Everyone Thinks I'm the Strongest

Chapter 9: The Glitch Awakens

The white void hummed with a sound like a thousand dying hard drives. Rian stood alone, his fingers hovering over the glowing, golden console that hovered in the nothingness.

"Okay. Okay, calm down," Rian muttered to the empty air, his voice sounding thin. "I just deleted a building. No big deal. Happens to the best of us, right?"

"Talking to yourself is the first sign of a corrupted kernel, Rian," the voice of the shard purred, vibrating inside his skull. "Or the first sign of becoming a god. Hard to tell the difference these days."

"I don't want to be a god," Rian snapped, slapping a button on the console to toggle the 'VOID_RENDER' setting. "I want to be in my living room, eating leftovers, and complaining about the neighbors. Can you turn this off?"

"The installation is at 42 percent," the voice replied. "You can’t pull the plug now without bricking your own consciousness."

Rian stumbled as the floor—or the lack of it—lurched violently. His vision fractured, sending jagged, neon-gold glitches cascading across his field of view. He slammed his head against the console, his knees hitting the ethereal floor.

"Installation? What are you even installing? My brain?"

"System modules," the shard replied, its voice growing deeper, more resonant. "The previous interface was a toy. This is the source code."

Rian’s body locked up. His muscles spasmed, and he crashed into the white void, his breath hitching as a sensation like molten lead poured into his veins.

"It burns," Rian gasped, clawing at his chest. "Why does a system update feel like… like being stabbed?"

"Growth is often painful," the voice remarked, sounding detached. "Try not to die. It would be a waste of good hardware."

Rian blacked out.

Flicker.

He gasped awake, staring at a ceiling of swirling, golden binary. The console was still there, but now it was flashing crimson warnings.

"Did I… did I do it?" Rian whispered, his voice trembling. "Is it finished?"

"System at 67 percent," the voice crooned. "You’re doing remarkably well. Most hosts would have liquified by now."

"I’m not a host," Rian wheezed, pushing himself up. "I’m a guy who wants to go home."

"Home is a relative coordinate, Rian. You’re currently rewriting the map."

Rian grabbed the edge of the console, his knuckles white. "If I’m rewriting the map, tell me how to get Sera back. She was standing right here, and then I… I hit a button."

"She’s in the buffer," the voice said. "She’s safe. For now."

"Bring her back," Rian demanded, his eyes glowing with a sudden, sharp, golden intensity. "Right now."

"You don't have the authority to pull from the buffer yet. You need to hit 100 percent."

"Then hurry it up!"

The dungeon around them—or what was left of it—began to groan. Massive cracks of white light spiderwebbed across the horizon. The entire reality was fraying at the seams, the limestone walls dissolving into cascading lines of gold and violet code.

"The structure is collapsing," the shard noted, sounding bored. "You’ve destabilized the instance by trying to exert too much control, Rian."

"You told me to touch the thing!" Rian shouted, his frustration boiling over. "You said I’d be the administrator!"

"I said you’d have the access. I didn't say you knew how to use it."

"Give me the manual, then!"

"There is no manual. There is only the interface. Learn to read it, or get crushed by your own architecture."

Rian looked at the screen. The metrics were spiraling out of control. ‘USERPERCEPTION: 50,000%.’ ‘REALITYINTEGRITY: 0.03%.’ ‘WARNING: TOTAL COLLAPSE IMMINENT.’

"Oh, crap," Rian whispered. "Everything is turning into pixels."

"That would be your fault," the voice pointed out.

"Help me!" Rian grabbed the shard, which was floating in the air, pulsing like a miniature sun. "Tell me what to click!"

"Click the 'REINITIALIZE' node. It’s the blue one, hidden behind the entropy slider."

Rian’s vision flickered again. He felt the familiar, crushing weight of the system pushing him toward unconsciousness. His head dipped, his eyes closing, and for a second, the entire world went dark.

Flicker.

He surged awake, his hands moving on their own. He swiped the entropy slider to the left and slammed his palm onto the blue node.

"What happened?" Rian gasped, his throat burning. "Did it work?"

"You just reset the local gravity and oxygen levels," the voice chuckled. "Impressive. You’re currently suffocating."

Rian clawed at his throat, his face turning purple. He couldn't breathe. The air felt like solid, liquid glass. He looked at the console, his vision blurring.

"Fix... it," Rian choked out, his fingers dancing over the board, frantically trying to find the air-pressure toggle.

"You’re a quick learner," the shard said. "But you’re running out of time."

The dungeon walls exploded outward, not with stone, but with raw, unformatted data. A swirling vortex of golden light swallowed the room, pulling Rian toward the center. He saw faces in the light—Sera, Kael, Marcus—all distorted, all screaming in binary.

"Is that them?" Rian cried, reaching out. "Are they in the code?"

"They are the code," the voice replied.

Rian’s fingers struck a key, and his entire body glowed with a blinding, terrifying gold. The status screen suddenly flooded his mind with metrics so high they didn't even register as numbers—they were just concepts, equations for infinite power.

‘STATUS: ARCHITECT. SYSTEM_VERSION: OMEGA.’

Rian looked at his hands, watching as they began to disassemble and reassemble, turning into a weaponized, crystalline lattice of pure authority.

"What am I?" Rian whispered, his voice sounding like a thousand people speaking at once.

"You’re the end of the game," the shard replied, its voice finally sounding human—too human. "And now, you have to decide who gets to survive the update."

The floor finally gave way, and Rian fell—not into the dark, but into the center of the system itself, where everything he had ever known was being rewritten, pixel by pixel.

He hit the 'ENTER' key with his mind, and the world screamed.