A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0018

Chapter 18

The apartment’s living room had never seemed so small.

Kevin occupied the space like a force of nature crammed into a room not built for it—his head pressed firmly against the low ceiling, his broad, wiry shoulders forced inward in a curve that made the ancient beams groan. Dust fell in slow spirals, caught in the yellowish light of the hanging lamp. The air had changed composition: the chemical smell of beer and cocaine had given way to something far more primal, an earthy, musky mixture of wild animal that didn’t belong in any port apartment, on any street in San Diego.

Jack stood a few steps away, his tall, lean body completely still, his green eyes scanning his friend from head to toe with a mixture of admiration and amusement he could barely contain. The Kevin who had sat on the sofa thirty minutes earlier—the chubby, impulsive one, the one who always ate cold eggs—had been replaced by something that filled two-thirds of the room with just his shoulders. The muscles beneath the dark fur gleamed like oiled steel. His hands, now immense paws with claws, opened and closed in the air as Kevin examined them with the wide eyes of someone who doesn’t recognize his own extremities.

“Dude,” Kevin said, his voice dropping an octave and a half and vibrating across the floor like a subwoofer, “what’s happening to me?” He slowly turned his hands from front to back, his brown eyes—still unmistakably his, with the same impulsive loyalty as always—wide open. Sweat trickled down his broad forehead, mingling with the bristles of his temples. “I… I feel like I could destroy the building with a sneeze. What did this fruit do to me, Jack?”

“You’re a boar-man now.” Jack let the sentence settle. A slow smile spread across the corner of his mouth, his sharp jaw throbbing with an excitement he could barely contain. “And not just any boar from our world. This fruit comes from a universe where animals like this possess colossal strength and size. In the state you’re in now, you probably surpass me physically.”

Kevin’s enormous head tilted to the side, scraping the ceiling with a screech of plaster. He processed the words for a few seconds. Then a wide, toothy grin spread across his transformed snout, his fangs glistening softly in the lamplight. It was the most Kevin-like smile imaginable—that stubborn optimism and unwavering loyalty surviving intact within it all. His chest expanded in a deep, thundering breath, what remained of his torn shirt unraveling further at the seams. ‘That… that was quite a gift you gave me, man.’ The gratitude in his voice carried genuine weight, the deep timbre making the empty beer cans on the table clink. ‘Really.’

That’s when something changed in Kevin’s posture. The nostrils on his snout flared. A strange, throbbing weight was felt at the base of his spine—something new, something that wasn’t his, something he still couldn’t control. Instinctively, he tried to reach out with one of his enormous paws to feel what it was.

The tail found the chair first.

The movement was quick and involuntary—a muscular whip with a tuft of bristles at the tip—and the impact was like a shotgun blast. The wooden chair flew in a chaotic curve across the room and exploded against the opposite wall, fragments of pine scattering across the worn linoleum and filling the air with the smell of fresh wood and dust. The noise echoed through the apartment like a detonation.

Kevin froze.

”Shit-!”

“Stop.” Jack’s voice came out firm and immediate, his green eyes scanning the wreckage—chair legs scattered, the fresh mark on the drywall, the dust still falling. His heart raced, but his suit maintained its analytical posture, the Neural Synergy processing and stabilizing. He took a step forward. “If you keep moving like that, you’re going to destroy the whole apartment. Breathe, man. Just breathe.”

Kevin stopped completely. His colossal body froze like a statue, with the genuine panic of someone who has just understood that his own strength is a risk. His chest rose and fell in short, controlled breaths, the fur on his arms bristling with residual adrenaline. Sweat trickled down the side of his snout. His paws hung uselessly by his sides. In his brown eyes was a very human terror—the fear of bringing the whole building down with one wrong move. “I… I’m trying not to move,” he murmured, his voice low and tense. Each breath sent thin creaks through the floorboards.

“Try to get back to normal. Focus on that. You felt the change happen—reverse it.”

Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. Veins bulged in his thick neck as he strained, muscles rippling beneath the skin with the internal struggle. ‘I’m trying,’ he growled through clenched teeth, the words escaping in a tense breath. His body trembled with the effort, flesh and bone fighting to compress back into the familiar shape.

Then footsteps echoed in the hallway outside.

Light, shuffling, slow footsteps, the creaking of the old floorboards under a small weight. Kevin’s new senses picked up on it before anything else—his ears twitching, his nostrils flared. His eyes darted. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered urgently, his voice laden with a new, precise clarity that wasn’t yet his own. His enormous head snapped toward the door.

