lines, rewritten choices, deleted flags. She wasn't a character. She was code now.

"Shit," muttered Clarina from behind a crumbling pillar. "They turned her into a static anchor."

Verena looked at her. "You came alone?"

Clarina shook her head. "No. I came with an error."

From behind her, Evelyn stepped out, holding a fractured memory core—a glowing sphere filled with the real Sera's laugh, her rage, her idiocy. Everything the story had tried to overwrite.

"She's not gone," Evelyn whispered. "Just… overwritten."

Saphira slithered beside them. "Then all we need is a restore point."

Verena approached the throne. The dream didn't attack. It wanted her to look. To see what a rewritten heroine looked like—perfect, passive, programmable.

"No," she said softly. "She wasn't built to be obeyed. She was built to break rules."

She raised her hand and pressed the memory core to Sera's chest.

The world cracked.

Sera gasped.

And then screamed.

The rewritten dream shattered like glass, and the true Sera surged forward, coughing, angry, alive. "What the hell—was I wearing a dress?!"

Clarina smirked. "Welcome back."

But the sky didn't cheer. It howled.

Across the fractured horizon, four more thrones rose—each with a heroine seated blankly. Evelyn's. Beatrice's. Even Verena's own, still unclaimed.

A voice screamed across the stars:

[YOU WILL NOT WIN.]

[THE HEROINE LOOP CANNOT BE BROKEN.]

[LOVE ALWAYS TRIUMPHS.]

Verena looked up, eyes burning. "Then let me show you what happens when love is cursed."

Thunder cracked across the dreamscape as Verena drew the Aurelian Sigil across the air, splitting narrative threads like veins of gold. Her power didn't sing—it screamed, raw and ancient. The other heroines' thrones pulsed in response, recognizing her defiance as a virus in the system. Evelyn clutched her chest as if something inside her stirred.

"Verena," she whispered, "they're rewriting our endings in real-time."

"I know." Verena pointed to the sky, where strings of fate dangled like marionette wires. "Cut them."

Sera grinned, still breathless. "Gladly."

One by one, they slashed at the threads tethering them to the fake narrative. Each cut sent a shockwave through the false realm. The throne of Beatrice cracked. Evelyn's eyes flared gold. And in the distance, Verena's own empty throne began to move—unaided, trembling with a will of its own.

The final battle had just begun—not for love, but for authorship.

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