"You think I would kneel just because you threaten my best friend’s life?” Axel muttered sharply beneath his helmet. His voice was swallowed by the roar of the motorcycle engine he was forcing past its safe limits on the empty streets of Vancouver. At the corner of his vision, the system interface flickered wildly, spewing unstable strings of code. The junk data injection he had executed at the apartment earlier had worked. The system now appeared overwhelmed, like an old computer forced to process thousands of commands at once.[SYSTEM ERROR: EMOTIONAL DATA ANOMALY][CALCULATION PROCESS DELAYED]A faint smirk curved Axel’s lips. The crushing pressure that had gripped his chest slowly began to ease. The overload had not destroyed the system, but it had bought him time. He leaned his bike at an extreme angle as he tore around the curve toward the central hospital district.“You can read statistics, but you cannot write destiny,” Axel hissed. A new warning appeared, the text unstable, as

“Slow your heartbeat before that parasite devours what’s left of your sanity,” Axel muttered to himself.His voice was nearly swallowed by the roar of the sea wind carrying the scent of rust and brine from the harbor. In front of him, Gery stood with unnatural menace. The man who should have been lying stiff in a hospital bed now stood upright, a green glow pulsing beneath the skin of his neck. Each time Gery breathed, the light dimmed and flared again, synchronized with the rhythm of Axel’s pulse.“You look very old for someone who’s just beginning his rise,” Gery sneered.The voice did not come from his damaged vocal cords. It echoed directly inside Axel’s skull through system resonance. Gery stepped forward, dragging a leg still wrapped in hospital bandages, yet his strength felt massive. Each footfall on the concrete pier left fine cracks that made no sense for an ordinary human being.“I don’t need praise from the walking dead,” Axel shot back.“The walking dead?” Gery laughed ho

“Give me your heartbeat, or you will die as a pile of dust without identity!”Goran’s voice thundered not through the air, but through resonant vibrations inside Axel’s skull. The gravity inside the harbor warehouse suddenly became a tangible enemy. Axel’s body was dragged toward Goran, who stood upright like a lighthouse of death among the shadows of the shipping containers. The system in Axel’s head no longer provided tactical options. His retina displayed only a single red digital number that continued to plummet at a horrifying speed.[REMAINING LIFESPAN: 6 YEARS 2 MONTHS 14 DAYS]Every second siphoned away felt like red-hot iron being slowly pulled from his bone marrow. Axel clutched his head. An overwhelming cold sensation spread from his toes to his heart. The skin on the backs of his hands visibly shriveled within seconds. His black hair fell onto the filthy warehouse floor and grew back in a dull, brittle white. This forced transaction was the most brutal biological asset liq

"Do not let go if you still want to see the sun tomorrow, Ben!"Joe’s voice was hoarse, cutting through the roar of the sea wind heavy with salt and rust. The heavyset man braced the end of a steel beam that swayed from the chain of an old crane. Axel, now forced to answer to the name Ben in front of the shipyard workers, gripped the other side of the cold metal. His wrinkled palms burned. The rough steel scraped away his thinning skin, now fragile as ancient paper. Watery red seeped through, staining his filthy cloth gloves."I do not plan on dying in this pile of scrap, Joe."Axel answered between ragged breaths. Each inhale felt like swallowing shards of glass. His lungs, now with the capacity of a sixty-year-old man, struggled to push oxygen into his straining muscles. His shoulder joints creaked faintly. His bones grated as if stripped of lubrication. This was real physical torment, far removed from the comfort of the digital manipulation he once commanded.[WARNING: PHYSICAL LOA

"Wake up before I harvest what is left of your useless heart, loser!"Gery spat directly into Arlo’s face as the man hung limp before him. Axel’s friend was chained to a pulley in the middle of their old, suffocating workshop. The room smelled of burnt oil and rotting rust. Arlo groaned softly. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Gery stood before him with a posture that no longer resembled a normal human being. The skin on his face, burned by last night’s diesel explosion, had peeled away, revealing pulsing strands of silver synthetic muscle.Arlo had ended up here because of one fatal mistake. After the explosion in Sector Six the previous night, he had assumed the abandoned workshop they had not used in a year would be the safest place to retrieve the remaining stash of medical stimulants for Axel. He did not know that Goran had planted vibration-based tracking devices on every property Axel had ever rented. Gery only needed to wait in the shadow of the lathe machine when Arlo opened