Jack was already moving. “Stay still and hide.” The voice was low and direct.

Kevin scanned the room, his eyes wide with panic. But he was enormous—a mass of muscle that occupied half the room, his shoulders brushing against the furniture. The bedroom door came into view. He walked heavily toward it, each step a controlled earthquake, the linoleum groaning. His immense hand closed around the doorknob with exaggerated care.

The entire door came off its hinges.

The sound was awful—cracking wood, clanging metal, screws exploding like bullets. Plaster dust rained down from the frame. Kevin stared at the door in his hand, horrified, then pressed it against the wall like a makeshift shield and shoved his immense body into Jack’s small room, the whole structure creaking in protest.

Jack watched the entire sequence. He stifled a laugh with effort—the kind of effort that hurts. The sight of his friend, once chubby and impulsive, now a self-conscious giant ripping doors off their hinges while trying to be discreet, was absurd in a way that words couldn’t describe. His green eyes gleamed as he turned toward the entrance and peered through the peephole.

An elderly woman stood outside. Thin, with gray hair, deep wrinkles carved by decades of hardship. A cigarette hung between her thin lips, the smoke rising lazily. She looked irritated—her bony fist already raised to strike again.

Jack unlocked the door and opened it just enough for a narrow crack. ‘Good evening, ma’am,’ he said calmly, his voice soft and disarming. ‘How can I help you?’

The old woman squinted through the crack, her piercing eyes narrowing. She took the cigarette from her mouth with her left hand, the ash falling to the floor, and pointed a gnarled finger at him with her right. “You troublemaker,” she cut in, her voice hoarse with smoker’s breath. “What are you doing in there? I heard loud noises—like something big was falling. Are you having a party or smashing furniture again?”

“Nothing, ma’am. I was just rearranging some things and made a bit of noise. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, took a long drag on her cigarette. “Young man, you’d better behave. You know very well that if you keep causing trouble you’ll end up on the street. This building isn’t for that kind of mess.”

From the room, Kevin—crammed inside with his body barely fitting—nodded vigorously with his enormous head, even though she couldn’t see him. The movement made the wall creak.

Jack nodded respectfully. “Understood, ma’am. I promise to keep everything in order.”

The old woman grumbled, turning away without saying anything more. She shuffled down the hallway, muttering something about today’s insolent youth and how the building was falling apart. Her footsteps faded into the stairwell.

Jack carefully closed the door, slid the chain back into place, and slowly exhaled. His shoulders dropped two inches. Thank God she hadn’t insisted on coming in. The apartment was a war zone—a destroyed chair, a ripped-off door, plaster on the floor, and a nearly two-and-a-half-meter-tall boar-man crammed into the bedroom.

When Kevin emerged, it was like a shamed giant leaving the scene of a crime he himself had committed against his own furniture. The doorway—now just a hole in the wall, hinges torn off, splinters of wood and twisted pieces of metal hanging like broken teeth—framed his colossal body as he bent to pass through. The broad snout, the short fangs, the brown eyes full of the same loyalty as always—all covered in a crimson of humiliation that had survived the transformation intact. He scratched the back of his neck with a huge paw, the claws gently grazing the thick skin, his eyes fixed on the floor as if he wanted to be swallowed by it.

“Sorry, man… I didn’t force anything. I just… turned the doorknob,” he murmured, his thunderous voice constricted into something small and embarrassed. The musky smell of wild animal was still strong around him, mixed with plaster dust and the residue of beer that permeated the apartment. His eyes kept drifting to the destroyed door, his ears lowered.

Jack crossed his arms. He let the silence last a second, two, three—and then the smile appeared, genuine and without cruelty. “We’ll fix this later. First, get back to normal. Focus.”

Kevin closed his eyes again. His body trembled from the inside out—flesh and bone rearranging, compressing, his skin contracting in a moist, organic sound that filled the room with a strange intimacy. His broad shoulders narrowed. His snout recoiled. His muscular tail dissolved with a final, involuntary whip that sent an empty beer can rolling across the floor. The process took almost a full minute, each second charged with tension and something akin to wonder.

When he finished, Kevin was standing in the center of the room, in his underwear, with the rest of his clothes in tatters on the floor around him. Without wasting any time, he ran to Jack’s room—now without a door—and returned with a loose T-shirt and sweatpants that barely closed on his stocky body. He dressed hurriedly, the fabric still damp with sweat clinging to his skin.

Jack placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. The skin was warm and slightly damp beneath his fingers. He remained quiet for a moment, letting the silence do its work, before speaking. ‘Back to normal.’

