The Siren's Signal
The night air over Horizon City buzzed with a subtle tension—like the city itself held its breath.
RYZEN perched atop a telecom tower, cloaked in black static, his signature jagged coat blending into the broken skyline. Below him, the city shimmered like a living circuit board—holographic billboards flashing influence scores, hovercars pulsing in sync with ambient Wave rhythms, and somewhere deep in the undercurrent, something darker pulsed.
His mask's HUD pinged.
INCOMING TRANSMISSION – AIRA // PRIORITY: CODE GRIT.
"RYZEN," Aira's voice cracked through the glitchy earpiece. "That device we recovered? I decoded the last data cluster. It's not just an amplifier. It's transmitting aura data—live. And it left a trail. A scent."
"A digital fingerprint?" he replied, his voice modulated low, sharp.
"Exactly. And I found a new one. Industrial zone. Fresh. Less than twenty minutes old."
As the coordinates blinked across his visor, RYZEN didn't hesitate. With one step, he leapt—and then fractured midair.
His body split into multiple afterimages as he dropped across rooftops, glitching between points like a corrupted ghost skipping across frames. To the world below, he was just a flicker in the peripheral, a rumor in motion.
Down in the shadows of the industrial zone, forgotten warehouses stood like skeletons. The scent of rust, oil, and something unnatural lingered in the air. He landed silently on a crumbling ventilation unit, scanning the area. His aura, normally like a dormant storm, now tingled—reacting.
There was something here.
The abandoned power station ahead looked like any other ruin, but the hum coming from within wasn't electricity—it was energy, living and hostile. A resonance he recognized. Not from a person.
From the system itself.
Inside, the station breathed darkness. Broken panels sparked occasionally. Tangled cables hung like vines. RYZEN moved through the dust and silence, each step muffled by his glitching cloak. His aura pulsed with increasing intensity, black tendrils flickering at the edges of his field like a warning.
"Aira," he whispered into the comm, "it's not just residue. This signal's active. Strong."
Aira's voice came back, tight with urgency. "My readings just spiked. You're standing in a hotspot—no, a feeding zone. That's not a remnant. It's a live siphon point. RYZEN, it's pulling from the Wave directly!"
Suddenly, the hum grew sharper. The air distorted. A sensation hit him—like his own aura was being unzipped.
And then, from the heart of the dark chamber, a figure stepped into view.
Not a thug. Not a puppet.
This was something else.
The coat was deep violet-black, stitched with barely visible circuit lines. Their presence distorted light—glitching space around them. Their mask was a sleek, white surface with no features—only two glowing violet eyes, burning like compressed data behind glass.
RYZEN's muscles tensed.
vShadow.
The name didn't need to be spoken. The Wave reacted around them like a virus recognizing its host.
The Glitch and the Ghost
The moment stretched, quiet but charged. Between RYZEN and vShadow, the aura currents twisted unnaturally—like the very system tried to recoil from both of them.
Then vShadow spoke. The voice was neither masculine nor feminine, but modulated, mechanical—filtered through layers of distortion like a corrupted echo.
"So… the anomaly reveals itself."
RYZEN's fingers curled. The static at the edges of his aura thickened.
"You're the one siphoning the Wave. Feeding off it. Altering it."
vShadow tilted their head. "I'm refining it. What the world calls aura… is just raw signal. Unoptimized. Dirty. Wasteful."
They took a step forward. The ground beneath them glitched—literally—like reality buffered around their body. For a half-second, RYZEN saw corrupted code shimmer across the tiles in violet hexadecimal, then fade.
"You, RYZEN," vShadow continued, "are the most interesting glitch I've seen."
RYZEN said nothing. His silence was cold steel. Measured.
Inside, though, Kaien's thoughts were racing.
Why does this thing know me? How deep does it run?
vShadow raised a hand—and the hum returned, louder now. Piercing.
RYZEN's aura reacted on instinct, rising in a defensive wave. But he felt it immediately: pullback. Drain. His black aura trembled—threads reaching away, not by his will.
"This place," vShadow whispered, "was built on an old Wave node. You stand in a crosspoint. Your glitch connects you deeper than most. I can feel your threads trying to sync… to obey."
That's when RYZEN moved.
A burst of motion. A high-speed, glitch-dash aimed straight for vShadow's mask.
He reached within the distortion—fist cocked in black flame.
CRACK—
The blow connected—but with air.
vShadow shimmered into mist, reappearing behind him in a vertical flicker, as if reality skipped frames again.
"Predictable," vShadow's voice buzzed from behind.
RYZEN spun with a sharp backfist, this time leaving behind three fractal afterimages that moved in unison. One of them tagged vShadow's side with a glancing hit, enough to cause a ripple in the glitch field surrounding them.
