Warren Smith crouched low in the cold, dimly-lit alley,

  He looked like a boy someone had forgotten to finish—his face still and too still, bruised in places, with a split lip that should've still been bleeding but wasn't. There was something off-putting about him, something unfinished. His features were too sharp in places, too soft in others. Cheekbones that hadn’t fully grown in. Eyes too big for his face, too quiet for his age. There was a hollowness in his expression, a kind of absence that made people instinctively uneasy. Not blank, not stunned—just... waiting.

  His hair was hacked unevenly, as if cut with broken scissors in the dark, some parts longer than others, wild and wet from the rain. The water made it stick to his temples in jagged, crooked strands, framing his face like slashes. His skin was pale beneath the grime, marked here and there with the remnants of older wounds—thin scabs, half-healed scrapes, faded bruises that told stories without needing words.

  His frame was wiry, all tendon and tension, deceptively thin under the bulk of his soaked yellow coat. The coat hung awkwardly on his narrow shoulders, too big, too heavy, the hem dragging at his knees. It made him look even smaller than he was. But he stood straight beneath it, as if the weight of it meant something. As if it mattered that he bore it well.

  He looked younger than he was—maybe fourteen at a glance, older only if you stared too long and saw the feral tension in how he held himself. The stillness in his posture. The way he didn’t blink when he should have. The way he didn’t fidget like a child, didn’t flinch like a victim. Just watched. Just breathed. Just waited.

  The sensation of icy rainwater seeped into his boots, soaking through the frayed soles and numbing his toes with every passing second. Blood dripped steadily from his fingers, a thin, rhythmic patter that mingled with the rain, staining the puddles red. He wiped them clean with clinical detachment on the slick, almost too-bright surface of his yellow raincoat. At first glance, it looked pristine—like something new, like it had just come off a rack in a forgotten storefront. But that illusion shattered if you looked closer. The fabric gleamed because it had been cleaned, maintained, mended over and over again. Every seam had been reinforced by hand, every tear re-stitched with surgical care. Not a thread was out of place. The coat had been rebuilt more times than it had been torn, made whole with deliberate attention and relentless discipline.

  Up close, you could see it wasn’t new—it was worn like ritual armor, burnished by weather, blood, and time. It had once belonged to someone else. Maybe a first responder. Maybe a firefighter. Someone meant to face danger head-on. Now it was something else. A shell. A legacy. The coat didn’t just protect him from rain—it declared something about who he was, who he chose to be. Not loud. Not proud. Just... exact. And if you knew how to read it—if you looked close enough—it wasn’t a garment at all. It was a warning.

  A bright, deliberate signal in a world where camouflage meant survival. It said: I’m not hiding. It said: I’ve been rebuilt the hard way. It said: if you come for me, you’d better not miss.

  There were no logos, no tags. Nothing flashy. Just clean lines and perfectly aligned stitching, like someone had cared enough to remake it better than before. The color hadn’t faded. Not because it was untouched, but because it was restored. Intentionally. Repeatedly. As if to say: this survives because I chose to make it survive.

  And despite the rain, despite the blood, it still gleamed. Still stood out. A beacon in a world that had lost its shine.

  Above him, the sky wept without mercy. Not in storms or thunder, but in a constant, ceaseless drizzle that seemed to fall from a world in mourning. The sun barely shined anymore—just a memory smeared behind a grey ceiling that never quite lifted. The world had lost something once, long ago, and never gotten it back. Now all it knew was rain and ruin.

  The steady fall carved tiny rivers through trash and ash, pooling in cracked pavement and running down warped gutters like the earth itself was bleeding out. It soaked broken glass and rusted rebar, dripping from shattered rooftops and overgrown signage. It filled the silence with a hush too soft to comfort and too steady to ignore.

  Warren stood in the middle of it, motionless but never passive. The rain touched everything, but it seemed to cling to him most—like it knew what he was. Like it recognized him. He didn’t just walk through the rain and ruin. He was the rain and ruin. A part of the landscape, shaped by it, carrying the weight of everything lost.

  It washed away the visible signs of the fight, but not the deeper weight. Not the way the air still pulsed with adrenaline. Not the way the silence felt bruised.

