Ethan Vance did not sleep. Not that night, not even for a minute.He sat in the darkness of his bedroom, staring at the empty space where the blue system screen had appeared.[PLAYER ETHAN VANCE HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATION.][OBSERVATION PERIOD: 60 DAYS.][THE EXPERIMENT WILL BEGIN EARLY.]The words had disappeared, but Ethan couldn't forget them. He had spent his previous life believing the war was a sudden disaster, a global catastrophe nobody had expected. The system appeared, the monsters appeared, the weapons appeared, and humanity got dragged into a fight nobody signed up for. At least that's what everyone believed.Now Ethan wasn't so sure."Experimental observation," he whispered.Someone had been watching him. But who, and why?He stood and walked to the window. The city outside was still asleep, streetlights burning over empty roads, a few cars passing in the distance. Everything looked normal. Too normal.Ethan remembered this day. March 12. Sixty days befo

The warehouse exploded behind them. Ethan ran without looking back, the ground shaking beneath his boots as flames tore through the building and metal rained into the surrounding structures."RUN!" Marcus's voice thundered behind him.Six people followed him toward the parking lot, Diana, Gideon, Toby, Dominic, Rebecca, all of them strangers who had already died once, all of them dragged back into a war that wasn't supposed to start for another sixty days.Ethan reached his car and threw the door open. "Everyone, get in!"Gideon stopped dead. "You're kidding. That's a five-seater."There were seven of them. Nobody spoke until another explosion lit up the distance, heat rolling across the lot."Maybe we discuss seating later," Toby said."Get in!"Marcus took the passenger seat, Diana and Rebecca squeezed into the back, Dominic folded himself into the trunk with a grunt that suggested it wasn't built for a man his size. Gideon looked at Toby. "You. Roof.""Why me?""You're the smallest

[HUNT BEGINS NOW.]For one second, the battlefield disappeared. The screaming, the gunfire, the mechanical creatures crawling out of the desert, none of it mattered next to one sentence. Aegis had officially declared him the first player to be eliminated. Not the first target. Not the most dangerous player. The first to be eliminated.Ethan looked up. Across the desert, thousands of red lights stared back, machines surrounding them, some four legged, some crawling like insects, a few unsettlingly close to human. Every weapon among them pointed at Ethan alone."Move!" Marcus shouted, and Ethan snapped back into his body as a creature leaped from the sand.BANG! It exploded in midair. A second one came from behind, and Diana screamed his name a half second before it would have mattered, its claws already rising, but Gideon's shot took its head off first."You're welcome," Gideon grinned."Keep shooting," Ethan said."That's your way of saying thank you?""Yes.""You're going to be a ter

The bullet never reached him.A blue wall snapped into existence a half inch off Ethan's chest, the same shimmer he'd seen wrap around him during the cheat code activation, and the round sparked against it and dropped to the floor, smoking, harmless.[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: DEFENSIVE PROTOCOL ENGAGED.]Ethan stared down at the spent bullet, then up at the woman who'd fired it. Her smile hadn't moved. If anything it had widened, like she'd expected exactly this."There it is," she said. "Good. You're stronger than the last one.""The last one," Ethan repeated, and something about the phrase landed wrong, cold in a way that had nothing to do with the gun.Marcus tackled him sideways before he could ask what it meant, dragging him behind an overturned support beam as Miller opened fire toward the rest of the group. Gideon returned it, muzzle flash lighting the dark in stuttering bursts, and Dominic dragged Diana away from Toby's body just far enough to keep her out of the crossfire while she ke

The stairwell wasn't on any blueprint Ethan had ever seen, hidden behind a section of wall that swung inward only after Rebecca pressed her palm flat against a panel that shouldn't have recognized her at all."How does it know you," Ethan asked."It doesn't know me," she said, watching the door creak open onto darkness. "It knows anyone who worked inside Aegis's systems long enough to learn the access codes. I'm not the only one who could have opened this."Marcus went first, weapon low, flashlight cutting a narrow beam through dust that hadn't been disturbed in what looked like years, each footstep raising a small cloud that hung in the beam like fog. The stairs descended further than Ethan expected, twenty steps, then thirty, concrete giving way to something older, reinforced steel bolted into rock that predated the property records Richard had shown him, the kind of construction Ethan associated with old Cold War bunkers rather than anything built in the last few decades."This was