Chapter 24

# Chapter 24

Floor Four's elevator core had spat us out with the taste of victory and the smell of burnt code—ozone and scorched circuitry, the particular aroma of systems that had been asked to do something they weren't designed for and had complied anyway, grudgingly, like a printer that resented every page.

We'd cleared One through Four.

Badge puzzles that required Elizabeth to read employee manuals from 2019 to find the right access patterns.

HR Manager—a boss that fired debuffs at you with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just discovered they could make people cry with paperwork.

Legacy server closet where I'd had to debug a COBOL subroutine that predated the Pyramid's existence, which felt like finding a typewriter in a server farm.

The kind of tutorial cruelty that taught you the Pyramid had a sense of humor and no sense of mercy.

Now we skipped Floors Two, Three, and Four the way speedrunners skip cutscenes—because the System had put the real boss at Five and we had a sync bar climbing like a countdown to genocide.

`[SYNC: 41%]`

Marcus didn't like skipping.

He liked knowing terrain—every corner, every sightline, every possible ambush point mapped in his head like a soldier's second language. Skipping felt like walking into a dark room and trusting the light switch to work.

Ghost didn't like skipping.

He liked clearing threats—one at a time, methodical, the way you'd clear a building room by room because rushing got people killed in the doorways.

Elizabeth had the maps—paper copies she'd printed from the lobby kiosk before the System realized we could read. Folded and creased and annotated in her careful nurse's handwriting.

Professor Chen had the math—spreadsheets on her tablet, probability curves, sync acceleration models that she updated every time the number ticked up.

I had the exploit log and a bad feeling that had been right often enough to earn tenure.

"We're not speedrunning for glory," I said on the elevator. The walls were glass, showing the floors we passed—blurs of content we'd never fight, puzzles we'd never solve, loot we'd never carry. "We're speedrunning because when sync hits a hundred, the Purge unpauses globally."

"How globally?" Elizabeth asked. She was checking her med kit straps, but her eyes were on me—looking for the crack in my confidence, the tell that meant I was guessing.

"Alcatraz globally. Vance globally. Every survivor we left behind globally."

Silence.

The elevator hummed like a server rack cooling itself before a meltdown—that low-frequency thrum that vibrated through your bones and made you feel like you were standing inside a machine that was thinking about you.

Maya's knuckles whitened on her axe handle. The wood creaked. She didn't notice.

"Then we skip," she said. Simple. Final. The kind of statement that ended debates because Maya had already decided and the rest of us were just catching up.

Marcus exhaled through his nose. Long. Controlled. The breath of a man counting to ten in his head. "Skipping means we don't learn floor layouts. Means ambush on Six or Seven hits blind."

"Staying means sync hits sixty before we reach Admin," Professor Chen said. She didn't look up from her tablet. The graph on her screen was a red line curving upward like a hockey stick—exponential, inevitable, hungry. "My model says forty-one percent now. Climb rate accelerates with vertical progress. Every floor we clear adds load to the merge queue."

"So the System punishes us for winning," Ghost said. His voice was flat, but I caught the edge—the frustration of a man who'd spent his life learning to move unseen and was now being penalized for it.

"The System punishes us for existing," I said. "Winning is just a faster route to the same invoice."

Elizabeth checked her med kit straps again—a nervous habit, the way some people checked their phones. "If we skip, I need everyone alive at Floor Five doors. No hero sprints into unknown geometry."

"Copy," Marcus said.

Ghost nodded once.

Maya rolled her shoulders—cracked her neck, adjusted her grip on the axe. "Floor Five. Mid-boss. We kill it. We patch the patcher."

I liked her plan.

I hated that it was our only plan.

Professor Chen pulled up a graph on her tablet—sync curve, red line, exponential smirk that reminded me of every professor who'd ever watched a student walk into an exam they hadn't studied for.

"At forty-one, we have maybe six floors before merge completes if we fight normally," she said. "At our current pace—"

"We're not fighting normally," Maya said.

"We're speedrunning," I finished. "Which means the System will fight abnormally back."

Marcus checked his magazine—slapped it, racked the slide, the sound of a man making peace with his ammunition count. "When Five opens, I want firing lanes. Ghost left, Maya center, Kevin behind tank line."

"Behind?" I said.

"You're the healer of code," Marcus said. "Not the healer of arteries."

Elizabeth raised a hand. "I'm the healer of arteries."

