Spend King: She Left Me, So I Bought Everything
Chapter 63: THE UNION’S PAYDAY & THE STAPLER’S LAST STAND

Chapter 63: THE UNION’S PAYDAY & THE STAPLER’S LAST STAND

A triumphant, if ragged, roar echoed from the direction of the Power Core crater. Tabitha landed heavily nearby, scales scorched black in patches, one wing membrane torn, but her emerald eyes blazing with fierce satisfaction.

Behind her limped the remnants of her union: the minotaur leaning on his desk-club, the phoenix smoldering weakly but upright, sprites buzzing with exhausted pride.

"Core’s slag," Tabitha announced, smoke curling from her nostrils. "Fold’s undone. Stapler’s..." She gestured with her snout towards the center of the plaza.

Stapler Prime lay partially buried under its own collapsed infrastructure. One leg was crumpled into uselessness by the Weaver’s fold, the other twitched spasmodically. Its chromed hull was scorched, dented, and pierced by debris. Its single red photoreceptor flickered erratically, casting dying light across the ruin. A broken, stuttering drone emitted from its speakers:

"F-F-Final F-Fold... t-t-terminated. P-P-Power Core... d-d-destroyed. D-D-Directive... f-f-failed." A shower of sparks erupted from its torso. "S-S-System... cor-cor-corruption... un-un-unacceptable. Ini-Ini-Initiating... S-S-Self... S-S-Scuttling... P-P-Protocol."

A countdown hologram, cracked and glitching, sputtered to life above its broken form: 00:59... 00:58...

Tabitha snorted. "Self-scuttling? Sounds like management skipping out on severance." She turned to her battered crew. "Alright, looters! Union Rule #58: Salvage rights apply post-hostilities! Gemstones, artifacts, anything not nailed down – which is everything – grab it! We earned our goddamn back pay!" The mythicals, despite their wounds, let out a ragged cheer and began scavenging with renewed, if pained, vigor.

[ TABITHA & UNION: VICTORIOUS BUT INJURED | OBJECTIVE: SALVAGE / SURVIVAL ]

[ STAPLER PRIME: CRITICAL DAMAGE | SELF-DESTRUCT COUNTDOWN: 00:57... 00:56... ]

Nishanth forced himself to sit up, gritting his teeth against the pain. The glitching countdown over Stapler Prime pulsed like a dying star. Less than a minute. The blast radius would be catastrophic. He looked at Lilith, still trembling; at Zara shielding the unconscious Weaver from Seraphina’s cold gaze; at Tabitha’s crew obliviously scavenging.

"Lilith," he rasped. "The paper. The memos. Stapler Prime’s systems... you know how they think. How do we stop that?" He gestured weakly at the countdown.

Lilith flinched, pulling her gaze from her own scarred hands. She stared at the dying god-machine, her eyes wide not with fear now, but with a frantic, analytical intensity born of intimate violation. She had been its conduit. She knew its logic, its pathways, the brittle architecture of its bureaucratic mind.

"Scuttling protocol... final directive..." she muttered, her voice gaining strength. "It prioritizes... clean termination. No loose ends. No... unfiled data." Her eyes snapped to the torrent of pink slips Nishanth had jammed into its leg joint earlier – the "Termination Notices" for itself. They were partially fused to the molten metal, fluttering in the dying machine’s tremors. "It can’t terminate... if it’s already terminated! The notices... they’re invalid... but physically present! A paradox in its core logic!"

She scrambled towards the massive, twitching leg, ignoring the shower of sparks. Nishanth tried to follow, crying out as his ribs protested. Lilith reached the wad of pink slips. The countdown hit 00:30...

"Come on, you rustbucket," Lilith hissed, grabbing the edge of a fused notice. "Accept your pink slip!" She shoved the entire wad deeper into the joint, right into the path of a sparking conduit. "YOU’RE FIRED!"

