IX – “Keep Calm and ISG”

Previously on ‘Glitch’:

Adela saves Edward from years of debt for all the destruction that the Sprites have spread across the school! Yet these entities insist on ruining the boy’s life! They pursue Edward and force him to let Adela go home with her jerk boyfriend so that she would be out of harm’s way.

Still cornered, Edward stays in school to play baseball with Karina, a schoolmate, and Macro; the punk whom he saved from the Cubs. Yet now our hero cannot go in his ‘Thief King Form’ anymore because his friends are all around him. I know this is not a problem for Superman and Yugi Moto, but our cast is not that dumb to do not notice.

How will Edward save himself? Let’s find out!

-| Glitch - |

“Hurry up, dude!” yelled Macro from the door of the school’s abandoned equipment storage. “You are choosing a baseball bat, not a wife!”

Edward shouted back, “Just give me a minute, it’s dark in here.”

Elizabeth spoke in the boy’s head, “Don’t mind Macro. Everything that wasn’t pillaged from this place is falling apart. Choose the wrong bat, it’ll break in half and give you a concussion.”

“We gotta go fast. The Sprites are coming,” replied the boy, yanking a bat from the shelf. “Will this one work?” he asked Elizabeth.

The boy’s eyes flashed purple. Numbers took shape over the object:

Hollow Baseball Bat

-20% Punching Force. (Strength of an average punch)

Elizabeth groaned. “Bloody no. Look for something else!”

“Alright!”

Macro waited outside. He frowned at his watch and shouted again, “Dude, you are creeping me out. Stop talking to yourself, pick a bat and just get done with it.”

“Sorry,” replied Edward. “Just one second.”

“I heard there is some ghost girl who roams around here at night. If I pay attention, I can hear her laugh. I’m getting goosebumps all over…”

“There are no ghosts, Macro.”

“If this turns out to be a prank, you’ll become one! Dude, I’m telling you”—he rubbed his arms and shivered—”it’s getting cold and warm all the time. I saw some weird &$&%# all the time in my grandma’s old house. It always began like this. If some creepy voice comes jinxing in my ear, I’m getting the hell outta here leaving you two to talk!”

“I’m in a dark place and I’m keeping my cool,” replied Edward as he hunted for a baseball bat inside the dim storage building. “You should do it too, Macro.”

“Easy for you! You are not ¨$&% phasmophobic!” snorted the punk, wiping the sweat from his face. His legs were wobbly.

Edward faltered. “What is phasmophobia?” he asked Elizabeth.

“Fear of ghosts and demons. Often used by people who are scared of the dark to make their phobia sound more glamorous.”

“So Macro has fear of the dark?”

“Likely. Now pick up a bat.”

“Alright,” replied the boy as he yanked a baseball from an old shelf, “will this one work—”

The entire shelf collapsed on him.

Macro squeaked like a little child when he heard the noise. “Dude, you are ¨$&%& doing it on purpose, aren’t you?” he snorted.

“S-S-Sorry! Argh”—Edward dragged himself out of the pile of broken sports equipment that covered him—”I’m alright if you were wondering.”

Elizabeth resigned, “Toothpick, just pick up anything and let’s get out of here before you end up killing yours—”

A pristine baseball bat rolled on the ground and touched the boy’s right foot. “W-What is that?” he asked himself, yanking the object from the ground. His eyes flashed purple. A stat sheet hovered over the wood:

Maple “Nixon” Baseball Bat

+30% Punching Force. (Strength of an average punch)

Average Swing of a Professional Batter: 0,4atm

“This seems perfect!” said the boy, smiling wide. “I shall call it Nixon—”

He felt as if his brain burned. Elizabeth shouted in his head:

“Toothpick, stand up now!”

“W-What?”

A toad Sprite’s yellow eye lightened the dark. It rose its longsword over the shoulder and jolted the blade down to tear Edward in half.

“I’ll take over!” intervened Elizabeth.

The boy’s eyes flashed purple and he turned into Thief King Edward. The man rolled on the ground and dodged the Sprite’s attack. The blade was so strong that the floor ripped open as if a pickaxe had hit it.

Macro heard all the noise, terrified. “D-Dude, what the &$*%(% is going on in there?” he asked.

“Nothing, you wanker,” replied Thief King as he dodged attack after attack from the creature. The Sprite demolished the room as if its weapon were a sledgehammer.

“What the &$&%&% happened to your voice?” asked Macro, trembling. “What is going on in there, Eddy?”