"Behind Elizabeth," Marcus amended.

Fair.

---

The elevator didn't stop at Two.

Didn't stop at Three.

Didn't stop at Four.

Each skipped floor flickered past the glass—blurs of cubicles, training dummies, a courtroom set dressed in neon legalese, a server aisle pulsing red like a heartbeat monitor in cardiac arrest. The System showed us what we weren't allowed to learn, taunting us with knowledge we'd have to pay for later.

`[FLOOR 2 — SKIPPED]` `[FLOOR 3 — SKIPPED]` `[FLOOR 4 — SKIPPED]` `[WARNING: KNOWLEDGE DEBT ACCUMULATES]`

Knowledge debt.

Like student loans, but the interest was teeth.

My overlay ticked.

`[SYNC: 42%]`

One percent for skipping three floors.

Great.

"Kevin," Professor Chen said quietly. Her voice was low enough that only I could hear—the tone she used when she was about to say something she wished she didn't have to. "When we exit at Five, expect adaptive response. The Pyramid treats skipped content as unresolved dependencies."

"Unresolved dependencies crash production," I said.

"Exactly."

The elevator slowed.

The doors opened on an antechamber—not the arena yet, but close enough that my overlay already tasted boss geometry. The air was colder here, drier, the kind of cold that made your lungs feel like they were folding in on themselves.

Two Enforcers stood flanking the inner doors like ushers at a funeral for optimism.

Standard issue.

LVL 19.

Their armor was matte black, absorbing light, making them look like holes cut out of reality. Their faces were smooth—no features, no expression, just the blank slate of a machine that didn't need to emote because it had never learned how.

Marcus and Ghost handled them in forty seconds—suppressed fire that sounded like coughs, katana through the neck joint I'd flagged, the kind of teamwork that looked effortless and cost everything in ammo and pain. Ghost's blade came out clean—the Enforcer's coolant was clear, not red, which somehow made it worse.

I didn't fight.

I scanned.

Stack Trace Sight on the inner doors while Ghost wiped blood off his blade with his good hand—his injured arm from Floor Four still wrapped, still costing him, but he didn't complain.

The spawn script for whatever waited beyond was already compiling.

Green thread labeled `[HOTFIX: REGEN +15% — CONDITIONAL]`.

Regeneration module.

Conditional on mid-fight patch deploy.

I wrote the counter in my wiki before the arena doors fully opened—section header: *Throw Garbage at the Deploy Queue*.

Didn't help during the fight.

Helped my pride.

Helped Maya later when I yelled "three seconds" and she knew exactly what to do with them.

"Kevin," Marcus said. "Stop typing. Start breathing."

"I'm breathing and typing. Multitasking."

"Boss room," Ghost said.

The inner doors irised open.

---

Circular.

Black sand that swallowed sound—every footstep muffled, every breath absorbed. The silence was wrong, the kind of quiet that made you hear your own heartbeat and wonder if it was loud enough to attract predators.

Walls curved up into darkness, and on those walls—projections. Kill-feeds from Day Zero. Names scrolling too fast to read. Timestamps. Coordinates. `[TERMINATED]` in clean sans-serif like the System was proud of its typography.

My stomach turned.

I recognized a street two blocks from my old apartment—the coffee shop I used to go to, the bodega on the corner, the fire hydrant my neighbor's dog always peed on.

I didn't recognize the names.

That was worse.

`[FLOOR 5 — MID-BOSS ARENA]` `[ENTITY: ENFORCER PRIME — LVL 24]` `[MECHANIC: ADAPTIVE PATCHING]` `[WARNING: MID-FIGHT HOTFIX ENABLED]` `[ATMOSPHERE: FEAR +12% | AGGRO PRIORITY: TANK > DPS > DEBUGGER]`

Mid-fight hotfix.

Of course.

The kill-feeds didn't stop when the boss spawned.

They accelerated.

A name would flash—`[TERMINATED — 00:04:12 DAY ZERO]`—and the sand under our boots would pulse like the arena was syncing our heartbeat to a database of the dead.

Marcus's jaw tightened. A muscle in his cheek twitched.

Ghost looked away from the wall—the first time I'd seen him break visual contact with a threat.

Elizabeth whispered a headcount under her breath—not enemies. Us. Making sure we were still six.

Professor Chen recorded frequency spikes like the walls were broadcasting on a band that made mammals panic.

