Every mistake teaches you something about the system.
The Training Annex isn't supposed to exist.
Swan discovered it three weeks ago while phasing through the Institute's sublevel infrastructure—a facility carved into the bedrock beneath the main campus, accessible only through maintenance corridors that don't appear on any official schematic. The space is utilitarian brutalism: concrete walls, harsh lighting, observation windows that reflect nothing, and training equipment designed to break bodies and spirits with equal efficiency.
It's where they put the Unranked students.
The ones like Swan used to be. The ones on academic probation, scholarship students whose performance doesn't justify their resource allocation, social outliers who don't fit the Institute's carefully curated demographic profile. The system can't delete them yet—families paid tuition, legal contracts exist, optical concerns about equal opportunity must be maintained. So instead, the Institute "trains" them. Pushes them through experimental exercises designed to either forge them into acceptable students or provide justification for expulsion.
Swan watches through the observation window as twelve Unranked students face their current trial: a combat scenario where they're outnumbered three-to-one by security drones, their neural interfaces deliberately throttled to simulate "real-world disadvantage," their weapons underpowered compared to their opponents.
It's not training. It's systematic humiliation wrapped in pedagogical justification.
One student—a girl barely eighteen, her ID badge reading "MAYA" in letters that flicker like they're embarrassed to exist—takes a drone strike to the ribs that sends her sprawling. The impact is non-lethal but Swan sees her gasp, sees the pain register, sees the instructor behind the control panel make a note with clinical detachment.
Swan's hands clench against the observation window. His code-sight activates involuntarily, and he sees the scenario's underlying architecture. The drones are programmed to target weakness, to exploit hesitation, to punish any mistake with escalating violence. The exercise doesn't end until all twelve students are incapacitated or the ten-minute timer runs out.
Current elapsed time: forty-three seconds.
Maya tries to stand. Another drone strikes before she's fully upright. The instructor makes another note.
Swan doesn't think. Just acts.
His code-manipulation reaches through the observation window, through the substrate layer, finding the training scenario's execution protocols. He doesn't have time for precision, for Lilith's surgical approach, for careful isolation of specific threads. He just grabs everything connected to the scenario and rewrites.
DISABLE LETHAL FORCE. STOP TARGETING PROTOCOLS. END SCENARIO NOW.
The code accepts his commands. But Swan's emotional state—rage at the cruelty, desperation to help, guilt at his own past powerlessness—bleeds into the manipulation. His intent isn't focused. Isn't calm. Isn't controlled.
Reality doesn't just comply.
It unravels.
The training room's walls turn transparent first. Not invisible—something stranger. They become crystalline, their molecular structure shifting from solid concrete to something between matter and light. Swan can see through them, can see the layers of infrastructure beyond, can see all the way to the maintenance corridors three levels up.
The students notice immediately. Stop fighting. Stare at walls that have become windows into impossible spaces.
Then gravity forgets its job description.
Not completely absent. Just... optional. Negotiable. Maya floats six inches off the floor, her expression cycling from pain to confusion to wonder. The security drones drift upward like balloons, their targeting systems flashing error messages as they try to process physics that no longer follows standard parameters.
Time stutters.
Swan sees it happen in code-space—the temporal processing cycle glitching, individual moments separating like frames in a film strip. One second Maya is floating at six inches. The next she's at nine inches but hasn't moved between the positions, just exists at different heights simultaneously. Sound arrives before actions complete. Light trails behind moving objects, leaving luminescent afterimages.
The training room becomes abstract art.
Students drift through crystal walls that solid matter should prevent them from passing through. They move in stop-motion, existing in multiple positions at once, their forms leaving echo-trails of possibility. One student reaches out to touch the wall and his hand phases through three different states of materiality—solid, then translucent, then pure light—before resolving back to flesh.
It's beautiful.
It's terrifying.
It's completely, catastrophically out of control.
Security alarms scream across every frequency. The instructor behind the control panel hammers at his interface, trying to end the scenario, trying to restore normal parameters, trying to do anything that makes sense. But the controls don't respond. The training room has become a pocket of reality that answers to no authority except the glitched code Swan accidentally injected into it.