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. Stapler Prime’s photoreceptor flared blindingly bright. The stuttering drone became a shriek of pure, digital agony.

"ER-ER-ERROR! TER-TER-TERMINATION CONFIRMED... BY... SELF? CON-CON-CONTRADICTION! PARADOX DETECTED! SYS-SYS-SYSTEM OVERLOA—"

The shriek cut off. The photoreceptor exploded in a shower of glass and sparks. The countdown hologram vanished. The massive machine gave one final, shuddering convulsion and fell utterly, irrevocably silent. Only the hiss of cooling metal and the crackle of distant fires remained.

Lilith stumbled back, breathing heavily, staring at her hands – the hands that had just killed a god-machine with paperwork. A hysterical, slightly unhinged laugh bubbled up in her throat. "Papercut prophet," she whispered, the laugh dying into something hollow. "I killed it with a clerical error."

[ STAPLER PRIME: DEACTIVATED / DESTROYED (LOGIC BOMB) ]

[ LILITH: TRAUMA COMPLICATED BY GRIM TRIUMPH | NEW DESIGNATION: "PAPERCUT PROPHET" ]

[ IMMEDIATE THREAT: STAPLER PRIME - NEUTRALIZED ]

The silence deepened, now truly settling. The auroras pulsed overhead. Seraphina hadn’t moved, her violet eyes now fixed not just on the Weaver, but on Zara’s static-arm, a flicker of intense curiosity breaking through her possessive fury.

Tabitha landed beside Nishanth, nudging him gently with her snout. "Still breathing, Ex-God?"

"Unfortunately," Nishanth groaned. "Feels like it." He looked around at the devastation, the survivors, the looming figures of Seraphina and the unconscious Weaver. "What now?"

"Now?" Tabitha rumbled, following his gaze. "Now we rebuild. Or run. Or fight the next bastard who thinks they can file us away." She bared her teeth in a feral grin. "Union’s got teeth now. And we’re hiring."

But her eyes, like Nishanth’s, lingered on the Weaver, and on the unnatural purple-green sky. The battle was won, but the Bureau was gone, and the fabric of reality felt thin, scarred, and terribly vulnerable. Mammon was voided, but the void remained – in Zara, in the child, and in the unsettling tear the Weaver had left in the world’s skin. The papercut apocalypse was over.

The ink-stained dawn promised something far more complicated.

The silence after Stapler Prime’s demise was brittle, shattered by the scrape of rubble under Seraphina’s boot. She stood at the edge of the salvage operation, her robes of dried blood and ash seeming to absorb the weak, aurora-stained light.

Her violet eyes, burning with cold intensity, weren’t on the fallen god-machine or the celebrating mythicals. They were fixed solely on Lyra, curled unconscious against Zara’s side, and then, with chilling curiosity, on Zara’s humming static-arm.

"You," Seraphina stated, her voice like stones grinding in a tomb. "You took what was mine. And you broke it."

Zara shifted, a low growl rumbling in her chest. The static along her forearm crackled, reacting to the proximity of Seraphina’s oppressive aura. She positioned her body squarely between the woman and the child. "We pulled her out of Mammon’s jaws. She’s alive. That’s not broken."

"Alive?" Seraphina scoffed, the sound devoid of warmth. "She is a Seam. A living patch stitched over a rend in the fabric of everything. And you, with your clumsy mortal wars and your stolen void..." Her gaze raked over Zara’s arm. "...you have frayed her edges. You have endangered worlds."

Nishanth pushed himself upright, wincing, placing himself slightly ahead of Lilith, who stared at Seraphina with dawning horror mixed with analytical fascination. "Stolen void? What are you talking about?"

Seraphina ignored him, taking a deliberate step forward. The air temperature plummeted. Shadows pooled unnaturally at her feet, thick and viscous like spilled ink. "Give. Her. Back."

Tabitha landed with a thud, smoke curling from her nostrils, placing her massive scaled bulk beside Nishanth. "Back off, Lady Ash-and-Mourning. The kid stays with her people. Union rules."

