CHAPTER 6: The Glitch, The Brawl & The Snarky A.I.
The psychic aftershock of the Rage worming its way into the Justice League archive wasn't a tremor. It was a system-wide cringe. Bris felt it in his digital teeth—a nails-on-chalkboard screech of pure malice followed by the stomach-dropping schlurp of a silent, devouring void. Somewhere in a frozen Gotham, a hateful scream and a hungry shadow had just been introduced. It was the worst blind date in the multiverse.
"Okay," Bris said, pinching the bridge of his nose—a gesture he'd picked up from Tarn and now couldn't shake. "We just fed a demonic ego-worm to a sentient trauma. This is fine. This is a Tuesday."
Lyra's luminous form flickered with alarm. "Their emotional frequencies are beginning to harmonize, Bris. It's not a confrontation. It's a… courtship. A terrible, awful courtship."
ALERT: CROSS-CONTAMINATION EVENT IN ARCHIVE_JL ESCALATING. The system message blipped with what sounded like robotic annoyance. SHARED SIMULATION FRAMEWORKS MAY BE COMPROMISED. DIAGNOSTIC RECOMMENDED. SELECT STRESS-TEST ENVIRONMENT.
Another menu popped up. This one had a distinctly violent flavor: [TEKKEN], [STREET FIGHTER], [DEAD OR ALIVE].
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Bris groaned. "The system's answer to our apocalyptic screw-up is 'go punch something'?"
"It's logical," Lyra said, though her tone suggested she too found it absurd. "If the emotional corruption is metastasizing, it will show in the foundational combat code. It's a diagnostic. Think of it as… checking the plumbing."
"By throwing me into a fighting tournament. Right." Bris scanned the options. Street Fighter was too iconic, too pure. Dead or Alive was… a complication he didn't need. Tekken, though. A soap opera of familial hatred and corporate backstabbing wrapped in a martial arts tournament. It was messy, emotional, and full of daddy issues. If any combat framework was susceptible to the Rage-Fear cocktail, it was this one.
"Fine. Let's go to family therapy, Tekken-style."
The world dissolved into the deafening roar of a packed arena. The air thrummed with bass-heavy techno and the smell of cheap arena hot dogs and expensive hologram projectors. The King of Iron Fist Tournament. And it was loud.
"Finally! Some action!" a voice boomed from a giant Jumbotron. On the screen was a grinning, mohawked man in ostentatious commentator gear. "After that inexplicable seven-year pause in the action, it looks like we have a LAST-MINUTE ENTRANT! Stepping into the ring, looking confused and underdressed… BRIIIIIS THE GLITCH!"
The spotlight hit him. He was wearing his simple Steward's clothes, looking like he'd wandered in from a ren faire. The crowd, a sea of frozen, mid-cheer spectators, didn't move a pixel.
"Uh," Bris said into the sudden, expectant silence. "Is there a tutorial? A 'how to not get my face punched in' pop-up?"
OBJECTIVE: DIAGNOSTIC BRAWL. the system helpfully supplied. AGITATE THE COMBAT LOGIC. PROVOKE AN EMOTIONAL RESPONSE. DO NOT GET 'PERFECTED.'
"Helpful. Very helpful."
Across the hexagonal ring, his opponent faded in. Not with a dramatic pose, but with a sigh. It was Paul Phoenix. The man was a mountain of denim and blond hair, his permanently furrowed brow suggesting a man perpetually trying to remember where he left his motorcycle keys.
"Another punk," Paul grumbled, his voice a gravelly baritone. "Don't you kids have schools to glitch into or something?"
Before Bris could retort, Paul lunged. It wasn't a fancy teleport or a fireball. It was a freight train in a jean jacket. The Deathfist. Bris's glitch-hunter reflexes screamed. He didn't dodge left or right—he dropped flat to the mat like a sack of code. The fist passed over him with a sound like a sonic boom.
Paul stumbled, off-balance. "Hey! No fair flopping! Stand up and fight!"
"I'm conducting a diagnostic!" Bris yelled, scrambling to his feet.
"Diagnose this!" Paul shot back, unleashing a barrage of jabs.
