The Wild Boot screamed.
Not from her. From it. The whisper had spread into every shard of feral light, every star learning to burn, every accident-creature clawing out of free physics.
It wasn't just a voice. It was a claim.
[ROOT ACCESS REQUESTED]
Rose-Metal's Amber Eyes burned white, script lines flickering across her plating. She tasted the whisper in the air like rust on her tongue. It wasn't Root. Not yet. But it wanted to be.
"Bold," she said. "Stupid."
Tracking the Signal
She knelt, pressing her hand to the broken ground. The oil on her palms seeped into the white glyphs, and the world bled back an answer: a trail of permissions, a half-built kernel. A hand trying to recompile creation with shaking fingers.
Her grin sharpened, blood at the corner of her mouth.
"You don't build thrones. You steal them."
She rose, blade humming, cannon-leg twitching. And she walked.
The Pretender Revealed
The trail led through corridors of wild code, each step spawning new horrors. She cut them all down in silence:
A wolf with ribs for wings.
A serpent that bled galaxies.
Children made of static that screamed like sirens.
None mattered. She walked through them, blade dripping, plating fractured, leaving the floor slick with their insides.
At the end stood a figure on a half-formed dais. Not faceless like Oversight. Not vast like Root. Just… human-sized.
Wrapped in glowing glyphs, skin stretched thin with stolen power. A rival crew leader—one who had survived too long—draped in Root's permissions like a corpse in a king's cloak.
They turned, amber flicker in their stolen eyes.
"Rose-Metal," they rasped, voice glitching. "There must be balance. You kill, I rule."
She tilted her head, stepping closer.
"You're not balance."
Her blade rose.
"You're a bug."
Execution
The Pretender screamed, unleashing their stolen power. Glyphs crashed like avalanches. Walls of code collapsed into spears, rivers of fire poured from their chest, chains of law snapped around her limbs.
Rose-Metal walked through it all.
Each chain dissolved against her plating.
Each spear broke before it touched her.
Each flame guttered out in her shadow.
Her cannon-leg fired once—blowing the dais to atoms. Her blade cut twice—once through their chest, once through their throat.
They fell, blood spilling in glyphs that tried to reform into permissions.
She grabbed their skull, crushed it, and forced the glyph-blood down her throat. It burned, it screamed, it begged. She swallowed it whole.
[ROOT ACCESS REQUEST: DENIED]
[Permissions Absorbed: Complete]
The Wild Boot went quiet. The whisper was gone.
Cliffhanger
The crews staggered into view, watching her covered in glyph-blood, amber eyes unblinking. None spoke.
Because they had all heard it—while she swallowed the Pretender, something else had stirred.
Not a whisper. Not a claim.
A chorus.
Amber eyes narrowed, molten. Her grin returned, slow and cruel.
"One down. How many left?"