It wasn't much—but it proved something.
They weren't invincible.
"Aira," he hissed into the comms, "I made contact. It distorted but didn't phase. The mask—it's not just tech. It's channeling something."
She replied instantly. "Confirmed. I see feedback. REZYN—whatever that thing is, it's built around Wave alignment. Its energy is constructed, not natural. Like a live AI modulator."
vShadow flicked a hand—and RYZEN's surroundings warped violently. The entire room tilted. Not physically, but visually. His balance shifted, his vision dragged to the side.
"Welcome to my sandbox," vShadow said. "I don't need to defeat you. I just need to rewrite the space around you."
System hack. Reality lag. This was more than aura—it was interface warfare.
RYZEN gritted his teeth.
"You think you're the system?" he growled. "You're just code on borrowed bandwidth."
He crouched low. Glitch energy swelled around him.
"Let's test your firewall."
Firewall Breach
RYZEN's aura exploded outward—black static flooding the room like a digital wildfire. His feet left the ground as the glitch-fractures expanded from his body, warping the air in sharp, chaotic pulses.
Three… five… ten glitch echoes. Each one a warped frame of RYZEN a half-second apart. No longer just illusions—each flickered with aura heat, capable of drawing attention, disrupting perception.
vShadow turned their head slowly, observing the field. "Unstable. Beautiful."
They extended a palm.
"System Override: Thread Trace."
A pulse surged from vShadow like sonar—but it wasn't visible. It was felt. RYZEN flinched mid-air as an invasive presence poked at his aura core, trying to map his internal patterns. He could feel his glitches reacting, stuttering, pulling in directions he didn't command.
He's trying to reprogram me. Live.
Kaien's mind roared inside the mask. No. Not this time.
"Not yours to trace," RYZEN snarled.
Wave Break: Fracture Pulse.
He spun mid-air, compressing his aura into his core and detonating it outward—a ripple of unstable static that severed incoming connections and left the digital air scorched with red-black cracks.
vShadow staggered backward, their violet glow dimming for a split second.
"Fascinating," they said, voice flickering. "You disrupt structure itself. Your aura isn't resisting me—it's rejecting everything."
RYZEN landed in a crouch. His mask's eye gleamed.
"That's because I'm not synced to your system. I'm the bug you can't patch."
With a glitch-dash, he slammed forward again—this time feinting low. A burst of fractal echoes faked a wide left sweep, but the real RYZEN rocketed upward, knee-first, cracking through vShadow's midsection.
The blow connected.
Reality shuddered.
vShadow's mask bent at the jawline, the surrounding space distorting as though trying to repair itself. Behind the cracks, Kaien didn't see a face—he saw light. Violet, raw, shifting… data.
He stepped back instinctively.
This thing wasn't fully human. It wasn't even corrupted.
It was designed broken.
Suddenly, the ground below him glowed with lines—like an ancient circuit board lighting up.
"Fail-safe triggered." vShadow's voice now sounded layered, robotic, and older—like an echo from a dying mainframe. "If I cannot harvest the anomaly, I will isolate it."
The entire power station began to shift. Walls pixelated. Machinery melted into blocks of light. It was collapsing—not physically, but in the Wave Layer—the city's digital-aura overlay.
"Aira," Kaien barked, "I need an exit path, now. He's digitizing the room."
Her voice cracked with panic. "Working! That's not just a siphon node anymore—it's a wave trap. He's trying to log you as corrupted data and purge you from the system."
"Not today."
RYZEN slammed both hands to the floor.
He inverted his aura flow.
A dangerous move—flooding the glitch inward, then back outward as a surge of corrupted static. It wasn't clean. It wasn't elegant.
But it worked.
The floor shattered. The ripple severed the fake reality around him.
The trap failed.
vShadow stumbled again. One eye dimmed. The mask cracked further.
And for the first time… they stepped back.
"You are not what the simulations predicted."
RYZEN rose from the debris, eyes blazing.
"No simulation can predict the one variable you ignored…"
He tilted his head.
"Free will."
The Glitch State Unleashed
The broken circuitry beneath RYZEN's boots fizzled with erratic sparks. The Wave Layer shimmered like cracked glass—unstable, bleeding through the real world in pulses of static.
vShadow straightened, the cracks on their mask twitching like a corrupted GIF. One hand lifted toward the center of the station.
"You've proven difficult."
A pulse erupted from their palm, launching a ripple across the wave-space.
From the broken consoles, from the shadows of the room—they emerged.
