THE SYSTEM GAVE ME EVERY VILLAIN'S POWER

Chapter 10

Kian stood perfectly still, his eyes flickering between the dull glow of low-grade embers and the sharp, clinical blue of Agent X’s stolen logic. Rain-cooled air rushed into his lungs, but the oxygen felt like data—cold, calculated, and terrifyingly clear.

"Kian, look at me!" Mei Ling called out from the ground, her voice cracking under the weight of her own injury. "Control it! Don't let the calculation take over!"

Kian’s head tilted at a stiff, unnatural angle. "Your heart rate is erratic, Mei Ling. The probability of you going into shock is increasing by zero-point-five percent every thirty seconds."

"Drop the act, kid!" Bao’s voice barked from the shadows. He emerged from the alley, a portable scanner already in his hand. He didn't look at Kian first; he looked at the dead Inquisitor. "I need you to step back before your static cooks the only valuable thing left in this meat-can."

"It’s not an act," Kian said, his voice flat. "It’s efficient."

"Efficient or not, you're vibrating like a blender," Bao muttered, crouching over Agent X. He pulled a serrated probe from his belt and jammed it into the base of the Inquisitor’s mechanical neck. "Help me pull him over. We need to d******d his black box before the Vanguard remote-wipes it."

"You want to play with the devil’s logs while he’s still cooling down?" Mei Ling gasped, wincing as she tried to stand. "Bao, if you trigger the kill-switch, this whole block goes up."

"Then stand further away, princess," Bao replied without looking up. "Kian, grab the other arm. Now."

Kian moved. He didn't hesitate. His fingers clamped around the cold carbon fiber with a precision that didn't belong to him. "Pressure points secured," Kian drone-like whispered.

"Good. Now focus on your own core. Don't let your fire bleed into the probe," Bao warned. A small screen on his wrist lit up with a cascade of scrolling emerald text. "Okay... we’re in. It’s dense. This isn't standard Inquisitor garbage. This guy was carrying high-council encrypted tokens."

"He was an Inquisitor," Mei Ling said, leaning against a trash bin. "They work for the high council. That’s not a secret."

"Yeah, but look at the assignment dates," Bao said, his brow furrowing as he scrolled faster. "Mei Ling, come look at this. You too, anomaly. If you’re gonna be a genius calculator, analyze this."

Kian looked. The numbers danced in front of his eyes. "Timestamp 09:40:00. Two minutes before the zero-point event."

"Wait, back it up," Bao commanded. "Look at the visual feed. This isn't from the Inquisitor’s eyes. It’s a remote satellite stream stored in his drive as background context."

On the screen, a grainy image appeared. It was a nondescript highway junction. Kian felt his chest tighten, the "logic" in his mind momentarily short-circuiting as raw, human panic flared up. "That’s... that’s my truck. That was my last delivery of the morning."

"See that blue shimmer on the right?" Bao pointed to a smudge of pixels near the edge of the screen. "That’s a gravity manipulation skill. Tier 4 or higher."

"What are you saying?" Mei Ling asked, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Someone was there?"

"Someone pushed him," Kian whispered, his orange eye flaring brightly again. "I didn't lose control of the brakes. They... they yanked the steering column from the outside."

"Look at the mana signature in the logs," Bao growled, tapping a sequence on the keyboard. "It’s signed. Not with a name, but with a title-key. Project: Void Host. Sponsor: The Curator."

Mei Ling staggered back as if she’d been hit. "No... that’s impossible. Not the Curator. He’s the first-ranked Hero. He’s the backbone of the entire Vanguard infrastructure."

"He’s your god, isn't he?" Bao snorted, finally ripping the probe out of Agent X’s neck as the drive hissed with steam. "Looks like your god decided he needed a lab rat, and Kian happened to be on the road at the right time."

"I was a delivery driver!" Kian’s shout echoed off the walls, his mechanical calm finally shattering. "I was just a normal guy! Why me?"

"Because you were 'nobody,' Kian," Bao said, standing up. "A void. A vacuum. They didn't want a hero or a villain. They wanted an empty vessel to see what happens when the logic fails. You aren't an accident. You’re an engineered disaster."

