The latte was lukewarm. The manuscript was worse.
Kael Vane massaged his temples, staring at the stack of paper on the scuffed wooden table of the 'Bean & Leaf' café. It was a submission from a hopeful debut author titled The Sword God's Infinite Harem of Doom.
"It's... energetic," Kael said, choosing the diplomatic lie.
The young author across from him—a college student named Leo with dark circles under his eyes—leaned forward, vibrating with caffeine and anxiety. "So? Do you think it's the next big hit? Will it get a webtoon adaptation? An anime?"
Kael sighed. He picked up his red pen—a Pilot G-2 0.7mm. It was the only object in his life he truly respected. He circled a paragraph on page three with a slash that felt like an execution.
"Leo, look here. On page one, your protagonist is an orphan who eats dirt to survive. On page three, he buys a golden armor set. Where did the money come from?"
"Plot armor!" Leo grinned, as if he'd cracked a code. "The readers won't care about economics if the fight scenes are cool."
"That's not a financial plan, Leo. That's a plot hole." Kael capped his pen with a click that sounded final. "I'm sorry. I can't represent this. The pacing is frantic, the characters are two-dimensional, and frankly, the world-building collapses if you think about it for more than five seconds."
Leo's face crumbled. The light in his eyes died out.
Kael felt a familiar twinge of guilt, but he squashed it. He was a Senior Literary Agent at Vanguard Publishing. His job wasn't to be nice; his job was to stand at the gates of literature and keep the garbage out. He checked his watch. 2:00 PM. He had three more rejections to deliver before he could go home and sleep.
He stood up, gathering his coat. "Keep writing. Just... maybe read a book on basic logic first."
Kael turned to leave the café.
That was when the sky shattered.
It didn't crack like glass. It glitched.
A jagged line of neon blue static tore through the ceiling of the café, slicing through the plaster, the retro hanging lights, and the unfortunate barista standing by the espresso machine.
There was no blood. The barista simply dissolved into pixels, scattering like blue dust.
SCREECH.
A sound like a dial-up modem amplified by a jet engine blasted through the room. Kael clapped his hands over his ears, dropping his briefcase.
The world froze. The screaming customers, the falling coffee cups, the dust motes in the air—everything stopped in suspended animation. The color drained from the world, leaving everything in shades of grey.
Then, a blue window, translucent and glowing, appeared directly in front of Kael's face. It floated in the air, using a clean, sans-serif font.
[System Initialization Complete.]
[Earth has been acquired by the Galactic Serialization Platform.]
[Genre: Dark Fantasy / Apocalypse.]
[Status: Live.]
"H-hallucination," Kael stammered, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Stroke. I'm having a stroke."
[Scanning Individual: Kaelen Vane.]
[Trait Detected: Obsessive Attention to Detail.]
[Trait Detected: Critical Eye.]
[Trait Detected: High Literacy.]
[Analyzing Class Compatibility...]
Text scrolled rapidly across the blue screen.
•Warrior? (Rejected: Muscle Mass Insufficient)
•Mage? (Rejected: Mana Sensitivity Low)
•Rogue? (Rejected: Morality Too High)
•Healer? (Rejected: Empathy Levels Below Threshold)
The box flickered red.
[Error. No Standard Combat Class Found.]
[Searching Deprecated Database...]
[...Match Found.]
Kael watched, paralyzed, as the text rearranged itself into a final notification.
[Congratulations! You have awakened the Unique Hidden Class: EDITOR (Grade F).]
[Current Stats]
Strength: 4 (Below Average)
Agility: 5 (Average)
Stamina: 3 (Smoker)
Ink: 10/10 (Resource for Reality Alteration)
Passive Skill: [Narrative Vision] - You can see the story before it happens.
"Editor?" Kael whispered. "What kind of useless...?"
Time resumed with a violent snap.
The screams returned instantly. Outside the café window, the street had vanished. Instead of asphalt, thick purple vines were erupting from the ground, crushing cars like soda cans. A man in a business suit was running past the window, chased by a wolf the size of a minivan with bone spikes protruding from its spine.