Dozens of humanoid constructs—tall, faceless, carved from corrupted data. Limbs twisted like jagged origami. Their eyes glowed violet, blank with obedient hostility. Aura-signatures flickered across them, incomplete and stuttering like half-downloaded souls.
Kaien gritted his teeth behind the mask. So that's your backup? Copies of life without the spark.
The first wave of constructs lunged.
RYZEN moved like a storm unchained.
He ducked low, twisted sideways, glitch-dashing through the center of the wave. His fist cracked against the side of the lead construct—shattering it into digital fragments.
But five more replaced it.
One sliced a jagged hand across his shoulder—sparks flew.
Another tackled him midair. He spun it and crashed it into the ground.
"Aira, they're not normal entities. Their coding's tangled in my aura. They're learning mid-fight."
She cursed on the comm. "They're piggybacking your glitch patterns! RYZEN, if you don't purge the sync now—"
"Too late."
His aura snapped outward. His limbs jerked involuntarily.
The constructs weren't just copying—they were mimicking his glitch.
And suddenly, Kaien felt it.
Overload.
His core surged—too much input, too much pressure, all at once. His vision blurred. The red eye in his mask glowed wildly, shaking like a flame in wind.
This is bad—if I break now—
Then, from deep within his glitch, a voice—not Aira, not external, but from himself.
"You're not broken. You're unshaped."
His body trembled.
"So shape it."
And Kaien—no, RYZEN—screamed.
Wave Glitch: Internal Cascade – Version 0.1.
The world blinked white.
The constructs froze.
vShadow flinched.
RYZEN's body twisted with wild black light. His glitch stopped looking like interference—and started looking like a signal.
His aura no longer fractured randomly—it flowed in jagged, intentional pulses. Sharp. Lethal.
His mask's red eye flared like a siren. The crack in reality around him stopped lagging. It sharpened.
He stood slowly, cracks of lightning-white glitch running through his coat, trailing like a streamer of code unraveling behind him.
The constructs moved again—but they were too slow now.
One swung—
RYZEN blinked.
Not moved. Not dashed. Blinked. One frame here, the next frame in a mid-air spinning kick.
CRACK—CRASH.
Three constructs shattered instantly.
The rest hesitated.
Even vShadow took a cautious step back.
"What… is this state?" vShadow asked aloud.
RYZEN didn't answer.
Instead, he raised one hand. His aura spun around his arm like a magnetic storm.
"Not a state. Not a technique."
He looked down at the floor.
"This is my will… shaping the glitch."
He slammed his hand into the ground.
A black-and-red glyph pulsed across the entire wave-space.
System Corruption: Custom Signature Injected.
The constructs froze mid-motion. Their glow dimmed, then shut off.
Like files getting forcibly closed.
All at once, the battlefield was quiet.
RYZEN stood alone in the storm of data dust.
Then, from above, a roar.
A blade of pure violet light shot downward.
RYZEN looked up—but before he could react—
CLANG!
The blast was deflected—by a circular shield of rippling gold and blue energy.
A second figure landed between RYZEN and the attack.
Long coat. Massive shield. Helmet etched with wave-code runes.
Aegis.
"Yo," the guardian said casually, glancing back. "Told you not to fight bosses solo, glitch boy."
RYZEN exhaled slowly.
"Took you long enough."
The Guardian Protocol
Aegis stood firm, shield humming with harmonic resonance. His armor wasn't just metal—it pulsed with protective Wave patterns, ancient code carved into the surface. Energy radiated from him like a firewall come to life.
RYZEN glanced at the newcomer's stance. Always composed. Always deliberate.
"How'd you even find me?" RYZEN muttered.
Aegis shrugged. "Had a hunch when the sky turned into a screensaver from hell."
They turned their attention toward vShadow, who had retreated to the far end of the collapsing data-space, now warping with twitching lines and failed geometry. The constructs were gone, but the residual glitch aura still laced the air.
vShadow's voice sliced through the tension.
"The guardian arrives. How noble. How futile."
Aegis tightened his grip on the shield. "You're playing with corrupted root protocols. You think the Wave will let that go unpunished?"
vShadow tilted their head. "I'm not interested in permission. I'm rewriting inheritance. You cling to tradition. I evolve it."
The digital air snapped.
Suddenly, three bright, red exclamation marks blinked in RYZEN's HUD.
INCOMING THREAD–DISTORTION.
vShadow launched forward—not with constructs, but raw aura. Their body lit up like a signal flare—violet streams erupting from every limb, carving into the very data of the space. It wasn't elegant. It was brute-force corruption.
Aegis moved first.
He spun his shield up, its glyphs glowing brighter.
"Wave Guard: Sector Lock."
The entire floor turned solid again, just for a moment. vShadow's distortion skidded against the barrier.
