The Meta Confusion
For a moment, the heavy, highly tense atmosphere hung in the air.
Then, Malesh let out a sharp, sudden snort.
The sheer, unfiltered absurdity of the situation completely broke the corporate tension. Malesh started laughing. Kniya quickly joined in, a chaotic, highly amused smirk spreading across his face.
"Look at this guy," Kniya cackled, pointing at me shivering in front of the Author. "He is getting chewed out exactly like Salesh does when the quarterly margins drop!"
Within seconds, Salesh and Filoska were openly laughing at the absolute meltdown happening right in front of them. The sheer relatability of a brutal middle-management performance review happening in the middle of a nuclear crater was too much to ignore.
Seeing the billionaires cracking up, I couldn't hold it in either. I let out a guilty, stifled laugh, scratching the back of my neck like a slacking employee trying to brush off a write-up.
The Boss desperately tried to maintain his furious glare, desperately wanting to be mad at his ruined creation. But as the infectious, unhinged laughter echoed across the sterilized crater, the corners of his mouth twitched. Despite his absolute rage, a small, involuntary chuckle escaped his lips as he looked at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.
"Seriously..." the Boss sighed, a small chuckle breaking through his anger as he looked at me. "What the fuck were you even doing this entire time?"
"I was doing world-building!" I defended weakly, trying to stop laughing. "I was explicitly explaining the ecological deficit to the readers!"
Kniya suddenly stopped laughing, his chaotic amusement morphing into a deep, highly suspicious confusion. He popped his mint gum, looking back and forth between Antox Desk and the guilty-looking guy who had just popped out of thin air.
"Wait a minute," Kniya asked, pointing his heavy broadsword toward me. "Why the fuck are you calling him 'Narrator'? What kind of a legal name is that?"
Malesh crossed his arms, staring at us with absolute, unfiltered weirdness. "Yeah, I am logically not getting the thing here. Why are you guys acting so incredibly weird? Who names their kid Narrator? And who the fuck are 'the readers' you are talking to?"
Filoska narrowed her eyes, completely bewildered. "Are you two part of some bizarre, highly dysfunctional theater troupe? Because this entire interaction is incredibly unprofessional."
The four executives stood there, completely weirded out, utterly unaware that they were aggressively interrogating the literal architect of their universe and the underpaid guy who had been documenting their every move.
The Administrative Penalty (Narrator's POV)
(Okay, I knew I was in deep, catastrophic trouble the moment the Boss materialized. My employment status was literally hanging by a thread over a radioactive crater.)
"I am really, really sorry, Boss, for what I have done," I pleaded, keeping my head bowed like a subordinate who had just accidentally deleted the entire company database. "I just got carried away narrating the structural damage!"
The Author glared at me, his sleep-deprived eyes twitching with pure, unadulterated stress.
"No, I am not really satisfied with that pathetic apology," the Boss snapped coldly. "I am officially cutting your salary. That deduction will serve as direct financial compensation for the massive landscape repairs I now have to authorize. Now, save the fucking Hero! What are you doing?! Why are you just watching me?! Why are you standing here like an idiot?! Save the fucking Hero right now!"
"Yes, sir! Right away, sir!" I panicked.
I immediately tapped into my absolute narrative authority. I snapped my fingers. The young warrior, who was desperately dangling over the edge of the collapsing, bottomless canyon, instantly vanished in a flash of script-editing light, teleported directly into the safest, highest-tier medical hospital in the surviving fantasy realm.
Then, I turned my attention to the completely shattered earth. I practically had to hit the cosmic 'backspace' button on reality. The jagged, ruptured tectonic plates groaned and violently reversed their momentum, the massive canyons stitching themselves back together as I manually repaired the geographical canvas those corporate psychos had just ripped apart.
(I have to admit, the sheer scale of the canyons they created with that single slash was genuinely amazing, but I wasn't about to say that out loud while my Boss was glaring at me.)
The Author's Vengeance
Kniya stood on the freshly repaired glass crater, his heavy corporate broadsword completely dissolved. He popped a fresh piece of mint gum into his mouth and stared at the man in the sweatpants, his chaotic street-instincts actively trying to process a massive inconsistency.
"Wait a minute," Kniya called out, pointing an accusing finger at the Author. "If you are the exact same guy from our previous timeline, you are acting really fucking different right now. The last time we saw you at the amusement park, I pulled my shotgun and you literally squealed and ran away like a terrified bitch. Why are you acting so literally fearless this time?"
