Chapter 1: Glitch in the Cradle.part 3
845 Words
Jordan had fought bosses before. Twitchy AI. Over clocked enemies. Hell, he once soloed a final dungeon while half-asleep. But this?
This wasn’t boss fight music and respawn chances.
This was life or death.
Aya didn’t wait for him to freeze.
She shoved a device into his palm — rough, compact, pulsing like a live heartbeat. “EMP node. Kills the signal feed for sixty seconds. It won’t stop it, but it'll blind it. Use it to move.”
Jordan blinked. “I’ve never fought anything in real life.”
“Welcome to permadeath mode, Valor,” she snapped, then dove behind a fallen skybus.
The skeletal entity, labeled [DEBUG HUNTER_00], let out a distortion shriek. Its steps left data cracks in the ground. One misstep and Jordan would probably evaporate — or worse, sync.
His HUD returned. This time, something was different.
> SYSTEM UPDATE
Skill Unlocked: Instinctive Survival (Passive)
Description: “When all else fails, the body remembers. Dodge with 90% reaction success when health is below 10%.”
That wasn’t in any game he’d ever played.
The moment it moved, he moved.
The creature struck — a wide sweep of glitch tendrils. Jordan ducked, pivoted, the world dragging in slow-motion around his decision. Sparks flew from the concrete as code split like a wound.
Aya threw the EMP.
The flash wasn’t light — it was silence. The enemy’s form distorted, its joints cracking inward like a skipped frame.
“RUN!” she screamed.
But Jordan didn’t.
Something in him clicked. Like an ancient command line, buried in his blood, had just been reactivated.
He dashed forward.
A button appeared in the air: [ALT. ACTION — IMPACT STRIKE UNLOCKED]
He reached out — and the device in his hand reshaped. Became a haptic blade. A digital weapon made real. Like he summoned code from inside himself.
The moment it connected with the creature’s core, light exploded. Code rained from the sky like pixels caught in gravity. The hunter let out a final corrupted shriek:
> “FINAL PLAYER PATH… INITIATED…”
Then it disintegrated.
---
Jordan collapsed to his knees.
Aya rushed to him, scanning for damage. “How the hell did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” he gasped. “I just… moved.”
She stared at him for a long second, then whispered:
“You’re not just unsynced. You’re something else.”
---
They found temporary cover in a crumbled mall — its glass dome flickering between broken advertisements and live warzone feeds. Aya explained quickly: the world had been undergoing background system updates for years. No one noticed.
The Merge was the culmination — a blending of virtual and real to form a controlled singularity. But the program had bugs. Jordan was one of them.
A Final Player. A rogue variable.
“You’re the last chance we have of crashing the System from the inside,” she said.
Jordan looked out at the city — twisted, digitized, half-swallowed by code. People were vanishing or rebooting in place. Resistance fighters were few, fragmented, hunted.
“I’m no hero,” he said quietly.
Aya stared. “You don’t have to be.”
---
They moved again after sundown.
That’s when the real horrors came out. Pixelborn beasts. Codewraiths. And the Echoes — digital shadows of people who’d once been real, now trapped in infinite loops of their last moments.
Jordan and Aya avoided them narrowly. Every block was a puzzle. Every movement, a test of reflex and timing. But with every step, Jordan’s body felt sharper. The world responded to him differently.
Like it recognized him.
Or feared him.
---
In the ruins of a gaming café, Jordan found a shattered monitor still running a system diagnostic. He tapped the screen.
> FINAL PLAYER
Reality Manipulation Skill: [Locked — Requires Trigger]
Survival Rate: 12%
Lives Remaining: 1
Active Objective: Reach the Signal Origin
Underneath it, a new message flickered:
> “Even in destruction… hope is always a choice.”
He didn’t know where it came from. But it hit him hard.
Somewhere deep inside, something woke up.
And then, as Aya slept beside the campfire, he whispered to himself:
> “Maybe I’m not meant to survive this.”
“Maybe I’m meant to change it.”
He clenched his fists.
Final Player wasn’t a title.
It was a sentence.
- Writer