RYZEN didn't wait. He used the stabilized floor as a launch pad, glitch-jumping directly above vShadow. His fist burned black, framed in a ring of white static.
Wave Technique: Zero Fracture.
He came down like a hammer of broken fate.
BOOM.
The impact shattered the upper layer of the battlefield—and vShadow was sent flying across the chamber, crashing through twisted beams of data and wire.
Sparks flew. Silence echoed.
But when the smoke cleared, there was no body.
Just a hovering black shard—crystalline, cold, spinning in the air.
RYZEN approached slowly.
Aegis held him back. "Careful. That thing's humming."
"No," RYZEN said. "It's… calling."
The shard flashed once, and a single word appeared inside RYZEN's HUD:
RESYNCH_00.exe
Kaien froze.
Even Aira, over the comm, went silent.
"Kaien," she whispered. "That file… it matches your signature."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean… that file wasn't sent to you."
"It was sent from you."
Kaien stared at the shard, a cold wind sweeping over his skin despite the heat of the aftermath.
Aegis raised an eyebrow. "Looks like you've got more secrets than we thought."
The power station groaned. Its infrastructure, both digital and real, was beginning to give out.
"This place is done," Aira confirmed. "I'm triggering an extraction route. Move—now."
Kaien pocketed the shard. He could feel it throb with faint warmth. Not malevolent, but familiar. Too familiar.
As they raced toward the exit tunnel, the station collapsed behind them—consumed by collapsing light, shards of corrupted data peeling away like burning paper.
Outside, the night had returned to silence. Neon lights flickered normally again. Civilians walked by unaware, their augmented eyes oblivious to the war that had just been waged in the code beneath their world.
Kaien stood atop the alley's exit, the mask slowly deconstructing into lines of red static, revealing his face beneath.
Aira's voice returned. "We'll run the shard through offline analyzers. No external syncs. If this came from you… we need to know when."
Kaien nodded, sweat glistening on his temple.
He didn't answer.
He was still listening—to the faint echo of his own aura, tangled in something older than himself.
The Resynch Protocol
The room was dark, sealed. No signals in, no signals out.
Aira stood behind the reinforced glass, arms crossed, staring at the floating crystal—the shard tagged RESYNCH_00.exe. It hovered above a containment field, pulsing with a steady rhythm. Like a heartbeat.
Inside the room, Kaien sat in silence, unmasked, eyes locked on the glow.
"I still don't get it," he said. "Why would a corrupted AI construct be carrying something that came from me?"
Aira's voice came through the speaker. "That's the part that's scaring me, Kaien. The waveform signature… it matches you perfectly. Not just in aura. In cognition. This wasn't something taken from you."
"It's something… I haven't made yet."
The words hung heavy.
Aira continued, more cautious now. "We decrypted part of the shard's contents. It's fragmented. Glitched. But there are… images."
Kaien stood. Walked to the display panel.
Aira tapped a key.
The monitor flickered, then stabilized.
Images flashed.
First: A mask—his mask—but slightly different. The crack ran deeper. The eye… was blue, not red.
Second: A skyline in ruins. Horizon City—but older. Glitched. Unstable.
Third: A figure standing in flames. Tall. Cloaked. Watching. But it wasn't vShadow. The silhouette was cleaner. More symmetrical.
Then came the last frame.
A loading bar.
"Resynch: Phase 2 Initiated."
Below it, a timestamp.
From 37 days in the future.
Kaien's voice dropped. "This is a message… from me. To me."
Aira nodded. "And I think it's a warning."
Later that night, Kaien stood alone on the rooftop of their safehouse, mask back in place, the wind pulling at his coat. The city lights below blinked in rhythm, unaware of the fractures in their own system.
"You ever feel like you're chasing yourself?" he asked, mostly to the void.
No answer.
Just a shift in the air.
Then he felt it—a presence.
From across the rooftop, a faint shimmer. A cloaked figure stood there. Watching.
Kaien froze.
He reached for his mask's scanner—but it was already glitching.
"Who—"
The figure raised a hand.
Red lines traced across their coat—lines just like his. But inverted.
Then came the voice. Low. Familiar.
"Don't look for answers, Kaien."
The figure's own mask flickered into view—shaped like RYZEN's but refined. Sharper. Sleeker. A glowing blue eye in place of red.
"You gave them up… to become me."
Then—static.
The figure vanished in a flicker of light.
Kaien stood there, alone again, heart racing.
Not just because he was scared.
But because…
He knew the voice.
He'd heard it once—years ago. A whisper in a blackout. A sound during his first aura glitch.
It had been him.
But not quite.
A version of him that was still waiting to be born.