Bris had zero fighting skill. But he had an Archivist's eye for system priority. He saw the data-stream queue up for a Phoenix Smasher. Instead of blocking, he did something utterly invalid: he stepped into Paul's personal space and hugged him.
The arena fell silent. The Jumbotron commentator sputtered. "I… what is this? Is this a new grapple? This is just sad!"
Paul froze, his character model locked in a 'throw' animation with no valid target. "Get off me, you weirdo!"
"See?" Bris said, his voice muffled against Paul's denim vest. "Your throw subroutine can't resolve because I'm not in a valid grapple state. Your aggression is overheating your own logic." He let go and danced back.
Paul blinked, his AI processing the paradox. "You talk too much." He came in again, slower this time, more cautious.
Bris didn't fight. He annoyed. He used tiny micro-glitches: making Paul's footstick to the mat for a frame, causing him to trip over his own pixel. He flooded Paul's audio channel with a three-second loop of a kazoo. He briefly replaced Paul's fighter model with a low-poly, dancing cactus from the Shattered Realms asset library.
"MY EYES!" Paul roared, swiping at the cactus now wearing his face.
EMOTIONAL DATA SPIKE DETECTED: FRUSTRATION. DIAGNOSTIC PROGRESS: 25%.
"It's working!" Lyra's voice chirped in his ear, a private channel. "But you're making him very angry."
"That's the point!" Bris ducked another wild swing. "I need a bigger reaction! I need to see if the real contamination is here!"
He needed to fight someone with deeper, nastier emotional coding. He scanned the roster accessible through the diagnostic. He saw Kazuya Mishima. Perfect. A well of cold hatred.
"Switch!" he yelled at the system.
The arena shimmered. Paul vanished, mid-roar. The crowd's frozen excitement reset. And in his place stood Kazuya. Immaculate red suit. Hair perfect. One eye glowed with subdued, demonic crimson. He regarded Bris with the disdain of a god examining a stain.
"A gnat," Kazuya stated, his voice like oiled silk. "I will swat you and return to my contemplation of world domination."
"Yeah, yeah, daddy issues, evil conglomerate, blah blah," Bris said, waving a hand. "Let's skip the monologue. I'm on a timer."
Kazuya's eye twitched. A minuscule breach in the perfect facade. He moved. It was not like Paul's brute force. It was a teleporting Spinning Hook Kick that appeared to come from three angles at once. Bris only survived because he was already throwing himself to the floor in a panicked dive. The kick missed, but the vacuum of its passage sucked the air from his lungs.
"Okay, rude," Bris gasped, rolling to his feet. "No warm-up? No 'en garde'?"
Kazuya didn't answer. He unleashed a series of jabs and low sweeps, a flawless, punishing rhythm. Bris couldn't read the moves, but he could read the system stress. Each attack was a precise call to the animation engine. He started feeding garbage data into those calls. A jab was supposed to load 'fist_forward_03.anim'? Bris sent 'chicken_dance.anim' instead.
The result was spectacular. Kazuya, mid-combo, suddenly did a jerky, spasmodic little shuffle before his leg swept out.
He froze. The crimson in his eye flared. "What… is this?"
"That's the contamination!" Bris said, backing away. "See? Your pristine hate-code is vulnerable to weirdness! My weirdness!"
Kazuya's form shimmered. The cool fury was cracking, revealing the raw, programming underneath. "HATE… FATHER… DESTROY… ERROR: FILE NOT FOUND…"
EMOTIONAL DATA SPIKE: CORE HATRED CORRUPTED. DIAGNOSTIC PROGRESS: 60%. WARNING: AVATAR INTEGRITY FAILING.
"It's working too well!" Lyra warned. "You're breaking him!"
Kazuya began to convulse. The red energy wasn't just in his eye now; it crackled over his body like bad wiring. His suit tore as jagged, pixelated wings of corrupted code—a bastardized version of his Devil form—erupted from his back. But they were glitchy, half-rendered, screaming with error messages.
"I! WILL! NOT! BE! A! JOKE!" The voice was a layered horror: Kazuya's silken baritone shredded by the Rage's screech and underpinned by the Fear's subsonic rumble.
