The Wild Boot convulsed.
Her kill hadn't silenced the throne—it had broken the lock. Now every shard of feral light, every half-born law, every unstable crew leader who had tasted her rise felt the gap.
And they lunged.
[Multiple ROOT ACCESS REQUESTS Detected]
[Permissions Conflict: Active]
The void filled with contenders.
The Pretenders Assemble
A woman of glass skin, every breath cutting her lungs, bleeding light into a halo of jagged shards.
A beast plated in planetary crust, each claw dragging gravity behind it like chains.
A warlock stitched together from the corpses of his own crew, their glyphs burned into his flesh as armor.
A choir of twins, one voice, many throats, their Amber Eyes diluted copies of hers.
Each stood wrapped in permissions they hadn't earned, glowing unstable. Each one smelled like desperation.
Behind them—crews. Hundreds. Thousands. Every survivor, every scavenger, every parasite who thought they could put their mouth to the throne and drink.
First Clash
They didn't wait.
The warlock struck first, hurling stitched-together corpses that detonated in bursts of glyphs. The beast roared, claws pulling planets out of orbit and crashing them as stones. The choir screamed in layered tones that bent light into knives.
The battlefield tore apart, turning into rivers of blood-script and mountains of fractured law.
Rose-Metal stepped forward, oil still dripping down her plating, blade humming.
Her voice was cold, flat.
"You all want Root. You can have the same ending."
The Butcher's Walk
She moved through them without pause.
The choir split apart mid-note, Amber Eyes bursting in fountains of black light as she dragged her blade through their throats.
The warlock's stitched armor collapsed, the glyphs crawling off him in terror as her cannon-leg tore a hole through his chest the size of a cathedral.
The glass-skinned woman shattered under a backhand, every shard falling silent in her oil-slick footprints.
The beast charged, gravity chains snapping—she erased its name, and it died without leaving a body.
Every death sprayed the void with gore and code. Permissions flailed in the air, screaming, until her Amber Eyes swallowed them whole.
[Permissions Absorbed]
[Conflicts Resolved]
But the War Didn't End
For every Pretender that fell, another rose.
The Wild Boot itself had become a battlefield of succession. Crews slaughtered each other in rivers of glyph-blood. Stars collapsed not from physics, but from ambition.
And through it all, Rose-Metal carved a line, inevitable, clinical, dripping.
Cliffhanger: The Chorus Returns
Amid the carnage, the light trembled again. Not whispers. Not one voice.
A chorus, larger than before. Hundreds. Thousands. Every failed Pretender merging into something greater, something collective.
[ROOT ACCESS MERGE ATTEMPT: ACTIVE]
[Entity: The Chorus Root]
[Threat Level: Ascending]
The Wild Boot screamed in layered tones as the Pretenders' corpses rose again, speaking with one throat.
Rose-Metal's amber eyes narrowed, molten white cutting the dark. Her blade dripped black ichor, her cannon-leg steaming.
Finally, a grin. Not playful. Predatory.
"Good. A chorus is easier to silence than a god."