Chapter 3: Glitch

The library annex door hissed shut behind him, sealing out the hallway murmur. The silence inside was thick and cool, smelling of ozone and old data. Xiao Zhi stood there for a moment, just breathing, though the air felt thin.

Jiang Muyao’s intensity clung to him like static. It wasn’t the physical proximity that lingered—he’d dealt with worse in sparring rings—but the raw, unasked-for claim in it. Stay off public streams. As if his choices were suddenly someone else’s jurisdiction. The order scraped against the part of him that had spent a lifetime answering to no one but his own discipline. It left a residue of restless energy under his skin, a low-grade hum that academic work wouldn’t touch.

He walked deeper into the annex, his steps quieter now on the sound-absorbing floor. Rows of private study terminals lined the walls, their screens dark. He chose one tucked into a corner alcove, shadowed by a towering server rack humming softly to itself. The seat conformed to his weight with a soft sigh.

Pulling out his datapad, he called up the lecture notes on crystalline swarm dispersal. The diagrams of geometric attack patterns blurred before his eyes. He tried to focus on the tactical annotations, but his mind kept looping back to the morning’s spectacle—the whispers, Shen Yue’s needle-thin smile, and finally Jiang Muyao’s burning gaze pinning him to the wall. A public curiosity by breakfast, a protected possession by mid-morning. Honestly, it was exhausting.

Bao Bao shifted in his jacket pocket, a warm, living weight against his ribs. The bunny poked his head out, nose twitching at the sterile library air before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort and settling back down.

Xiao Zhi stared at the datapad for another five minutes, accomplishing precisely nothing. The restless energy needed an outlet, something more physical than staring at text. Academic focus was clearly a lost cause right now.

He logged out of the terminal and stood up. The academy maintained a bank of VR simulation pods for cadet training on the lower level of the annex, accessible during free periods. They were supposed to be for tactical drills and mecha familiarization. Right now, they sounded like the perfect place to hit something very, very hard.

The stairwell down was even quieter, lit by pale blue guide lights. The pod room was a long, low-ceilinged space, chilly from active cooling systems. A dozen sleek pods stood in neat rows, most of them dark and dormant. One at the far end showed a green available light.

He walked over, his boots echoing faintly. The pod’s hatch slid open at his cadet ID scan, revealing a contoured seat and a helmet dangling from a retractable arm. The interior smelled like clean plastic and faint sweat.

Settling into the seat, he strapped in. The harness tightened across his shoulders with automated precision. He pulled the helmet on, its weight familiar and oddly comforting. The world outside vanished as the visor display lit up with a soft chime, projecting the standard Federation Virtual Training Environment login.

He selected his profile. The system recognized his cadet credentials and linked to his assigned training mecha—a standard-issue light scout model, though its external shell had been recalibrated months ago to a soft, matte pink after that unfortunate incident with the spiritual energy overflow during diagnostics. The academy technicians had thrown up their hands. Pink Chaos wasn’t an official designation, but it was what he called her in his head.

The menu offered a list of pre-approved scenarios: Urban Pacification Drills, Orbital Dock Defense, Basic Zerg Swarm Engagement. He bypassed them all, navigating to the custom session option. He just wanted something straightforward to burn off this buzzing frustration. He selected “Urban Combat – Standard Difficulty” and initiated the sequence.

The pod hummed around him. The visor filled with a loading bar that zipped to completion.

Reality dissolved into the gritty detail of a simulated cityscape at dusk. He stood—or rather, his mecha stood—in the center of a wide boulevard lined with crumbling neo-classical facades. The sky was a bruised purple streaked with smoke from distant fires. The familiar weight of the controls settled into his hands, the feedback grips vibrating softly with idle power.

Good. Simple. Hostile drone signatures already pinged on his tactical map, emerging from alleyways ahead.

He took a step forward, the mecha’s hydraulics whining in simulation.

Then the world tore apart.