“Edward is dead. You are next,” replied the purple-eyed man.

Edward spoke in Thief King’s head, “stop scaring Macro, Elizabeth!”

Thief King rolled his eyes. “Bugger,” he snorted as he turned into Edward again.

Elizabeth, once more a voice in the boy’s head, buffed, “Why must I hate all your friends?”

“Elizabeth, what are you doing?” asked the boy, surprised. Edward did not expect to fight. He held Nixon, his baseball bat, like a two-handed sword. The Sprite rested its heavy blade on the shoulder and walked closer. The ground trembled with its steps.

“Knight Class Kobold” LV2 Sprite

HP: 4atm

Reaction: 288ms

Strength: 200lbs

Dislocation: 2mph

Equipment: Ethereal Zweihander (adds Strength, reduces Dislocation)

KNOWN SKILLS

- The Tongue of the Relinquished: Unbreakable tongue with infinite length and three times the strength of the Sprite.

- Growth: Can swallow other Sprites to increase Level and evolve.

“This was the card that I got. I will only explain how to do this once,” began Elizabeth, “this Sprite is slow but it hits like a truck…” She rambled about strategy and the meaning of every status. She described fundaments of battle so fast that a listener would wonder what language she spoke.

Yet Edward did not react. He shivered, catatonic. He could not take his eyes away from the entity that approached him with the intention of murder. For him, the creature’s steps sounded much louder than the woman’s endless ramblings about attribute values and meanings. The boy’s adrenaline faltered and he realized that he was in a fight to the death—or better, complete erasure. Fear immobilized his legs like chains.

Yet Elizabeth spoke about strategy, unaware that Edward had a panic attack. She continued:

“You must be wise and”—she realized that he did not react—“Toothpick?” she shouted. “Toothpick, snap out of it! Wake up!”

Edward was blind to what was around him. He saw scenes of his childhood before his eyes as if he watched a movie of his life.

He saw himself approaching the hospital bed of a man with burned skin. The patient’s body was in so much pain that he could barely move his neck. A doctor rose her voice:

“Remember he jumped off a plane in flames—she narrowed his eyes at Joy, Edward’s mother—“tell your son to do not push him beyond his limits. I’ll let you two alone with your husband now. He is on a sedative to do not feel pain when he talks.”

Edward leaned forward to see the man from up-close. “Dad?” asked the boy. Tears filled his eyelids.

“Eddy?” mumbled the man, moving his neck to face his child.

“D-Did you die, dad?”

The man chuckled. “I got 7 lives. 5 are left,” he replied.

The boy grinned in excitement. “Like in a video game?” he asked with light in his eyes.

“Kinda,” replied the man as he glanced at the curtain of blood sacks surrounding his body.

“Why did you jump, dad?” asked Edward.

“I was gonna fall, either way, man. I couldn’t change gravity,” he explained with a smile so bright that his teeth could brighten the darkness. “Might as well choose where you will jump and face the trouble head-on,” he continued. “You either make a choice of where the land, or let the enemy make it for you. That’s how life works.”

Edward recoiled. His reverie ended and he saw himself back in the storage of St. Michael’s High.

“Toothpick wake up!” Elizabeth shouted in his head. “You must—”

“Fight,” he completed without a doubt of what to do. His eyes flashed green. “I must hit it from the side after it does an attack, got it. He’s slow and that will give me an opening.”

“—or you could just run away. Look at the speed values.”

Edward recoiled. “Wow, I’m an idiot—”

“Get down!” yelled Elizabeth.

The Sprite swung its sword horizontally to separate the boy’s chest from his waist.

Edward ducked and dodged the attack, gasping. “So close,” he told himself, exasperated. His eyes widened in despair as the creature regained control of its sword and prepared to attack again.

“It’s not over yet! Get away now, Edward!”

“W-Wait,” pleaded the boy as he felt reality distorting around him. A shiver crept down his spine as he saw a tiny green target taking shape on the Sprite’s chest. “I-Is that a—”

“A Glitch’s Rift?” completed Elizabeth, baffled.

“W-What am I supposed to do, Elizabeth?” asked Edward as the Sprite eyed him with lust for blood.

“I told you. Glitches appear when you do something new and play the game how it is not supposed to be played. Most glitches are circumstantial, yet you can break reality and force some of them to happen again, like the Fire of Mourgiana,” she explained, fascinated. “This could be one of your ‘Fire of Mourgiana’, Edward.”

