The Liquidation of Magic
The young warrior materialized high above the newly formed, bottomless chasm, intending to land safely on the far ridge.
But something went catastrophically, terrifyingly wrong.
As he reappeared in the air, a sickening, violent pulling sensation gripped his entire body. His spatial tunnel collapsed prematurely. He didn't land gracefully on his feet; he slammed violently into the jagged, crumbling edge of the newly ruptured cliffside.
"Gah!" the Hero choked, his heavy iron armor scraping against the rock as he desperately shot his right hand out.
His iron gauntlet blindly clamped onto a jagged piece of exposed bedrock at the very edge of the precipice. His legs dangled helplessly over the bottomless, black abyss.
He gritted his teeth, desperately trying to summon his mana to teleport back onto solid ground. But his core was completely, utterly empty. The magical reserves that had sustained him through countless battles were entirely gone.
He looked up over the edge of the cliff, his eyes widening in pure, unadulterated horror.
Kniya was standing at the edge of the chasm, slowly raising the massive, corporate-black sword for a second strike. But the blade wasn't just glowing—it was acting as a catastrophic, magical black hole.
The executives' powers weren't just draining the trees and the earth anymore. Because the Hero was in their immediate vicinity, their anomaly was actively, aggressively feeding off of him. Every single drop of the young warrior's mana, his life-force, and his magical energy was being violently siphoned out of his body and funneled directly into Kniya's blade. He was being completely liquidated.
"My... my powers..." the Hero gasped, his fingers slipping against the crumbling rock as his physical strength rapidly abandoned him. "You are draining... everything..."
Kniya stood towering over the edge of the cliff, staring down at the helpless, dangling Hero. The chaotic, manic energy had settled into a cold, terrifyingly absolute executioner's glare. The massive sword in his hands hummed with the stolen energy of the world, glowing with a blinding, lethal intensity.
"I told you," Kniya whispered, his voice completely devoid of mercy. "Your story ends here."
Kniya raised the apocalyptic blade high above his head, the dark energy completely eclipsing the sun.
With all of their combined, stolen power focused into a single, devastating point, Kniya brought the heavy steel violently crashing down toward the Hero's hand.
The Author's Intervention
Kniya raised the apocalyptic, hyper-dense corporate blade high above his head, the dark energy completely eclipsing the toxic sun. He swung the massive broadsword down with all of his stolen, world-ending might, fully intending to liquidate the Hero once and for all.
But the blade never hit its target.
Suddenly, the very fabric of reality didn't just warp—it completely shattered. Out of absolute nowhere, a man in highly overworked sweatpants and a stained, wrinkled t-shirt materialized directly between Kniya and the dangling Hero.
With a look of sheer, sleep-deprived panic, the strange man desperately threw his hand out and slapped the flat side of the apocalyptic broadsword, violently diverting the trajectory of the swing.
The heavy blade missed the Hero by a fraction of an inch, striking the empty horizon instead.
KRRR-BOOOOOOM!
The redirected slash didn't just split the earth—it deleted it. A catastrophic, supersonic shockwave of pure, unadulterated dark energy fired outward, completely erasing absolutely everything within a one-hundred-kilometer radius. Massive mountain ranges, dense forests, distant lakes, and the very curvature of the bedrock were instantaneously vaporized into a perfectly flat, desolate sheet of smoking ash. It was a blast so incomprehensibly powerful that it literally rearranged the continent's geography in a single millisecond.
The man in the sweatpants stumbled back, his hands frantically gripping his own hair as he stared at the freshly leveled, one-hundred-kilometer expanse of absolute nothingness.
"Oh my god... shit, shit, SHIT!" the man screamed, completely losing his mind. He spun around to face the four executives, his face red with absolute fury and sheer disbelief. "What the actual fuck have you done?! You guys literally destroyed my fucking world, you absolute shitholes! Wherever you go, you completely ruin that fucking place! Ahhhhh! Why do you have to do this?!"
Kniya froze, the massive dark sword lowering slightly as his chaotic momentum was completely derailed. He narrowed his eyes, staring at the panicked man in the t-shirt. A spark of highly specific recognition flashed across Kniya's face.
"Wait a minute," Kniya muttered, tilting his head in pure confusion. "I know that ugly fucking shirt. Are you... Antox Desk?"