I pulled up my overlay and pre-loaded Stack Trace Sight.

The Prime hadn't moved yet.

Good.

Debuggers liked problems that hadn't started.

`[KEVIN PARK — LVL 15 | DEBUGGER]` `[SKILL: STACK TRACE SIGHT — READY]` `[SKILL: PATTERN INTERRUPT — READY]` `[SKILL: NULL SUMMON — 8s COOLDOWN]`

The Enforcer Prime wasn't mannequin-smooth like the guards on Four.

It was *armored*—plates of obsidian light, joints visible, each one a subsystem I could see with Stack Trace Sight before it tried to kill us. Shoulder mount like a turret, barrels rotating slowly, warming up. Core housing behind sternum plate, pulsing with a light that matched the kill-feed timestamps. Shield generator humming at 2.4 GHz because Professor Chen had taught me to read frequency like sheet music.

Marcus didn't wait for a speech.

He fired first.

Three-round burst.

Rounds sparked off shielding—blue sparks, wasted lead, the sound of bullets losing an argument with physics.

`[ENFORCER PRIME — SHIELD: 98%]` `[ADAPTIVE PATCHING: OBSERVING]`

"It's learning," I shouted.

"It's always learning," Professor Chen said. "That's the problem."

Ghost flanked left.

Silent.

Professional.

The Prime's head tracked him before Ghost took three steps.

`[SYSTEM PING — STEALTH BROKEN]` `[PATCH NOTE: STEALTH DETECTION +40% IN BOSS ZONES]`

"New patch," I yelled. "Stealth nerf live!"

"I noticed," Ghost said, voice flat, katana already adjusting angle.

He didn't complain.

He adapted.

His injured arm from the Floor Four mess—still wrapped, still costing him, the bandage darkening at the edges—stayed tight to his body. He used the good arm. He used shadows that weren't shadows anymore. He still moved like death with a commute.

Maya charged.

Her defining moment wasn't supposed to be here.

But the System had put a boss between us and the Admin terminal, and Maya had put herself between bosses and me since Day Three.

The Prime swung—a horizontal arc meant to delete a party.

Maya didn't dodge like a tutorial player.

She *read* it.

Axe up.

Deflect.

Metal screamed—the sound of two weapons meeting at velocity, the kind of noise that made your teeth ache.

Spin.

[Surgical Strike] on the elbow joint I'd called out from stack trace—red highlight on the overlay, weak point flagged like a bug in Jira.

`[SUBSYSTEM: ARM — DAMAGED]` `[ENFORCER PRIME — SHIELD: 71%]`

The Prime staggered.

Marcus poured fire into the gap—rounds sparking off exposed internals, coolant spraying, the smell of burnt lubricant.

Ghost cut the wrist actuator—a precise slice that severed the control cable, sending the Prime's hand into a spasm of useless twitching.

The Prime tried to execute `[COUNTER SWEEP — 360°]`.

I hit Pattern Interrupt.

The sweep stuttered mid-arc—animation frame dropped, hitbox desynced, the kind of bug that got games recalled and got us alive.

`[PATTERN INTERRUPT — SUCCESS]` `[ENFORCER PRIME — ACTION QUEUE CLEARED]`

Two seconds.

Maya used both.

She drove her axe into the Prime's knee joint—a deep, brutal strike that sent cracks spiderwebbing across the armor plate.

Elizabeth hung back—triage position, not cowardice. Her hands were ready, bandages already unwound, waiting for the moment one of us broke.

Professor Chen fed me numbers—sync percentages, patch queue depths, the frequency of the shield generator. "The hotfix is queued! Three seconds ETA!"

I fed the party calls.

Null Summon spat a wraith into the Prime's threat table—confusion debuff, aggro roulette, the Prime's turret locking onto a decoy that wasn't there.

The decoy died in one hit.

Worth it.

Then the world *hiccuped*.

My wiki counter had said three seconds.

Professor Chen had said shallow queue.

The arena had said *critical priority*.

All three were true, which was the worst kind of bug—consistent inconsistency.

---

`[HOTFIX DEPLOYING — ETA 3s]` `[TARGET: ENFORCER PRIME]` `[CHANGE: REGENERATION +15%]` `[PRIORITY: CRITICAL]`

"Kevin!" Professor Chen yelled. "Stop the patch!"

