They weren't standing.
They weren't floating either.
The space they now occupied didn't allow for something as consistent as physics.
They simply were—present in a fragment of reality so removed from structure that the idea of "movement" had to be imagined before it could be performed. Yet somehow, they all managed to breathe, to exist, to remain in the midst of the Reader's hesitation.
That pause—it was everything.
In that fraction of eternity, the Reader, the being of endless consumption, had acknowledged them. It had seen them as more than script, more than noise in the background of a collapsing cosmos. For the first time, it had read them on purpose.
Julius felt it in his bones—or the metaphor that remained of his bones. He looked across the folding fragments of space at his allies. Each of them stood tethered to the unique essence they had stabbed into the void, anchoring them in the anti-narrative space.
The Reader was watching. Not through eyes. Not through comprehension. It experienced them.
Madara grinned. That old smirk he used to wear in the Fourth Shinobi War, the one that said he knew more than anyone else in the room. But this wasn't arrogance anymore. It was something darker. Defiance made holy.
"I say we carve deeper," he muttered.
Remi, gripping her staff, shook her head slowly. "If we dig in too fast, we collapse the pocket. This isn't a battlefield—it's a thought maze."
"And the goal?" Asher asked. His voice had become more fragmented lately, like his words were starting to arrive before or after he spoke them.
Julius turned toward the rippling distortion above them, the nearest thing this space had to a sky. "We reach the center. The Eye of the Reader."
"How do you find a center in something that's all consumption?" Remi whispered.
Julius blinked. And that blink wrote an answer.
They were characters. Their power wasn't just strength, not anymore. It was relevance. Julius willed the idea of direction, and the fabric of the void bent. A stairwell appeared—not stone, not metal, but lines of code laced in dialogue tags and unused metadata. A staircase made of broken POVs.
Madara stepped onto it first. "Let's find the bastard's mind."
They walked.
Each step brought them through moments.
Not places. Moments.
A child crying in an alley after their favorite series was canceled.
A girl clutching a book that saved her life during a depressive spiral.
A boy deleting fanfiction he poured his heart into because no one read it.
All real.
All raw.
All part of the Reader.
They were inside a creature that fed on story, and in doing so, had absorbed readers too.
"Wait," Asher whispered, halting. "If it absorbs readers... what does that make us?"
No one answered.
Not because they didn't know.
But because they did.
Remi turned her gaze inward. Her memory was already unstable, slipping and morphing like wet ink. She held tightly to the one truth she refused to lose—her bond to Character 0. The undefined. The original wildcard. It was the last thread keeping her identity from dissolving completely.
They reached the next layer.
It was a library.
Or what had once wanted to be a library. Stacks stretched endlessly in directions that didn't make sense. Books screamed as they opened and closed on their own. Paragraphs dripped from the ceilings like blood. Sentences crawled along the floor.
This was the Graveyard of Forgotten Tropes.
The smell of stale arcs and wasted potential burned their lungs. A book floated toward them, its cover frayed, its pages weeping.
Asher caught it. "This is... me."
He opened it.
It was a version of himself—a side arc that had never been explored. A potential romance line with a character who no longer existed. A full path never chosen. Asher closed it, carefully, and let it drift away.
"This place is dangerous," Julius said.
"No," Madara corrected. "This place is honest."
He drew his blade. Not because he needed it—but because the blade itself was symbolic now. A reminder of his origin. His rise. His fall. His resurrection. He was a warlord who transcended genre and morality.
And he refused to let that be rewritten.
As they moved through the Graveyard, the Reader's eye blinked again.
It didn't like them being here.
Words warped around them. The scenery tried to erase itself. Concepts crumbled.
Remi spun her staff, casting a sentence shield—literal text wrapped around them, forming a dome of thematic stability.
"The closer we get to its core, the more it tries to become unknowable," she said.
"It's afraid," Julius said.
"No," Madara growled, slicing through an incoming plot hole. "It's hungry. And we're the only things left with flavor."
They passed through another veil, and the library shifted.
This time, they arrived in a place none of them could name.
Because it was after the ending.
A vast, empty space filled only with the residue of conclusions. Happy ones. Sad ones. Open ones. Final ones.
Julius stopped.
He recognized the feeling.
"This is where readers go when they finish a story but don't want to leave it."
Madara looked around, confused. "So it's limbo?"
Remi shook her head. "It's worse. It's nostalgia."
The weight hit them like gravity returning all at once. Every unresolved character arc. Every cliffhanger that never got closure. Every ship that sank. Every power-up that came too late. It was all here.
Their knees buckled. Even Madara's.
But something stirred in the dark.
A small, flickering light.
A child, curled up, crying.
Not just any child.
Reader Zero.
The one who started it all.
The first spark of imagination.
The Reader before the consumption.
The innocence of just wanting one more chapter.
Julius stepped forward. "That's it. That's the core."
Asher frowned. "How do we reach it?"
Remi pointed upward. "By reminding it why stories exist."
She raised her staff and spoke a line from her origin:
"I was nobody. Until a story chose to notice me."
The void trembled.
Madara stepped beside her. "I was a villain. Until I rewrote the script."
Julius followed. "I was time. Until I learned to live outside of it."
Asher clenched his fist. "I was overlooked. Until I gave myself a name."
Each declaration sent shockwaves through the anti-narrative.
And the child looked up.
Tears of literal punctuation streamed down his cheeks.
He reached for them.
The Reader's Eye flared. Furious. Jealous. Desperate.
It descended.
Not as a monster.
Not as a god.
But as a glitching author, wielding a pen made of despair and a mouth that wrote endings with every breath.
And the final battle began.