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The chrysalis did not shatter.

It came apart the way a thing comes apart when it is being taken apart on purpose: face by face, starting at the bottom, each panel dissolving into a column of falling characters that evaporated before it reached the floor.

Nothing broke. Nothing fell. The shell simply finished, and cleaned up after itself, and stopped being there.

What was left was floating.

It was Gesbiek in the way that a cast is the shape of a hand.

The skin had become metal, flexible and matte, rippling like mercury where the brazier light caught it. Seamless at every joint. No scars, which was the detail that struck Grolm hardest, because that body had been assembled out of seven years of scars and every goblin in the mountain had contributed one.

The eyes opened, and there was nothing in them. No iris and no pupil. Two even orbs of white light.

He came down to the floor without falling, and his feet arrived on the stone without a sound.

The air pressure in the room dropped, all at once, and then settled somewhere lower than it had been.

Ten feet away, Grolm stood absolutely still.

He had been about to strike a corpse. His hindbrain, which had kept him alive for fifty years and had never once been wrong about anything, was telling him something his mouth could not have said.

The thing in front of him had left the food chain. Not above it. Off it.

* * * *

Gesbiek opened his eyes fully, and the world took its clothes off.

The Throne Room walls, five feet of ancient stone, resolved into blue wireframe. He could see the far side of them. Not through them, exactly. He simply understood their dimensions the way you understand your own hand.

The braziers stopped being fire.

They were a three-second loop of orange sprites. Frame one, frame two, frame three, frame one, consuming no fuel because there was no combustion, providing no heat because there was nothing to produce it. The clan had been warming its hands at a decoration for four generations.

Physics floated in the air as annotation. Gravity constants. Friction values. Air pressure recalculating in real time and getting it slightly wrong, because he had changed it by arriving.

The world was not a place. It was a document.

[STATUS: ADMIN (ACTIVE)]
[PERMISSIONS: UNRESTRICTED]
[MANA: ∞ | HEALTH: ∞ | STAMINA: ∞]

The symbols were not decoration and they were not a very large number.

Gesbiek closed a silver fist slowly and paid attention to what he felt, because he wanted to know.

It was not strength. Grolm felt strength, and Gesbiek had watched it happen to him at close range, the heat and the swelling and the joy of it.

This was permission.

Strength was a variable. Durability was a parameter. Level was a counter that went up when told.

The difference was not *I am strong*.

The difference was *I decide what strong means*, and Gesbiek was still turning that over when Grolm reminded him that not everybody in the room had undergone a philosophical transformation.

* * * *

The Warlord roared and swung the axe.

It was all he had. It was all he had ever had, and it had worked on everything for fifty years.

The blade came round in a killing arc toward Gesbiek's neck, and to Gesbiek it moved like something being poured.

He could count the rotations. He could see individual drops of sweat leaving Grolm's brow and beginning their separate journeys.

He did not dodge.

He looked at the space between his neck and the axe and thought one word at it.

*Pause.*

BOOM.

Time stopped, with a sound like an iron door closing somewhere very large.

The axe hung three inches from his throat. The sweat drops held in the air like beads on invisible thread. The brazier flames became sculptures of themselves. The dust stopped drifting and simply occupied space.

Gesbiek walked around the axe blade and looked at it from the other side.

Then he walked around Grolm, taking his time.

In this state the Warlord looked small. Not physically, because he was still seven feet of muscle mid-swing, but small in some other dimension: a statue of a goblin doing the only thing he knew how to do, at a thing that could not be affected by it.

Gesbiek felt no fear at all. What he felt was closer to the interest of somebody opening a machine to find out how it had been assembled.

Then, because he could, he looked past the walls.

The mountain was wireframe. Beyond it the camp lay open to him in one piece: four hundred and thirty-one goblins held in mid-motion, each one carrying a small readout, almost all of them amber or red. The bone pit with its forty-two. A cooking fire with a femur in it. Two Ogres at a doorway, frozen in the middle of an argument about a draught.

He could see every one of them at once, and none of them had ever been able to see any of this, and that was not their fault. It had simply never been available.

Somewhere out past the camp there was a ridge, and a scree field of fallen markers, and one that somebody had stacked with a little care. Gesbiek did not look in that direction, and was aware of not looking.

He looked down at himself while the world held.

The silver body was generic. Featureless. Correct in every anatomical particular and blank in all the rest, the way a thing is blank before anybody has decided anything about it.

That would not do.

He opened a menu with a thought and pulled the sliders back.

The silver went under the surface rather than away, settling beneath like a second layer. His skin came back green, deep and rich, considerably better green than he had ever managed on his own. The tattered loincloth dissolved and something replaced it, black and unmoving, that did not respond to air currents because it was not made of anything that had opinions about air.

He restored the leg. It filled in from the knee down while he watched, bone and muscle and skin arriving in that order.

Then he brought the height down.

Four and a half feet had been the forest's doing, laid on him a level at a time without his ever once asking for it. He took it back off in a single pass. Three feet. The shoulders narrowed. The ribs came up under the green in the places where the ribs had always been, and he left them there.

He wanted to be recognisable. That was the whole reason for the work.

Not a silver stranger. Gesbiek, who had carried buckets. Grolm was going to know exactly who was doing this to him.

* * * *

He went back to the frozen Warlord and put a hand on the twin shards.

