Chapter 72 Revision War II

The timer showed nine seconds, a queue of unowned damage waiting beneath it, with the gray construct planted between workbench and cabinet.

Damien did not attack it, since attacking had produced four reverted hits and a floor that forgot his footing.

He put the Sinner’s Brand on it instead, which was a skill built for living debtors and nothing else.

[Sinner’s Brand: target invalid]

[Construct carries no ledger]

’Of course it does not, damn, there is no body, no blood, nothing resembling an account, so the brand finds nowhere to write.’

The Proofreader raised its hand toward the Stay again, Damien let it happen, and he watched the correction this time instead of the timer.

The gray fingers closed around an event that had not finished, the queue began sliding backward, and inside that half second the system printed something entirely new.

[Correction in progress]

[Actor: Proofreader-class construct]

[Liability: 900, unassigned]

’There, yeah, while it is holding the edit, the edit belongs to it, and that is a ledger entry with a hand attached.’

He branded it inside that half second, the red sigil bit into gray cloth exactly as it bites skin.

[Sinner’s Brand applied to active correction]

[Debtor: Proofreader-class construct]

[Liability assigned: 900]

[Interest: ×1.2 per exchange, doubled by brand]

The construct stopped moving for the first time all evening in a way that had nothing to do with confusion, and its blank face came fully around toward him.

’It felt that, yeah, whatever passes for nerves inside a filing cabinet just registered an unpaid invoice.’

"Whatever you just did, its hand is shaking and constructs do not have hands that shake," Mina said from behind the barrier line.

"It owes me nine hundred points for a repair job it performed without asking, and now it is holding the invoice," Damien answered.

The obvious escape was to finish the reversion and let the event vanish, so the Proofreader tried exactly that, which was the mistake he had been waiting on since the vise.

Finishing the correction completed an action, which counts as an event, and everything happening in this room now carried a price written underneath in his handwriting.

[Correction completed]

[Debt: 900 → 1,080 with interest]

The construct reached for that entry to revert it, which became a fresh correction, a finished action, one more line on the same account.

[Correction attempted: recursive]

[Debt: 1,080 → 1,296]

[Debt: 1,296 → 1,555]

’It cannot stop, since undoing the debt creates the debt, shit, it is auditing itself into bankruptcy and it does not know how to quit.’

Mina held her console up with her mouth open, watching a figure rise on Verdict’s tally faster than any student in Halcrest ever saw.

"Hey, your cap is twelve forty and my console reads fifteen fifty-five, so tell me which of those numbers is lying," she called.

"Neither, since the cap governs what my body holds and this debt is standing over there wearing a coat," Damien replied.

The Proofreader tried a fourth reversion, then a fifth, the workshop lights failed each time with a sound like paper dragged over a blade.

On the sixth, its right arm came apart at the elbow into gray flakes that tried reassembling themselves and failed halfway through.

’Six corrections and it has audited its own limb off, damn, this thing cannot stop working any more than I can stop counting.’

[Debt: 1,555 → 1,866]

[Debtor integrity: failing]

[Reckoning available]

Damien took the Sterling draw position with the tally running full gold along Verdict’s flat, the light in the room went the color of a struck match.

"Down behind the bench, since this is going through the wall, preferably only one of them," he said.

Mina dropped, and Blank flattened itself against the floorboards with its edges gone completely still for the first time all evening.

Reckoning released in a single horizontal cut that took the construct across the middle and kept going into the eastern wall.

[RECKONING - 1,866 Debt × 2.0 = 3,732]

[Verdict conductance +20% = 4,478]

The Proofreader came apart without a sound, nothing reverted, every piece staying precisely broken in the shape it landed.

The wall behind it opened onto the annex corridor, which was going to be a difficult conversation with facilities in roughly nine hours.

’Well, that is one construct, one wall and one carpet, yeah, the invoice for the room is still cheaper than what it charged me.’

[Death Flag survived: Proofreader-class]

[All rewards ×10]

[System Points: +6,000]

[Bonus: Correction bounty, +5,900]

[Item acquired: Page Fragment]

’Eleven thousand nine hundred points off one gray bureaucrat, yeah, the script sent it here, which means the script funded me again.’

The fragment lay in the wreckage where the construct’s chest had been, a single piece of paper about the size of a hand, heavy as a coin.

It had a torn left edge, a clean right edge, and eleven lines of text in a typeface that made Damien’s eyes water when he tried to hold them still.

Mina did not touch the thing at all, setting the paired custody case down beside it instead, photographing the whole arrangement twice before anything moved.

"That is evidence and not loot, so nobody picks it up with a bare hand until it has a custody number," she said.

"You have started treating pieces of the script like a crime scene," Damien answered, crouching to read what he could.

"Every fragment we have found came out of something that tried to erase a person, and my authorship records are eleven feet from this one," Mina replied.

’She is right, she got there without knowing a single mechanic, damn, she just reasoned her way into the truth from the paperwork side.’

The eleven lines described a room holding one desk, with a manuscript open across it, corrections already marked down the margin.

The text named nobody at all, referencing a revision cycle, an approval, then one phrase Damien had never seen inside two thousand Chapters of a novel he finished twice.

One line near the torn edge read The Editor’s Desk declines the second appeal, in a typeface that hurt to hold still.

’Two thousand Chapters and that line appears in none of them, shit, this did not come out of the book, it came out of whatever was writing the book.’

He read it a fourth time while his hands stayed carefully off the paper, feeling the same crawl he had felt reading black-gold columns on a chamber wall.

’A second appeal means there was a first one, damn, somebody in that room has already argued about this world once and lost.’

Blank came off the floorboards, walked to the edge of the custody case, then produced a sound nobody there had heard before, low, unhappy, very old.

The creature would not go near the fragment, sitting down facing it with rigid edges, refusing to move, which read as recognition rather than fear.

"Your familiar has met that handwriting before and it did not enjoy the introduction," Mina said, sealing the case lid.

"It hatched out of a fate anomaly, so whatever wrote that page is closer to family than anything else in this room," Damien answered.

The batch numbers posted while Mina sealed the case, and Damien read them standing in a workshop with a hole in the eastern wall.

[Level: 700]

[Experience: 298,000 / 700,000]

[System Points: 25,300 → 37,200]

[Divergence: 33%]

[Foreknowledge Integrity: 67%]

[Ascension Board: 11 → 8]

[Debt held: 0]

The last entry arrived four minutes later, it did not concern the fragment, the construct or the wall.

[Script Page purchased Ch.59: corrupted timing resolved]

[Marlowe frame: active now]

Damien read that line twice, then took the stairs at a dead run toward the courtyard where Isolde waited with a report she had not finished writing.