System Reboot

Chapter Eight: Signatures

"Back door. Now. Don't argue with me."

Dax already had Ray's arm over his shoulder, half-carrying him toward the pharmacy's rear exit while Priya grabbed what supplies she could stuff into a bag in under ten seconds. Wren stood frozen a moment longer, eyes distant, reading something in the air none of the rest of them could see.

"Wren. Move."

"They're not coming straight at us," she said, voice tight with concentration. "Two of the small signatures split off. Going around the block instead. Like they're trying to cut off the back."

"Then we go out the side." Dax adjusted his grip on Ray, who bit back a groan and nodded once, jaw set. "How far's the third one?"

"Close. Really close." Wren's eyes snapped open, panic flickering through the focus for just a second. "It's already at the corner."

The pharmacy's side door burst inward before anyone reached it.

A Vanguard soldier filled the frame, armor plated in the same faint blue as Marcus's had been, though the level number floating above this one's head sat far lower. Twenty-something, maybe. Enough to be dangerous. Nowhere near enough to be Marcus.

"Everybody down!" the soldier shouted. "Vanguard audit enforcement, this location is flagged—"

Dax didn't wait to hear the rest.

He set Ray down against the shelving and closed the distance in two steps, driving his shoulder into the soldier's chest before the man's weapon fully came level. They went down together, tangled, the soldier's helmet cracking against the doorframe hard enough to daze him.

"Priya, the bag, go, get them out the side!" Dax pinned the soldier's arm, twisting the weapon free before a second shot could clear. "Now!"

The soldier's HUD flickered, some notification passing across it that Dax couldn't read from this angle, and then his voice came out different, less panicked, more certain.

"You're the medic," the soldier said, staring up at Dax with something like recognition. "Reyes's medic. He told us to watch for you specifically."

"I'm nobody's medic anymore."

"Didn't say his. Said yours." The soldier's mouth twisted into something between a grimace and a grin, blood at the corner of his lip from the doorframe. "Said if we found you, don't engage. Said to fall back and report position only. This isn't an audit team, Doc. This is a search team. And you're the thing we're searching for."

Dax went still for half a second, weight still pinning the man down.

"Search team for what."

"Above my rank to know. Just following orders." The soldier's eyes flicked past Dax, toward the doorway Wren had frozen in, watching the exchange with wide eyes and a crowbar held loose in one shaking hand. "Didn't expect the kid to already have a Class though. That wasn't in the briefing. Somebody's going to want to know about that fast."

The words landed like ice water down Dax's spine.

"You reported it already," he said. "The trigger event. Somebody already flagged it."

"System flags irregular triggers automatically. Anything that hits right at the edge of a window instead of clean in the middle gets logged and pushed up the chain same day. Standard protocol." The soldier's smile turned thin, almost apologetic. "You should've picked a broker with a slower encounter. Cutter's setup runs right through Vanguard's monitoring range. Has for months. Guess nobody told you that part of the deal."

Behind them, glass shattered at the front of the pharmacy, a second soldier vaulting through the broken window with weapon already raised.

"Priya!" Dax shouted, but she was already moving, dragging Ray toward the side exit while Wren scrambled to cover them, crowbar up, Warden senses clearly screaming every direction at once now.

Dax slammed his fist once, hard, into the pinned soldier's jaw, enough to buy silence without killing him, then rolled clear as the second soldier's shot cracked past where his head had been a half second earlier.

[Damage Taken: 12]

[Attrition Tank Effect Triggered]

[+1 STR / +1 CON]

Small. Not enough to matter much. He needed bigger mistakes from them than a graze to make his class worth anything here, and he didn't have time to bait one out properly.

"Wren, threat sense, give me a direction that isn't full of Vanguard!"

"East!" she shouted back, already moving that way herself, pulling Priya and Ray with her. "East is clear, mostly, but the big signature—" Her voice cracked, fear breaking through the concentration. "It's moving now. It wasn't moving before. It's moving fast."

Dax's stomach dropped.

Marcus. Actually moving. Not observing from a careful distance anymore.

"How fast," Dax said, ducking behind an overturned shelf as another shot chewed through the space he'd just occupied.

"Fast enough that I don't think east stays clear for long."

He didn't have a better option than the plan already in motion, so he committed to it fully, using the shelf as cover to close the distance to the second soldier instead of retreating from him. Better to end this fast, close it down before Marcus arrived and turned a manageable fight into something else entirely.

The soldier fired again, wild, panicked at the sudden proximity, and Dax used the miss to get inside his guard, driving an elbow into his ribs hard enough to fold him over.

[Damage Taken: 8]

[Attrition Tank Effect Triggered]

[+1 STR]

Not the mechanic he needed right now. He needed distance, not damage, needed his people through that side exit and gone before the number one Ranker on the whole Grid arrived to see exactly what his old medic was protecting.

"Down and stay down," Dax told the soldier, finishing it with a strike that dropped him clean, and turned back toward the door in time to see Priya's group already at the corner, Wren glancing back over her shoulder with pure panic on her face.

"Dax, come on!"

He ran.

The street outside had gone strange, the way it sometimes did right before something big moved through a Zone, air pressure shifting, the ambient hum of the System's rules bending around a nearby high-level presence. Dax had felt it a handful of times before. Never this strong.

[High-Threat Presence Detected]

[Recommend Immediate Evacuation]

He didn't need the System to tell him that.

They cut east through the alley behind the pharmacy, Ray limping hard on Priya's shoulder, Wren leading with her new senses stretched thin and desperate, every one of them running on the particular fear that came from knowing exactly who was closing the distance behind them and exactly how little chance they'd have if he actually caught up.

The alley opened onto a wider street, and for a moment it looked clear, looked like maybe they'd bought enough room to breathe.

Then Wren stopped dead, staring back the way they'd come, face gone white.

"He's here," she whispered. "He's right behind us. I can feel him like a wall."

Dax turned, and there, framed at the alley's far end under a flickering streetlight, stood Marcus, level indicator glowing steady above his head, expression unreadable in the half dark, close enough now that there was nowhere left to run that would matter.