In stopped time they felt like glass. Cold, hard, inert, entirely unlike the living things that had headbutted him in the face an hour ago.

He looked deeper, and found what was actually holding them together.

[DRIVER: RED_RESONANCE]
[VERSION: 2.3.4]
[STATUS: RUNNING]
[UPTIME: 2,690 DAYS]

Seven years and change of continuous operation. It had never crashed, never been updated, never been examined by anybody, because until tonight nobody in the world had possessed the means to look at it.

The whole of Grolm's supremacy, the Lieutenants eaten and the brother killed and the clan starved down to bark, was a process that had been running quietly in the background this entire time.

Not a gift from anything. Not a birthright. Not the natural order asserting itself through the strongest available goblin, which was the only theory of the world Grolm had ever held.

A driver. Version 2.3.4. Somebody had made three revisions to it at some point and had not thought it worth mentioning to anyone.

Gesbiek selected it.

A menu opened.

[OPEN] [EDIT] [DISABLE] [DELETE] [PROPERTIES]

He looked at the fourth option for a moment.

Delete would end it. Not the driver, the shards. Grolm would be a large goblin standing in a room, and would go on being one for perhaps ten more seconds, and the entire matter would be closed before time resumed.

Gesbiek chose the third one instead, and did not fully examine his reasons for it, and part of the reason was that he wanted his uncle awake for what came next.

[ARE YOU SURE?]

He was.

A small grey mark appeared over Grolm's chest and the connection went out, silently, before time had resumed.

Then he opened his own properties, found the line he wanted, and set damage reception to disabled.

A golden shield glimmered above his head for a moment and faded.

He stepped back into the path of the axe.

He took some care over the positioning, aligning his forehead exactly where the blade was going to arrive, which by any ordinary standard was an extremely poor place to stand, and by the standard now applying was the best available seat in the room.

He raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

* * * *

Time came back with a rush of pressure, and Grolm's roar resumed exactly where it had been interrupted, a syllable he had begun in a different world.

The axe finished its swing with everything a 2-Red body could put behind it.

The blade struck Gesbiek square in the forehead.

CLANG.

It was the loudest sound the mountain had ever made. Dust came off the ceiling. The brazier loops flickered out of sequence and reset.

Gesbiek's head did not move.

Not a fraction. Not a tremor. The blade had arrived at something that had no opinion about being struck.

The axe shattered.

A thousand fragments of masterwork steel went outward in every direction, and the energy that had been travelling forward, having nowhere else to be, came back down the haft.

Grolm's wrists broke. His elbows went past the angle they were built for. Both shoulders came out of their sockets with two wet sounds a fraction apart.

His arms dropped and hung wrong.

He stared at Gesbiek's forehead.

There was not a mark on it. Not a scratch, not a redness, not a depression in the skin. Perfect green, entirely unbothered.

Grolm looked down at his own ruined hands, and then reached for his chest.

He put his palm over the twin shards and called for the aura, the way he had called for it ten thousand times, the way a goblin reaches for his own heartbeat.

Nothing came.

They were still there. He could feel them under his hand. They were cold, and heavy, and they were not doing anything at all.

"What," Grolm said, and his voice did something it had never done in his life. "What are you?"

Gesbiek answered, and his voice had changed.

It came out as three at once, layered and slightly out of phase: something deep underneath, something flat and level in the middle, and above both a thin synthetic tone that had never been produced by a throat. The three of them interfered with each other and made harmonics, and the result arrived inside Grolm's skull as much as in his ears.

"I am the update."

The words moved dust on the floor.

* * * *

Gesbiek looked around the chamber.

Craters in the floor. Three pillars gone. Bone shrapnel across everything, cracks up the walls, the stone dais split, ash where the Totem had stood.

It offended him. Not morally. Structurally. It was untidy in a way that his new senses reported as an error condition.

He moved one hand.

[RESTORE_ENVIRONMENT: THRONE_ROOM]

White light went out from him in a sphere, and everything it touched put itself back.

Pillar fragments flew home and rejoined along the lines they had broken on. Cracks closed. Floor tiles straightened themselves and the gaps between them shut. The dust did not settle; it stopped existing. The bone shrapnel dissolved into white particles and evaporated.

It took under ten seconds, and then the Throne Room was pristine, and it looked precisely as it had looked when Gesbiek had been dragged into it two years ago by the back of the neck.

Grolm stood in the middle of the clean floor holding a broken stick.

He had spent his life fighting things. Warriors, beasts, brothers, challengers, all of them things that could be hit.

He was now standing in front of something that had decided the floor should exist.

Gesbiek crossed to the Throne of Skulls and sat down on it.

He did it casually, one arm over the rest, legs crossed, the way you sit in a chair that belongs to you and has for some time.

He looked down at his uncle.

Then he moved one finger, perhaps an inch.

Grolm's knees folded.

He fought it. Everything he had went into not going down, every remaining scrap of a body built over fifty years, and it made no difference whatsoever, because the question was not being settled by strength.

He knelt on the floor of his own throne room.

Gesbiek leaned forward slightly.

"You loved your levels, uncle."

The three voices came down off the throne and filled the space.

"You loved being large. You loved being feared. You loved the number, and the two lights, and the way rooms went quiet."

He let that sit.

"Let us see who you are without them."

Gesbiek raised his hand, and spread his fingers, and opened the menu.