"So everything," Kian said, his hands beginning to smoke as he looked at Mei Ling. "The hospital, the arsonist core, the rift in the subway... it was all part of the schedule?"

"I didn't know," Mei Ling said, her eyes filling with tears. "Kian, I swear, I didn't know. My team... my brother’s team... they sent us there to 'contain' it. We were just fodder too? To see how you'd react?"

"Probably," Bao said coldly. "The logs suggest the subway was a stress test. They wanted to see if the empathy of the 'Kian' persona could survive the 'Embers' integration. Seems you passed with flying colors."

"Stress test?" Kian’s jaw set into a hard line. Inside his mind, the two voices—the logic and the rage—suddenly stopped fighting. They didn't harmonize, but they turned in the same direction. They looked at the Curator’s name on the screen together.

"What's the calculation now, genius?" Bao asked, watching Kian carefully.

"The calculation is simple," Kian said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm register. "They destroyed my life for an experiment. Now, the math says I destroy the laboratory."

"Kian, if you go after the Guild Council, you're not just an anomaly anymore," Mei Ling warned, though she didn't raise her spear. "You’ll be a terrorist. A Tier-0 existential threat."

"Look at where loyalty got you," Kian said, glancing at her ribs. "Look at the guy who just tried to 'clean' you because you were in the way. Do you really want to go back and file a report with the guy who tried to have you murdered?"

Mei Ling looked down at her spear, then at the dead Inquisitor, and finally at Bao. "I can't go back. If they see these logs in my peripheral memory, they'll scrub my soul too."

"Then it’s settled," Bao said, packing his gear with a sharp, final click. "A disgraced Hero, an info-broker with too many secrets, and a glitch with a god-complex. We're quite the team."

"We're not a team," Kian corrected, his eyes glowing intensely in the dark. "We're a temporary alliance of the damned. I want the Curator’s head. Bao wants the data. What do you want, Mei Ling?"

"I want the truth," she said, her voice strengthening. "And I want to see his face when he realizes his 'experiment' has its own ideas."

"Good," Bao said. "Because the window just closed. Look at your UI, kid."

Kian looked. Every corner of his vision began to strobe a violent, emergency red.

[SYSTEM BROADCAST: MANDATORY NOTIFICATION]

[ATTENTION ALL CITIZENS: EMERGENCY PROTOCOL X-9]

[LEVEL 1 THREAT IDENTIFIED: KIAN ADIYATMA]

[CRIMES: INQUISITORIAL MURDER, CORE THEFT, HIGH TREASON]

[OBJECTIVE: EXTERMINATE ON SIGHT]

[REWARD: 5,000,000 POINTS]

Suddenly, a hundred high-pitched tones erupted simultaneously. It wasn't just Kian’s vision. Every smartphone in the pockets of passersby on the street above, every digital billboard in the city, and even the emergency intercoms in the alleyway began to blare a continuous, piercing alarm.

"That's a bit of a bounty," Bao muttered, pulling up his hood. "Guess I'm retiring from the tea business a little early."

"Five million points," Mei Ling said, looking up at the sky where blue Guild spotlights were already beginning to sweep the neighborhood. "Kian, they've tagged your bio-metric signature across the whole network. We can't stay on the surface."

"Then we go deep," Kian said, the blue digital grid in his eyes overlaying the geography of the alley. "I see a maintenance tunnel three hundred meters north. Probability of bypass success: sixty-eight percent."

"Better than zero," Bao said. "Let's move."

"Wait," Kian said, his hand twitching. "I hear them."

"Who?" Mei Ling whispered.

"Everyone," Kian said, looking toward the alley entrance. "The people. They’re coming for the bounty."

The sound of collective footsteps filled the silence—the sound of a city turning into a hunting pack. Kian didn't look afraid anymore. He simply held out his hands, the sparks of white-orange heat flickering with a steady, rhythmic pulse like a ticking clock.

"Let them come," Kian said. "I’m tired of being the delivery. It’s time to start making the drops myself."