It happened without warning. One moment the city was solid around him, the next it pixelated into a screaming riot of color and noise. The buildings stretched into impossible digital strands before snapping back into jagged polygons. The sky shredded into static snow, a deafening roar of white noise filling his audio feed. The tactical map imploded into a spiraling vortex of corrupted data.

Xiao Zhi flinched back in the seat, his grip tightening on the controls instinctively. A system error? A massive overload? The pod around him remained stable, no warning lights flashing on its internal panel that he could see through the visual chaos.

The glitch intensified. The cityscape didn’t just freeze—it dissolved, melting like wet paint running down a glass pane. Colors bled into each other: grey concrete smearing into purple sky, streaks of neon signage dripping into black nothingness. The roar in his ears peaked into a single, piercing digital shriek that made his teeth ache.

Then everything went black. Silent.

Total sensory deprivation lasted for three heartbeats, long enough for him to wonder if he’d just blown out a very expensive piece of academy equipment.

Light returned.

Not city light. This was the hard, cold gleam of reflected starlight on crystal.

His mecha hung in space.

No—not quite space. He floated within a dense field of jagged asteroids, each one looking like it had been carved from massive geode formations. Purple and blue crystalline spikes thrust out in chaotic clusters, some as large as buildings, others as fine as needles. Distant stars shone as unwinking pinpricks in an ink-black void.

This wasn’t any training scenario from the academy list. He knew every drill module by heart at this point, having run through them all while trying to appear appropriately average. Asteroid fields featured in deep-space reconnaissance exercises, sure, but never ones that looked like the inside of a giant’s gem collection.

A proximity alert blared in his cockpit.

Before he could even process the new environment, a lance of searing orange energy sliced past his mecha’s left shoulder, missing by meters but close enough for the heat signature to flash across his external sensors. The beam struck a crystalline spire fifty meters away, which exploded in a spectacular shower of glittering shards that spun out in deadly slow motion.

Hostile fire. Unseen hostiles.

Another energy blast came from a different vector, then another. They weren’t aiming to miss now. Trajectory lines spider-webbed across his display as the simulation’s threat-assessment algorithms finally caught up, painting sources from multiple directions amidst the asteroid clutter.

The standard urban combat scenario was gone. In its place was an unlisted, high-difficulty warzone where the terrain itself could kill you and someone was already shooting.

Xiao Zhi’s breath steadied inside the helmet. The restless frustration from moments ago crystallized into something else entirely—a sharp, clear focus.

Well then. At least now he had something to hit

Deep within the academy's network core, a subroutine of the central AI designated for training integrity flagged an anomaly. The alert was minor at first—a cadet pod had initiated a standard urban combat module with standard credentials. Then the module's data stream had experienced a catastrophic discontinuity, a full protocol break that should have triggered an automatic safety shutdown and a technician alert.

Instead, the data stream had re-established almost instantly, but the environmental signature no longer matched any authorized training package in the database. The new signature bore markers of a high-difficulty, multi-vector combat stress-test, a classification usually reserved for senior officer evaluations or black-box R&D projects. It was also accessing simulation assets that weren't on the public server.

The AI, operating under its primary mandate to monitor for system breaches and exceptional performance, didn't terminate the session. It initiated a silent, priority-one observational log. All external indicators on the physical pod remained green, normal. Invisibly, every control input from the cadet, every mecha system response, every micro-adjustment to thrust and balance began streaming to a secure analysis buffer. Performance metrics started populating a hidden file tagged with the cadet's ID: Lin Xiao Zhi.

Three hundred kilometers away, in a pentsuite that overlooked the neon-drenched skylanes of the capital's entertainment district, Wei Chengliu's personal server array chimed softly.

He was reviewing telemetry from his last underground mecha bout, his fingers tracing damage patterns on a holographic schematic. The chime was a specific tone keyed to one of his many automated watchers—a piece of subtle code he'd embedded in the military academy's public simulation network months ago, mainly out of boredom. It was supposed to ping him if anyone triggered certain obscure, legacy training modules he found intellectually interesting.

