System Reboot

Chapter Two: Forty-Eight Hours

"You can't just decide I'm not scared."

"I'm not deciding anything. I'm asking you to eat."

Wren pushed the can of beans around with a bent fork instead of eating them. Dax sat across from her on an overturned shelf, elbows on his knees, watching her not eat. The pharmacy had gone quiet around them. Ray was asleep in the back corner, leg propped up, chest moving steady. Priya was somewhere out front, running numbers on a cracked tablet she refused to explain.

"Forty-eight hours," Wren said. "That's not a lot of time to grow a Class."

"No," Dax said. "It's not."

"You're supposed to lie to me right now. Tell me it'll be fine."

"I don't lie to you. Never have."

She set the fork down. In the low light her face looked older than sixteen, the way most kids' faces did now. Nobody got to keep the soft parts of being young. The Grid took those first.

"What happens if I don't trigger something," she said. "Say it plain. Not the word Ray used."

Dax held her eyes. She'd earned plain.

"They move Unranked people into low-priority Zones," he said. "Zones with bad resource numbers. Monster density's higher there because nobody strong enough to clear it wants to live there. People go in. Not many come back out."

"So it's a death sentence with paperwork."

"That's the shape of it, yeah."

Wren nodded slow, like she'd already worked that out herself and just needed him to say it so it was real instead of a feeling in her stomach.

"Then I need to level," she said. "Tonight if I can."

"Classes don't work like that. You know this. You get one when the System decides you've earned it. Usually a real fight. Sometimes a real loss."

"Then get me a real fight."

"Not going to happen."

"Why not? You fight things every single day."

"Because I've watched twelve people try to force a trigger event and I've buried four of them." Dax kept his voice level. Not angry. Just done arguing about it. "The System doesn't reward people who go looking for near-death. It rewards people who survive it without asking for it. There's a difference and it matters."

Wren's jaw worked. She didn't have a comeback for that, because there wasn't one, and she knew it.

Priya's boots came scuffing back through the front room, tablet under her arm. She dropped down onto a stack of crates across from them, tablet screen throwing pale light up onto her face.

"I pulled everything I've got on Reyes," she said. "Not much. He doesn't post kill logs like most top-hundred players do. No bragging streams, no gear flexing. Just level notifications, clean and quiet, like he's doing paperwork instead of climbing a leaderboard."

"That tracks," Dax said. "He was always like that. Quiet before he moved."

"You knew him well?"

"Pulled him out of two collapsed positions overseas. Kept him breathing both times."

Priya studied him a second longer than the sentence needed. "And now he runs audit sweeps that end with kids getting shipped to death Zones."

"I don't have an answer for that yet."

"You'll need one in forty-eight hours."

Dax didn't argue with that either.

His HUD blinked, small and easy to miss if you weren't used to watching for it.

[Zone 1 Threat Index Rising — Local Spawn Rate +12%]

He frowned at it. Zone spikes usually meant something upstream had shifted, a bigger fight somewhere, a boss encounter, a territory change. The System liked to redistribute pressure whenever the map moved under it.

"You feel that?" Priya asked, watching his face change.

"Threat index just jumped. Not huge. Enough to notice."

"Vanguard moving early?"

"Maybe. Or something else entirely." Dax stood, joints stiff, the ache in his ribs from earlier finally making itself known now that the adrenaline had faded out. "I want eyes on the block before we sleep. Wren, you're with me. Priya, stay with Ray, he shouldn't be alone yet."

"I don't need babysitting," Wren said, already grabbing her crowbar.

"Didn't say you did. Said you're with me."

Outside, the street had gone the particular kind of dark the Grid did after sundown, streetlights either dead or flickering at angles that didn't match where the poles actually stood. A block over, something large scraped against concrete, slow and patient, the kind of sound that meant it wasn't hunting yet. Just moving.

Wren kept close, crowbar held low and ready the way Dax had taught her. Good instincts. No Class, no stat sheet backing her up, and she still moved like someone who understood the difference between being scared and being careless.

"You really think they'll ship me out," she said quietly.

"I think Marcus doesn't do anything halfway. Never did. If he's running the sweep himself, it means he's decided this matters enough for his personal attention." Dax scanned the rooftops out of habit, old training that never quite switched off. "That should scare you a little. It scares me."

"You're not acting scared."

"I don't get the luxury of looking it. Doesn't mean it's not there."

They reached the corner where Ray had come stumbling in bleeding six hours earlier. The street beyond it sat empty, buildings leaning at the Grid's usual impossible angles, one whole structure floating a careful two feet off its own foundation like it was deciding whether gravity still applied to it personally.

Then the notification hit, sharp and sudden, filling the corner of Dax's vision in red instead of the usual pale blue.

[Vanguard Patrol Detected — Proximity: 200m]

"They're not waiting forty-eight hours," Dax said quietly.

Wren's grip tightened on the crowbar. "They're here now."

Down the block, past the leaning building, three shapes moved into view under a working streetlight, armor plated and level indicators glowing steady above their heads. Not a full sweep team. A scouting group, small and fast.

And at the center of them, unmistakable even from this distance, unmistakable even after six months and a war and a whole broken world between them, stood a shape Dax hadn't seen in person since the last time he'd screamed a name into a radio and begged a body to keep breathing.

Marcus had come himself. Early.

Dax pulled Wren back into the shadow of the doorway and understood, with a cold certainty settling into his chest, that the forty-eight hours had just become considerably less than that.