Kevin slowly opened his eyes. A wide, almost childlike smile spread across his round face. The initial embarrassment gave way to a gratitude that lit up his features from the inside out, his cheeks now flushed not with shame but with pure emotion. His heart pounded in his chest with a force he had never felt before—more alive, more present, as if the transformation had recalibrated something that had been wrong for a long time. Since childhood, watching heroes fly on television, he had dreamed of real power. Not the chubby, useless son of the gas station owner. Not the loyal friend who stood by while others did the work. Now, he was part of it. Jack had given him the chance. He pressed his hand over Jack’s on his own shoulder. “Thanks, brother. Really. This is… this is crazy. I feel like I can do something now. Really.”

The two stood there for a moment, the comfortable silence punctuated by the distant hum of the city and the occasional creak of the old building’s structure. Jack patted his friend lightly on the shoulder before turning to the coffee table, which still bore the vestiges of the night: the neatly arranged bundles of money, the packets of drugs sealed with tape. His voice took on that practical and determined tone that had grown along with everything else since ChaosGacha entered their lives. “The night isn’t over yet.”

Kevin threw himself onto the sofa next to Jack, the springs groaning under their usual weight. They both stared at the table as if it were a profane altar, the air between them heavy with expectation.

Jack picked up the second compact package with both hands. The package was dense and substantial—twenty thousand dollars by Kevin’s quick calculation earlier—and slightly sticky to the touch. He closed his eyes. Concentration came more easily this time, the Neural Synergy already calibrated by the previous effort, the electric tingling rising through his palms like a hot wire. Five minutes of dense silence: sweat welled up on Jack’s temples and trickled slowly down, Kevin beside him with his thick fingers clenched on his knees, the apartment seeming to hold its own breath along with them. Then lightness arrived. The package disappeared in a subtle glow.

Something materialized on the worn wood of the table.

A compass. Small, made of aged bronze with intricate details, the glass slightly cracked but sturdy, a golden needle that trembled gently as if it were alive. Kevin leaned forward, his brown eyes wide. ‘Is that it?’ he murmured, his voice carrying a mixture of disappointment and curiosity as he examined the small, old object.

Jack already had the notebook in his hand, the pen running across the paper.

Tia Dalma’s Compass
Origin: Pirates of the Caribbean — Type: Mystical Artifact — Category: Navigation, Search and Guidance Item — Rarity: Rare

Description: An antique, worn-looking compass with a bronze frame, sturdy glass, and a gold needle. Unlike a regular compass, it does not point north.

Jack Sparrow’s compass possesses a mysterious enchantment: it points in the direction of what its bearer most desires in their heart, at the precise moment they consult it. The object makes no distinction between noble and selfish desires. What matters is the deepest truth of the user’s soul.

Jack finished writing and picked up the compass with his long, pale fingers. The object was cold, heavy, with a solidity that didn’t match its size—the feeling of holding something that didn’t obey the normal laws of weight and presence. The golden needle slowly spun until it pointed in a direction that had nothing to do with north. He stared at it for a moment.

“It’s useful,” the reflective voice finally said. The applications were already unfolding in his mind: locating threats, resources, answers about ChaosGacha itself. In a city like San Diego, with Vought spreading its invisible tentacles and underworld factions filling the power vacuum left by the corporate “heroes,” a compass pointing to what you wanted most was an advantage money couldn’t buy. But something was still missing—the compass was a navigation tool, not a combat tool. It didn’t change what happened when he was facing someone who could break down walls with their fists.

Kevin stared at the object, his chin resting on his hand, elbows on his knees, a smile slowly appearing on his round face. “A compass that leads you to what you want most?” He paused, tilting his head to the side. “Man, if I hold this thing now, it’ll point to the pizza.”

Jack let out a sound that was half laughter, more than he’d made in weeks. The destroyed apartment around them—chair in pieces, door ripped off, plaster on the floor, the lingering smell of wild animal still clinging to the air—seemed no less chaotic. But there was something different about the weight of that chaos. It was their chaos. Built by choices they had made together, step by step, since the day Kevin had walked into the gas station with that wide grin and a debt to a drug dealer. Two young men with nothing in a dockside apartment that wasn’t worth the rent, and now one of them had beans that reversed death and the other could rip doors off their hinges with a careless hand.

Jack placed the compass next to the +1 dagger on the table. The two objects rested together under the dim light of the lamp—a blade that never missed and a needle that always told the truth. The future was dangerous, full of brutal promises and forces that the two could barely map. But for the first time, it had a shape they could recognize.

And that was enough for tonight.