Chapter 2

# Chapter 2

Duncan was not unimpressed. Duncan was asleep.

Kai locked the apartment door behind him—three deadbolts, two of which actually worked—and found the cat sprawled across his pillow in a posture of supreme entitlement, one paw dangling off the edge of the mattress. The good eye cracked open at Kai's entrance, evaluated him with the withering assessment only cats can manage, and closed again. Verdict rendered: not interesting enough to wake up for.

"Love you too, buddy."

The apartment was eleven square meters of optimistic real estate. A bed that doubled as a couch. A hot plate that tripled as a fire hazard. A bathroom so small you had to back into it. The walls were papered with signal-dampening mesh that Kai had stolen from a corp recycling facility two years ago—not because he was paranoid, but because he was a data thief and paranoia was a job requirement. The mesh turned the whole space into a Faraday cage, which meant no wireless surveillance could get in.

It also meant the System interface went quiet the moment he crossed the threshold.

The floating text, the health bar, the ambient hum of network awareness—all of it cut out like someone had pulled a plug. One second he could feel every data current in the Spillway singing through his nervous system; the next, silence. Total electromagnetic silence.

Kai stood in the dark for a long moment, dripping noodle-shop water and crawler ichor onto linoleum that had stopped caring about stains sometime in the previous decade.

Then he peeled off his hoodie, looked at the burns on his forearms where the ichor had eaten through fabric and skin, and said, very calmly, "What the fuck."

The burns weren't deep, but they were ugly—raised welts in patterns that followed the splash trajectory, the skin around them pink and angry. Normal acid burns, except for the part where the acid had come from an interdimensional spider-thing that he'd killed with a glowing multi-tool while text from a cosmic video game floated in his eyeballs.

He ran cold water over his arms. The building's plumbing groaned in protest but complied. He cleaned the wounds, smeared on antibiotic gel from a first-aid kit held together by duct tape and stubbornness, and wrapped his forearms in gauze.

Then he sat on the edge of his bed—gently, so as not to disturb His Majesty—and tried to think.

The System. Capital S, because apparently his life was just going to be a series of capitalized proper nouns from now on. It had activated during the breach. It had given him a class. It had made him stronger, faster, more capable than any baseline human had a right to be. And it had done it through his node—the same black-market wetware he'd been using for years to boost data heists.

Coincidence? Kai didn't believe in coincidence. Coincidence was what lazy people called patterns they hadn't figured out yet.

He pulled the chitin shard from his bag. It was about the size of his thumb, obsidian-black, warm to the touch. The crawler had dissolved into light when it died, but this piece had remained, materializing in the air where the corpse had been and dropping to the ground with a clink. Outside the Faraday cage, the System had labeled it—CHITIN SHARD (COMMON)—with the clinical detachment of an inventory screen. In here, it was just a weird piece of bug.

He turned it over in his fingers. Light played across its surface in ways that didn't match the bare bulb overhead.

"I could sell you," he told the shard. "Dungeon drops are worth money. Good money."

The shard had no opinion on the matter.

Dungeon loot was the backbone of a shadow economy that had sprung up within months of the Fracture. Crystals, cores, organic materials, occasionally something that defied categorization—all of it had properties that mainstream science was still tripping over itself to explain, and all of it was technically government property under the Spatial Anomaly Salvage Act. Which meant the legal market was a bureaucratic nightmare, which meant the black market was booming.

Kai knew three dealers who'd buy dungeon drops, no questions asked. His fence, Yara, was one of them. She was also the person who'd sent him into that noodle shop tonight, which had put him within 340 meters of a breach, which had led to... everything.

He set the shard on the shelf next to a half-empty bottle of soy sauce and a framed photo of Duncan looking regal.

Sleep. He needed sleep. His body ached in places he didn't know could ache—the System might have patched his HP, but HP apparently didn't cover muscle fatigue, bruising, or the specific kind of full-body soreness that came from being ragdolled into a delivery van by a creature that shouldn't exist.

He lay down next to Duncan, who shifted slightly to claim more pillow territory, and stared at the ceiling.

Three hours later, he was still staring at the ceiling.