The Author slowly turned to face the Managing Director. The sheer exhaustion on his face morphed into a cold, god-like wrath.
"I had my reasons for that back then," the Author replied, his voice dropping into a dark, echoing register that vibrated the very air around them. "But right now? You four are all going to pay for what you did to my story."
Before Kniya could even fire back a sarcastic retort, the Author's physical form violently glitched.
With a horrifying, metaphysical tearing sound, the Author's anatomy aggressively expanded. Two entirely new, fully functional arms violently sprouted from his ribs. Now standing as a terrifying, four-armed entity of pure creative vengeance, the Boss raised all four of his hands. Out of thin air, four massive, hyper-lethal, glowing handguns materialized into his grips, all aimed directly at the executive board.
Salesh shrieked, dropping to his knees, while Filoska took a terrified step backward.
"Hey, hey, hey! Wait a minute!" Kniya yelled, his arrogant smirk instantly evaporating as he threw his hands up in defense.
"What the fuck is this?!" Malesh demanded, his stubborn composure finally cracking as he stared down four divine gun barrels. "What the hell are you going to do?!"
"This is just a little bit of compensation," the Author stated coldly.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Four deafening gunshots rang out in perfect unison. The bullets didn't just pierce flesh; they shattered the executives' presence in this dimension entirely. Kniya, Malesh, Filoska, and Salesh instantly collapsed onto the glass crater, completely dead, their bodies dissolving into glowing blue pixels of deleted code.
The Boss let out a massive, highly dramatic groan, aggressively pinching the bridge of his nose like he was dealing with the world's most incompetent toddlers.
"Narrator!" the Boss rambled, talking a mile a minute and completely dropping any shred of professionalism. "Just grab all the legal documents and the territorial deeds for their stupid corporate empire! And honestly? A.S.S.? Are you fucking kidding me right now?! Half of this executive board is literally lying dead on the floor, their entire plotline is ruined, and the grand monopoly they are leaving behind is named A.S.S.?! It sounds like a cheap, over-the-counter diarrhea medication! Who names a global superpower that?! It's so fucking embarrassing!"
"It truly is a branding nightmare, Boss," I nodded frantically, aggressively agreeing with literally anything he said just so he wouldn't shoot me next.
"Just—ugh! Take all that paperwork and literally shove it into the Hero's hands when he wakes up in the hospital!" the Author continued, waving his hands wildly as he paced around the radioactive crater. "I am just giving him the entire monopoly! Let him deal with the administrative headache, the labor strikes, and the massive tax fraud! I don't have the time or the mental capacity for this absolute bullshit right now! I need to go figure out how to write the next fucking chapter out of this radioactive mess!"
With a sharp crack of reality, the Boss vanished, leaving me alone to handle the administrative paperwork of a transferred empire.
The Chronological Whiplash
The transition was not a physical movement; it was an aggressive, stomach-churning snap in the fundamental fabric of space and time.
*GASP!*
One millisecond, Kniya, Malesh, Filoska, and Salesh were standing on the radioactive glass of an apocalyptic wasteland, staring down the glowing barrels of a highly enraged, four-armed deity. The next millisecond, the deafening roar of the atomic wind was completely erased, instantly replaced by the quiet, heavy hum of the building's ventilation system and the faint, distinctly bureaucratic scent of fresh printer toner and polished stone.
There was no blood. There was no crater. There was no sweatpants-wearing god.
Kniya violently sucked in a massive breath of air, his chest heaving as his eyes snapped open. He frantically patted down his tailored suit, his hands desperately searching for the fatal injuries that had sent him into the primitive medieval dimension in the first place. He felt absolutely nothing. The expensive fabric of his blazer was pristine, completely untouched by violence or dirt.
They were sitting right back on the uncomfortable leather sofa inside the federal tax department headquarters in Seistain.
For the four billionaires, three agonizing, grueling years of waging corporate war, violently altering royal governments, and building massive concrete highways and developing a world out of nothing had just passed. But looking around, the room hadn't changed a single, solitary bit. The paperwork resting on the heavy metal desk was exactly where it had been. The environment was a monument to terrifying, organized efficiency. The polished marble tiles beneath their expensive leather shoes gleamed perfectly under the high-end, fully functioning lights. The walls were freshly painted, and the air smelled entirely clean.
Because for this pristine room—and the man standing inside it—it had only been exactly sixty seconds.