  His body screamed with every breath. Every twitch of a muscle pulled tight with fatigue. Bruises bloomed beneath his skin like storm clouds, and his limbs trembled with the aftermath of too much strain, too little rest. The pain wasn’t sharp—it was deep, bone-anchored, a kind of protest echoing from every cell.

  The odds had not just been against him—they had tried to bury him. It had been a fight meant to end him. And somehow, it hadn’t.

  That fact alone pulsed through his veins like fuel. Beneath the exhaustion, beneath the tremor in his legs and the cold fire lacing his spine, there was something else. A flicker of triumph. Not joy. Not relief. Something colder, sharper. He had survived. Just barely. But in this world, barely was enough to count as a win.

  At his feet lay a Mutated Broken, a specimen so far gone in its corruption it barely qualified as a person anymore—twisted so thoroughly it was hard to believe it had once been human. Its limbs were too long, joints bent in places that defied anatomy, and its flesh twitched with the echo of malfunctioning commands—glitch-ridden spasms that gave its movements a terrible unpredictability. Its skin shimmered with the faint residue of old implants gone haywire, patchwork scars stretched over bulging sinew and sharp, exposed bone.

  It had been faster than anything Warren had ever fought. Not just in speed, but in aggression. It moved like pain was a fuel, like rage had fused with muscle and wouldn't let go. Desperation poured off it like heat, a thing that didn’t fear death because it didn’t understand it anymore.

  He’d seen others like it before. Not all Broken looked the same. Some crawled on all fours, joints regrown wrong, skin sloughing off in patches where nanites had cannibalized their own structure until they collapsed. Others glowed faintly in the dark—veins lit up like dying circuits in failing machines, marked by old tech that refused to die.

  Then there were the common ones—the majority. Bodies too damaged to sprint, but still mobile. They limped, staggered, twitched in a rhythmless shuffle that filled the ruins like background noise. Not quick enough to hunt, but never quite still either. They moved in broken mimicry of life, sometimes clustering like they'd remembered what crowds used to be.

  There were the howlers—ones whose voices had glitched into static shrieks, unending and sharp enough to shatter old glass.

  There were the runners.

  Slender, twitching, and fast—too fast. They didn't wander. They hunted. Packs of them moved through the ruins like rumors, silent until they weren’t. When one charged, the others followed—synchronized by instinct or pattern, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that when you saw one, you were already surrounded.

  Warren had once seen a caravan torn apart in less than two minutes. The guards fired wild. No time to aim. No time to scream. The runners didn’t slow down. Didn’t stop until the bodies stopped twitching.

  And there were brutes.

  Thick-limbed, hulking things with half their muscle torn open from the inside, rebuilt wrong or grown too fast. They didn’t chase. They didn’t speak. They just advanced, slow and implacable, like the world owed them a body to break. Their movements were all force, smashing through walls, metal, bone—anything in their way. Warren had seen one tear the roof off a salvage rig with its bare hands.

  They were hard to take down. Not because they were clever, but because they were relentless. You could break their knees and they’d still crawl. Couldn’t outrun them in a straight line, couldn’t take a direct hit. Brutes turned mistakes into splatters.

  Fighting one meant thinking ahead. You didn’t win by being stronger. You won by making them think they already had you.

  They didn’t make noise. They didn’t shriek. They didn’t speak. They just ran you down and kept moving.

  He didn’t know what made them that way. Maybe it was trauma, or tech, or time. But he knew one thing: they weren’t dead. Not technically. Not completely. But if they could speak—if they could still want anything—most of them would wish they were.

  He remembered one with its arms fused together, melded at the elbow like the code couldn’t decide which limb it was supposed to be. It had charged blindly into walls, into wreckage, into its own death, because stopping wasn’t a function it remembered how to perform.

  Some had fragments still pulsing in their spines. Dangerous ones. They radiated a kind of pressure—something felt more than heard. Warren had seen a scavver get too close once. The man froze like something had slipped loose in his brain, then started clawing at his own neck, shaking, muttering things that didn’t match his voice. He screamed for hours before tearing his chip out with a shard of mirror. Warren hadn’t helped. He’d just watched, learning.

  The Broken weren’t just mistakes. They were reminders. Every twitch, every spark, every shriek was a record of what the System had done and what it still might do. They were walking ghosts—data that refused to die, puppets made from ruin.

  But Warren didn’t fear them. He studied them.