Salesh pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, his jaw dropping in shock. "Holy shit, he is! You are Antox Desk! You are the screaming lunatic from the amusement park back in our world! You were the one who ran up to us by the bumper cars and started ranting about some 'main character' shit right before Kniya pulled a shotgun on you!"
"Please, for the love of god, spare me from your delusional, unhinged billionaire jargon right now!" the Author yelled, aggressively pointing at the smoking hundred-kilometer wasteland. "You literally just destroyed this world!"
The Author spun away from the billionaires, violently running both hands through his messy hair as he paced frantically across the radioactive glass. He stared out at the smoking, completely vaporized landscape, having an absolute, unfiltered meltdown over his ruined manuscript.
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain a cohesive fantasy setting when you idiots keep nuking the geography?!" the Author ranted to the empty air, completely furious with his own invisible production team. He aggressively tilted his head back, glaring up into the toxic, smog-choked sky.
"Hey! Where the fuck are you hiding, you incompetent, voice-over hack?!" the Author shrieked, his voice cracking like a highly stressed director whose movie budget had just caught on fire. His scream echoed violently across the empty crater. "I know you are up there, you useless, invisible parasite! Get your ass down here right fucking now, Narrator!"
The Employee Review (Narrator's POV)
(Okay, look. I have to break the fourth wall here for a second. That screaming guy in the sweatpants? That is my Boss. The literal Author of this entire story. When he screams my name, I have a legal and contractual obligation to physically manifest.)
With a highly reluctant, glitching pop, I physically materialized in the air and slowly floated down to the glass crater. I looked exactly like a highly exhausted, severely underpaid corporate employee who had just been caught slacking off. I nervously shuffled my feet, looking everywhere except directly at my screaming Boss.
"I am right here, Boss!" I defended myself instantly, waving my hands. "I came within three seconds! I was literally just dictating the geographical erasure of the continent! I am doing my fucking job!"
But the Boss aggressively marched right up to me, practically foaming at the mouth.
"You fucking bastard!" the Boss screamed, jabbing a finger violently into my chest. "I told you specifically to keep a close eye on these idiots because I knew they were shitass assholes! I knew exactly what they were capable of! Why didn't you stop them on time?!"
"Stop them?!" I argued back, pointing at Kniya and Malesh. "Sir, they have intercontinental ballistic missiles and a magical black-hole sword! I am just the explainer of this story! What exactly did you want me to do? Manipulate the text and literally narrate them to death?! I just write the words down, I can't physically block a nuclear weapon! If you wanted to block them in the first place, you should not have written this plot, or basically, you should not have allowed them to have so much power!!"
"Now you can see the absolute fucking result of keeping them here!" the Boss wailed, clutching his chest dramatically like I had just stabbed him, completely ignoring my highly valid logic. "They completely ruined my pacing! They bypassed the entire Demon Lord training arc! Do you have any idea how many dramatic flashback chapters I had planned for that?! And they were about to brutally execute the Hero! I spent months writing his character arc! I gave him a glowing sword, a tragic backstory, and a highly marketable cape! He was going to have a beach episode! And these absolute lunatics are just vaporizing my entire manuscript like it's a fucking joke!"
The Boss aggressively kicked a chunk of cooled radioactive glass, instantly stubbing his toe, and started hopping around on one foot in pure agony.
"I spent three whole weeks designing high-tier elemental sword techniques!" the Boss yelled, waving his arms hysterically. "The Hero was supposed to unleash the Heaven-Shattering Star Blade with glowing sparkles in his eyes and save the realm with righteous honor! Instead, his magical mana got violently drained into a black hole, and he was two seconds away from getting sliced in half by an unhinged maniac casually popping bubbles with mint gum!"
"Well, you created them, Boss! You gave them the cheat codes!" I yelled back, throwing my hands in the air. "You dropped four ruthless billionaires into a fantasy kingdom, and now you're shocked that they resolved your epic dark prophecy by dropping fifty ballistic missiles and executing the protagonist?!"
The Boss threw his hands up in the air, utterly defeated by the industrial wasteland around them.
"Look at this place! This is an absolute disaster zone!" the Boss cried out in despair. "We cannot even call this a fucking fantasy genre anymore! It's a post-apocalyptic corporate dystopia!"