The Lifespan Wealth System

CHAPTER 11. PROBABILITY OF DEATH

"You think I would kneel just because you threaten my best friend’s life?” Axel muttered sharply beneath his helmet. His voice was swallowed by the roar of the motorcycle engine he was forcing past its safe limits on the empty streets of Vancouver. At the corner of his vision, the system interface flickered wildly, spewing unstable strings of code. The junk data injection he had executed at the apartment earlier had worked. The system now appeared overwhelmed, like an old computer forced to process thousands of commands at once.

[SYSTEM ERROR: EMOTIONAL DATA ANOMALY]

[CALCULATION PROCESS DELAYED]

A faint smirk curved Axel’s lips. The crushing pressure that had gripped his chest slowly began to ease. The overload had not destroyed the system, but it had bought him time. He leaned his bike at an extreme angle as he tore around the curve toward the central hospital district.

“You can read statistics, but you cannot write destiny,” Axel hissed. A new warning appeared, the text unstable, as if trembling across his retina.

[STATUS: ARLO’S FATE NETWORK DIMMING. DEATH SIGNAL DETECTED IN MAIN ELEVATOR AREA. INTERVENTION REQUIRED.]

Axel slammed the front brake. The rear tire shrieked, leaving a long black scar across the wet asphalt. He stopped a hundred meters from the hospital gate. His mind spun rapidly. If the system specified a probability point, then there was a physical gap he could intervene in. The entity in his head did not conjure bombs from thin air. It detected weaknesses in the real world and used them as tools to collect its debt.

“Arlo will not die because of a curse,” Axel said into the darkness. “He will die because something there is already broken.”

He pulled a backup phone from his jacket pocket. His fingers trembled with adrenaline as he dialed the police emergency number. He steadied his breathing, shifting his voice into that of a panicked middle-aged man.

“There’s a bomb threat on the fourth floor of the General Hospital,” Axel reported briefly. “Main elevator machine room. Hurry.”

He ended the call and tossed the phone into a sewer drain. That was the first wild variable. The police would arrive, evacuation procedures would begin, and the timeline the system had calculated would unravel. Axel did not stop there. As he stepped into the rear parking area, he triggered a dozen fictitious transactions in the digital black market through his mental interface. He let the commands hang without final confirmation.

[WARNING: DATA SYNCHRONIZATION FAILED]

[COORDINATE TRACKING FAILURE]

The transparent display before his eyes began to lag. The coordinate point marking Arlo, once a deep red, now flickered faintly. Axel moved swiftly through rows of parked cars. He did not want the system to know his current position. He chose blind paths beyond the reach of the bio-organic sensors in his blood.

Axel stopped behind a concrete pillar in Sector D. What he saw ignited his fighting instinct. An elevator technician stood in front of the machine room door. He was not alone. A man in a black leather jacket handed him a thick envelope that looked heavy. No words were exchanged. Only a small nod loaded with malicious intent.

Axel needed no explanation. He moved like a shadow. Before the man in the leather jacket could register his presence, Axel had already lunged. The first punch struck squarely at the man’s throat, cutting off his breath.

The man staggered, eyes bulging as his hands clawed at his crushed windpipe. Axel gave him no opening. He seized the man’s head and slammed it against the concrete pillar with a sickening crack. The man’s nose shattered, fresh blood spraying across the rough cement. Axel’s movements were not graceful. He did not fight like an action movie hero. He moved with the efficiency of an executioner deleting corrupted lines of code.

“Who paid you?” Axel demanded, gripping the collar of the man’s jacket as his body went limp.

The terrified elevator technician tried to flee, but Axel swept his leg, sending him crashing to the ground. Axel pressed his knee into the man’s back, his eyes still locked on the leather-jacketed accomplice.

“Talk, or I will let you die slowly here,” Axel threatened in a calm, lethal voice.

The man in the leather jacket coughed, spitting blood. “Someone told us to install a device in elevator machine room number four. Just to make the elevator stop suddenly.”

Axel released him and let him collapse. He dragged the technician into the machine room and kicked the metal door open. Inside, he found a small electronic device attached to the emergency brake sensor. It was not a plastic explosive. It was a sabotage trigger designed to send the elevator into a brief free fall before jerking to a violent stop.

“Just to make the elevator stop suddenly?” Axel stared at the device blankly.

“Yes. I did not know it would kill anyone,” the technician wailed. “I just needed the money.”

“Bastard. Do you think a life can be replaced with money?” Axel snapped, his fist crashing into the technician’s face.

“Forgive me. My wife is undergoing leukemia surgery. I need money for the hospital bills. Please let me go,” the technician begged.

“Who paid you?”

“I do not know him, but his body smelled awful.”

“You almost killed my friend!” Axel roared, letting both men collapse. He refused to let his anger age him further.

He ripped the wires from the device with a sharp yank. Instantly, the red lines across his retina shifted. His head throbbed violently. Then he realized something far more terrifying than the system in his mind.

“So you did not create this accident,” Axel murmured, leaning his back against the cold wall. “You only read the evil intentions that were already there.”

[PROBABILITY UPDATED: TARGET IN SAFE STATUS]

[STATUS: TRANSACTION CANCELED]

Axel let out a bitter laugh. He knew who was responsible. The system did not need supernatural power to kill Arlo. It only had to let human greed follow its course. The system was a bookmaker placing bets on deaths the world had already arranged.

“So you are just an opportunist,” Axel said to the now stable blue display. “You see gaps in reality, then sell them to me as threats so I will make transactions.”

The system did not respond. It simply displayed Arlo’s profile, now standing in front of the hospital, looking confused by the evacuation alarm triggered by Axel’s false bomb report. Arlo was alive because Axel had acted as an anomaly outside the algorithm.

“Are you angry because I did not use your balance?” Axel mocked.

[PHYSICAL INTERVENTION DETECTED]

Axel collapsed to his knees. He did not need numbers to know what he had lost. His lungs suddenly tightened, and his spine cracked as if decades of weight had been dropped onto his shoulders. His vision blurred. The system did not need to tell him how many days remained. The pain in his marrow told him he had just surrendered a large portion of his youth.

He walked out of the machine room, ignoring the technician still curled in fear. In the distance, police sirens began to wail closer. Axel mounted his motorcycle and vanished into the darkness before the area was sealed off. He felt utterly exhausted, yet his mind was sharper than ever. He had discovered the entity’s fundamental weakness. The system could only operate within the corridor of logic. If he continued to create irregularities, it would lose control.

Night had deepened by the time Axel returned to his apartment. His steps dragged as he climbed the stairs.

“This is only the beginning,” Axel whispered as his hand touched the doorknob.

Suddenly, the blood in his neck pulsed hot, as if another parasite were attempting to communicate through the same cellular frequency. His retina trembled, displaying a message not from his own system but a manual distortion from an older host.

[MESSAGE FROM HOST 01: IMPRESSIVE VARIABLE, AXEL. BUT THE SYSTEM ALWAYS FINDS A WAY TO COLLECT ITS DEBT. SEE YOU AT THE HARBOR.]

Axel froze. His heart pounded hard. Goran was not merely targeting him. He had been watching Axel’s every move in real time without Axel realizing it.

Axel’s system felt hot, vibrating whenever Goran entered a certain radius or transmitted a signal through his own blood, which was also infected by the system.

“I will end this, you old bastard,” Axel hissed as he opened the door.