The beating stopped.
Leo stayed pressed against the cold metal door, his breath a shallow rasp in the sudden quiet.
The only sounds were the endless, layered hum of server fans and the frantic drum of his own heart against his ribs.
The red and green LED lights painted the crowded room in pulses, casting long, shifting shadows that looked like reaching hands.
The new line of text in his vision had faded to a soft, persistent glow in the lower left corner:
[Glitch Reading: Instinctive Level - Active].
He didn't understand it.
He just… saw.
The darkness of the server room wasn't complete. It was webbed with lines.
Thin, wavering distortions in the air, like heat haze over a grill or a bad video signal.
They cut through racks, through the floor, through the air itself.
One snaked right through the server tower beside his head, making the blinking status lights behind it seem to stutter.
Another, a jagged crackle of static, ran vertically through the door he leaned on.
His head ached. A deep, hollow throb where the memory had been ripped out.
The birthday cake.
He could remember the fact of it—there was a cake at age ten—but the taste of the frosting, the warmth of the candles on his face, the shape of his mother's smile as she sang… it was all gone.
A file deleted, leaving only a blank space with a label.
A soft, androgynous chime echoed in his skull.
Next Location Ping in: 00:14:22.
Fourteen minutes.
Then a red dot would bloom on every screen, every retina, in a one-kilometer radius.
A beacon on this fireproof door.
Outside, the silence broke.
A low scrape of something heavy being dragged across the corridor floor.
A muffled thud.
Then whispers, not frantic anymore, but coordinated. Purposeful.
"—just need to wedge it here. Block the other exits, he's only got the one door."
"Is the fire axe still in the glass case?"
"Forget the axe. The reward is for elimination. The method is secondary."
Danilo's voice, clearer now, cutting through the murmurs.
"Listen. Just listen. The reward is collective. We take him alive, the System decides what 'elimination' means. But alive or not, the district gets the immunity. We all get the points. We do this clean. We do this smart."
A cleaner barbarism.
Leo closed his eyes. Danilo from Accounting, who complained about the coffee machine being two dollars over budget, was now orchestrating his capture with the calm efficiency of a project manager.
His hands were trembling.
He balled them into fists, pressed the knuckles against the cold floor.
The HUD cheerfully reminded him: STR: 1. AGI: 1. END: 1.
He was a ghost made of paper in a world of claws.
The glitch on the door caught his eye again.
It originated from the electronic lock mechanism, a shimmering, iridescent thread that spilled out and danced through the metal near the handle.
It didn't look like a way out.
It looked like a tear.
Without letting himself think, Leo crawled forward.
He reached out, his fingers hovering just before the distortion. The air there felt ionized, the fine hair on his arm standing up.
He touched it.
A jolt, not of electricity, but of pure, cold information shot up his arm and into his brain.
Glitch Type: Collision Void.
Location: Internal Deadbolt Assembly.
Stability: Critical. Duration: 2.3-second cycle.
Failure Point: Pin 4, Sheared.
It wasn't words. It was a knowing. A diagram etched in ice behind his eyes.
He could see the broken pin, the tiny gap in the world's logic where the bolt failed to fully engage every 2.3 seconds.
He knew it like he knew his own breath.
The cost of this knowledge was a hole where a happy memory used to be.
From the corridor, a heavy, solid THUMP shook the door.
They'd braced something against it. A desk. A filing cabinet.
"Leo?"
Danilo called, his voice pressed close to the seam of the door. Reasonable. Almost friendly.
"It's over. There's nowhere to go. Come out, and we promise it'll be… processed. It's the System, not us. You understand how it is."
Leo didn't answer.
His eyes were locked on the glitch. It pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, in time with the hum of the servers. A visual metronome.
On… off… on… off…
A 2.3-second cycle.
The next heavy thud against the door came. A testing blow.
On… off… on…
He placed his hand on the real metal handle. It was cool, solid. An anchor.
He had to sync the turn with the glitch's void moment. The moment the world's physics forgot the lock existed.
…off… on…
He listened to the noises outside. The shuffling. The low, tense planning.
He waited for a distraction, a shift in their pattern.
A voice, sharp and nervous: "Did you check the vents? He could—"
Now.
Leo twisted the handle.
It wasn't like turning a normal knob.
For the first fraction of a second, there was no resistance at all, a nauseating feeling of spinning empty air.
Then metal ground, reality reasserted itself with a sudden, shrieking CLACK that was far too loud.
From the other side of the door, a sharp digital squawk—the sound of an electronic lock shorting out.
A yelp of surprise.
"What the hell was that? The light just went red!"
The door was unlocked.
Leo didn't pull it open.
He shoved himself back from it, crab-walking deeper into the server maze.
The instinct was a scream in his blood: RUN THROUGH THE DOOR.
But the analytical ghost in his mind, the Level 2 Support Analyst, coldly overruled it.
It was a trap. The only exit, now known, now unsealed.
They'd be poised.
They'd be ready.
The glow of his new sight pulled his eyes away from the door, to the back wall of the server room.
He'd missed it before, in his panic.
A larger distortion hung there, spanning from the ceiling to the floor between two server racks.
It wasn't a line. It was a sprawl, a splash of fractured reality like a frozen spiderweb, about the size of a human being.
