Chapter Three: Glitchborn
The night bled red.
Clouds pulsed like veins in the sky, and the Aether moon—sickly and cracked—hung over Houston like an unblinking eye.
Kael didn’t sleep.
He sat alone on the hotel rooftop, the wind whispering through shattered concrete and rebar, Reaver Slash pulsing faintly in his hand.
Evie slept below, curled in a pile of jackets.
The others? Watching. Waiting.
He felt it.
They hadn’t forgiven him.
Not for stopping the kill.
Not for unlocking his Aether without blood.
Something in the system didn’t like that either.
His card was flickering again. Unstable. The edges of the glyphs glitching like static. Like it was waiting for something.
Then—cold swept through his spine.
Kael stood slowly.
Something was coming.
And it wasn’t human.
***
Below.
The betrayal came with a whisper.
Wren approached Evie, smiling gently. "Hey. Kael sent me. Says we’re moving. Too dangerous to stay."
She blinked, sleepy, trusting.
Until Kara stepped from the shadows—gun raised. Cold. Mechanical.
“Time’s up, kid.”
***
Rooftop.
Kael heard it.
Not the scream. Not the gun.
The card.
It surged in his chest like a detonating star.
[SUMMON ACTIVE]
Override: GLITCHBORN ENTITY – STATUS: UNSTABLE | UNFILTERED | UNCHAINED
Initiating direct defense protocol…
WARNING: SYSTEM REJECTION IMMINENT
Reality ripped.
Not glitched—fractured.
The summon didn’t appear. It erupted—unfolding like a digital nightmare from Kael’s shadow. No longer half-formed or flickering.
Now it was complete.
Towering. Blade-limbed. Masked in shifting code. Its body swirled with corrupted data, limbs reshaping endlessly. Not a beast. Not a soldier.
A glitch. A mistake the system couldn’t delete.
It turned its featureless head to Kael and knelt.
Not a summon.
A servant.
***
Lobby.
"One card. That's all you have. You're worthless." Kara raised the gun, eyes cold. "But a warning shot? That sends a message. Let this be a lesson—no one defies my orders."
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
No bullet.
No time.
The summon descended.
Through the ceiling. Through space.
It hit the ground in silence—too fast, too wrong—and the air itself warped around it. Walls shattered. The floor cracked. The system screamed in Kael’s mind:
UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY DETECTED.
ERASURE FAILED.
ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.
Wren screamed. Kara fired.
Bullets passed through the summon like light through smoke.
It moved. Fast.
Kara was the first to fall—cut from collarbone to hip by a blade of pure data. She never even had time to scream. Her card dropped, flickering. Forgotten.
The others panicked. Ran. Fused decks mid-combat.
Useless.
The summon tore through them, unstoppable. Not elegant. Not efficient.
Brutal.
***
Kael stumbled into the lobby just as the last survivor hit the ground, his face locked in a scream, his deck incinerated by the glitch’s touch.
Only Wren remained.
Bleeding. Whimpering. “We didn’t… we didn’t know—”
Kael stood over him.
The summon loomed behind, glitching violently.
“I didn’t want this,” Kael said. “But you made it happen.”
The system whispered:
Finish him. Collect the drop. Ascend.
Kael looked at his card.
At Evie—crying in the corner.
At the corpses of people who’d stopped being people the moment power mattered more than mercy.
He turned away.
“Let him crawl.”
The summon twitched—and vanished.
Kael walked to Evie. Helped her stand. She clung to him, trembling.
“You’re not like them,” she whispered.
Kael didn’t answer.
Because part of him was.
The summon had answered his blood—not his command.
And the system hadn’t summoned it.
He had.
Not a player.
Not a summoner.
An anomaly.
A glitch in the game.
And somewhere in the static of the ruined world, something watching whispered back:
The anomaly grows.
Purge protocols initiating.
The air was still—too still.
Kael stood in the ruins of the hotel lobby, surrounded by the dead.
The survivors who turned on him. The ones who chose power over people. Kara’s body slumped near the scorched stairs, her fingers still curled around the weapon she’d raised against a child.