This ping was different. It carried an anomaly flag and a session ID that linked back to a cadet access point he'd noted before, purely because its associated mecha profile had an amusing color scheme.

Wei Chengliu blinked once, slowly. His eyes, dark and unnervingly still, shifted from the hologram to a secondary monitor that lit up automatically. With a few precise taps, he routed the ping through a series of anonymizing proxies and established a remote link to the observational feed the academy AI was now generating.

A real-time visualization of the crystalline asteroid field resolved on his screen. A small, pink mecha icon hung in the center, surrounded by hostile trajectory lines. The feed was raw, devoid of game-like overlays, showing only system-level data: positioning vectors, energy outputs, incoming fire solutions.

He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers under his chin. His expression didn't change. He watched.

Inside the pod, Xiao Zhi had no bandwidth for thoughts of system errors or observers. The immediate problem occupied all available space: don't get vaporized.

The energy blasts were coming faster now, lancing out from behind larger asteroid clusters. They weren't random potshots. They followed bracketing patterns, trying to herd him into a kill zone where crossfire would be unavoidable. Standard simulation drone behavior, albeit more aggressive than anything in the basic curriculum.

A jagged shard of crystal, flung outward from an earlier explosion, tumbled toward his cockpit in a lazy spin. It would impact in roughly four seconds.

Fine.

The restless energy that had driven him here finally found its conduit. He stopped trying to pilot the mecha like a cadet running a drill. He stopped thinking about standard evasion protocols or approved tactical responses.

His breathing evened out. His awareness expanded past the cockpit, sinking into the feedback of the machine around him—the subtle strain in the left ankle actuator, the ready hum of the dorsal thrusters. It was similar to the focus he found in the training hall, where opponents became puzzles of leverage and momentum.

His hands moved on the controls.

The shift was subtle at first. The mecha’s stance adjusted, its weight redistributing not for optimal bracing against recoil, but for potential movement in any one of three directions. When he fired the thrusters to dodge the next energy blast, it wasn't a single burst away from danger. It was a short, precise pulse that bled momentum sideways while angling the torso to present a narrower profile, all while pre-charging the leg actuators for the next move.

The pink mecha slid through the vacuum not with the jarring jumps of a simulator-trained pilot, but with a fluid, almost graceful continuity. It wove between two slower-moving crystalline chunks as another orange beam seared through the space it had just occupied.

Wei Chengliu’s eyes narrowed a fraction as he watched the data stream. The evasion metrics scrolling on his screen were deviating from predictive models. The standard academy algorithm for dodging in zero-g involved calculating an optimal escape vector from the projected path of incoming fire, then executing a thrust along that vector.

Cadet Lin Xiao Zhi’s mecha wasn't following vectors. It was following… curves. It moved in arcs and spirals that seemed to incorporate the drifting debris as part of its evasive landscape, using glancing touches off smaller crystals to alter its spin without wasting thruster fuel. The movement calculations required for that weren't just advanced; they were inefficient for a machine to compute in real-time under fire. A human pilot wouldn't even attempt them, lacking the instinctual grasp of micro-impacts and angular momentum.

Yet the pink mecha was doing it.

Another barrage came—three shots from different angles, timed to cover likely dodges. Xiao Zhi saw the trap forming on his tactical display, the converging lines of fire.

Instead of picking one escape route and committing, he gave a series of rapid, tiny inputs. His mecha dropped into a sudden micro-burn downward, letting one shot pass over its head. Then it kicked off a passing crystal shard no larger than its foot, the impact translating into a sharp lateral rotation that twisted it around the second beam. The third shot was already there, aimed at where he should have been after the first two moves.

He didn't try to avoid it outright. He angled his right arm shield forward, not to block fully, but to deflect. The energy blast screeched across the shield surface, dissipating most of its force in a shower of virtual sparks and imparting a wild spin to his mecha. Most pilots would have fought the spin, burning thrusters to stabilize.

Xiao Zhi went with it.

