System Of Retribution

Chapter 5

Ryan spent the first morning after his discharge sitting on the floor of his half-empty apartment, with his back against the wall, and his laptop balanced on his knees, and forty three dollars in his bank account staring back at him from the screen like a personal insult.

The eviction notice gave him three weeks. Three weeks to find money he didn't have, in a city that had already decided he wasn't worth employing, and with a reputation that Tyler Briggs had spent six months carefully dismantling before Ryan even knew the demolition had started.

"Okay," Ryan said to the system and the general unfairness of everything. "Let's talk about strategy."

“I was wondering when you would get around to that,” the system said. “You have been staring at your bank balance for eleven minutes.”

"I was processing," Ryan said.

“You were catastrophizing,” the system said. “There is a difference.”

"Fine," Ryan said. "What do I actually have right now."

“You have Reflex Tier 1, which is modest but real. You have Threat Sense at a basic level, enough to read a room before a room reads you. You have a functioning mind, which is more than most of your enemies can claim. And you have me.”

"And forty three dollars," Ryan said.

“And forty three dollars,” the system agreed. “Though that number is about to change if you stop sitting on the floor.”

Ryan closed the laptop, set it aside, and pulled up everything he still had on Tyler Briggs from memory, nine years of working adjacent to the man, watching him operate, and watching him cut corners and charm clients and take credit for other people's work.

Tyler was good at appearances and terrible at substance, the kind of man who thrived specifically because nobody looked closely enough.

Ryan was about to look very closely.

"Tyler still has the Whitlow Logistics account," Ryan said, thinking out loud. "Or he thinks he does."

“Correct,” the system said. “He submitted a revised security proposal to Whitlow three days ago. The proposal contains several inaccuracies regarding camera coverage on the warehouse's east side. Whitlow's operations manager has not yet noticed.”

Ryan went still. "How do you know what's in Tyler's proposal?"

“I know what is relevant to your advancement,” the system said. “Do not ask questions that will slow you down.”

"That's not an answer."

“It is the only answer you are getting today,” the system said. “Focus.”

Ryan let it go, filing the question away for later, and pulled out the cheap notebook he used for thinking through problems when screens felt too clean and distant for the kind of thinking he needed to do.

He wrote Tyler's name at the top. Below it, Whitlow Logistics. Below that, east side camera coverage.

He knew people at Whitlow, men who remembered him as competent and thorough before the scandal had rewritten that reputation.

One of them, a logistics coordinator named Pete, had reached out six months ago to express quiet sympathy when the news broke.

He pulled up Pete's contact now and stared at it for a long moment.

"This has to be clean," Ryan said. "No fingerprints. Nothing that ties back to me directly."

“Agreed,” the system said. “You are not yet powerful enough for open warfare. Right now you are a ghost. Ghosts do not announce themselves.”

"So I don't contact Pete directly," Ryan said, working it through. "I find another way to get the information about the east side cameras in front of Whitlow's operations team without it ever coming back to me."

“Now you are thinking correctly,” the system said, “and Ryan could have sworn there was something almost approving in the tone, dry and restrained but there.”

He spent the next two hours building an anonymous email address through three different routing services, the kind of digital paper trail that would take a serious investigator weeks to unravel and Tyler Briggs absolutely no capacity to trace at all.

He drafted a message to Whitlow's operations department, not accusatory or dramatic but just a quiet and specific note from an unnamed "industry contact" flagging a discrepancy in their current security coverage and suggesting they request a site verification before signing anything.

He sent it at noon and closed the laptop.

“Now we wait,” the system said.

"Now we wait," Ryan agreed, leaning his head back against the wall. "How long do you think before Whitlow pulls the contract?"

“That depends entirely on how quickly their operations manager reads his emails,” the system replied. “Based on current patterns, I will estimate forty eight to seventy two hours.”

"You're monitoring his email patterns," Ryan said, narrowing his eyes.

“I monitor what is useful,” the system said.

"That's either incredibly helpful or deeply unsettling."

“Why not both,” the system said.

Ryan almost smiled at that, the first real almost smile in longer than he could remember, small and private and still tasting faintly of blood from his split lip, but real enough to count.

Forty eight hours later, at six fourteen in the morning, Ryan was woken from the first decent sleep he'd managed in a week by a sharp, warm pulse moving through his chest like someone had flicked a switch somewhere inside him.

He sat up in the dark, blinking, and the system was already there, bright and immediate at the edge of his thoughts.

“Whitlow Logistics has terminated its contract with Tyler Briggs Security Consultants,” the system said. “Estimated value of lost contract, four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Tyler's response upon receiving the news was not measured.”

"How not measured," Ryan said.

“He threw a chair,* the system said. “Several people witnessed it. Word is already spreading among his remaining clients.”

Ryan sat there in the dark, feeling the warmth of the system's transfer settling through him, sharper reflexes ticking up another notch, his body feeling marginally less like it had been used as a punching bag, and thought about a man throwing a chair in an office full of people watching.

"Good," Ryan said quietly.

“That is only the beginning,” the system said. “He still has three active contracts. Would you like to discuss the next move?”

Ryan swung his legs over the side of the mattress on the floor, the only piece of furniture the landlord hadn't touched yet, and reached for the notebook.

"Let's discuss all three," Ryan said.