"How?"

"Same way you crashed the island—overflow, corrupt, *interrupt*!"

Three seconds.

The Prime's wounds began to close—pixel blood reversing, light knitting, the System doing what it did best: undoing player progress.

Maya bled.

A gash across her thigh from the deflect—she'd traded skin for angle, and the angle had cost her. Blood soaked through her pants, dark and spreading.

Marcus drew aggro with a grenade that did nothing but buy attention—the Prime's head turned, the turret swiveled, and Marcus dove behind a pillar of sand that wouldn't stop anything.

Ghost created openings that cost him pain—the Prime's backhand caught his shoulder, bad arm screamed, he didn't fall. He took the hit, used the momentum to spin, and carved a line across the Prime's chest plate.

I opened my laptop on my knees in a boss arena like a fool.

Because fools were what the System expected.

Expected fools died.

Unexpected fools threw null pointers at god.

My fingers flew.

Stack Trace Sight showed the patch pipeline—threads labeled `[DEPLOY]`, `[VALIDATE]`, `[MERGE]`. The regen module was a green bar filling, thirty percent, forty, fifty—

Professor Chen shouted numbers. "Duplicate ID limit: eight! Patch queue depth: shallow! Mesh registry accepting objects until—"

"Until what?"

"Until it chokes!"

Elizabeth slapped a mana stim into my hand—the glass cold, the liquid blue, the needle sharp. "Drink. Type. Don't die."

I drank.

Apocalypse coffee trilogy incomplete.

Still worked.

The stim hit my bloodstream like a shot of lightning, and the world sharpened—colors brighter, thoughts clearer, the patch pipeline visible in perfect detail.

I didn't overflow memory this time.

I overflowed *attention*.

Every orphan mesh ID I'd collected since Floor One.

Every decoy wraith tag from Null Summon.

Every null summon charge I'd been hoarding like a miser with segfaults.

Dumped into the patch pipeline as noise.

`[HOTFIX: CONFLICT — DUPLICATE OBJECT IDs]` `[HOTFIX: VALIDATION FAILED — RETRYING]` `[HOTFIX: DELAYED]` `[ENFORCER PRIME — REGEN FAILED]`

Delay.

Not cancel.

Enough.

Maya roared—actual sound, human fury—and drove her axe through the failed regen window into the Prime's core housing.

Light exploded.

Pixel blood.

Scream of metal.

The Prime collapsed into black sand and static.

`[+3,400 XP — SHARED]` `[BOSS DEFEATED: ENFORCER PRIME]` `[LOOT: PATCH KEY — FLOOR 6+]` `[ACHIEVEMENT: INTERRUPT LIVE DEPLOYMENT]`

Maya dropped to one knee.

Not defeated.

Exhausted.

Elizabeth was there instantly—med kit, hands steady, pressure bandage, antiseptic that smelled like hospitals used to. "Stay," she said, her voice calm, the voice of someone who'd done this a hundred times.

"Stay," Maya gasped.

"I'm staying," Elizabeth said.

I stumbled to Maya.

My laptop still open.

Still ridiculous.

"That was—"

"Shut up." She grinned blood on her teeth. "You bought me three seconds. I used them."

Ghost leaned on his katana—breathing hard, the first time I'd seen him winded.

Marcus reloaded—slapping a fresh magazine into his rifle with the practiced efficiency of a man who'd done this a thousand times.

Professor Chen stared at my laptop like it was holy and heretical in equal measure.

"You interrupted a live patch," she whispered.

"I threw garbage at the devs." I laughed—hysteria, relief, the sound of a man who'd just won an argument with an operating system. "Classic."

`[SYNC: 52%]`

Half.

We were half merged with doom.

---

I documented the hotfix interrupt in the wiki with shaking hands while Elizabeth finished Maya's stitches. The needle went in and out, thread pulling tight, Maya's jaw clenched but silent.

Title: *How to Throw Null Pointers at God*.

Section one: identify live patch ETA.

Section two: inventory orphan mesh IDs.

Section three: dump until validation fails.

Section four: do not die during section three.

Maya watched me type.

"You naming articles now?"

"Someone has to," I said. "Future Debuggers need a FAQ."

"There are future Debuggers?"

"There will be if we reach Floor Ten."

She didn't argue.

That scared me more than the boss had.