It pulsed slowly, synchronizing not with the fans, but with a slower, deeper rhythm he felt in his teeth.
He crept towards it, the cold floor biting through his cheap pants.
The hum of the machines grew louder, a physical pressure in his ears.
Inside the distortion, the air shimmered like a mirage.
And within the mirage…
A shape.
Leo froze.
Slumped against the wall, half-phased through a server rack, was a man in the familiar pale-blue shirt of E-Net's facilities staff.
His head was bowed, chin on his chest. He wasn't moving.
A faint, translucent HUD hung in the air before his lifeless face, frozen on a single line of text:
[USER: DISCONNECTED].
Not dead.
The word didn't fit. This was something else.
The body had no wounds. The skin was pale but intact. It was simply… empty.
A suit of flesh with the pilot yanked out.
A placeholder that the world had forgotten to refresh.
The sight hit Leo like a punch to the gut.
This was the "Apagamento"? Not an explosion, not fire.
A deletion.
A quiet severing from the script of reality, leaving behind this… husk.
A new sound from the door.
A subtle, metallic scratching. A key? A tool trying to manually engage the bolt they thought was broken.
His eyes darted from the horrifying statue in the glitch to the pulsing network of smaller distortions around it.
One thick, jagged line ran from the ceiling down through the [DISCONNECTED] man's shoulder and into the floor.
Another, a nexus of frantic, tiny static sparks, hovered near a main power conduit.
The androgynous voice whispered, a secret just for him.
Passive Skill Evolution: [Glitch Reading] is integrating environmental data.
Hypothesis: Area is a 'Ghost Zone' — residual instability from a prior, localized System correction.
A ghost zone.
The disconnected man was a ghost.
The glitches were its breath.
The scratching at the door became more insistent.
"Almost got it," someone muttered.
Leo looked at the large, pulsing glitch, at the smaller lines feeding into it.
He looked at his own hands. STR: 1. He couldn't fight. AGI: 1. He couldn't run far. END: 1. He couldn't endure.
But he could see the cracks in the world.
A plan, desperate and insane, cobbled itself together from fragments of instinct and cold, memory-less logic.
He couldn't go out the door.
He couldn't stay here.
The only variable left was the room itself. The unstable, ghost-haunted room.
He reached out, not towards the dead man, but towards the nest of frantic sparks near the power conduit.
The information flooded him, bitter and sharp:
Glitch Type: Data-Backfeed Surge.
Unstable. Contact may induce temporary cascade in local System integrity.
Consequence: Unpredictable.
Unpredictable.
It was the only weapon he had.
From the corridor, Danilo's voice, tight with triumph.
"Got it! Bolt's retracted! On three. One…"
Leo took a breath.
The hollow ache in his head where his memories used to be felt like a crater.
He thought of nothing.
He felt no brave last stand. Only a simple, animal calculus: better a chaotic unknown than a certain, orderly capture.
"Two…"
He slammed his open palm into the cluster of static sparks.
The world screamed.
Not in sound, but in light and wrongness.
Every LED in the room—red, green, status, power—flared into a blinding, white-hot intensity.
The fan-hum shot up into a deafening, metallic shriek.
The network of glitch-lines flared like ignited fuses, blazing with actinic blue light.
The large distortion on the wall rippled.
The [DISCONNECTED] man's head jerked up.
His eyes were open, filled with the same blinding white light.
His mouth moved, but what came out was the distorted, screaming skirl of a dial-up modem mixed with a human groan.
"THREE!"
The metal door crashed inward, slamming against the desk they'd braced behind it.
Danilo and two others surged into the doorway, silhouetted by the corridor light.
They stopped dead.
They saw the storm of lightning-crack glitches illuminating the server room.
They saw the screaming man of light and noise fused to the wall.
They saw Leo, a frail shadow in the center of the chaos, his hand buried in a fistful of furious electricity.
For a second, pure, superstitious terror wiped the greed from their faces.
In that second, Leo pulled his hand back.
The glitch he'd touched didn't fade.
It spread.
It raced up the power line, and with a sound like a giant switch being thrown, every single server rack in the room went dark and silent.
The silence was absolute.
The screaming-light man vanished, the distortion swallowing him whole.
The only illumination now was the emergency strip lighting on the floor, casting a hellish red glow upwards.
In the sudden dark and quiet, Danilo's interface flared.
He looked at it, his face ghastly in the red light. His voice was a whisper of pure confusion.
"My HUD… it's glitching. The mission tracker… it's just static."
He looked up, his eyes finding Leo's across the dark room.
The fear in them was being rapidly displaced by a dawning, horrifying understanding.
Leo had no stats.
He had no strength.
He had no right to be a threat.
But he could break the game.
From the corridor outside, new voices shouted, panicked.
"What happened to the lights?"
"My interface is flickering!"
Leo took a step back, melting deeper into the shadows between the dead server towers.
He was still the prey.
He was still the weakest thing in the building.
But he had just shown them the walls of their new cage were thin.
And he could see all the cracks.
Danilo took a hesitant step forward, into the blood-red dark of the ghost zone.
"Leo," he said, the name sounding strange in his mouth.
"What did you do?"
Leo said nothing.
He just watched, his breath a faint plume in the suddenly chilled air, waiting to see what his first move had truly unleashed.