---

Morning in the Spillway arrived less as a time of day and more as an ambient brightness level. Actual sunlight hadn't reached street level in this part of Neo Kowloon since the megastructure expansion in '39, so "morning" was whatever the city's environmental lighting system decided it was. Today it decided on a sickly orange that made everything look like a lo-fi photograph of someone else's bad decisions.

Kai made instant coffee on the hot plate, fed Duncan a can of something that claimed to be tuna, and sat cross-legged on the bed staring at his wrapped forearms.

He needed to go outside. He needed to step past the mesh and let the System reconnect—if it would reconnect—and figure out what it actually was, what it wanted, and whether he could turn it off. But the idea of that flood of information hitting his nervous system again made his stomach clench.

It had felt *good*. That was the problem. Not just the power—the clarity. Standing in that intersection surrounded by crawlers, jacked into the System, he'd felt more present, more *real*, than he had in years. Like he'd been watching life through a dirty window and someone had wiped the glass.

That kind of good was dangerous. That kind of good got people killed.

"Duncan," he said. "I need a second opinion."

Duncan was washing his face with one paw, a process that involved significant drooling and even more significant indifference.

"You're right. Overthinking it."

He pulled on a clean hoodie—this one's zipper worked, a genuine luxury—grabbed his bag, and walked out the door.

The System hit him like a wave.

**SYSTEM INTERFACE — RECONNECTED** **WELCOME BACK, TECHNOMANCER** **CURRENT STATUS:** **LEVEL: 2** **HP: 110/110** **MP: 45/45** **ACTIVE SKILLS: CIRCUIT SURGE (LV.1), THREAT SENSE (LV.1), SYSTEM RESONANCE (LV.1)**

MP. Mana points. Of course. Because why would the universe half-ass this particular cosmic joke?

He took a breath. The network awareness flooded in—not overwhelming this time, more like slipping into a warm current. He could feel the data traffic flowing through the building's infrastructure, the Spillway's mesh of legitimate and pirated connections, the deep hum of the trunk lines that ran beneath the streets. Before the System, he'd needed his node's interface to tap into any of that. Now the node was just... a lens. The System was the eye.

Kai walked down four flights of stairs—the elevator had been broken since before he'd moved in, and he suspected it had been broken since before he'd been *born*—and pushed through the building's front door into the Spillway's eternal twilight.

The street was busy. Morning-shift vendors were setting up food stalls, filling the air with the smell of frying dough and chili oil. A delivery drone buzzed overhead, weaving between the laundry lines that crisscrossed the alley like a cat's cradle designed by someone having a breakdown. Two kids chased each other through the crowd, shrieking with laughter. Normal. Alive. Completely oblivious to the fact that three blocks west, the asphalt still bore scorch marks from an interdimensional breach.

Kai bought a pork bun from a vendor he liked—Mrs. Zhao, seventy-something, built like a fire hydrant, made buns that could make you briefly believe the world was fundamentally good—and ate it standing up while he studied the System notifications that had accumulated overnight.

**OVERNIGHT UPDATES:** **— SPILLWAY BREACH (SECTOR 7-KAPPA) CLASSIFIED: SEALED** **— CIVIC RESPONSE REPORT FILED: 6 CASUALTIES (2 FATAL)** **— DUNGEON RESIDUE: ELEVATED (48-HR DECAY ESTIMATED)** **— SYSTEM NOTE: RESIDUAL MANA CONCENTRATION IN YOUR AREA MAY ATTRACT LOW-LEVEL ENTITIES. REMAIN ALERT.**

Two people had died. While he was fighting crawlers and unlocking skills like it was a tutorial level, two people three blocks away had died.

The pork bun turned to paste in his mouth.

He forced himself to keep reading. Below the notifications, a new panel had appeared—one he hadn't seen last night.

**LOCAL SYSTEM USERS: 3 DETECTED (SPILLWAY DISTRICT)** **NOTE: SYSTEM VISIBILITY LIMITED TO 500M RADIUS AT CURRENT LEVEL**

Three. There were three other people within five hundred meters who had this... whatever it was. This interface. This cosmic RPG overlay.

He scanned the crowd automatically, as if System users would be wearing signs. They weren't, obviously. They looked like everyone else—tired, busy, trying to get through the day. But somewhere in this press of bodies, three people were walking around with the same impossible text floating in their vision, the same impossible power humming in their bones.