A [Dire Wolf (Lvl 5)]. The name floated above the beast's head in red text.
"Help! Oh god, help!" Leo, the young author, was cowering under the table, clutching his rejected manuscript.
The café door smashed open.
A creature hopped onto the nearest table. It was green, leathery, and ugly—a Goblin. But not a cartoon goblin. This thing smelled like sewage and rot. It held a rusted, jagged knife that dripped with something black.
The Goblin locked eyes with Leo. It grinned, revealing yellow needle-teeth.
Kael froze. Instinct told him to run. He was a stats-less civilian. He had an F-Grade class.
But his eyes... his eyes were doing something strange.
As he looked at the scene, white rectangular boxes were popping up in the air, overlaying reality like subtitles in a movie.
Above the Goblin:
[Goblin Scavenger (Lvl 1)]
Current Action: Aggro locked on target (Leo).
But there was another box. A narration pane floating right next to the Goblin's head. It read:
The Goblin raised its rusted blade, its muscles tensing. It would strike the cowering boy in the chest, ending his life instantly to establish the brutal stakes of this new world.
Kael stared at the text. Ending his life instantly?
Leo was going to die. It was written. Literally written.
"No," Kael muttered. The editor in him flared up, overriding the fear. "That's... that's lazy writing. Killing the first side character just for shock value? It's a cliché!"
He reached out. He didn't know what he was doing, but the Blue Screen seemed to respond to his will. His finger hovered over the floating narration box.
[Skill Activated: Suggest Change (Level 1)]
[Cost: 5 Ink]
The world turned greyscale for a split second. A blinking cursor appeared in the text box floating in mid-air.
Kael's mind raced. He couldn't fight the Goblin. He had Strength 4. He couldn't delete the Goblin; he felt intuitively that deleting a whole noun would cost too much Ink.
He had to change the context.
He looked at the sentence:
> The Goblin raised its rusted [blade]...
Kael swiped his finger. He couldn't delete the weapon entirely. But he could swap the object for a phonetic match or a similar noun class.
He frantically scribbled with his finger, crossing out blade.
The Goblin raised its rusted [ladle].
[Edit Accepted.]
Color slammed back into the world.
The Goblin shrieked and swung its weapon down with lethal force. Leo screamed, covering his face, waiting for death.
CLANG.
It wasn't the wet sound of a blade slicing flesh. It was the dull, hollow ring of cheap metal hitting a wooden table.
The Goblin froze. Leo froze. Kael blinked.
In the Goblin's hand, the jagged knife was gone. It was holding a large, rusty soup ladle.
The Goblin looked at the ladle. It looked at Leo. It looked at the ladle again. The creature let out a confused, guttural noise that sounded distinctly like, "Huh?"
The tension in the room vanished, replaced by sheer absurdity. The narrative momentum had been broken.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Kael grabbed a heavy ceramic mug from the table next to him and smashed it over the Goblin's head.
[Critical Hit!]
The confused Goblin, disoriented by the weapon swap, didn't even try to dodge. It screeched and dissolved into blue pixels.
[Experience Gained.]
[Level Up!]
[You have distributed 1 Stat Point to: Intelligence.]
Leo crawled out from under the table, trembling. "You... you saved me. You turned his knife into a spoon. Are you a Wizard?"
Kael looked at his hand. It was trembling, but not from fear anymore. A strange, electric thrill was coursing through him. His Ink meter had dropped to 5/10.
He looked down at the floor, where his Pilot G-2 pen lay. A new system window popped up over it.
[Item Recognized.]
[Would you like to bind "Red Pen" as your Primary Weapon?]
Kael picked it up. He clicked it. Click-clack.
He looked out the window at the chaos outside—the monsters, the fire, the text boxes floating over the screaming city. The world had become a story. A poorly written, violent, tragic story.
And he was the only one with a red pen.
"I'm not a Wizard, Leo," Kael said, a slow, sharp grin spreading across his face. "I'm an Editor. And this first draft? It needs a lot of work."