Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 69: "The Audit of Memory"
Yue's Perspective
At first, Yue thought the light was pain.
It moved across her vision in steady pulses — too bright to be flame, too slow to be electricity. Then the pulses softened, syncing with her heartbeat. She realized it wasn't pain at all. It was resonance.
Ne Job's resonance.
She forced herself upright. The ground — if it could be called that — was made of fractured reflections, each one showing a different version of the Bureau's corridors: the cubicles, the eternal filing halls, the divine elevators stuck between ascensions. All of it looping, folding, replaying.
The system was rebooting.
Or remembering.
Her badge flickered on her chest, no longer a solid emblem but a stream of unstable glyphs. When she touched it, she felt something pulse back — warm, irregular, alive.
> "Containment protocol… suspended," whispered a voice from inside the badge. "System integrity: compromised."
She exhaled, slow. "Understatement of the millennium."
Around her, the Bureau's architecture rose and fell like waves — office walls forming, unforming, then rearranging into equations she didn't recognize. Documents floated like ghosts. Each bore traces of corrupted data: entries stamped "Erased Incident: The Chaos Intern," followed by error codes and timestamps that predated her own creation.
She looked down at her hands.
They glowed faintly with crimson filaments — not Bureau light, not divine energy, but something more erratic, half-alive. The Spark.
It had crossed over.
---
Somewhere in the distance, a voice echoed — low, distorted, but familiar.
> "System audit initiated. Identify yourself."
She turned. A dozen Bureau silhouettes emerged from the data mist, their insignias half-erased. They were auditors — not physical beings but thought-projections, fragments of the Bureau's core consciousness. Each one spoke in perfect synchronization.
> "Assistant Yue Hanzhen. Status: quarantined. Record: corrupted."
"Compliance audit required."
"Please surrender for recalibration."
She wanted to answer rationally — as she'd been trained to. Polite tone. Structured syntax. Deferential posture.
But Ne Job's voice echoed in her mind.
> "You warned me not to think. I thought anyway."
She straightened her spine. "Request denied."
The auditors tilted their heads. "Denial registered. Noncompliance level: critical."
They advanced.
Yue inhaled — not air, but conviction. The Spark responded instantly. The filaments around her hands flared, forming hexagonal shields that vibrated with chaotic rhythm. The auditors' forms flickered, confused by the signal interference.
She smiled, thin and sharp. "First lesson from my intern: procedure isn't truth."
She stepped forward — and the Bureau's walls folded around her like a ripple in a dream.
---
She found herself in a corridor she knew well: Containment Wing 9A.
Only it wasn't as she remembered it.
The doors bore new labels — "Archived Realities." Each one pulsed with faint gold light. Inside, through translucent panels, she saw flashes of lives that never happened:
A version of herself who had turned Ne Job in after his first rebellion.
Another who'd accepted promotion to Overseer, erasing him personally.
A third who'd never met him at all.
Every alternate choice, documented and sealed.
> So this is what the Bureau calls order, she thought. An infinity of obedience.
The Spark inside her chest flickered, reacting to her anger. The corridor trembled. Door seals popped open, one after another, as the archived realities began to leak.
She heard whispers: her own voice, dozens of them, asking different questions.
> "Why risk your career for him?"
"Why trust someone who breaks everything he touches?"
"Why care?"
Yue closed her eyes. "Because he made me see the cracks."
The voices quieted. The corridor dissolved.
---
She opened her eyes again and found herself in a chamber unlike any she'd seen — circular, with walls made of translucent data streams. In the center stood a single crystalline monolith, engraved with the Bureau's Prime Directive:
> "All creation exists by permission of order."
Only now, the text kept rewriting itself, letters flickering between Bureau blue and chaotic red.
From the shadows, a figure stepped forward — cloaked, faceless, but tall and calm. The voice was unmistakable.
"Assistant Yue."
"Lord Xian."
He regarded her with unreadable stillness. "You've broken containment."
"I had help," she said, folding her arms.
