I was in a maintenance cradle.
Not metaphorical.
A literal U-shaped frame holding my siege-body off the ground, feet hanging like I'd been jacked up for a tire swap.
Core-bands lit up and cinched around my chassis.
Restraints rendered in—no tool marks, no handiwork, just a clean spawn.
They didn't just hold me—they listened.
When I panicked, the bands tightened in perfect steps, like an auto-restraint script set to "ruin your day."
My plating creaked.
My cannon mount twitched and got corrected back into place.
> [NOTICE: Integrity Drain Active: -3 HP/sec]
> [ERROR: VOID SLOT LEAK DETECTED]
> [LEAK PROGRESS: 61%]
Every second, the system skimmed another slice off my HP.
Not dramatic.
Administrative.
A drain ticker chewing through my chassis from the inside.
[-3 HP] at the end of a breath.
Another [-3 HP] when I swallowed and my intake fans caught nothing but sterile lab coolant stink.
The Professor stood on a wheeled stool to reach my torso panels, goggles pushed up, whiskers immaculate.
Calm.
Clinical.
He got that look—like when a bug finally happens on stream and you can't pretend it's "rare" anymore.
"Hot-Swap procedure," he said, like it was a patch note. "We crack you open while you're still online, yank the busted anchor, slot the stabilizer, and pray your aim-stop stops drifting."
I tried to object.
My voice came out like voice chat on trash ping—clipped, delayed, falling apart.
"Y-you can't—"
Lag ate my syllables.
"S-sedation—"
The Professor's ears twitched.
"No sedation. If you're awake, the system reads you cleaner."
He said it like it was policy.
Like I'd asked why we needed logs.
A rack of core-lasers spun up.
It wasn't a hum.
It was a synth whine that climbed until it found my heartbeat and harmonized.
My internal clock—tick, tick, tick—kept getting louder, like someone maxed the SFX slider on time itself.
He flicked a switch and my HUD complied.
A pre-op scan tiled across my vision: cutaway pics of my torso panels, layers tagged in clean Zenith font.
> BUS_A.
> BUS_B.
> COOLANT.
> AMMO_FEED.
And there—an ugly tag hovering like a ban notice:
> VOID_PTR
A warning popup snapped dead center and blocked the only thing that mattered.
> [OPERATION: UNSUPPORTED WHILE LIVE]
"Yeah," I rasped. "No kidding."
The Professor didn't even blink.
He tapped a tool against my plating.
Metal pressure—real, grinding, way too intimate.
Under that—worse.
Like someone changing my settings mid-fight.
My pain settings got ripped out and rewritten.
It went from hurts to the system says you're allowed to feel it.
My restraints tightened.
My vision jittered.
A module waited beside the open bay on a velvet pad like it outranked me: the Core Node Stabilizer (Modified).
It pulsed in sync with my drain ticker, like it already owned my chassis.
"The swap window will be seconds," the Professor said, almost cheerful. "Failure will spike the leak. So! We must be precise."
The laser tip touched my seam.
Heat—then the seam lit up in a razor-straight line.
A carved groove.
Sparks burst—and my graphics glitched and tagged them as blood.
Pixelated red droplets that fell upward for half a frame before gravity remembered itself.
My view yanked in—forced zoom.
Locked on the cut line.
> [LEAK PROGRESS: 62%]
> [-3 HP]
The Professor leaned closer.
> [LIVE WRITE MODE: ENABLED]
The laser pressed deeper.
The first laser didn't cut.
It pinned the seam in place—core light like hard tape, a containment field that numbed the outer plating while everything underneath screamed.
The second beam slid along the line it created, peeling my armor back in slow arcs.
Like cracking a tin
with a can key—slow, ugly, inevitable.
> [CHASSIS INTEGRITY -2%]
> [THERMAL LOAD +15]
> [PAIN SIM: ON]
Pain sim.
Axiom's dumbest setting, and I caught it on the worst possible day.
Somebody once wrote "for immersion" in a dev note, and now I'm stuck feeling it on max settings.
My HP bar didn't just drop.
It ticked.
A metronome in the corner of my HUD—every beat took a bite.
[-3 HP]
[-3 HP]
[-3 HP]
Then the VOID_SLOT surged—my vision stuttered and the laser trails smeared into red glitch trails.
> [ERROR: VOID_PTR LEAK SURGE]
> [INTEGRITY DRAIN: -9 HP/sec]
Beat-beat-beat—faster.
My throat locked around a sound that wasn't language—just compressed air shoved through bad code.
"Hold still," Professpr snapped.
His voice came through clean, like he had voice priority over the whole damn lab.
"Your controls are jittering!"
I tried.
I really did.
But my chassis spasmed like the system hit me with an unskippable stun.
The cradle felt me move and the restraints tightened in clean steps until my plating complained.
> [RESTRAINTS: AUTO-TENSION +12%]
> [STAMINA: 41%]
Resisting burned stamina like sprinting uphill with my movement speed capped.
I forced my breathing into the laser's pulse cycle—inhale on the whine rising, exhale when it dipped.
