The Infinite Wealth System

Chapter 7: Hunters

The red emergency lights buzzed overhead, casting long shadows across the panicked crowd trapped inside the sealed auction hall. Kaelor’s fist tightened around the iron key, his pulse hammering against his ribs as murmurs turned into shouts.

“Let us out!” a man in a tuxedo screamed, pounding against the steel shutters.

“Someone call security!” a woman shrieked, her diamond earrings catching the red light as she stumbled backward. Then the side doors burst open.

Six figures dressed in black tactical gear stormed into the hall, faces hidden behind smooth featureless masks, moving with the precision of trained soldiers rather than common criminals. Wealthy guests screamed and scattered, diving beneath tables and overturned chairs, but the masked intruders ignored them completely, weapons raised, eyes scanning the crowd with mechanical focus.

[Threat detected.]

The System’s words flashed across Kaelor’s vision at the exact moment one of the masked figures turned directly toward him.

“There,” the lead intruder said, voice distorted through some kind of filter. “Target confirmed.”

Kaelor’s blood ran cold. They were not here for the auction. They were not here for the jewels or the ancient manuscripts or the fortunes being thrown around all night. They were here for him.

He bolted, Shoving past a stunned waiter, Kaelor sprinted toward a service door at the side of the hall, his shoes skidding against polished marble. A bullet cracked past his ear, embedding itself into a marble pillar inches from his head. Screams erupted behind him as the crowd dove for cover.

“Move, move!” one of the masked men barked.

Kaelor shoved through the service door into a narrow corridor lined with pipes and flickering bulbs, his lungs already burning. Footsteps pounded behind him, closing fast. He had no idea where this corridor led, only that stopping meant dying.

[Predictive Analysis: Available.]

The words flashed bright red in the corner of his vision, sharper and more urgent than anything the System had shown him before.

“What does that mean?” Kaelor gasped, rounding a corner.

[Activate to preview immediate danger.]

He did not have time to question it. “Activate it! Now!”

The world seemed to slow for half a second. A faint translucent outline appeared in front of him, showing a ghostly image of himself continuing straight ahead, only to be met by a second team of assassins waiting around the next bend, weapons raised, ready to end everything in an instant.

Kaelor’s stomach lurched. He veered left instead, crashing through a narrow maintenance door just as gunfire tore into the wall where he would have been standing seconds later.

“He went left!” a voice shouted behind him.

The tunnel beyond the door was pitch black, damp, and narrow, clearly part of some old underground network connecting the bank to other buildings nearby. Kaelor ran blind, one hand trailing along the cold brick wall, his other hand still clutching the iron key like it might somehow save him.

[Predictive Analysis: Recharging.]

“Recharging? Now?” Kaelor hissed through gritted teeth, ducking beneath a low pipe just as footsteps echoed from an intersecting tunnel ahead of him.

He pressed himself flat against the wall, chest heaving, listening as two sets of boots grew louder, then paused directly on the other side of the brick.

“Split up,” one voice ordered. “He can’t have gone far.”

Kaelor held his breath, every muscle locked tight, praying the darkness would hide him. The footsteps finally moved away, fading down a different passage, and he allowed himself one shaky exhale before continuing deeper into the tunnel system.

[Predictive Analysis: Available.]

“Show me,” Kaelor whispered.

The ghostly preview flickered to life again, revealing a hidden trip wire stretched across the tunnel floor just ahead, connected to some kind of explosive device wired into the ceiling. Kaelor’s blood turned to ice. He stepped carefully around it, pressing himself against the far wall, moving with agonizing slowness until he cleared the danger completely.

Behind him, faint voices grew louder again, closing in from multiple directions now, like hunters coordinating a pincer movement through the tunnels. Kaelor’s mind raced. He was running out of turns to take, running out of tunnel, running out of luck.

[Predictive Analysis: Available.]

He activated it instantly this time, without hesitation. The ghostly image showed a narrow gap in the brick wall just ahead, barely visible in the darkness, leading to a maintenance ladder rising up toward a service hatch above.

Kaelor squeezed through the gap just as flashlight beams swept across the tunnel behind him, missing him by mere seconds. He climbed the ladder as quietly as his shaking arms would allow, pushing open the rusted hatch above and hauling himself up into a storm drain running beneath the city streets.

Cold water rushed past his ankles as he crawled forward, following the drain until it opened into an alley several blocks from the auction house. He collapsed against the brick wall, gasping for air, rain misting down from a sky finally clearing after the storm.

For a long moment, Kaelor simply sat there, shaking, staring up at the narrow strip of night sky visible between the buildings. He had survived. Somehow, impossibly, he had survived.

⸻

Back inside the sealed tunnels beneath the Ashford Vault, the six masked figures regrouped at the intersection where Kaelor had vanished. Their leader pressed two fingers against his earpiece, his voice flat and clipped.

“Target evaded capture.”

A pause followed, filled only by the soft dripping of water somewhere deeper in the tunnels.

“Understood,” the leader said finally. “Target confirmed. Location tracker remains active. We withdraw for now.”

The six figures melted back into the shadows, leaving the tunnels empty and silent once more, as if they had never been there at all.

⸻

Kaelor finally pushed himself to his feet in the alley, his legs still trembling from exhaustion and adrenaline. He needed to get somewhere safe, somewhere he could think clearly about everything that had happened tonight. The key. The auction. Orien’s warning. The assassins hunting him with terrifying precision through tunnels they clearly knew better than he did.

Target confirmed.

The words echoed in his mind, cold and clinical, like he was nothing more than a name on a list waiting to be crossed off. How had they found him so quickly? How had they known exactly where he would be tonight, in a hidden underground auction most of the city did not even know existed?

[Anomaly detected.]

Kaelor froze at the sudden alert flashing across his vision. “What kind of anomaly?”

[Foreign signal detected within Host’s body.]

His stomach dropped. “What?”

[Location: Left shoulder, subcutaneous. Signal actively transmitting.]

Kaelor’s hand flew to his shoulder, fingers pressing against damp fabric until he felt it, a small hard lump beneath his skin, no larger than a grain of rice, yet undeniably foreign, undeniably real. His mind raced backward through the chaos of the night, searching for the moment someone could have placed it there.

The security guard who scanned him at the door. The crowded auction floor where dozens of strangers had brushed past him in the darkness. The chaos of the lockdown, bodies pressed together in panic. Any one of them could have done it without him even noticing.

“They’ve been tracking me,” Kaelor whispered, horror creeping through his veins like ice water. “This whole time, they’ve known exactly where I was.”

[Confirmed.]

Kaelor pressed his fingers harder against the small implant beneath his skin, his breathing shallow, his mind spinning with a single terrifying realization.

Whoever was hunting him did not need luck or coincidence to find him again. They already knew exactly where he was standing right now.