He fed power into the spin, turning uncontrolled momentum into a whirling dodge as two more beams lanced through the center of his previous position. The pink mecha emerged from the spin behind the cover of a massive cobalt-blue crystal formation, its systems humming with transferred kinetic energy.

In his pentsuite, Wei Chengliu leaned forward imperceptibly. One of his fingers tapped once against the desk surface. The performance metrics on his screen were climbing into statistical outliers: reaction times dipping below human-norm thresholds, movement efficiency ratings soaring past simulation benchmarks. The AI’s hidden log was faithfully recording it all—every non-standard input, every recovery that defied standard physics models.

This wasn't a cadet stumbling through a glitched simulation. This was something else entirely.

And Wei Chengliu’s watcher code had found it first

The simulation, perhaps sensing its initial tactics were insufficient, changed its approach. From behind the larger asteroid clusters, the sources of the energy fire finally emerged. They weren’t just abstract targeting drones. Sleek, angular fighter proxies swooped into view on his sensors, their designs vaguely reminiscent of the Zerg interceptors from textbook footage, though simplified for a training environment. Six of them fanned out in a standard hunter-killer formation, their weapons cycling to a rapid-fire mode.

Cover was now a temporary concept. They would simply chew through the crystal.

Xiao Zhi’s focus sharpened further, the last vestiges of morning’s social irritation burning away in the pure calculus of combat. Evasion alone would become a losing game against sustained fire from multiple vectors. He needed to reduce their numbers.

The first interceptor dove at him, guns blazing. Standard simulation drone behavior: a linear attack run, predictable.

He didn’t retreat. He pushed forward, meeting the charge.

His control inputs became something beyond piloting. They translated the ingrained muscle memory of a thousand martial forms into the language of hydraulics and thrusters. As the interceptor closed, its energy bolts stitching a line toward his cockpit, he twisted the mecha’s torso in a motion that originated from the hips—a shen fa body evasion. The bolts passed harmlessly through empty space where his center mass had been a split-second before.

The drone tried to bank away for another pass. It was too close now.

Xiao Zhi’s mecha shot its left arm forward not in a punch, but in a flowing, intercepting motion—a lan que barring strike adapted for a machine limb twice the size of a human’s. The forearm collided with the drone’s wing assembly not with brute force, but with precise, redirecting impact. The drone’s own momentum was turned against it, sending it into a violent, uncontrolled tumble past him and directly into the path of its wingmate’s follow-up fire. Both proxies vanished in a silent blossom of orange light and debris.

Two down.

The remaining four adapted, breaking formation to come at him from different angles simultaneously. The simulation was definitely escalating beyond any glitch. This felt like a stress test.

He let them come.

When the next attacker fired, he didn’t fully dodge. He shifted, taking a grazing hit on his already-scored shoulder shield that spun him halfway around. The spin became part of the next motion—a whirling back-kick from his mecha’s right leg that caught a second drone attempting to slip inside his guard. The actuator-driven impact crumpled its forward sensor array, sending it spiraling away blind and colliding with an asteroid.

The third and fourth arrived together. One high, one low.

Xiao Zhi dropped into a low stance, the mecha’s knees bending as if rooted to nothingness. A high-energy beam passed over his cockpit canopy. At the same time, he shot his free hand downward in a spear-hand strike—biao zhi—that pierced through the lower drone’s primary thruster housing. The machine seized, its systems shorting out in a cascade of electrical failures.

The final drone hovered for a millisecond, recalculating.

That was all the opening he needed. A burst from his lateral thrusters closed the distance before it could fire again. His mecha’s hands came up in a simultaneous, flowing double-palm strike—shuang feng guan er—that impacted the drone’s central chassis from both sides. The proxy compacted with a satisfying crunch of virtual metal before detonating.

Silence returned to the crystal field, broken only by the faint ping of cooling metal and the drift of wreckage.

It lasted for maybe five seconds.

