Level 999: The Glitch King

The Mercy Trap

"The one that doesn't need your hand to work."

Jace's arm was still shaking when Theodore said it, and the words landed with the same unhurried calm as everything else Sunchain had done to him so far. That was the part he was starting to hate more than the pain.

"Then show me," Jace said. "Whatever it is."

Theodore didn't answer directly. He looked past Jace, toward Caleb.

"Prepare the field."

Jace's legs didn't want to hold him for this. Zero Stamina did that — not weakness exactly, just an accounting problem his body kept losing more of by the minute. Seraphina's arm under his shoulder was the only reason he wasn't already back on the marble, and she didn't let go of it now.

"Whatever this is," she said, "he doesn't consent to it in advance."

"Noted," Theodore said, in the tone of a man filing something away rather than agreeing to it.

Caleb's hands moved without hesitation. Gold lines rose from the marble in a wide ring, not a weapon, not a wall — a screen. The kind of surface built to display something rather than stop it. He never took his eyes off its edges, feeding small corrections into the light whenever it wavered, the way someone might steady a bowl of water they were carrying somewhere important.

STABILITY PROTOCOL — TERMINAL OPTIONS

Branch A: Untreated Divergence.

Branch B: Continuity Preservation.

Generating projection...

The ring filled with light, and inside the light stood Jace.

Not him. A version of him, rendered in the same gold the chain had been made of, moving through a compressed stretch of days he hadn't lived yet. This Jace stood at the base of the throne, Corruption crawling visibly up his arms like something growing under the skin rather than through it.

TARGET ANALYSIS — PROJECTED SUBJECT (T+7 DAYS)

Corruption Load: 89% → 94%.

Recovery Resistance: DEGRADING.

Motor Control: Intermittent.

"That's a week," Jace said. "Feels early to be writing my obituary."

"It isn't your obituary," Theodore said. "It's a forecast. Forecasts can still be wrong."

"Do they usually run wrong in your experience?"

Theodore didn't answer that one.

Breach Sight came up out of habit more than decision, dragging the familiar ache back in behind his eyes. He pushed it toward the ring itself, past the projected version of himself and into whatever was doing the projecting.

PROJECTION SOURCE: OBSTRUCTED.

Reason: Insufficient Stability outside active recovery.

Whatever was rendering this wasn't guessing. It knew which finger failed first, in which order the veins spread, how many days it took a body to stop correcting itself. That kind of specificity came from somewhere. He just couldn't see where, not yet, not with Stamina sitting at zero and the sight already costing him more than he had.

"Unauthorized analysis of protected infrastructure," Caleb said, without turning around. "Cease."

"You say that like I found something."

"You will not."

"That's a very specific kind of confident."

The projection advanced without waiting for either of them, the compressed days folding forward until the readout changed again.

TARGET ANALYSIS — PROJECTED SUBJECT (T+14 DAYS)

Corruption Load: 89% → 100%.

Identity Variance: SEVERE. Classification: Destabilizing.

Structural Integrity: Failing.

The projected Jace's outline flickered at the edges first — a hand losing its shape for half a second before correcting, then failing to correct at all. By the second week he wasn't glitching anymore so much as coming apart along seams that had never been there in the original, pieces of him blinking out and back in slightly wrong, like a signal losing the thread of what it was supposed to be reconstructing.

"This is what refusal costs," Theodore said. "Not punishment. Consequence."

"You built the consequence. That's not the same as it being natural."

"I built the treatment. Your body is building the consequence."

"You keep saying that like it settles something."

"It settles what I'm responsible for."

Elijah had gone very quiet at the edge of the field. Jace almost missed it — a small, private flinch, there and gone, at the exact moment the projection's readout flagged Identity Variance as the failure point rather than the Corruption itself. As if he recognized the wording. As if he'd heard it applied to someone before Jace ever stood in this room. His fingers found his own wrist again, briefly, before he seemed to notice and stopped.

Jace watched himself die in fourteen days and found that the worst part wasn't the image. It was how quiet the room stayed while it happened — no alarm in Caleb's voice, no urgency in Theodore's, nothing about the process that Sunchain considered worth reacting to, because to them this wasn't a tragedy being narrated, it was a data point being confirmed, the expected output of a subject who kept insisting on being one thing when the safest version of him required becoming something smaller. He understood, watching it, that the horror had never been the corruption. The horror was that everyone in the room already agreed on what would fix it, and the fix was him.

"There is another branch," Theodore said.

Something in his voice changed on that line — not softer, exactly. Slower. Like a man choosing each word after already living through the sentence once.

"Most heirs choose it eventually," he said. "Not because they're broken. Because at some point, freedom stops feeling like the safer option."

Theodore looked at the failing projection a moment too long before it faded — not the practiced glance of a man narrating a case file, but the look of someone checking whether an old wound had actually closed.

Seraphina's grip on Jace's shoulder tightened. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to; Jace felt the answer in how hard her hand had gone.

The ring dimmed the failing Jace to nothing.

Then it began building the other one.

The black veins disappeared first.

The shaking stopped. The damage along his right hand sealed without scar tissue, gold restraint, or visible pain. His posture straightened as the projection reconstructed him piece by piece — healthy, rested, and perfectly still before the throne. His breathing slowed to something even and unhurried. Whatever had been holding tension in his shoulders let go of it entirely, the way tension leaves a body only in sleep, or in death, or in something designed to resemble both closely enough that the difference stopped mattering. Even his hands looked different — open, unclenched, the particular stillness of someone who had stopped expecting to need them for anything.

TARGET ANALYSIS — PROJECTED SUBJECT: CONTINUITY PRESERVED

Corruption Load: 0%.

Structural Integrity: STABLE.

Pain Response: NONE.

Identity Variance: WITHIN ACCEPTABLE LIMITS.

Projected Survival Status: PERMANENTLY PRESERVED.

Seraphina hadn't moved. Jace could feel her looking at the calm version of him the way she'd look at something wearing a friend's face without being the friend.

Jace stared at the version of himself Sunchain considered saved.

The other Jace opened his eyes.

They were calm.

Completely calm.