  Because deep down, in the places he didn’t speak of—not even to himself—he knew he wasn’t just close to them.

  He was one of them.

  Not Broken. Not like them. But still marked. Still wired wrong in a way the world didn’t see.

  Warren was an Aberrant. That word meant something—meant everything—because it was the difference between mindless collapse and absolute control. Where they glitched, he calculated. Where they raged, he chose.

  There was no voice in his head, no static in his blood—but he moved through the ruins like they did. Not because he had to. Because it was natural.

  He didn’t speak unless it mattered. He didn’t sleep unless it was earned. He didn’t live. He functioned.

  Not because he was Broken.

  Because he was broken—and he had learned to make that hurt obey him.

  The only difference was that Warren still remembered who he was while he did it.

  And this one—the mutated one—was dead because of that.

  But it hadn’t just been fast. That thing had been warped—mutated in a way that felt wrong even by Broken standards. Its body had moved like wet bone and heat metal, its spine bending too far, its mouth unhinging in ways that defied human anatomy. Even its scent was wrong—acidic, metallic, with a coppery tang that stung the air like it was trying to choke whoever breathed it.

  It hadn’t just lunged. It had vanished, then reappeared mid-motion, warping reality or perception—Warren wasn’t sure which. One second, it was in front of him. The next, behind. It had left afterimages like his eyes couldn’t decide where it really was.

  He’d seen the Broken glitch before. But this wasn’t a glitch. This was something else. A power he hadn’t encountered before—one that had no place in the predictable patterns of decay and failure he was used to.

  Its blows came faster than muscle should allow. Its limbs flexed and extended like they were no longer constrained by ligaments or joints. At one point, it had thrown a chunk of rebar—not as a weapon, but as a distraction, timed so precisely it made Warren hesitate. That was new. That was thinking.

  The thing had bled like anything else. It died like anything else. But for a few long moments, Warren had felt it—something new and wrong moving just beneath its skin.

  It had taken everything he had to bring it down. Not just precision. Not just endurance. But restraint. Because something in him had wanted to meet that chaos head-on. To lose control. And that couldn’t happen.

  Not yet.

  The fight had nearly ended him—more than once. And not because he underestimated it, but because something in his brain needed to learn the pattern—reading movement, spacing, angles. Not empathy. Just geometry. Not tactics. Just probability. It wasn’t about what it was. It was about how to end it clean. The faster, the simpler, the quieter—the better. It moved like its bones didn’t care about rules anymore.

  Warren didn’t panic. He never panicked. But he was adjusting faster than usual—an edge of urgency crawling beneath his skin. Every impact, every dodge, every step felt like playing a game he hadn’t seen the rules for, but was still expected to win.

  The creature’s movement was more than unnatural—it was purposeful. Flickers weren’t evasion. They were strategy. It blinked in and out mid-motion, changing positions in ways that made no physical sense. It didn’t move faster. It just cheated positioning. It attacked from the side before it had even left the front.

  One flicker sent it skidding across the wet concrete on all fours like a spider, straight toward him. Warren pivoted to strike, only for it to vanish mid-lunge and reappear behind him, already turning for the next blow. He dropped low, swung back—nothing.

  It’s testing my correction time, he realized. Learning how I recover.

  A faint growl reached him from behind a crumbling stack of crates. Then the flicker again—gone, reappearing directly above him, limbs wide like it wanted to crush him flat. Warren dove sideways. The thing struck the ground, splintering stone.

  It looked up.

  Not like an animal. Not like a person. Like a problem. And Warren’s mind—sharp, stripped of everything but process—was built to solve problems.

  Warren's breath came shallow now, but his thoughts stayed cold. It's not fast. It just sees where it needs to be—and gets there. That was worse than fast. That was tactical. It meant this wasn’t a fluke. It meant something had taught it how to hunt.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  And whatever that something was, Warren knew it wasn’t the rain. Splinters dug into his back. He didn’t register the pain. He couldn’t afford to.

  He rolled to his feet just in time to avoid another strike. It missed him by millimeters, splitting a rusted pipe embedded in the alley wall. The shatter echoed, metal shrieking as it collapsed. Warren kept moving, darting sideways, trying to gain position—trying to breathe.

