The System That Hates Its Owner

Chapter 8: Six Hours

The paramedics arrived four minutes too late to matter and just in time to be useful anyway.

Ethan sat against the scaffolding while a medic pressed something cold and chemical against his side, Lily wrapped in a foil blanket a few feet away, already being fussed over by a second responder who kept asking her questions she was too shaken to answer. The hunter … Ethan still didn't know his name … stood over both of them like he wasn't sure whether to thank Ethan or arrest him.

A containment tech pulled the reinforced case off Ethan's back before he'd even finished sitting down, running a scanner over its seals with the kind of urgency that suggested this wasn't routine. It beeped clean. "Not cracked," the tech said, sounding more relieved than professional. "You're lucky. Guild's going to want a full report on why a civilian courier was hauling this through an active breach, but that's tomorrow's problem." He carried it off into the dark without waiting for an answer, and just like that, six hours of triple-rate hazard pay walked away without him.

"You shouldn't be alive," the medic said, not unkindly, cutting away torn fabric to check the wound underneath. "This should've killed you twice over."

"Yeah," Ethan said. "I got that memo too."

He didn't explain the rest. He wasn't sure how he would have, even if he'd wanted to … a voice appeared in my head and now I owe it a fight, wasn't a sentence that ended well for the person who said it out loud in front of two guild medics and a hunter with a lot of questions building behind his eyes.

The notification hadn't gone anywhere. It sat at the edge of his vision the whole time they worked on him, patient in a way that felt less like software and more like something watching.

[NEXT MISSION: DEFEAT AN AWAKENED HUMAN.] [TIME REMAINING: 6:00:00.]

The countdown had started the moment the words appeared. It was already down to five hours and fifty-something minutes by the time the medic finished bandaging him and told him, twice, to go straight to a hospital instead of home.

Ethan had no intention of going to a hospital. He had every intention of ignoring the mission entirely.

I didn't ask for this, he thought, as clearly and deliberately as he could manage, aiming the thought at whatever was listening. I'm not fighting anyone. I just want to go home.

Nothing answered. No error, no argument, no acknowledgment at all … just the timer, ticking down with the same patient indifference it had shown from the start.

He let Lily's aunt find her, watched the two of them collapse into each other in a way that made the whole night feel almost worth it, and then he walked away from the scene before anyone official could think to stop a bleeding, unregistered man from leaving.

He made it three blocks before the first warning arrived.

[MISSION NOT ACCEPTED. TIME REMAINING: 5:41:12.] [NONCOMPLIANCE WILL RESULT IN PENALTY.]

"Do your worst," Ethan muttered, and kept walking.

For two hours, nothing happened. He got home, opened the door, climbed the three flights on legs that barely agreed to the work, got into his apartment and peeled off a jacket soaked through with blood and rain in equal measure, sat on the edge of his mattress in the dark, and let himself believe, for exactly that long, that refusing had actually worked.

The timer hit four hours remaining.

[FINAL WARNING. TIME REMAINING: 4:00:00.]

"I heard you the first time," Ethan said to the empty room.

The timer kept falling. Three hours. Two.

He tried to sleep, mostly out of stubbornness, and got almost twenty minutes of something close to it before his right arm moved on its own.

It wasn't a spasm. It wasn't a cramp. It lifted itself off the mattress, fingers curling and uncurling in a slow, deliberate rhythm that had nothing to do with anything Ethan was asking it to do, and when he tried to pull it back down, tried with everything he had, it simply didn't respond to him at all.

"Okay," he said, voice rising despite himself, watching his own hand flex like it belonged to someone renting space in his body. "Okay, I hear you. Stop."

[NONCOMPLIANCE PENALTY: ACTIVE.] [HOST MOBILITY OVERRIDE: PARTIAL.]

The arm pulled him upright. Not violently … almost gently, in a way that was somehow worse than force would have been, like the system had all the patience in the world and none of the concern. His legs came next, swinging off the bed, finding the floor, carrying him toward the door while the rest of him stood there, furious and helpless, along for the ride.

"This isn't asking," Ethan said, to no one, to everyone, to whatever piece of code had decided his body was negotiable. "This is just taking."

The system didn't dignify that with a response. It didn't need to. His own feet were already answering for it, one step at a time, carrying him back out into the rain, back toward the Hunter District, toward a fight he had explicitly, repeatedly, refused to accept.

By the time full control of his body finally returned to him … abruptly, without warning, like a leash being dropped rather than released … Ethan was standing in the center of a cracked, half-lit sparring yard behind a guild training hall, soaked to the skin, barely twenty minutes of sleep behind him and a stranger already waiting across the yard.

The stranger was awakened. Ethan could tell before the man even spoke, from the faint shimmer running along his knuckles, the easy, contemptuous way he rolled his shoulders like this wouldn't take long.

"They tell you to be here?" the stranger asked, sounding almost bored by the prospect.

Ethan looked down at his own hands … his own, again, finally … and felt the timer resolve itself into a new notification, small and absolute, sitting in the corner of his vision like it had been waiting for this exact moment the whole time.

[MISSION ACCEPTED. FIGHT BEGINS ON CONTACT.]

"Something like that," Ethan said, and the stranger smiled the way people smiled right before they stopped being polite.