Loot pinged on my overlay besides the Patch Key:

`[MESSAGE: WELL DONE, DEBUGGER]` `[ADMIN LIFT — FLOOR 10+]`

Creepy.

Useful.

The kind of message that made you wonder if Ada was watching from the stack or if the System had just promoted you to unpaid intern on the god floor.

Maya's hands shook—adrenaline dump, not fear.

Elizabeth monitored for shock.

Maya met my eyes anyway.

"You stopped the patch."

"I threw noise."

"You stopped the patch."

Partnership.

We ascended without celebrating.

Celebrating was probably a debuff the System had filed under *premature morale*.

Sync fifty-two.

Purge paused.

Not cancelled.

Maya walked center now—the blade we'd sharpened on every floor since Day Three.

Betrayal waited above that.

I felt it in my teeth like a cavity the dentist had become a prophet.

The hardest patches are trust.

---

Elevator to Floor Six.

Maya walked.

Bleeding.

Standing.

Defining.

The doors opened on a server farm dressed as a gym.

Racks of blades humming like choir practice for machines—the sound of a thousand fans spinning in perfect sync, a white noise that drowned out thought.

Treadmills running with no runners—except the Enforcers, which was somehow worse.

Enforcers on treadmills.

Literally running hotfixes.

Their LCD faces scrolled patch notes while their legs pumped at a pace that said *sprint velocity or termination*.

The air smelled like ozone and corporate wellness—that particular blend of recycled air and cleaning chemicals that every office in America had perfected.

Marcus called it "agile hell."

"Stand-up in five," I muttered. "All blockers are mortal."

My overlay flagged three spawn pipelines feeding the treadmills—green threads pulsing in rhythm with the belt speed.

Cut the feed, kill the treadmill army.

Simple in documentation.

Never simple in production.

Ghost disabled the conveyor belt that fed them spawns—katana through control panel, sparks, the satisfying `[SPAWN PIPELINE — OFFLINE]`.

Maya axed the Sprint Coordinator when it tried to retroactively declare our skip "out of scope."

`[MINI-BOSS: SPRINT COORDINATOR — LVL 21]` `[+1,900 XP — SHARED]` `[SYNC: 58%]`

Six percent in one floor.

The Pyramid was billing us for altitude.

Maya limped through Six but didn't slow.

Elizabeth had bandaged the thigh.

Marcus looted coolant canisters.

Ghost found a maintenance hatch labeled `[ESCALATION ONLY]` and wired it shut with zip ties and spite.

I copied Sprint Coordinator's spawn table into the wiki.

Added a footnote: *Do not skip stand-ups.*

---

Floor Seven: legal department.

Walls of contracts—paper stacked to the ceiling, filing cabinets overflowing, the smell of toner and anxiety.

Quest text as binding law.

Elizabeth read every line aloud because skipping ToS killed people now—literally, a skeleton in a suit had `[CAUSE OF DEATH: ACCEPTED WITHOUT READING]` on Floor Three's warning feed.

I null-summoned through a forced arbitration clause—wraiths as legal persons, why not, the System hated ambiguity.

Marcus shot the notary drone before it could stamp `[PURGE CLAUSE — BINDING]`.

Professor Chen flagged a hidden addendum on page four hundred twelve:

`[CLAUSE: PURGE RESUME ON SYNC 100%]`

We knew.

We climbed anyway.

`[SYNC: 64%]`

Ghost took a paper cut from a liability waiver.

Actually bled.

The System had made paperwork lethal.

Maya burned a contract pile with axe sparks.

Marcus called it "the most honest litigation I've seen."

Professor Chen photographed clause headers.

I didn't ask why.

Some Handler habits you logged and dealt with later.

---

Floor Eight: blackout.

Lights dead.

Emergency strips failed—because of course they did. The System didn't believe in redundant safety unless the redundancy killed you slower.

My overlay dropped to half resolution.

Ghost's stealth at half.

Marcus's rifle optics useless.

For thirty seconds I was blind in a way Debuggers weren't supposed to be—no stack trace, no spawn script, just sound and guesswork and the cold certainty that something above us was taking notes.

Maya's axe found targets by sound—inhuman, necessary, the scrape of sand, the click of joints, the wet exhale of something that wasn't Enforcer.

Something watched us from the ceiling.

Not Enforcer.

Observer.

Handler's backup?

Professor Chen's tablet flickered once—frequency spike, then flat.