Timing it to the whine like a rhythm game.
Stamina crawled back by scraps.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
> [STAMINA: 44%]
> [NOTICE: JITTER REDUCED 3%]
A coolant line hissed somewhere inside me.
The HUD didn't hiss. It just judged.
> [COOLANT LOW: 12%]
Tool drones hovered over the bench, idling in a neat stack.
One tried to show a label—then the icon smeared into unreadable blocks, like my UI glitched mid-update.
The minimap ghosted in the corner and, for half a second, the center sector was just black fog.
Where it shouldn't be.
The Professor didn't look up.
He pulled a syringe of glowing code and jammed it into an exposed port like it was normal to shoot a hotfix into a living character.
Cold clarity snapped through my controls—my inputs stopped wobbling.
The jitter eased.
> [BUFF: STEADY HAND +20%]
> [DEBUFF: OVERHEAT RISK +10%]
> [THERMAL LOAD +8]
Tradeoffs.
Always.
A core-ring clamp snapped around the port with a chime that went straight through my frame.
It vibrated through my frame and rang behind my eyes—like a notification sound welded to my skull.
> [SYSTEM: PORT ACCESS LOCKDOWN ATTEMPT]
> [PAIN SIM: SPIKE]
"Manual checksum," The Professor said. "Now. Confirm prompts as they appear!"
Two windows slammed into my vision.
> [CONFIRM SYSTEM LAYOUT? Y/N]
> [ALLOW PORT ACCESS? Y/N]
My cursor—my will—hung on "N."
Reflex.
Self-preservation.
The metronome punished hesitation.
[-9 HP]
[-9 HP]
I tasted fake copper and felt something in my system pop as my controls hard-reset under me.
I forced the selection.
Y.
Y.
The world lurched, like I'd just typed my admin password into /all chat and hit enter.
The Professor pried at the VOID_SLOT cover.
The moment it cracked, a vacuum pull started—my core trying to stream itself into nothing.
My HP dropped in chunks I could feel in my teeth.
[-42 HP]
[-42 HP]
[-42 HP]
> [VOID_PTR LEAK: 87%]
The Professor lifted the Core Node Stabilizer, aligning it with hands that didn't shake.
The slot warped—edges crawling, angles wrong—like corruption was reshaping the socket mid-op.
"Swap window," he breathed. "We get one insertion."
And the hole in me pulled harder, hungry for whatever I'd just clicked "Yes" to become.
> [STATUS UPDATE]
> HP: 1052/1750
> MP: 450
> [EFFECTS]
> DATA LEAK: SURGE
> BUFF: STEADY HAND (+20%)
> DEBUFF: OVERHEAT RISK (+10%)
[RESOURCES]
> STAMINA: 44% (RECOVERING)
> COOLANT: 12% (CRITICAL)
> [FLAGS]
> PORT_ACCESS: GRANTED
The Professor drove the Core Node Stabilizer toward the VOID_PTR slot like he was racing a despawn timer.
The containment field flickered.
Not off.
Worse.
Out of sync.
The module's edges split into afterimages—three versions of the same object, offset like a lagging cursor.
One of them was already inside me.
One of them wasn't even in the Professor's hands yet.
My vision hard-vignetted, tunneling down to a single center point.
The lab-bay collapsed into grime, brass, and The Sink oil-stink, then dimmed until only one thing rendered cleanly:
> [VOID_PTR LEAK: 92%]
> [VOID_PTR LEAK: 94%]
> [VOID_PTR LEAK: 96%]
Every percent hit like a punch—no impact, just chunks of missing data.
Like the system was wiping memory I was still trying to run on.
[-17 HP].
[-17 HP].
The Professor froze mid-insertion, pupils pinpricked behind the lenses.
"It's not an empty slot."
The VOID_PTR pulled.
Not suction—intent.
A button press that never comes back.
It was trying to write "nothing" over the stabilizer—turn the Core Node into an empty slot that points to nowhere.
The Professor swore in perfect Zenith diction.
"The anchor is fused. Normal insertion won't work—I have to force the swap."
The Professor grabbed a pair of mag-pliers, jammed them into the distortion, and twisted.
A shriek of tearing metal—and a black splinter ripped free, clattering onto the tray.
"Forcing the install!"
The lasers re-angled.
The synth whine climbed past hearing and into my teeth.
"Glitch," he said, voice suddenly thin, "this will feel like pain at every layer."
Then he did it anyway.
A white-hot core-grid slammed down and pinned my chassis open—every brace another lock I couldn't mute.
The air tasted like hot metal and Sink rot—like The Sink had crawled into my filters.
My HUD jittered under the brightness.
The stabilizer's pins entered.
I felt them like metal spikes driving into ports I didn't have a second ago—
[-33 HP]
—and like system rules stitching into who I was, rewriting my build while I was still online.
My name tag shook: GLITCH. GLI—TCH. G—.
The Professor barked, "Anchor it! You have Admin Access—use it!"
A hidden menu tore open, like I'd just flipped open the "are you sure" cover on my own UI.