Then the asteroid field itself seemed to move. From behind every major crystalline formation, new signatures bloomed on his sensor grid. Dozens of them. These proxies were bulkier, more insectile in design, with articulated limbs and carapaces that glittered like black chitin. They moved with a skittering, multi-limbed gait across the asteroid surfaces or propelled themselves through the vacuum with jarring bursts of speed.

Advanced Zerg analogs. A full wave.

Xiao Zhi felt a flicker of something that wasn’t fear—it was closer to recognition. This was what the real war would look like, eventually. The simulation had stopped being a curious glitch and had become a preview.

He stopped holding anything back.

The pink mecha became a nexus of controlled chaos. He stopped treating it as a machine he operated and started moving as it, his own instincts flowing into its systems without the filter of standard operating procedure. He met the charging wave not with defensive maneuvers, but with aggressive interception.

He weaved through their midst, his movements a dazzling blur of economy and brutality. He used their numbers against them, baiting one into the firing line of another. A spinning kick shattered a carapace. A forearm smash caved in a sensor cluster. He grabbed a smaller proxy by one limb and used it as an improvised flail to sweep two others off an asteroid ledge into the path of friendly fire.

He wasn't just fighting; he was dismantling. Every strike targeted joints, thruster ports, weapon mounts—precise, disabling blows that neutralized threats with minimal energy expenditure. The mecha’s systems screamed warnings as he pushed thermal tolerances and actuator stress limits, riding the very edge of mechanical failure. He ignored them, trusting his own sense of the machine’s rhythm more than its cautionary alerts.

It was beautiful in a horrifying way. A ballet of pure, efficient violence performed by a pink machine in a jeweled graveyard.

Wei Chengliu watched, utterly still. The data on his screen was a torrent now. Reaction times consistently in the superhuman range. Movement prediction algorithms failed completely, their forecasts overwritten by the pilot’s non-linear choices. Damage efficiency metrics were off the charts—each of the cadet’s actions resulted in maximum enemy degradation for minimum resource cost, a ratio veteran pilots trained for years to achieve. The AI’s log was silently recording what could only be described as an anomaly event.

The wave crested and began to break under the relentless, precise counter-assault. The last few proxies were picked apart with methodical ruthlessness.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it ended.

The crystalline asteroid field, the wreckage, the hostile signatures—all vanished. The visor display went to a neutral, soft grey. A plain system message appeared in standard font: SIMULATION TERMINATED.

Silence flooded back into the pod, now just the hum of cooling fans and his own steady breathing inside the helmet.

Xiao Zhi sat there for a moment, his hands still resting on the controls. The adrenaline ebbed slowly, leaving behind a pleasant, tired clarity. That had been… intense. And definitely not on the curriculum. A major system error, obviously. He’d have to report it to the techs so they could fix whatever training module had corrupted into that nightmare.

He unclenched his fingers from the grips one by one, feeling the faint tremble of exertion in his muscles. Righting himself in the seat, he reached up with both hands to unlock and lift the helmet.

The seal broke with a hiss of equalizing pressure. Cool air washed over his face as he pulled the helmet off, setting it aside on its cradle. The pod’s interior lights were dimmed. Outside the hatch window, the quiet pod room was unchanged, empty.

He took a deep breath, running a hand through his pink hair where the helmet had pressed it flat.

A soft chime sounded from within the pod, not from the main simulator system but from the small personal screen mounted beside the seat, used for checking messages or browsing training manuals between sessions. It usually stayed dark unless actively touched.

It was lit now.

A direct message notification glowed on its surface. It wasn’t routed through the academy’s internal cadet network; it bore a different protocol signature entirely, sleek and unfamiliar.

The sender ID was plain text: Serpent_Sovereign.

Xiao Zhi stared at it, his post-simulation calm freezing over instantly. That name. The donation. The avalanche of credits from his accidental stream.

His finger hovered over the screen for a second before tapping to open the message.

There was no body text. No explanation. No demands. Just two words, centered on the otherwise blank interface:

Found you.