  The thing was already on him. Flickering left, right, then vanishing entirely for half a second. A visual blur. A trick Warren had no answer for. He backed up fast, kept the wall behind him. He didn’t dare give it an angle.

  It attacked in a flurry—claws, knees, elbows. Everything was a weapon. Warren parried high, ducked low, barely kept up. His forearm throbbed. He’d blocked too much with bone. A few more hits and something would snap.

  Then it flickered again—an afterimage first, then a blur, then gone. Warren stepped back, scanning, breath locked in his throat.

  It shouldn't be this smart.

  That thought hit him like a crack in his focus. The Broken were erratic, corrupted, mindless. But this one—this one was calculating. Testing him. Choosing when to vanish and when to strike. It wasn’t just reacting. It was watching.

  It reappeared six feet to his left, upside down, twisted in mid-air like its spine was rubber. It launched itself sideways from the wall, claws aimed at his throat. He ducked and pivoted—too slow. A shallow line of blood opened across his jaw.

  He spun, struck back—nothing there. It was already moving, vanishing in frames, skipping steps in reality. Warren caught a glimpse of it crouched on all fours behind a dumpster, eyes gleaming, mouth twitching like it was deciding whether to laugh or lunge.

  It chose lunge.

  It came from above next, having scaled the wall while Warren had blinked. It dropped like a boulder, but halfway down it twisted its body in mid-air, spiraling into a kick that clipped Warren’s shoulder and sent him sprawling. The pain wasn’t sharp—it was electric.

  He landed on his side and rolled, just as claws shattered the ground where his head had been. Brick exploded into chips. It wasn’t just strong. It was accurate. Predictive.

  Warren used the momentum to kick back upright, barely. His thoughts raced, but his face stayed still. It doesn’t want to win fast, he realized. It wants to break me apart first. Piece by piece. The thing vanished again—but only for a blink. Just long enough to break timing, to ruin rhythm. That was the trick. It didn’t stay invisible. It didn’t teleport. It flickered—precise, selective, wrong. Like it had found the seams in the world and learned to step between them.

  And worst of all—it wasn’t wasting energy. It struck when it had advantage. It paused when it didn’t. That wasn’t rage. That was intent.

  Warren adjusted. Not out of confidence—but calculation. If it was studying him, then it was vulnerable to the same. He wasn’t faster, wasn’t stronger, but he was better at turning moments into openings. That was his edge.

  Don’t chase, he thought. Bait.

  He started testing, not with strikes, but with movement—half-steps, shifts in weight, eye flicks that meant nothing. And it watched. Reacted. The flicker wasn’t random. It was habit. Tactical.

  The realization brought clarity. If he could control its options—limit the angles—it would start repeating. It had to. Even predators fell into rhythm.

  But it was hard. His breath was thin. Pain spiked behind his ribs. His body screamed and the thing kept coming. Harder now, angrier. It had figured something out too.

  It knew Warren wasn’t afraid.

  And maybe that made it afraid.

  He twisted to the side, shoulder-checking the creature into a garbage bin, buying a heartbeat.

  It thinks in sequences. That realization locked into place like the final piece of a puzzle. And it expects me to follow mine.

  He faked a stumble, dragging one foot through a puddle with just enough splash to draw the eye. The mutant reacted—not with a flicker, but a twitch. It was watching his weight distribution. Calculating.

  Warren had never seen a Broken move like this. Not even the advanced types. This wasn’t just intelligence. It was adaptation—live pattern recognition. Every failed strike refined the next. Every dodge informed the next attack.

  It wasn’t just trying to kill him.

  It was learning how to do it better.

  He shifted his grip on the truncheon, tilting the weight ever so slightly off-center. If it tracked motion cues, even a false imbalance could become bait. His pulse steadied. His mind quieted.

  Let it learn the wrong thing. It rebounded instantly, snarling low like an animal, but its movements were too precise—this wasn’t blind rage. It wanted to break him apart.

  It lashed again. He dodged the main strike—but the follow-up clipped him, sending him sprawling across the slick pavement. The mutant moved to finish him.

  Warren kicked upward, heel to its chin. It staggered. Not much, but enough. He scrambled upright, breathing ragged. Chest burning. Eyes darting. His fingers gripped the truncheon tighter.

