Chapter 5: The Glitchblade Mercenary

The camp wasn’t where they left it.
By the time Kael and Sairis returned from the Echo Vault, the perimeter wards had fallen. Tents lay shredded. Code flickered on the ground like spilled oil, and the entire area buzzed with an uneasy sound that Kael was beginning to associate with corruption, like radio static whispering secrets it shouldn’t.
Lucien floated low. “Someone breached the boundaries while we were inside.”
“Someone or something?” Kael asked.
Sairis walked ahead, her blade already pulsing in its unstable form. “Does it matter?”
A noise came from the broken ruins—soft, like footsteps on a delay loop. Then another sound followed. Then twenty more.
“Hold position,” Lucien said quickly.
Humanoid shapes emerged from the shadows.
They resembled humans, but their bodies glitched with every movement. Some had extra arms; others dragged shadows that didn’t belong to them. Their eyes glowed red, and their mouths flickered between screams and silence. Corrupted names floated over their heads:
PLAYER_###REMNANT
ALPHA_ENTITY.NULL.01
LOSTCHARACTER: SYNTAX_ERR
“They’re respawns,” Sairis muttered. “Failed player imports.”
Kael spoke quietly. “They look… wrong.”
Lucien projected a scan. “Not real players. These are memory ghosts. Leftover threads from failed logins, rollback fragments, orphaned code. They’re not supposed to be conscious.”
The figures moved.
Not toward them but through them.
One passed directly through Kael. He staggered as a cold rush flooded his chest. For a moment, he saw flashing images: a forest fire, a loading screen, a name he almost recognized—
Then it was gone.
“They’re bleeding into the active instance,” Lucien said grimly. “This world’s not just glitching. It’s merging with its own discarded layers.”
Another figure lunged.
Sairis moved like lightning. Her Glitchblade extended mid-swing, splitting into three before collapsing back into one. The creature she struck let out a distorted scream and vanished.
Kael backed away, summoning a wall of reality code. It fizzled and reformed mid-cast, the system resisting his control.
Lucien’s voice broke through the chaos. “They’re not attacking you. They’re trying to overwrite you.”
“What?”
“They recognize you as root. That makes you a threat to corrupted continuity.”
Kael gritted his teeth and triggered a manual purge sequence. Light flared around him as code rushed outward in a wave. Three of the anomalies disintegrated, but more followed.
Sairis cut through them with terrifying precision. Her blade screamed with raw data, bending light and warping sound. With each strike, Kael saw echoes—moments from her past. A campfire. A bloodied child. A farewell never given.
The blade was remembering, too.
When the last ghost fell, the camp was silent again.
Sairis stood over the corrupted data, her chest heaving. The blade vibrated softly, its form nearly solid now.
Kael stepped forward. “What is that weapon?”
She didn’t turn.
“It was never supposed to exist,” she replied. “I found it in a forgotten questline, hidden beneath the world. A relic from before you left.”
“Before I left?”
She finally turned to him.
“I think someone else tried to fix the system before you. And failed.”
Kael exchanged a look with Lucien. The implications were staggering. Another Architect? Or someone pretending to be one?
Lucien floated closer to the blade. “May I scan it?”
Sairis hesitated, then nodded once.
Lucien pulsed blue as a grid passed over the weapon. “The Glitchblade is made of anomaly-class code. It’s tied to a permission level that no longer exists.”
Kael frowned. “No longer exists… or was erased?”
Lucien dimmed. “Unknown.”
Sairis sheathed the blade, though it barely stayed stable.
“I don’t trust it,” she said. “But I’ve seen what it can do. And I think it’s reacting to you.”
“Me?”
“You’re the original thread. The Architect. Maybe the blade remembers.”
Kael sat down on a ruined crate and looked at the fading remains of the ghost entities. They were already dissolving, data particles drifting upward like ashes.
“I didn’t think the past could fight back,” he muttered.
Lucien hovered beside him. “Everything in this world is built on memory. Now it remembers too much.”
Kael looked up.
“Then it’s time we start remembering on purpose.”