My Karmic Debt System

Chapter 6: First Debt

Chapter 6: First Debt

The veterinary supply run went exactly as the system predicted, which should have been comforting but honestly just made the whole thing more unsettling.

I walked into the store at five-fifteen in the morning, looking like absolute hell—bloodstained shirt, dark circles under my eyes, hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The night clerk was a tired college student with headphones around her neck and a textbook open on the counter, and she barely glanced up when I came through the door. I invented a story about my dog being hit by a car, something about how the vet was closed and I needed to stabilize him until morning, and she just nodded and pointed me toward the medical supplies aisle without asking a single follow-up question.

She didn't care. She was probably getting paid minimum wage to sit in an empty store until her shift ended, and some guy's fake dog emergency was not her problem.

I grabbed antibiotics, surgical staples, painkillers, gauze, sterilization supplies—everything the system had recommended plus a few things I thought might be useful. The total came to three hundred and forty dollars, which left me with sixty

bucks and a receipt I shoved into my pocket without looking at.

By the time I got back to the warehouse, the sun was starting to come up.

Jerome was exactly where I had left him, unconscious on the concrete floor with his legs elevated on crates. His breathing was still shallow, but it hadn't gotten worse, which I chose to interpret as a good sign. I knelt beside him and pulled out my supplies, spreading them across the floor like mise en place for a surgery I had absolutely no business performing.

The SUV had a phone in the console, probably a burner the attackers used for communication. I used it to pull up a WikiHow article on treating head wounds, because that was apparently my life now—performing amateur surgery in an abandoned

warehouse using instructions from the internet.

But here's the thing: my hands were steady.

The enhanced cognition from the mission reward was still active, and it made everything feel like following a recipe. Step one: clean the wound with sterilized water. Check. Step two: apply antibiotic ointment to prevent infection. Check. Step three: close the gash with surgical staples, spacing them evenly across the wound. Check. Step four: start IV antibiotics to fight any infection that might have already set in.

I had never started an IV in my life, but the instructions were clear and my mind was sharp and my hands knew exactly what to do. The needle slid into Jerome's arm on the first try, and I taped it down and hung the antibiotic bag from a nail sticking out of a wooden beam above his head.

By sunrise, Jerome was stable and sleeping, his color better than it had been, his breathing deeper and more regular. I sat down against a concrete pillar and let myself breathe for the first time in hours.

That was when the system interface pulsed back into visibility.

MISSION COMPLETE.

Reward delivered.

New balance: Karmic debt -$1,500.

Interest accruing at variable rate.

I stared at the numbers, trying to process what I was seeing. Negative fifteen hundred dollars. Debt. I had gone into debt to save Jerome's life, which made a sick kind of sense given everything else that had happened tonight.

But then I noticed something that made my stomach drop.

The number was changing. Growing. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, but definitely moving.

-$1,501.

-$1,502.

-$1,503.

I understood with sick clarity what I was looking at. This was a debt that accumulated interest, compounding over time like a credit card balance from hell. And I had no idea how to pay it off.

I explored the interface, trying to figure out what the fuck I had gotten myself into. There were options I hadn't seen before: ABILITIES, MISSIONS, DEBT LOG, COLLECTION WARNINGS. I opened the debt log first, hoping it would explain something, anything, about how this system worked.

What I found made me want to throw up.

The log showed my transaction from earlier that night: +$1,500 debt for the mission acceptance and cognitive boost. That made sense. But below that entry were older ones, entries that shouldn't have existed because I hadn't even known about this system until a few hours ago.

-$186,000: Helen Chen-West, medical debt transferred upon death.

-$68,000: Vesper Restaurant, business failure loss.

-$847,000: Total accumulated life debt.

Eight hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.

The system had been tracking my suffering long before tonight. Every loss I had ever experienced, every debt I had accumulated, every failure that had broken me piece by piece—all of it had been catalogued and assigned a dollar value. Helen's medical bills. The bankruptcy. The destruction of everything I had built. It was all there, recorded in neat little entries like a ledger from some cosmic accounting firm.

This thing had been watching me suffer for years. Measuring my pain. Calculating exactly how much I was worth.

And now it was using that suffering as currency, treating my broken life like collateral for whatever fucked up powers it was offering me. It was perverse. It was sick. It made me want to scream at the empty warehouse until my voice gave out.

But I didn't scream. I just sat there, staring at the numbers, trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do now.

The system offered another ability, the text appearing unbidden at the edge of my vision.

ABILITY AVAILABLE: Probability Tilt.

Minor influence over chance events.

Cost: Variable debt based on usage.

I was about to refuse, to tell the damn thing to leave me alone, when Jerome stirred on the floor beside me.

"Marcus?"

His voice was weak but clear, clearer than it had been since he showed up bleeding at my door. I turned to look at him and found his eyes open, actually focused, actually seeing me instead of staring through me at something only the dying can see.

"Hey," I said. "Welcome back."

"Where are we?" He tried to sit up and I put a hand on his chest to stop him.

"Don't move. You've got a concussion and I just stapled your head closed. We're in the old Vesper warehouse in Bayview. It's safe here, at least for now."

Jerome relaxed back against the floor, his eyes moving around the space, taking in the broken windows and graffiti-covered walls. "How long was I out?"

"Most of the night. You scared the shit out of me, man."

He almost smiled at that. Almost. Then his expression got serious again, and I knew he was thinking about everything he had told me before the attackers showed up.

"The people who came for us," he said. "They were Harrington's. Private security. She's been using them to clean up loose ends for years."

"How many loose ends are we talking about?"

"I don't know exactly. But I was being followed for weeks before they finally caught up to me. They're organized, Marcus. Well-funded. Connected to people in law enforcement and government. This isn't some small-time operation."

I thought about the USB drive in my pocket, about all the names and documents it contained. David Lowell. Victoria Harrington. The federal agents who had murdered my wife. A whole network of people who had destroyed my life and were now trying to

kill me for finding out about it.

"What are you going to do?" Jerome asked.

I looked at the interface hovering at the edge of my vision, invisible to him, showing me options he couldn't imagine. Then I looked at the USB drive, solid and real and full of evidence.

"I'm going to destroy them," I said. "Every single one of them. Everyone who did this to us."

Jerome nodded weakly. "How?"

I didn't have an answer. Not yet. But the system did.

STRATEGIC MISSION AVAILABLE: Expose David Lowell.

Estimated success rate: 23%.

With system assistance: 67%.

Cost: Moderate karmic debt.

The text burned in my peripheral vision, offering me a path forward. A way to hurt the

people who had hurt me. All it would cost was more debt, more of my suffering converted into whatever twisted currency this thing ran on.

I looked at Jerome, then back at the invisible interface.

"Do you believe in supernatural justice?" I asked.

Jerome frowned, confusion written all over his face. "What?"

I shook my head. "Nothing. Forget I said anything. Get some rest." I pushed myself to my feet, my body aching from exhaustion and stress and everything else. "We have work to do.”