Volume 6 Numbers 1 and 2 | Apr-Sept 2026

The Glitch Kid

Story idea by Kavya Ranjan | Story by CG Salamander | Art by Kruttika Susarla

Kavya’s pitch:

Most superheroes get their powers from lab accidents, ancient magic, or aliens. I got mine… from a Wi-Fi router. It started on a normal school night. I was gaming late, grinding in Valorant when the screen suddenly glitched. My headset let out this weird screech, and then everything stopped. Not just the game – even the lights, the fan, the clock. The whole room paused. Then something insane happened. My router burst with blue light, zapping me in the chest. The next second, I wasn’t in my room any more. I was inside a strange virtual world. Giant floating code walls. Glowing circuits. Like I’d been uploaded into the internet. Then a voice echoed through the space: “USER_ANS01: SYSTEM OVERRIDE GRANTED.”

When I woke up back in my room, I thought I dreamed it until I paused my teacher mid-lecture the next day… just by blinking. That’s when I realized: I could control glitches in reality. I could rewind time five seconds. Fast-forward boring conversations. Freeze people mid-sneeze. I called myself GlitchKid. At first, it was awesome. I fixed mistakes, dodged cricket balls, even muted a kid in class who wouldn’t stop talking.

But the more I used my power… the more the world around me started to glitch. Birds froze mid-flight. My math teacher blinked with just one eye. My screen once played a voice note backwards, whispering: “Code breach… interference detected…”

Then, one night, the weirdest thing happened. The router pulsed with a strange blue heartbeat again. A hand made entirely of code reached out of the signal, tapped my PC mouse, and disappeared. A hidden file opened on its own: SYSTEM_ANS01.BUG [Warning: Power Limit Reached. Tracer Incoming…]

Suddenly, my window shattered, glitching inward like cracked glass and a figure stepped through. He wore a black, pixelated hoodie. His eyes flickered like broken screens. He didn’t walk – he buffered forward, frame by frame. “I’m the Firewall,” he said. “And you’re the bug.” He launched a blast of raw data. I barely glitched back in time to dodge it.

I ran through the city, past frozen streets, dodging corrupted people and collapsing code. The world was crashing. And I knew what I had to do: reset the system. I returned to the router – the source – and opened the system console again. A message popped up: Final Patch: SYSTEM RESET? Warning: May erase GlitchKid.exe.

I hesitated. If I reset everything, I might lose my powers. Maybe even forget everything. But if I didn’t… the Firewall would win. The world would be nothing but glitch. The Firewall appeared behind me. “You can’t win. Glitches get deleted.” I turned. “No. Glitches fix what the system ignores.” I pressed the button.

RESETTING… White light exploded around me. I felt myself dissolve into pixels, code scattering like stars until everything went silent. When I woke up, everything was normal. No glitches. No Firewall. No powers. Or so I thought. Later that day, I saw a bird fly backwards. My router blinked twice softly. A small sticky note was taped to it: “System stable. Bug contained. Welcome back, Ansh. Patch 2.0 pending.” And I smiled. Because deep in the code… GlitchKid still lives.