Had they been at the breach last night? Had they fought? Had they chosen classes, unlocked skills, felt that terrifying rush of something more than human?

His node buzzed. Not the System—his actual node, the old hardware, doing what it had always done: routing communications.

**INCOMING — ENCRYPTED** **SOURCE: YARA**

He flicked the connection open.

"You alive?" Yara's voice was flat, clipped, the verbal equivalent of a straight razor. She spoke English with an accent that shifted depending on her mood—right now it was leaning Slavic, which meant she was annoyed.

"Debatable."

"I saw the breach report. Sector 7-Kappa, that's your noodle shop. You were in range."

"I was in range."

"Did you get my splice done before the breach hit?"

Kai laughed. It came out slightly unhinged. "Yara, I got attacked by giant spiders from another dimension and you're asking about the *data splice*?"

"The splice pays your rent. The spiders don't." A pause. "You're not hurt?"

There it was. The warmth under the razor. Yara would never admit she cared about anything softer than profit margins, but the pause gave her away every time.

"Some burns. Nothing permanent."

"Good. Because I have another job, and it's time-sensitive."

"Yara—"

"Fifty thousand."

Kai's protest died mid-syllable. Fifty thousand was not a data splice number. Fifty thousand was not a "crawl under a condemned noodle shop" number. Fifty thousand was the kind of number that changed the math on your entire quarter.

"I'm listening," he said, hating himself a little.

"There's a research lab in the Stacks. BioVault subsidiary, mid-tier security, nothing you can't handle. They've been doing work on dungeon-harvested biologics—using breach materials to develop proprietary compounds. Pharma stuff, supposedly."

"Supposedly."

"My client wants their data. All of it. Research files, lab results, internal communications. They want to know what BioVault found."

"Who's the client?"

"Anonymous, obviously."

"Anonymous-anonymous or anonymous-you-know-but-won't-tell-me?"

"The second one. And before you ask: no, I won't tell you. But I'll tell you this—they're not corp. They're not government. And they're specifically interested in one project."

"Which is?"

Another pause. Longer this time.

"BioVault has been studying people, Kai. People who were near breaches when they happened. People who... changed."

The street noise faded. The crowd, the drones, the sizzle of Mrs. Zhao's griddle—all of it receded to a dull hum beneath the sudden thunder of his own heartbeat.

"Changed how?" he asked, knowing the answer.

"That's what the data will tell us. Meet me at the Eighth Bridge, noon. I'll have the full brief." She killed the connection.

Kai stood in the middle of the morning crowd, pork bun forgotten in his hand, and watched the System's passive scan highlight data streams flowing through the buildings around him. Power lines. Security feeds. Communication relays. A living web of information, all of it suddenly transparent, all of it suddenly his to touch.

BioVault was studying people like him. People the System had chosen. Which meant either BioVault had answers he desperately needed, or BioVault was a threat he desperately needed to understand.

Either way, he was going to break in.

**QUEST AVAILABLE: BIOVAULT INFILTRATION** **RECOMMENDED LEVEL: 5** **YOUR CURRENT LEVEL: 2** **ACCEPT? [Y/N]**

"Yeah," he muttered, crushing the notification away with a thought. "I can read."

Recommended Level 5. He was Level 2. Three levels short of what the System considered safe, which meant the System thought this was a bad idea, which put it in agreement with every rational part of his brain.

But rational had never been Kai's strongest attribute. Stubborn, creative, and too angry to quit—those were his stats. And right now, somebody with a lab coat and a corporate budget was studying whatever had happened to him last night, probably without the consent of the people they were studying, and probably without anything resembling ethical oversight.

He'd seen how corps handled things they couldn't control. You either became a product or a problem.

Kai Morrow had no intention of being either.

He tossed the rest of the pork bun to a stray dog that had been eyeing him with transparent hope, adjusted his bag on his shoulder, and started walking toward the Eighth Bridge.

Behind him, unseen, the chitin shard on his apartment shelf pulsed once with a faint, dark light.

Duncan, who was sitting next to it, watched the pulse with his one good eye, then went back to sleep.

Some things were beneath a cat's concern.