  It paused just out of range. And then, quick and deliberate, it grabbed a length of rusted rebar from the debris and whipped it across the alley—not at Warren, but to the side, where it clanged loudly against a dented drainage pipe. The sudden burst of noise echoed like a crack of thunder, sharp and disorienting.

  Warren’s body flinched before his brain caught up, his head snapping toward the sound not out of fear—but curiosity. He wanted to know. Wanted to see. But his body—his body was built for the kill. It moved without asking, without thinking, dragging him back into motion just before the thing struck. A reflex born from something deeper than training. A mistake, nearly—but not quite.

  He ducked low and swung, clipping the creature’s leg. It didn’t scream. Just stumbled, twisted, and came at him harder. Like it was learning. Like pain only fed it.

  Warren feinted left, then struck right—his weapon smashing into meat and glancing off something metallic buried beneath the skin, the dull impact radiating up his arms like an electric shock. It shrieked then, not in pain, but in distortion. A gurgling, digital wail like feedback through rusted speakers. Warren’s ears rang.

  They crashed against the alley wall. Warren pinned it for half a second. Long enough to see its teeth—too many, too uneven. Long enough to feel its breath, hot and wet and wrong.

  It bucked him off with sudden force. Warren tumbled, rolled to recover.

  It lunged.

  Then he struck. A one-handed swing, tight and fast, aimed where he knew it would be—because he’d finally seen it. The pattern. The rhythm beneath the glitch. And in that breathless heartbeat before impact, the mutant vanished—blinking out like a broken frame.

  Warren didn’t hesitate.

  He triggered the spike mod mid-swing. It extended with a snap and hiss, and just as it emerged—the mutant reappeared, exactly where he predicted. Its head lowered in motion, lunging forward for the kill.

  The spike punched through the base of its skull.

  It convulsed instantly, limbs flailing midair before collapsing like a puppet with its strings cut. Its momentum crashed into Warren, but he held the swing steady, driving the point deeper with every pound of pressure his body could give.

  The recoil stung his shoulder. The impact reverberated up his spine.

  Then the body dropped.

  Not folded. Not twitching. Just dropped.

  The alley went still.

  Except for Warren. Gasping. Bleeding. Alive.

  As rain washed away the blood and splintered stone, Warren crouched beside the twitchless body. Steam rose off the meat, curling faintly in the downpour. His fingers worked with practiced calm, slipping beneath the matted flesh at the base of the neck until they found what he was looking for.

  A fragment.

  Small. Dense. Buzzing faintly with heat and static. It wasn’t much to look at—just a sliver of blackened metal, barely bigger than a tooth—but it hummed with something old and angry. The kind of charge that didn’t come from scavver rigs or rusted circuits. The kind that didn’t belong in things that could still move.

  Fragments weren’t tech. Not really. They weren’t built—they were harvested, pulled from the nervous system of chips. Not the surface code, not the UI overlay—the core. The part that made decisions. The part that adapted. They were collections of nanites, clustered like stem cells, brimming with potential and raw instruction. Not yet assigned. Not yet contained.

  Most fragments had no visible function.but only when shaped. Only when given form. Fragments didn’t come with purpose. They weren’t crafted for a task. They were unrealized potential—pure, unassigned, waiting. Nothing until they became something.

  That was the danger.

  Not the power itself, but the hunger people felt to be the one to shape it. People hunted fragments not because of what they were, but because of what they could become. The fantasy of control. The illusion of unlocking something no one else had touched.

  They weren’t treasures. Unless you counted digging one out of a corpse’s neck as treasure hunting, there was nothing noble in the search.. They weren’t relics. They were questions without answers.

  The real danger was the value. People would kill for them. Scavvers, even the Broken, and especially System-enforcers—everyone wanted fragments, even if they didn’t understand them. Especially if they didn’t.

  Unused code could still rewrite a mind, but it often rewrote alliances. A fragment meant power. A fragment meant leverage. And once in a while, one came marked—set with an instinctive role, a task embedded so deep it hummed through the metal.

  Then there were those the ones that changed things. they Gave instruction. Gave skill. Gave power

  That was the danger.

  Each one carried data. A purpose. A piece of function, like memory, etched into metal. They weren’t passive—they wanted to be used, in that quiet, humming way only dangerous things did.