> [ADMIN MENU: ENABLE?] Y/N
My cursor trembled.
Saying "Y" felt like handing admin access to a stranger.
The leak ticked anyway.
[-21 HP].
Y.
> [WARNING: TRUE DRAIN ON CONFIRM]
> [EXECUTE: LOCK SLOT?] Y/N
Y.
[-18 HP]
> [EXECUTE: CLEAR GLITCHED DATA?] Y/N
Y.
[-18 HP]
My audio hard-cut into muffled static.
The world desaturated into gray shapes—no textures, no lighting, just wrong.
> [VOID_PTR LEAK: 99%]
> [FORCED REBOOT IMMINENT]
[-4 HP].
[-3 HP].
The Professor's hands shook for the first time.
The Professor braced the stabilizer with both palms like he was physically holding me in place.
"BIND," he hissed. "BIND IT NOW!"
> [EXECUTE: BIND_CORENODE?] Y/N
Y.
A new prompt punched through the static:
> [ALLOW PERMANENT HOOK?]
> Consequence: Max HP Reduction / Persistent Scar
I accepted.
Because a full wipe-out was worse.
The final core-laser burst hit like a slammed door.
The stabilizer seated ugly—violent, misaligned—and then jammed home with a sound like metal snapping and code agreeing.
The leak counter froze at 99%… then dropped to 0% in a single frame.
Silence, hard-cut.
A system chime.
[CRITICAL ERROR RESOLVED]
VOID_PTR: STABILIZED VIA CORE-NODE BIND
REBOOT SEQUENCE: INITIATED
Black screen.
Boot text crawled up the dark like a crash log you keep pretending isn't yours.
Fragmented memories: a keyboard, Finals countdown, a minion wave pathing wrong.
Loading
bars inching forward like the client was billing me per pixel.
In the darkness, the first new UI element rendered:
> [CORE-CHARGE: 0/100]
Fans first—always fans first.
A staggered spool-up under my ribs, like someone started a noisy server inside a dented trash can.
My audio came back in channels—left, then right—until the lab resolved into metal clinks and Nox's fast, shallow breathing.
Vision followed.
Gray geometry.
Outline view.
Then the textures finally loaded.
Color came back piece by piece: brass, oil-black, tox-green stains in the grout.
> [STATUS: VOID_PTR STABLE]
> [HP DRAIN REMOVED]
> [NEW RESOURCE UNLOCKED: CORE-CHARGE]
> [WARNING: CORE-CHARGE VOLATILE]
The restraints around my chassis loosened with polite hydraulics, like the system noticed I'd stopped fighting.
Not free.
Just… less owned.
The Professor leaned in, hands hovering like he didn't trust himself to touch anything.
His goggles were smudged.
Good.
Proof he could slip.
"Post-op results," he said, voice pitching into that patch-note cadence. "Stabilizer bind successful. Leak line cleared. Permissions persisted. Minor… structural compromise."
He glanced at my HUD like he could read it.
"Expected."
I tried to move.
Flexed a hand.
The motor responded clean.
No jitter.
No frame hitch.
Like my inputs were finally clean instead of dragged through spaghetti code and duct-tape hacks.
Then I heard it.
A click.
Tiny.
Internal.
Mine.
> [CORE-CHARGE: 1/100] **[+1]
Three seconds later—click.
> [CORE-CHARGE: 2/100] **[+1]
A metronome that wanted its due.
Nox's ears twitched at nothing.
"You feel it, yes? The stabilizer converts kinetic motion into charge. Battery and bomb. Spend it for burst output—shielding, power spikes, maybe a localized stasis—"
His whiskers dipped—shaken for half a second.
"—but do not overfill. Overload state would be… messy."
My character sheet auto-updated, like the client stamped WARRANTY VOID across my save.
> [TAG: HOT-SWAP SCAR (Permanent)]
> [EFFECT: MAX HP REDUCED BY 10%]
> [MAX HP: 1750 -> 1575]
> [TAG: CORE-NODE BIND (Experimental)]
I sat up.
Pain sim was still on—just muted, like someone dropped the slider instead of fixing the bug.
The absence of the drain felt wrong.
Like missing gravity.
My HP bar wasn't shrinking.
I kept waiting for it to.
The lab floor below me looked like a corrupted replay file: cooling slag curls, pixel-sparks fading out mid-flicker.
The discarded VOID_PTR cover lay near a drain channel, twitching every few seconds as corrupted code peeled off in thin, glitchy threads.
Nox held up a jar with a brass lid.
Inside, a black splinter floated in suspension, refusing to touch the glass.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: VOID SHARD]
A tooltip flickered across my HUD— glyphs stuttering into meaning for one frame too long before snapping into place: the new charge bar, dormant and waiting.
He tucked it into my inventory like it might bite through glass.
"We field-test immediately," he said.
The minimap ghost snapped back into place—cleaner now, meaner.
My internal click sped up.
> [CORE-CHARGE: 4/100] **[+2]
> [NOTICE: Threat Response Charging]
I got to my feet.
Unsteady.
Alive.
Ticking.
Generated by GlitchWriter.
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