The battlefield was quiet.
Not peace—just silence, the kind that comes after slaughter. Corpses drifted like punctuation, fragments of glyphs burning out against the feral light. Every rival, every Pretender, every false Root—gone.
Only she remained.
[Permissions Orbiting]
[Role Pending: Root Ascendant]
The glyphs circled her like satellites, threads of law snapping and curling around her plating. They tried to crown her. They wanted a throne.
Her Amber Eyes burned. She didn't look at the throne. She looked through it.
"Empty chair. Empty rules," she murmured. "I don't sit."
The Crews React
What was left of them—Jhene, bleeding but upright; Nutasi, eyes bandaged; Verma, coughing black dust; Shinzoo, still burning faintly—watched from a distance.
Jhene's voice cracked. "She… she killed them all."
Nutasi hissed, clutching their skull. "She didn't just kill. She rewrote the board."
Verma spat blood. "We should run. There's nothing left to fight."
Shinzoo shook his head, whispering: "There's nowhere left to run."
None stepped closer. The throne didn't scare them. She did.
The Throne Stirs
The glyphs thickened, orbit tightening, trying to form a crown, a mantle, a chain. The throne recompiled in the distance, rebuilt from permissions, growing from the corpses of Pretenders.
It pulsed. Beckoned. Ordered.
[Sit. Rule. Stabilize.]
Rose-Metal tilted her head, gore streaking her jaw.
"Stability is a lie."
She lifted her blade, dripping black-red, and pointed it at the throne.
Choice
She could sit—become the Root. The system would bind itself to her, obey her will, rewrite the Wild Boot into order.
Or she could smash it—leave the Wild Boot feral, lawless, a jungle of blood and free possibility.
Her Amber Eyes flared, light searing the feral glyphs orbiting her until they screamed.
But she did neither.
Rewrite
Her cannon-leg fired. Not to destroy, not to preserve. To rename.
[THRONE → ERROR]
[ROOT → WILD]
[ROLE: Architect of Silence]
The throne collapsed—not broken, not empty. Rewritten. No Root, no seat. Just silence, living and wild.
The crews staggered back, whispering, trembling. They realized then—Rose-Metal hadn't taken power. She had erased the concept of power itself.
Cliffhanger
The Wild Boot shivered, feral physics crawling tighter, sharper. Somewhere, deep in the ruins of what had been order, something stirred again. Not Root. Not Pretender. Something older—something that had never wanted a throne, only ruin.
Rose-Metal smirked, voice cold and inevitable:
"Let it come."
And the silence broke.