  No one really knew how many types there were. The System didn’t list them. Didn’t warn about them. Didn’t acknowledge them. But scavvers like Warren had seen what they could do when fused, when focused, when aligned, when truly seen. That was why people needed them. Not wanted—needed. Like food. Like water. Like the air they breathed. Because fragments didn’t just offer power. They offered a chance. A shot at survival. A shot at something better. And to those desperate to thrive in a world that had long since stopped caring, that whisper was everything.

  He turned it over in his fingers once before sliding it into a sealed pocket inside his coat. This one was different. It didn’t just hum—it thrummed. Alive, almost. Brimming with power. He could feel it in the tips of his fingers, like it was waiting for him to notice it. Waiting for him to take it. Not demanding. Not calling. Just there—with the quiet patience of something that knew exactly what it could become.

  [UNRECOGNIZED SIGNAL DETECTED]

  It wasn’t aloud. Wasn’t insistent. Just there. Like the System had tried to whisper, only to choke halfway through the sentence.

  Warren stared at the message, unmoving.

  That wasn’t random.

  He’d seen glitches before. He knew how they felt—erratic, empty, like broken code chewing itself to death. But this? This had weight. This had intent.

  And whatever it meant, it wasn’t just about the fight. It was about what came next. A shift—not in the world, but in the way it saw him. As if the System, for a second, had looked directly at him… and didn’t know what it was seeing.

  He let the flicker linger. Didn’t blink it away. Let it hum against his vision like a static pulse. It faded slowly, uncertainly—like it hadn’t been shut off, just pulled back.

  There was no sound, no threat, no alert. But Warren felt it. That subtle click of presence. The moment you realized the camera was no longer unplugged.

  You're late, he thought. Not to the System. To whatever part of it had finally noticed.

  The rain kept falling.

  He stood slowly, body protesting in small, sharp ways—torn muscle, bruised ribs, joints that had taken too many hits to be called fresh anymore. He didn’t grunt. Didn’t curse. He simply stood, as if rising were no more notable than breathing.

  The alley behind him was wrecked. Blood, brick dust, pieces of the mutant scattered like shattered gear. No one would know what had happened here. Not unless they looked too close. Not unless they knew what to see.

  Warren turned his back on the mess.

  He walked with purpose. Measured steps. No rush. There was no point. The danger was dead. The message had already been sent.

  And someone—something—had heard it.

  He didn’t know if that meant he’d won.

  But he was sure of one thing:

  They would remember this kill.

  Warren moved through the alleys like a shadow, the rain blurring him into the ruins. He wasn’t hiding. He was cooling. Coming down from something that still hummed in his blood.

  The kill had settled, but it hadn’t left him. It clung to his bones like mist, threaded through muscle memory and breath. His body bore the aftermath in bruises and cuts—evidence of a fight survived—but his mind? His mind stayed sharp. Carved thin and honed by need. Not just from the fight—but from what came after.

  He needed to find her—Azolde. Not the version others saw. The real one. The girl who knew when to run, when to stand, and when to strike without warning. And those who had taken her from him? They weren’t just a threat. They were already sentenced.

  He would stop at nothing until he did.

  Nothing meant nothing. No rule. No line. No hesitation. The rules had changed the moment they had taken her, and Warren had never been one for playing fair to begin with.

  Lucas was a dead man walking.

  There was no rush. No anger left unspent. Just inevitability. The only real question was how far Warren would go to make the message clear.

  Each step echoed quieter than the last. Not because the storm had softened, but because Warren had. The adrenaline had faded, yes—but in its place was something sharper. A presence of mind that didn’t falter. Like every movement now was filtered through intent. Precision.

  The city blurred around him. Lights. Debris. Rain. None of it mattered. Only the path forward, and what stood in the way.

  Azolde. That name didn’t sound like it belonged in the alleys. It didn’t sound like something the ruins deserved to hold. She was too alive. Too present. But they had taken her anyway. Like they took everything else. Like the world was addicted to theft.

  He didn’t picture her face. That would be too much. Too sharp. Instead, he remembered how she moved—careful, fast, quiet, like someone who knew just how much she could lose. Like someone who had already lost it once.

  Warren didn’t hate easily. Hate was inefficient. But for Lucas, it came unbidden. A slow simmer that kept the rain from chilling him. Lucas hadn’t just taken someone. He had made a decision. A personal one. One Warren wouldn’t let go unanswered.

