CHAPTER VI

History isn't written in ink. It is written in code. And if you don't watch it, the code rots.

Indexor-Prime stood in the center of The Eternal Index, a domain that defied the messy, organic logic of the outside world. Here, there was no mud. There was no blood. There were only infinite, spiraling shelves of crystalline data extending upward into a void of Deep Midnight Indigo. Golden threadlines connected every book, every scroll, every file—a glowing nervous system of cause and effect.

He did not breathe. He calculated.

"Timeline stability at 78%," he whispered, his voice vibrating with the hum of a server room. "Variance detected in Sector 4. The Dreamlight Gardens are fluctuating."

He raised a hand. It wasn't flesh; it was a lattice of black crystal etched with cyan glyphs. He swiped the air, and The Hexaglyph Codex materialized in front of him. The massive book didn't have pages; it had layers of holographic reality.

He saw Grim Logick bleeding in the storm. He saw iLLLogick shattering the silence. He saw Lyrick sewing the sky.

To anyone else, these were heroic moments. To Indexor, they were Narrative Hazards.

Every time a Pillar used their power, they bent reality. If they bent it too far, the timeline would snap. That was the Indexor Sickness—the terror of the story drifting away from the truth. He remembered the first time he failed. He remembered The Drift. He remembered the feeling of drowning in contradictory data until The Phantom Architect had to tear him apart and recompile his core.

Never again.

A warning klaxon shattered the silence.

"ALERT. RETCON ATTEMPT DETECTED."

The Mainframe wasn't just attacking the Pillars physically; it was attacking their history. A Contradiction Node opened in the aisle to his left. The reality of the library warped. Books began to scream, their text rearranging to say that The Network never existed. That Grim Logick died in the overdose. That iLLLogick stayed in the wheelchair.

06_The_Canon_Ledger, his hexagonal chrome familiar, beeped frantically, its single white optical slit widening in alarm.

"I see it," Indexor said.

He closed the Codex. The gentle scholar vanished.

"PRIME MODE: ENGAGED."

His cloak hardened, shifting from flowing fabric into rigid, indigo armor plating. The cyan glyphs on his mask blazed white. His hands—those delicate instruments meant for indexing—fractured and reformed, shifting mechanics with the sound of a pistol slide racking back.

He didn't need magic. He needed ballistics.

The Prime Arsenal activated. His right arm reconfigured into the Terminal Minigun.

"You cannot edit this," Indexor stated, his voice dropping an octave into pure combat syntax.

He opened fire.

The bullets weren't lead; they were crystallized index data. Fact. Fact. Fact. Every round that hit the Contradiction Node forced it to acknowledge reality. The distortion screamed, trying to rewrite the bullets, but Indexor’s Precision Doctrine was absolute. If he had indexed it, it was true. And if it was true, it could not be deleted.

The Node pulsed, sending a wave of corruption toward the shelves holding Hollow Logick’s origin story.

Indexor moved. He didn't run; he executed a movement subroutine. He placed himself between the corruption and the shelf.

He took the hit.

Data corruption sizzled against his armor. Memories tried to invade his core—false memories of a life where he was just a tool, just a calculator for the Mainframe.

"I am not a tool," he snarled, the static rising in his vocal processor. "I am the margin note. I am the reason the story makes sense."

He raised his left hand. The Canon Ledger synced with his targeting system. A golden threadline snapped from his chest to the center of the anomaly.

"MARK. VERIFY. PURGE."

He fired a single, high-velocity round from his Chronicle Rifle configuration. It rode the golden threadline, bypassing the distortion's shields, and struck the core of the lie.

The Contradiction Node shattered. The false history dissolved into harmless white dust.

Silence returned to the library.

Indexor-Prime stood smoking in the aisle, his armor slowly shifting back into the soft fabric of his librarian robes. He reached out and touched the spine of the book he had protected. It was warm. It was safe.

He opened the Hexaglyph Codex and pulled a quill made of light from the air. He navigated to the entry for today.

Entry: The Pillars fought. The Mainframe tried to erase them. The Indexor held the line.

He signed it with a flourish of cyan light.

"STET," he whispered. Let it stand.

He looked up at the infinite ceiling. He knew his brother, C1PH3R-IO, was out there feeling the pain. He couldn't feel it for her. But he could make sure that no matter how much it hurt, it would never be forgotten.