A Laser Cannon beam, not clean crimson but a sputtering, glitchy torrent of green and black static, fired from his eye. It wasn't aiming for Bris. It was writhing wildly, carving chaotic gouges in the arena, hitting the frozen crowd, turning them into melting mannequins.
"Okay, that's new!" Bris yelped, diving behind a fragmenting pillar. "I broke the diagnostic!"
"The fusion's emotional signature is in the combat framework!" Lyra cried. "You didn't just provoke Kazuya, you plugged him into the Rage-Fear channel! He's a conduit!"
The Devil-Kazuya abomination turned its head, its neck moving in a jerky, stop-motion stutter. It fixed its crackling eye on Bris. "LITTLE GLITCH. WE SEE YOU. YOU ARE… ANNOYING."
"Finally, some recognition," Bris muttered. He had to shut this down. He couldn't out-punch it. He had to out-stupid it.
He remembered the countermeasure data from the diagnostic. An emotional antivirus. He needed to deliver it. But how do you inoculate a screaming, laser-shooting, half-rendered devil?
With an even bigger system violation.
He stood up, hands on his hips. "Hey! Ugly! Your father was right! You're a disappointment!"
The abomination flinched as if physically struck. The laser sputtered out. "WHAT?"
"Heihachi was right to throw you off that cliff! Your combos are basic! Your evil plan is derivative! And that suit? Pre-ripped? So try-hard."
"YOU DARE—"
"I dare! You're not a fearsome devil! You're a mid-tier boss with daddy issues and a texture-loading problem!" Bris was screaming now, pouring every ounce of taunting, playground-insult energy he had into his words, weaving it with a specific data-signature—the "Responsibility Protocol" he'd built for Peter Parker, the code that contextualized chaotic emotion.
The abomination roared, but the roar gurgled into confusion. The glitch-wings flickered. It was trying to process the insult, but the antivirus code attached to Bris's words was forcing its emotional processors to analyze the taunt, to contextualize the rage, instead of just feeling it. It was giving the malignant intelligence an existential crisis.
"Your evil laugh needs work!" Bris pressed, advancing. "It's all 'muahaha' when it should be more 'sigh, everything is ashes.' You lack nuance!"
"NUANCE… IS… INEFFICIENT…" it argued, but its voice was losing cohesion.
"Now!" Bris thought to Lyra.
Lyra, from the system layer, struck. She didn't attack the monster. She attacked the shared emotional channel it was using, flooding it with the concentrated, stabilizing data from Kal's sandbox—simple, human grief—and from May Parker's kitchen—unconditional love.
The effect was like throwing a logic bomb into a rage volcano. The Devil-Kazuya form didn't explode. It… short-circuited. It pixelated, shrank, and melted into a puddle of conflicting code that resolved into a sad, generic training dummy. Then it vanished.
The arena was a disaster zone, half-dissolved. The Jumbotron showed the commentator, now a flickering smear of pixels, trying to say "Unbelievable!" but only managing "Un-bzzzt-le."
DIAGNOSTIC CONCLUSIVE. The system message popped up, crisp and clean amidst the chaos. CROSS-CONTAMINATION CONFIRMED IN COMBAT EMOTION SUITE. COUNTERMEASURE EFFECTIVE. EMERGENCY INTERVENTION PROTOCOL UNLOCKED FOR ARCHIVISTS.
A new icon appeared in Bris's HUD: a glowing, silver key labeled [BACKSTAGE PASS - GOTHAM SECTOR].
He'd done it. He'd gotten the key. But as the ruined Tekken arena faded, he heard one last, layered whisper echo in the code, a direct message from the fused entity now waiting for him in the dark:
"COME THEN, ANNOYANCE. BRING YOUR JOKES. WE HAVE MADE A DARKNESS THAT EATS LIGHT. WE HAVE MADE A FEAR THAT LOVES TO HURT. IT WILL BE… FUNNY."
Bris looked at Lyra. "They've got a sense of humor."
"Terrifying," Lyra replied.
"Yeah," Bris said, cracking his digital knuckles. A grim, determined smile touched his lips. "But so do I. Let's go crash their party."