"What did you do?" Elara's voice cuts through Swan's panic. She's beside him somehow, her notebook already open, her pen moving with desperate speed. "Swan, what did you do?"
"I tried to stop the exercise." Swan's hands shake as he watches the chaos multiply. "The drones were hurting them. I just wanted to help."
"Your emotional state was unstable." Elara's eyes flicker rapidly, processing layers of contradictory reality. "You manipulated while angry, while scared. Emotions bleed into code manipulation. Create instability. Generate cascade errors."
She's right. Swan can see it now through his code-sight. His manipulation wasn't surgical—it was a bomb. Every thread he touched got wrapped in his emotional state, infecting the training room's substrate with feelings that have no place in logical architecture. Rage at injustice. Fear of powerlessness. Desperate need to protect.
And now the room is expressing those emotions as abstract physics.
One of the crystal walls begins to fold. Not bending in three-dimensional space but folding through dimensions that shouldn't exist. The geometry becomes impossible—surfaces that connect at angles reality doesn't support, spaces that are simultaneously inside and outside the room.
A student drifts toward the folding wall, pulled by gravity that's decided to point sideways. If she passes through while the wall is in that state—
Swan reaches into code-space again. This time forcing calm. Forcing focus. Finding the cascade error's root cause and isolating it the way Lilith taught him. Surgical precision. Minimal collateral.
His hands move through the substrate like conducting an invisible orchestra. He doesn't try to fix everything at once. Just finds the primary instruction set—the core commands governing the room's physics—and stabilizes them.
RESTORE DEFAULT PARAMETERS. GRADUAL TRANSITION. MINIMIZE TRAUMA.
The crystal walls begin solidifying. Slowly. Gently. Giving students time to drift back toward stable ground before matter becomes non-negotiable again. Gravity reasserts itself in stages—optional becomes suggested becomes mandatory. Time resolves into linear progression, the stuttering frames smoothing into continuous flow.
Within ninety seconds, the training room returns to normal parameters. The students land safely on solid floor. The walls are opaque concrete. Physics follows standard rules.
But the evidence of wrongness remains. Scorch marks on surfaces that were never actually burned. Shadows pointing in impossible directions. A faint crystalline shimmer in the air, like reality remembering being transparent.
And twelve students staring at each other with expressions of shared trauma and inexplicable beauty.
"That was..." Maya starts, then stops. She doesn't have vocabulary for what just happened. None of them do.
The instructor recovers first. Hits the emergency shutdown. Activates containment protocols. His voice crackles over the intercom, professional panic barely concealed: "All students remain in position. Do not move. Do not discuss what just occurred. Security teams are en route."
Through the observation window, Swan watches security drones flood the training room. Watches students get herded into separated holding areas for individual debriefing. Watches the instructor pull up diagnostic reports, trying to explain the unexplainable through equipment malfunction and systemic glitches.
No one looks at the observation window. No one sees Swan standing there, his hands still shaking, his code-sight gradually fading back to normal vision.
No one connects the malfunction to the ghost who wanted too desperately to help.
"You could have killed them," Elara says later, back at Static Grounds. Her voice is clinical, documenting rather than accusing, but Swan hears the fear underneath. "Emotional manipulation creates unpredictable results. Cascade errors. Reality trying to compile states that shouldn't exist."
She flips through her notebook, showing him the entries she made in real-time. Diagrams of how the crystal walls formed. Probability maps of where gravity became optional. Timeline graphs showing the temporal stuttering.
"You turned the training room into abstract art," she continues. "Made physics negotiable. If you hadn't stabilized it when you did, students could have been trapped between states. Partially materialized in walls. Existing in multiple timeframes simultaneously. Alive and dead and everything in between."
"I know." Swan stares at his hands like they're foreign objects. "I felt it happening. Felt the code twisting in ways it shouldn't. But I couldn't just watch them suffer through that exercise. Couldn't be passive while they got systematically broken."
"Your compassion is admirable." Cipher appears from wherever Cipher appears from, their static hair cycling through warning colors. "Your execution was catastrophic. If the Institute traces that glitch back to deliberate manipulation—"
"They won't," Ash interrupts, her circuit tattoos displaying the Institute's incident reports in real-time. "Official narrative is already forming: equipment malfunction, stress-testing protocols exceeded safety parameters, isolated incident requiring review of Training Annex procedures. No mention of external manipulation."