“B-But what did I do?” he asked. “Play baseball?”

“You chose to fight.”

“I did,” he said, frowning at his father’s paratrooper ring around the hand that held Nixon, the baseball bat. The boy for once felt as if the accessory fit him. He knew exactly what to do.

“Look straight!” warned Elizabeth.

The Sprite rose its two-handed blade over its shoulders to attack.

“You decide now, Toothpick. You run or fight!”

-| Infinite Swing Glitch (ISG) – Multiplication Glitch. - |

“Argh!” shouted Edward, twisting his waist and swinging the bat at the creature’s chest. His movement was weak and the creature barely flinched. Yet reality distorted around him. He felt his arms moving by themselves, repeating the swing as if he lived in a rewinding scene in a movie. His attack was insignificant by itself, yet a series of attacks was a force to be feared. He swung the beat as fast as a machine gun fired bullets. “Eat it!” said Edward as he hit the Sprite’s head with the bat and knocked the creature to the ground.

“Finish him, toothpick!” said Elizabeth.

“Wait a moment, please.”

He collapsed to his knees, gasping. His body weighed and he used Nixon, the baseball bat, as a cane. “What’s going on,” he bemoaned. ‘I can’t lift my right arm anymore.”

“I feared this would happen,” she remarked. “Glitches don’t come for free. A trained batter can exert a pressure of 0,4 atmospheres with a single swing. Since your only lifting is the one you do when you get off the bed, you can barely do one-fourth of that damage and thus need to swing your arms until you dislocate your shoulders when using the ISG. And the thing is not even dead.”

The Sprite contorted on the ground. Its wounds disappeared as if the entity’s body healed itself. “How will I destroy it, then?” asked Edward, frowning. He had no time to feel proud of his first victory.

“Not with a dislocated shoulder,” replied Elizabeth. “Just get away from here and call it a day. Better leave before more of them shows up.”

“A-Alright,” replied Edward as he ran out of the abandoned storage building.

The air from the outside was fresh and cold. Yet something bothered Elizabeth. “Aren’t we forgetting something—”

A hand grasped Edward’s knee.

“What?” asked the boy as he frowned and saw an expressionless Macro sitting on the ground.

The punk hugged his helmet as if he held a teddy bear. His skin was cold as ice. Although he feared ghosts, he became the closest thing to one in that school.

“Easy there,” remarked Edward as he struggled to pull the man off the ground. Yet Macro felt as heavy as a boulder. He did not raise a finger to help. “I can’t do it,” the boy resigned. “Any ideas, Elizabeth?”

“Let me try scaring him.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

Edward became Thief King. The purple-eyed man crouched and whispered into Macro’s ears with the deepest voice that he could:

“You have such a great skin. I wonder how well it will look on me.”

The punk widened his mouth and screamed so loud that the entire neighborhood could hear his voice. He sprung off the ground and ran away as Thief King laughed maniacally. “The Fire of Mourgiana devours you, Mark Ro—”

“No more glitches! We gotta go tell Karina that we can’t play. Doing that glitch to Macro is just mean!”

“Have a sense of humor, toothpick. A little scare won’t do him harm, I promise.”

“No!”

They discussed what to do. There was so much noise inside Thief King’s head that neither Elizabeth nor Edward noticed a sudden flash dotting the darkness and capturing his image in a frame.

“So this is your secret, Edward Williams,” remarked Sammy, the boy’s strange classmate who claimed to see the Sprites around the school. She frowned upon the picture of Thief King Edward that the camera printed. “I wonder what you were fleeing from,” she told herself as she walked into the abandoned storage house where the boy had found his baseball bat. She looked through the camera’s lenses and saw that Sprites roamed the place. One of them widened its jaw and devoured the creature that Edward had defeated while the others searched for clues. They all narrowed their eyes at the girl as she entered the building.

“Face the light,” said Sammy as she took a picture of the creatures. Her camera’s flash turned them into stone. “You now belong among the evidence,” she said as her camera printed the picture of the toad Sprite. She stored the image in an album filled with black-and-white animated images of many types of Sprites. Her collection was a chaotic one, for the creatures protested and fought to escape their photos.

The girl yanked the picture that she had taken of Thief King and frowned upon him. “You’re now scheduled for an interview in the paranormal club, Edward Williams.”

Tables for the Table Gods:

Spoiler: Spoiler

Edward's Stat Cards:

Edward (Thief King Mode)'s Stat Card: