The night was silent except for the gentle rustle of praying mantises moving through the leaves and the steady footsteps of Priya as she paced the small, gloomy hut. A child clung to her hip.
"Could you two stop eating for a second and help me think of a way out?" Priya snapped, her voice tight with frayed nerves. "I'm so done mothering a child who isn't mine!" She glared at Jace, whose face was stuffed with a compact triangle of sticky rice wrapped with seaweed.
Jace swallowed hard, a piece of onigiri caught in his throat. "Hey, I'm just hungry after all that stress," he said, taking another bite.
"The AI model works well; it's generated a house and meals for even NPCs," Marcus said with a grin, trying to lighten the mood.
"But now Priya has a child," Jace wheezed, gesturing with his half-eaten onigiri at the clingy toddler, whose presence seemed to be grinding Priya's last nerve.
"Why are the glitches reduced?" Marcus looked around, his brow furrowed in concentration. "And there are no sink holes."
"Maybe because it's 'filler time'?" Priya said, rubbing her temples.
"'Filler time'? What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Jace's ears perked up.
"You know," Priya explained with a sigh, "the time when nothing important happens. The night falls, the main characters are just hanging out, and the plot takes a break." She looked around the claustrophobic wooden hut, feeling the child's small hands tighten on her leg.
"But, Priya, how do you know what filler time is?" Marcus narrowed his eyes.
Priya's cheeks flushed a light pink. "Well, I watch anime-" she muttered, looking away in embarrassment.
The hut suddenly vanished into static along with the clinging child and the food. The sun hung high, casting a harsh light across the bright blue sky. The heat and clarity were a sharp, painful contrast to the gloomy night they had just been in.
They took a moment, blinking and shielding their eyes from the sudden, piercing sunlight. The village around them twisted and shimmered, colors bleeding into each other as sink holes appeared and disappeared.
"Priya! The fox kid is back!" Jace screamed at the sight of the blond teenager's frown.
"Jace! You'll never win! Only through pain and friendship can you grow stronger!" Naruto's words echoed, a sound that was both familiar and utterly ridiculous in this context.
"Shut up, you cringey idiot!" Jace's sharp words made everything around them glitch.
"I will defeat you! Your darkness can never consume us!" Naruto's voice echoed, bouncing off the flickering wooden rooftops.
"Jeez, stop taking about me like i'm satan or something" jace said, his fists balled.
Jace glanced at Priya, who was crouched behind the flickering ramen stall, her eyes scanning the strange flickers around her. A glitching PC terminal appeared in front of her.
"Marcus! This might be our key!" Priya called out. She gestured for the sysadmin-turned-mentor to inspect the terminal.
"Is that a- a freaking computer?" Marcus said.
The screen pulsed for a few seconds, a flurry of garbled code flashing before vanishing. Priya's fingers twitched, her coder instincts kicking in despite the surreal situation.
"Come on, come on-" she muttered, kneeling to catch the screen when it blinked into view again. This time, she caught a fragment: def override_plot():
"Bingo!" She smiled, her hands moving to modify the code.
Before she could type anything, Jace grunted and shoved past her.
"Priya! He's about to charge at me! What do I do?" Jace yelled, adjusting his orange jacket, preparing for another real fight.
The blond teenager appeared out of the blue, his eyes blazing red, his jumpsuit flickering like a broken neon sign. "You can't run from fate, Jace!" he shouted, throwing a kunai that warped midair into a pixelated butterfly.
Jace dodged, barely, and threw a clumsy punch that landed with a solid thud on Naruto's glitching jaw.
The spiky-blond-haired teen growled, "You will pay for this, Jace!" and strode toward Jace to strike.
Marcus stepped out, his blue headband tight, his face set. "Watch out, you suicidal freak!" he said, He raised one hand, and a gust of yellow chakra wind blasted Naruto backward, taking out an old wooden fruit cart in the process.
"Damn it, I don't wanna fight a glitching teen," Jace yelled, but Marcus just shrugged, looking surprisingly satisfied after the blow.
Naruto scrambled up, his form flickering. "Your darkness will never beat my light! Believe it!"
Jace groaned and pulled Priya aside, whispering urgently, "Did you get a clue? Can you do anything with that flickering PC to get rid of this screaming fox, at least for now?"
Priya nodded, her eyes glued to the sporadic screen popping up around the square, this time on a crumpled scroll nailed to a fencepost.
Her finger steady on the glitching PC, she typed as fast as she could, fearing it might disappear: disable_rival_instant_teleport()
A massive glitch appeared in the world. Naruto blinked, mid-teleport, now stuck awkwardly in place for a beat longer than usual. His mouth moved, but no words came out; binary 0s and 1s spat from his mouth instead.
"Ha! Take that, 'power of friendship,' my butt!" Jace smirked as a plot hole swallowed the spiky-haired teen into its darkness.
But the victory was short-lived. Suddenly, with a loud thunder, a crack ripped open the sky, and through it, a new figure stepped: a gloomy teenager with a black trench coat, spiky hair, and a glowing sword at his side. Everyone's head turned toward him, a collective sense of dread building in the air.
"Who the hell is that kid now?" Marcus mumbled, his eyes glued back to the terminal on the flickering PC. "Priya! The AI's compiling again, but with a- Wha- are those classes?"
"I said, I'll handle it, Marcus!" She pushed aside Marcus, with trembling hands started trying to fix the code again.
Marcus clenched her fists. "Great. This one kid looks like trouble."
The new rival, with a gloomy expression, stepped into the glitching village like he owned it.
Priya whispered, "We can piece together more code fragments if we can keep the AI distracted. But every fix just makes the world more unstable."
Marcus stomped on the ground in frustration. "God damnit, Teamwork, And don't kill yourself, you bastard!"
Jace shot him a tired grin. "Our best bet right now is to fight him."
The ground cracked in different places around them, the void pulsing like a heartbeat.
"Priya! Do something! The sink holes are back!" Jace exclaimed.
"Hang on tight, Jace! Let me try to alter the code!" Priya yelled, her fingers hovering over the flickering keyboard.
"Because this is going to get worse before it gets better."
Marcus shot her a glare as he gulped. "Just what do you know that we don't"
TO BE CONTINUED....