The Summoning of Man

The golden light pulsed through my veins, my body burning with power that was both there and not. The world around me—if it could still be called a world—had fractured.

Reality itself had become a battlefield.

And I was its last line of defense.

The thing in the void twisted, flickering in and out of existence, its form never truly settling. It had no eyes, no mouth, no face—just presence.

And it was watching me.

For the first time, it hesitated.

Because it had realized something.

It was no longer fighting a person.

It was fighting something greater.

The System had once bound it. Trapped it. But the System had been rigid, unchanging, unable to truly stop what was beyond its design.

Now, I was the System.

But I was not the same.

I had rewritten it.

And that meant I could rewrite everything.

The golden light roared, spiraling around me like an unstoppable storm, bending the fabric of existence to my will. The laws of the world tore apart, reshaped in ways only I could see.

The thing tried to move.

I did not let it.

A single thought—and the space around it collapsed.

Not just trapping it.

Erasing the very idea of its movement.

It flickered violently, trying to rewrite itself, to slip through the cracks of a world that had once been predictable.

But I wasn't leaving cracks.

I was sealing them shut.

The golden threads tightened, wrapping around the thing that should not exist. It pulsed, fighting against my grasp, pushing at the edges of reality, trying to escape into the gaps of the unseen.

But there were no gaps anymore.

Not in my world.

I clenched my fist, and the golden energy surged, threads of light unraveling and reforming around the entity, locking it in place.

It twisted, shrieked— though not in sound.

The cry rang through the fabric of existence itself.

It was afraid.

I stepped forward, my voice steady, my will unshaken. "This is over."

It writhed, its shifting form distorting, trying to hold itself together. But I wasn't allowing it anymore.

The System had once been a cage. A force that preserved, that held the world static.

But I had changed it.

I had become something new.

The golden light pulsed brighter, filling the shattered space around us, burning away the broken remains of reality's edge.

And the thing in the void—

It started to come apart.

Not like a body being destroyed.

Not like a mind breaking.

Like a mistake being erased.

It tried to push back—tried to sink into what remained of the past.

But there was no past anymore.

I had rewritten it.

And now?

It had nowhere left to go.

The golden light flared, my energy wrapping around it completely, undoing it at its core.

It had existed outside of rules, outside of time, outside of meaning.

But in my world, everything had a place.

And there was no place left for it.

The last remnants of its form flickered— a final, desperate struggle.

And then, in one final breath of golden light—

It was gone.

Not destroyed.

Not dead.

Unmade.

The world around me lurched.

The fractured battlefield—the broken shards of reality that had formed in the wake of our battle—started to collapse.

Not into chaos.

Into something new.

Because for the first time in centuries, the System was whole again.

The golden light dimmed, settling into my skin, into my bones. The air around me stilled, the overwhelming hum of energy fading into silence.

It was over.

I let out a slow breath, my pulse still hammering in my ears, my body still burning from what I had done.

I had not just won.

I had rewritten existence itself.

The woman's voice cut through the quiet. "Josh."

I turned.

She was still there. Alive.

For a moment, she just stared at me, eyes sharp, unreadable. Then, finally, she spoke again. "It's gone."

I nodded. "Yeah."

A pause.

She studied me carefully, her grip tightening around her weapon. "And what does that make you now?"

I exhaled slowly, looking down at my hands. Golden energy still pulsed beneath my skin, faint but ever-present.

I wasn't the same.

Not anymore.

I looked at her. My voice was quiet, steady.

"I don't know."

Because I had destroyed the old System.

I had rewritten the rules.

And now?

I was the only one who could decide what happened next.