"Your rules," Seraphina hissed, "are scribbles on ash." She raised a hand, fingers splayed. The pooled shadows at her feet surged.

They weren’t mere darkness. They were liquid contracts, barbed clauses, chains forged from the fine print of existence. They moved with terrifying speed and purpose.

Tabitha: Ink-shadows coiled around her legs and tail, solidifying into chains etched with glowing runes – Article 7: Containment of Non-Compliant Entities. The dragon roared, fire guttering in her throat as the chains bit deep, sapping her strength.

Nishanth & Lilith: Tendrils lashed out, wrapping around their limbs, pinning them against a folded slab of reinforced memo-paper. Nishanth gasped as the cold, binding energy seeped into his bones, triggering phantom pains from his ribs. Lilith choked, her eyes wide as she saw the structure of the attack – it wasn’t magic; it was enforced protocol, a brutal application of systemic power.

The Union: Minotaurs bellowed, sprites shrieked, pinned by smaller, faster tendrils that solidified into manacles stamped "Pending Processing."

Only Zara stood unbounded. The shadows recoiled from her static-arm as if burned. It crackled violently, emitting a high-pitched whine that resonated unnervingly with the energy Seraphina wielded. The void within Zara, the power she’d thought was hers, recognized something.

Seraphina’s impassive mask cracked. Not with anger, but with a terrifying, cold recognition. "Impossible..." she breathed. She took another step, closing the distance in a blink. Her hand shot out, not to strike Zara, but to grasp her wrist – the wrist above the humming static field.

Her touch was like plunging Zara’s arm into liquid nitrogen. It burned with absolute cold. Seraphina’s violet eyes bored into hers, and Zara saw.

Flash:

Not darkness, but crystalline citadels under a sky of swirling, chaotic void-stuff.

Figures robed in light and shadow moving through impossible geometries, maintaining barriers against the hungry nothingness.

Herself – younger, face etched with grim determination, standing before a council of stern Wardens.

A rift – burning, unstable – and her own desperate flight through it, chased by the hungry tendrils of the void, a scream tearing from her throat...

The vision shattered. Zara gasped, staggering back, wrenching her wrist free. The static-arm blazed, throwing off sparks of black and white energy. Seraphina stared at her hand, then back at Zara, her expression a storm of disbelief and ancient fury.

"You..." Seraphina whispered, the grinding-stone voice now laced with venomous shock. "You are a Fracture. One of us. A Void-Warden who fled her post. They sealed you in mortal flesh, buried your power deep... a containment vessel." Her lip curled in disgust. "Mammon didn’t corrupt you, fool. He merely cracked your cage. That power... it was never his. It was the dregs of what you are."

The revelation hit Zara like a physical blow. The whispers, the hunger, the sense of otherness... not Mammon’s taint. Her nature. Sealed away. Broken open. The void wasn’t a weapon she wielded; it was her core.

A weak whimper cut through the tension. Lyra stirred, her eyes fluttering open. They weren’t filled with childlike confusion this time, but with a profound, ancient sadness as they locked onto Seraphina, then Zara. The auroras overhead pulsed violently, shifting from bruised purple and sickly green to a deep, unsettling crimson.

"Mother..." Lyra whispered, the word heavy with sorrow, not affection. "...stop."

Seraphina flinched, a flicker of pain crossing her stony features before hardening again. "You are not my daughter, child. You are the Seam.

The patch I placed over the tear she made!" She pointed a shaking finger at Zara. "Her escape fractured reality! I bound the wound with you, weaving your essence from the void itself to hold the breach! For three centuries, I have guarded you, guarded the tear! And now..." Her voice rose, trembling with a rage born of eons of lonely duty. "...now she returns, dragging chaos in her wake, draining you, weakening the Seam! Give her to me! Before it’s too late!"

To be continued...