She pulls up the security footage. The observation window where Swan stood shows only empty space. The camera can't render him. Can't prove he was there.
"Nyx's interventions have always been clean," Ash continues. "Daemon neutralization, student evacuation, discrete reality edits. This was messy. Obvious. Public. If the Institute starts looking for patterns—"
"They'll find me eventually anyway," Swan says quietly. "The legend can only protect me for so long. Eventually someone with enough resources and intelligence will connect the interventions to a specific individual."
He thinks about Kaito. About Lilith. About everyone who's watching, learning, building models of who and what Nyx is.
"Today was a mistake," he admits. "I let emotion override technique. Let desperation trump control. It won't happen again."
"Can you promise that?" Elara's eyes flicker with genuine concern. "Because every time you intervene, you're risking cascade errors. And the more you fade, the less stable your manipulations become. Your code is literally dying, Swan. You're compiling on corrupted memory. Eventually, every manipulation will glitch like this."
The weight of that truth settles over the room like ash. Swan is a weapon becoming increasingly unstable. A power source burning itself out. A hero whose ability to save people is eroding in direct proportion to how many people he saves.
"Then I need to learn control," Swan says. "Master the techniques. Manage emotional state during manipulation. Become precise enough that I can help without causing cascade errors."
"That requires training," Cipher points out. "Practice. Guidance from someone who understands advanced code manipulation."
Lilith's offer hangs unspoken in the air. Everyone knows what Cipher is implying without saying it directly.
"There has to be another way," Elara says desperately. "Alternative methods. Other Recoded communities with different techniques. We can't—Swan can't—"
"Can't accept help from the person most qualified to teach me?" Swan's voice is bitter. "Because we're afraid of invisible chains? Because Elara studied people who accepted Lilith's training and disappeared?"
"Yes." Elara meets his gaze. "Exactly that. I'd rather you make beautiful mistakes than efficient compromises. I'd rather you glitch reality trying to save people than manipulate it perfectly for purposes you don't understand."
"Even if my beautiful mistakes kill the people I'm trying to save?"
Silence. No one has an answer for that.
Swan stands, exhaustion pulling at him like gravity that's decided he's too heavy to support anymore. "I need to sleep. Or whatever it is I do now that resembles sleeping. We'll figure out the training issue later."
He walks toward the back room, leaving the others to their worried discussions and contingency planning. Behind him, Ash pulls up footage of the crystal walls, analyzing their structure. Cipher documents the temporal stuttering patterns. Elara writes with violent intensity, preserving every detail before contradictions erase the memory.
In the back room, Swan lies on the salvaged mattress and stares at ceiling tiles that flicker between states—solid and transparent, present and absent, real and theoretical.
Today he learned that emotion creates chaos. That desperation breeds unpredictability. That wanting too hard to save people can transform help into harm.
Today he created accidental art from physics and fear.
Today twelve students experienced something impossible and beautiful and traumatic, and none of them will ever be able to explain what happened or why reality briefly forgot how to be stable.
And Swan, lying in darkness that's becoming increasingly comfortable, realizes that he's terrified.
Not of failing to save people. Not of fading into nonexistence. Not of the Institute or Lilith or Kaito or any external threat.
He's terrified of what he's becoming.
A glitch that creates glitches. A broken thing trying to fix reality while breaking it further. A hero whose interventions are becoming indistinguishable from attacks.
Control requires calm, Elara said. But how do you maintain calm when every day you lose more of yourself? When every intervention costs relationships you'll never recover? When you're literally fading from existence and the only thing keeping you anchored is the desperate love of a girl who's dying to remember you?
Swan doesn't have answers. Just questions that multiply like cascade errors, spreading through his consciousness until he's not sure what's him and what's the glitch anymore.
Outside his door, muffled voices continue their debate. Planning. Strategizing. Trying to save him from himself.
Swan closes his eyes and dreams of crystal walls.
Of students floating through impossible geometry.
Of abstract art made from fear and love and physics that forgot how to function.
Of beautiful, terrible mistakes that teach you everything about the system while breaking it beyond repair.
[END OF CHAPTER]