Wren was the last to die—crawling, sobbing, begging.
Kael hadn’t swung the blade. The Glitchborn had.
But the result was the same.
Their blood soaked the floor. Their cards floated in the still air, glowing like fireflies—unclaimed.
Kael stared at them.
Five. Maybe six.
All Rare tier or higher.
He felt sick.
Then he stepped forward—and took them.
One by one, the cards sank into his hand, each whispering their power into his mind. Some screamed. Some laughed. One wept. But all of them accepted him.
The system responded instantly.
[CARD ACQUIRED: CHAINFIRE DISC – Rare | Cipher Type]
[CARD ACQUIRED: VOIDSTEP – Rare | Event Type]
[CARD ACQUIRED: GLASS WARD – Rare | Relic Type]
[CARD ACQUIRED: BLOODHOUND – Epic | Summon Type]
[CARD ACQUIRED: GRAVEPULSE – Rare | Event Type]
His deck filled.
Five glowing slots burned in his chest now—each linked to a card that pulsed with stolen potential.
BATTLE DECK STATUS: FULL
AETHER POOL: 90/100
DECK TRAITS: HYBRID COMBAT / SHADOW INFILTRATION / SUMMON SYNERGY
MORAL PENALTY: NONE
Kael narrowed his eyes at that last line.
None?
He’d taken cards from the dead. But the system didn’t punish him. It didn’t care how he’d earned them.
Only that he had.
Kael looked at the corpses again. Not with sorrow. Not even regret.
Just resolve.
“Your power won’t be wasted.”
Then the system whispered:
Unregistered kills logged. Anomaly activity detected. Purge protocol preparing…
Kael turned his head toward the window.
The sky cracked.
And the Null Angel descended.
Seconds later—
They ran.
***
Kael carried Evie across rooftops and through smoke-clogged alleys, a spear of light vaporizing the building behind them. Every time he thought he’d lost the Angel, it appeared again—hovering, humming, judging.
Kael dropped from a collapsed skywalk and rolled, dragging Evie behind a wrecked ambulance.
The card in his hand pulsed—Chainfire Disc. He summoned it mid-fall, launching a spinning wheel of plasma behind them. It struck a wall and ricocheted—blasting a path through rubble.
They ran through the flames.
[AETHER: 72/100]
Kael didn’t stop.
They burst out onto the freeway—what was left of it. Cars twisted into each other like metal sculptures. Beyond the wreckage, the city fell away—endless lights flickering in the corrupted skyline.
Then his summon responded.
The Glitchborn didn’t erupt this time. It stepped from Kael’s shadow, fully formed, silent and focused. No distortion. No chaos.
It looked at Kael.
Then pointed—to the horizon.
A pulse flared across Kael’s card.
Coordinates.
A signal.
A beacon locked in the genetic signature of his bloodline.
Searching… searching… MATCH FOUND.
ISLA MERCER – STATUS: ALIVE
Location: South Gulf Region | Signal Source: THE GATE
His heart stopped.
Isla. His sister. Alive.
He didn’t ask how. He didn’t care.
“Evie!” he shouted, hoisting her up. “We’re not running anymore. We’re heading south.”
“Why?” she cried. “Why there?”
Kael looked at the Glitchborn.
And for the first time, it spoke—not with voice, but with understanding.
The Gate waits. And the system fears what lies behind it.
Behind them, the Null Angel descended again—its wings spreading wide, code unraveling like scripture from a dead god.
It launched its spear—
Kael activated Voidstep.
[CARD ACTIVATED: VOIDSTEP – Blink 20m, immunity during phase]
[AETHER: 61/100]
The world blinked. Kael and Evie vanished—reappearing on the next rooftop, smoke curling behind them.
He didn’t look back.
He didn’t need to.
The system had marked him.
The survivors had turned on him.
The monsters had failed to kill him.
And now, Kael Mercer was armed, angry—
—and heading straight for the Gate.
Where his family might still live.
Where the system’s truth waited to be torn open.
And where everything was going to burn.