  This was Lucas’s invitation.

  He just didn’t know what he was really calling upon.

  And now Warren would make his entrance.

  He didn’t fantasize about the moment. There would be no dramatic words. No speeches. Just a clean kill. A correction.

  He remembered the sound of her voice. Not what she said—but how she said it. Like it didn’t need to rise above the noise to be heard. Like truth carried its own weight. That tone didn’t belong to the past. It belonged to something still waiting to return.

  He would find her.

  Even if he had to bleed the whole sector dry to do it.

  And then, slowly, deliberately—Warren faded.

  Not stopped. Not fled. Just faded. Like the storm had grown tired of holding onto his outline. His steps softened. His edges blurred. One breath, one blink, and he was the rain.

  The coat helped. That ghost-yellow silhouette. It shined—it warned. It whispered threat . It was a promise of reckoning wrapped in fabric.

  The jacket didn’t need to glow. It was already bright—an unnatural yellow that cut through the mist like a warning flare. It didn’t shimmer. It didn’t pulse. It simply was—impossible to ignore, unforgettable to those who saw it. A symbol. A signal. A storm made wearable.

  And still, eyes rolled off him. Like the world itself decided he wasn’t meant to be looked at directly. As if survival instinct whispered: don’t stare at the lightning while it’s walking.

  Mist coiled around him. Veils of it drawn from gutter steam and storm fog. Warren moved through it like he belonged to it, as if the mist knew him—had been waiting for him to return.

  He didn’t disappear.

  He became something else.

  The Yellow Jacket.

  A ghost in the rain.

  You have reached Level 10

  You have gained one new class modification available

  Warren Smith — Level 10 (Scavenger)

  Class: Scavenger

  Alignment: Aberrant

  Unallocated Stat Points: 4

  Attributes:

  Strength: 10 (Determines raw physical output—how much force one can exert in a single motion. Influences lifting capability, grip strength, leverage, and the ability to interact physically with the world on a foundational level. High Strength contributes to physical presence and intimidation.)

  Perception: 15 (Governs environmental awareness and detail recognition. Influences the accuracy of observations, reaction timing, and the ability to notice anomalies or hidden patterns. Essential for tracking, anticipating motion, and sensing subtle changes in space.)

  Intelligence: 20 (Measures cognitive processing power, learning speed, and abstract reasoning. Influences how quickly and efficiently one can understand systems, synthesize information, and solve complex problems. Affects memory capacity, logic formation, and adaptability in unfamiliar situations.)

  Dexterity: 14 (Determines fine motor control, limb articulation, and precise bodily movement. Influences hand-eye coordination, sleight of hand, tool usage, and the ability to move through tight or unstable environments without disruption.)

  Endurance: 10 (Measures sustained physical exertion capacity, breath control, and internal stabilization under stress. Influences postural integrity, long-term mobility, and the ability to maintain composure during physically taxing activity without immediate fatigue.)

  Resolve: 17 (Governs internal discipline, clarity under pressure, and mental resistance to disorientation or external influence. Influences the ability to suppress panic, resist temptation, and commit to a task despite distraction or discomfort. A high Resolve reinforces identity against erosion.)

  Skills at Level 10:

  Examine (Passive): Allows close, precise inspection of physical items. Identifies structural materials, mechanical condition, origin markers, manufacturing details, and utility potential. Does not reveal hidden properties.

  Scavenger’s Eye (Passive): Enhances visual pattern recognition and environmental scanning. Trains the brain to notice material irregularities, out-of-place objects, and salvage opportunities even in chaotic debris fields. Grounded in perceptual filtering and mental cataloging.

  Quick Reflexes (Passive): Improves startle-response timing and intramuscular coordination. Allows the body to instinctively respond to fast-changing movement or proximity without conscious input, evasive steps, and reflexive tensing when startled. Reflexes that fire before thought—clean, automatic, almost predictive. As if the body, when trained long enough, starts to anticipate motion before it registers. like instinct honed into something sharp.

  Crafting (Active): Activates a system-assisted overlay that highlights structural stress points, compatible materials, and assembly pathways in real time. Enhances focus and spatial awareness, allowing rapid assessment and execution of mechanical or structural tasks. Used to repurpose materials into tools, stabilizers, or functioning devices with heightened efficiency and minimal error.