She said nothing.

I logged it.

We didn't stop.

Marcus used muzzle flash as strobe.

I fed overlay breadcrumbs to Maya—sound to vector, vector to weak point.

Ghost killed two observers.

Or thought he did.

They dissolved into static without loot.

`[ENTITY: OBSERVER — UNKILLABLE?]`

I marked it `[NEEDS REPRO]`.

Floor Nine was close.

We didn't stop.

`[SYNC: 69%]`

---

Floor Nine: a break room.

Single coffee machine.

Vending machine empty except dust.

A note taped to the fridge:

`[TO: DEBUGGER — YOU'RE LATE]`

Creepy.

Useful.

The machine dispensed when I touched it:

`[BUFF: MANA REGEN +20% — 10 MIN]` `[FLAVOR: DARK ROAST — APOCALYPSE BLEND]`

I drank.

Apocalypse coffee trilogy complete.

Bitter.

Warm.

Like hope with caffeine dependency.

Professor Chen whispered, "Floor Ten is admin. After that, nothing is tutorial."

Marcus checked ammo.

Ghost checked arm.

Elizabeth checked all of us.

Maya checked the elevator light.

`[SYNC: 71%]`

Twenty-nine points from global resume.

Floor Ten waited.

Betrayal waited.

Ada waited—or whatever name the Admin terminal used when it pretended to be on our side.

I tightened my laptop strap.

Patch Key cold against my hip.

"Floor Five taught them we interrupt patches," I said.

"Floor Ten teaches us who we trust," Elizabeth replied.

Maya shouldered her axe.

Blood dry.

Eyes clear.

"We're not trusting the System," she said.

"We're trusting us."

Elevator rose.

The raid continued.

The walls stopped showing Day Zero feeds.

Started showing `[SYNC: 71% — ADMIN FLOOR APPROACHING]`.

And the System watched like a product manager who'd just learned the users fight back—who'd just learned the Debugger class threw null pointers at god and made the god wait three seconds.

Three seconds.

Maya had used them.

I'd buy her three more if I had to.

Floor Ten was next.

The Admin terminal.

The conversation that could alter permissions.

The betrayal I could feel in my teeth like a cavity the dentist had become a prophet.

I opened my wiki.

Added a line under *How to Throw Null Pointers at God*:

*Next chapter: who watches the watchers.*

Elevator chimed.

Floor Ten.

The doors opened on cathedral servers and ozone prayer.

Racks of glass the size of redwoods—blade servers stacked to the ceiling, their LEDs blinking in patterns that looked like Morse code for something terrible.

Cables thick as pythons ran between them, carrying data that could rewrite reality.

Coolant mist drifted between aisles like incense at a church that worshipped uptime—the fog of a system that ran so hot it needed constant refrigeration.

My overlay screamed admin permissions—read-only for now, but the stack felt *close*, like standing outside a vault with the combination in your pocket and a gun in the lobby.

Professor Chen's tablet flatlined for half a second.

Frequency spike.

Then smile.

Wrong smile.

The kind that made Ghost's hand drift toward his katana without him deciding to.

I logged it under `[NEEDS REPRO — HANDLER?]` and kept walking.

Marcus swept the aisle with muzzle discipline.

Elizabeth counted us again—six, still six, for now.

Maya's axe rested easy on her shoulder.

Blood dry.

Eyes clear.

The blade we'd sharpened on Floor Five and every floor since.

Ghost didn't speak.

Ghost listened.

Always listening.

He heard things the rest of us filtered out—packet whispers, sync hiccups, the sound of betrayal loading in the background.

Hindsight was a debugger perk nobody wanted.

Forethought was the one we needed.

We had forty-seven minutes on Ten, according to Professor Chen's model.

We had Ada in the stack—or whatever name the Admin terminal used when it pretended to be on our side.

We had a Patch Key cold against my hip and a wiki full of exploits that might not matter when permissions changed.

We had each other—fractured, bleeding, still six.

That had to be enough.

It was all we had.

I tightened my laptop strap.

Opened the wiki one last time before we crossed the threshold.

Added a line under *How to Throw Null Pointers at God*:

*Next chapter: who watches the watchers.*

We walked in.

The System held its breath.

And I held my laptop like a weapon.

Because it was.

Because Floor Ten was the kind of chapter that changed permissions—and I intended to be the one holding the admin prompt when it did.