THE LAST 100 DAYS

Burn Rate

Chapter 8: Burn Rate

"One minute," Ethan whispered. "That's all. Just one."

The pharmacy was still dark. Whatever had dragged across the roof had left an hour before dawn, and nobody else had heard it. Nobody else had been awake to count its footsteps.

**[CONVERT 1 MINUTE: BODY ENHANCEMENT?]**

*Yes.*

Heat flooded his legs. His heartbeat steadied, his hands stopped shaking, and the ache in his ribs thinned to nothing. He rolled his shoulders, and the movement felt like someone else's, crisp and exact.

He crossed the stockroom without a sound. He could hear Dana's son breathing from six feet away, and the drip of a pipe behind the wall.

*Four minutes. Five.*

He was grinning. He hated that he was grinning.

Then the heat bled out, and the clock clicked down.

**[93 DAYS, 0 HOURS, 52 MINUTES.]**

The grin died.

Last night he had paid a minute for forty seconds of speed. Now a minute had bought five minutes of strength, sharper senses, and a body that finally did what he told it. It felt like a bargain, and that was what scared him.

*It feels free. It isn't.*

A thin line of text opened under the clock.

**[TIME HARVEST: PROFICIENCY 1%.]**

*It improves with use.*

He tried a bigger conversion, just to see the price. The system answered before he committed.

**[CONVERT 10 MINUTES: COST 10 MINUTES.]**

**[CONVERT 60 MINUTES: COST 60 MINUTES.]**

He cancelled it fast, his pulse hammering.

*Stronger costs more. Always more.*

Ethan sat on an upturned crate and did the math on the back of his map. Seventeen minutes per evolved monster. Ten minutes bought a real fight. Sixty bought something he couldn't imagine. If the monsters grew stronger, he needed stronger boosts, and stronger boosts cost more time than any single kill gave back.

*Fight bigger things to earn time. Spend time to survive bigger things. Round and round.*

He underlined it twice. It wasn't a gift. It was a treadmill, and he was already on it.

---

By midmorning he was behind the pharmacy, doing push-ups on broken asphalt until his arms shook.

*No System. Just me.*

Sixteen. His chest burned. Twenty. His elbows locked and he dropped to the ground, gasping.

*I can't rely on the clock for everything. If I burn time just to keep up, I'm dead by day sixty.*

He pushed himself up again. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

"Again," he told himself. "Again."

At twenty-five he cheated.

**[CONVERT 30 SECONDS?]**

Yes. The ache vanished. He cranked out ten more, then ten more, smooth and furious, until his vision tunneled.

"That's enough."

Marcus stood in the alley mouth with a canvas bag over one shoulder. His face was unreadable.

Ethan scrambled to his feet. "I was just..."

"I know what you were doing. I've been watching you for ten minutes." Marcus dropped the bag. "You're pushing like a man trying to outrun something."

"I need to be useful."

"You *are* useful."

"Not enough." The words scraped out of him. "Last night I almost died in front of everyone. Dana's kid was thirty feet away. If I'd been faster, if I'd been stronger..."

"You'd have died faster."

Ethan went quiet.

Marcus stepped closer and lowered his voice. "I trained recruits for eleven years. The ones who broke first weren't the weak ones. They were the ones who thought strength was the whole problem. They stopped checking the exits. They stopped listening." He tapped Ethan's temple, hard. "This is what's kept us alive. Not your arms."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I know." Ethan looked at his scraped palms. "I just can't stand being the weakest thing in the room."

"Nobody can." Marcus's face softened for half a second. "That's how you know you should be scared of it."

He picked up the bag and walked away. Ethan stood in the alley, shaking, with the secret like a stone in his throat.

*He's right.*

*And I'm still not telling him.*

---

Night came. Dana's son slept. Eli muttered through a fever, and Pete sat by the door with a pipe across his knees, watching the dark. Ethan lay on his back and stared at nothing.

The window opened in front of him without a sound.

**[NOTICE.]**

**[SURVIVAL PATH ANALYSIS UPDATED.]**

**[STANDARD SURVIVOR TRAJECTORY: DECLINING.]**

**[YOUR TRAJECTORY: DIVERGING.]**

He stopped breathing.

*Diverging from what?*

The text didn't answer. It only sat there, patient and pale. He realized it was not praising him. It was filing him.

Beneath it, one more line burned in.

**[ADDITIONAL OBSERVER ATTENTION: DETECTED.]**

Ethan closed his eyes. When he opened them, the window was gone.

Across the room, Marcus's voice came out of the dark, low enough that no one else would hear.

"This morning I watched you cross forty feet of open ground in the time it takes to blink."

Ethan didn't move.

"And Pete watched it too," Marcus said. "He's been staring at your hands ever since. I'd decide what you're going to tell us, Ethan, before he decides for you."