Chapter 13: Glitch
Elsa was crying too. She kept rubbing at her eyes as if she could erase the tears by force alone, while her other hand hovered over the sleeping hatchling, close enough to touch but never quite making contact.
"It’s tiny," she managed through a sniffle. "Just look at it. It’s absolutely perfect. I’m going to train it harder than anything. It’ll grow into the strongest beast in the whole Ring." She wiped her nose. "It needs a proper name. Something powerful. Something that sounds dangerous."
"Aurelius," Arthur answered without hesitation, his voice rough.
Elsa made a face. "That sounds like somebody’s grandfather."
Arthur smiled faintly. "It was the name of a great beast."
He offered nothing else, and he didn’t have to. His old partner. The one he’d lost in the ambush ten years earlier, the same day he lost his leg and the life he’d known.
Her expression softened for a moment before she rallied again.
"Then I vote for Onyx. Or... Shadowfang. Nightclaw. Something people will actually fear."
Arthur frowned. "Nightclaw?"
"It sounds awesome."
"It sounds like a bargain-bin mercenary."
Jin lowered his eyes to the little black hatchling drooling peacefully across his shirt.
"...Glitch."
Nobody spoke.
Elsa blinked at him.
"That is an awful name."
Arthur wiped at his face again and gave a tired shrug. "I’ve heard worse."
"It’s not even a real word," Elsa complained. "What’s it even supposed to mean? Glitch? Seriously?"
A memory surfaced in Jin’s mind: a screen covered in black squares where an empty menu should have been. A number increasing where nobody else could see it. Something hidden beneath something harmless.
"It means there’s something running underneath that isn’t supposed to be," he said. "And nobody notices."
Three identical blank stares answered him.
The hatchling stirred at the sound of their voices. It raised its head, blinked its golden eyes at the three of them...
...then chirped twice, cheerful as ever.
Arthur let out a damp chuckle.
"Looks like it approves."
Elsa threw both hands into the air.
"Fine. Glitch it is. But when it grows into some legendary war-beast and everyone asks what it’s called, I’m telling them its real name is Nightclaw."
That settled it.
The very next thing Elsa did was snap a picture and send it to the family chat. As always during Elena’s hydroponics shift, the reply came back immediately.
Delivery queued until shift break.
"Mom’s going to cry," Elsa said with certainty.
Arthur shook his head.
"No. Your mother is going to ask why we named him after broken software."
Eventually everyone drifted back toward bed. Arthur stopped in the doorway twice, glancing back at the cradle each time, almost as though looking away for too long might somehow undo the night.
Outside the ventilation grates, the sky had faded into the dull purple-grey the Ring called dawn.
Glitch slept through it all, now curled up on the incubator’s warm felt with its tail tucked over its nose.
Sitting cross-legged in the pale morning light, Jin picked up his phone.
He disabled the perception filter.
The harmless puzzle game disappeared.
The Engine was waiting underneath.
He aimed it at the sleeping hatchling.
A thin scan of light swept over the tiny black body.
The display filled with text.
[Synchronization Successful.]
Species: Grey Rock Lizard (Mutant)
Hidden Bloodline: Detected
Status: Dormant
Compatibility: Perfect
Nothing else appeared.
No percentages.
No dramatic wall of hidden information.
No explanation of the dormant Sub-Dragon bloodline. No list of future abilities. No awakening requirements. Nothing about the faint violet lines hidden beneath Glitch’s scales.
Just four plain lines confirming something nobody else inside the shelter could possibly know.
The rock had never been empty.
It only looked that way.
Jin breathed out slowly.
To everyone else, Glitch would simply be an oddly coloured lizard. As long as he could protect that secret, it would stay that way.
"Yeah," he murmured. "Let’s keep it between us."
He’d expected today to be miserable from exhaustion.
He wasn’t wrong.
The problem was that Glitch apparently only had two operating modes.
Completely unconscious.
Or complete menace.
Around the middle of the morning, fully rested, it switched.
First it woke up.
Then it stretched.
Then it rolled straight off the incubator.
After deciding that falling wasn’t actually a problem, it wandered off to investigate the apartment.
Jin watched over the top of his phone while his first real companion carried out what looked like a very serious research expedition.
Glitch spent half a minute sniffing one table leg.
It tried climbing onto the table, reached about a third of the way up the chair, and slowly slid back down on its stomach.
Then it discovered Arthur.
Arthur was still asleep in the chair, boots on, too exhausted to make it to bed.
Glitch froze.
Locked onto the left boot.
Stalked closer with all the focus of a hunter confronting worthy prey.
Then it bit it.
The boot, being a boot, remained completely unimpressed.
Glitch growled anyway.
It made a tiny buzzing rasp, shook its head fiercely as though wrestling a monster ten times bigger, abruptly lost interest, rolled onto its back, and lay there with all four legs pointing into the air looking completely satisfied with life.
Jin couldn’t quite suppress a smile.
Then his eyes dropped back to the phone.
His expression stopped changing.
The tutorial dungeon avatar was different.
Gone was the plain grey lizard.
Now the tiny pixel creature was black.
Gold eyes.
A tail just a little too long.
Two small bumps on its head.
It was Glitch.
Not similar.
Exactly Glitch.
The instant Jin looked at it, the avatar stopped idling.
It turned.
Faced the screen.
Faced him.
Alert.
Watching.
Recognising him.
There was no tutorial message.
No explanation.
The creature inside the game simply knew him, exactly the same way the hatchling had known him the moment it broke out of the shell.
Same soul.
Two windows.
Almost on cue, the real Glitch rolled upright, sat back on its feet, and looked at him as well.
One on the screen.
One on the floor.
Both waiting.
He really should have gone to sleep.
Instead, acting on an impulse he couldn’t explain, Jin lifted the phone so he could see both the display and the hatchling at once.
He entered a single command.
The first real order he’d ever given a beast that truly belonged to him.
"Dodge."
Inside the dungeon, the avatar snapped sideways in one smooth movement, the same perfectly drilled dodge it had performed countless times.
At almost the same instant—
Glitch jerked in exactly the same direction.
Nothing threatened it.
There was no slime.
No enemy.
Only morning light and Arthur asleep in his chair.
Even so, the hatchling shifted sharply to the left, matching the movement on the screen with uncanny precision before blinking at itself in mild confusion.
Jin didn’t move.
He already knew the synchronization flowed from the game into the beast.
He’d watched the egg darken day after day because of it.
What he’d never imagined, what nobody could have imagined, was that it worked in reverse as well.
The body on the floor was already mirroring the one inside the game.
Instantly.
Naturally.
Without anyone teaching it.
Training hadn’t started when he gave the command.
It had begun the instant Glitch hatched.
The instant one soul finished making itself a second place to exist.
"...Huh."
His phone chimed.
[Bond Synchronization Established.]
New Feature Available ...Locked
He pressed it.
[Access Denied.]
Requirement — Mutual Trust: Insufficient.
Jin stared at the message.
Then he slowly looked down at Glitch.
The hatchling had already decided standing was boring.
It waddled the short distance back across the floor, painstakingly climbed over Jin’s crossed leg, collapsed into his lap, and immediately fell asleep again against the stomach of someone it had known for exactly six hours.
"..."
"You trust me enough to sleep in my lap," Jin said in a flat voice. "Twice. In the same night."
Glitch’s tail dropped over its nose.
"But apparently not enough for software."
The hatchling opened its mouth in a tiny pink yawn full of needle-like teeth, chirped once in complete contentment, and drifted right back to sleep.
Jin watched it for a long while.
Eventually he gave up arguing, placed the phone beside him, and quietly let it sleep.