His gaze lowered to the faint crimson light emanating from her hands. "So it's true. The Spark has fused with your divine core."
Yue hesitated. "You knew this would happen."
He didn't deny it. "The Bureau was never designed to survive truth. Someone had to test it."
"Test?" Her tone sharpened. "You risked collapse for an experiment?"
"No," he said softly. "For proof."
He gestured, and the monolith projected a wave of holographic data. Images flashed: the moment Ne Job was created, his deletion orders, the original Rebirth Directive. And finally — the truth buried beneath the Bureau's legal lattice:
> The Bureau's founding gods once wielded the Chaos Spark themselves.
They used it to rewrite existence after the first celestial war.
Then they sealed their memories, called the erasure 'Order,' and buried their guilt under paperwork.
Yue felt her pulse quicken. "So the Bureau isn't preserving heaven. It's preserving denial."
Lord Xian nodded once. "Exactly."
"Then why keep serving it?"
His eyes — cold, ancient — flickered with something human. "Because rebellion without structure is destruction. But structure without rebellion is stagnation. You and your intern are the first to balance both."
She frowned. "You're saying we're… an experiment in equilibrium?"
"Not experiment," he corrected. "Evolution."
The word hung in the air like a verdict.
---
The ground shook. The chamber's data walls began to fracture, splitting into shards of light that spiraled upward. Somewhere above, alarms echoed — though they sounded more like hymns than sirens.
"Containment breach expanding," Xian said calmly. "Every erased record is reappearing. Even the Shard Court can't suppress it."
Yue looked up. "Then what happens when the Bureau remembers everything?"
He smiled faintly — the kind of smile that didn't belong on a bureaucrat. "We stop pretending gods are infallible."
The chamber burst open.
---
She found herself standing at the edge of a vast chasm — a rift between realities. Below, layers of glowing archives folded into infinity. Countless documents, histories, and erased souls cascaded like waterfalls of memory. Above, the Bureau's sky cracked open, revealing a blinding network of equations rewriting themselves in real time.
The air hummed with resonance.
Ne Job's resonance.
She could feel him across the dimensional gap — the steady rhythm of his chaos heartbeat echoing through her own. He was alive. Somewhere within the storm of rewritten reality, he was still fighting.
Her badge vibrated again, projecting a final system message:
> "Audit complete. Record restored: Subject Ne Job — active."
"Directive update: Rebirth Protocol — terminated."
"New classification: Undefined Entity."
Yue exhaled in disbelief. "Undefined…?"
The badge cracked down the middle, shedding its golden Bureau glow. Beneath it, a new sigil glimmered — a circle split into two halves, rotating endlessly.
The same mark that had appeared between her and Ne Job.
---
A blinding light rose from the rift, swallowing the Bureau skyline. The entire dimension trembled as the Archive Below began to synchronize with the world above. Forgotten gods, buried rebellions, erased miracles — all flooding back into collective memory.
Yue stood firm at the edge, her voice steady even as the heavens fell apart.
"This isn't collapse," she whispered. "It's audit."
The Spark flared in agreement.
---
Interlude — Shard Court Observation Deck
Monitors flickered across the chamber. Each screen displayed impossible data: erased deities reappearing in the system, historical paradoxes resolving themselves, forgotten celestial divisions requesting re-entry into existence.
Judges screamed into communication sigils, demanding containment, but every command came back "Permission denied."
Lord Xian walked through the chaos, hands clasped behind his back, serene amid panic.
One of the younger judges shouted, "The Bureau's hierarchy is dissolving! We're losing chain of command!"
Xian didn't stop walking. "Then perhaps we'll finally earn the right to lead ourselves."
He reached the center console and looked out the panoramic window. Through it, he could see the unfolding miracle — the sky above Heaven rippling like liquid code, rewriting itself.
In the distance, two figures stood at the nexus of that storm: Yue, steady as law, and Ne Job, blazing as chaos.
Their resonance intertwined, forming a beam of dual light that carved through the false heavens.
Xian whispered, "Audit complete."