I set my jaw and ran my fingers over the matte card. The shimmer rippled faintly, like a pond disturbed by a single drop of rain.
The holographic countdown on my wrist flickered, numbers glitching across the screen. I scoffed and threw the card back at Kael. "You're seriously telling me this isn't a scam? Since when do the messengers believe more than info?"
He caught it effortlessly, tapping it against his palm. "Worked just now. No scam. Trust me… mostly."
"Mostly?" I muttered. "And why would the System hand us a card that lets us rewrite its own rules?"
Kael leaned back, smirk sharpening. "Because it doesn't know what it has. The System's obsessed with collecting data—every movement, every kill, every burst of chaos—but it doesn't understand any of it. It's like a child hoarding rocks it can't count properly."
I blinked at him. "So… we're basically holding a loaded pen while the world thinks it's the author?"
"Exactly," he said, grinning. "We climb the missions, raise our rank, and the System keeps tracking, recording, logging… completely blind to the fact that it's letting us get closer to the backend. That's when the matte card matters."
"And until then?" I asked.
"Until then," Kael said, standing and stretching, "we play by the rules it thinks it set, chase Mission 618, rack chaos points, and raise rank. Every scrap of data it collects? That's fuel for us when we finally use the card."
I rubbed my temple. "So, we're basically giving the System a high-five while we sneak past the door it didn't know existed."
Kael laughed. "Beautifully put. Come on, Pier 22 isn't going to wait for us to philosophise."
I grabbed my rifle case and followed him out into the hallway. The safehouse door creaked shut behind us, sealing in the smell of instant noodles and wet steel.
Outside, the city was humming under the rain, alive in that indifferent way only cities could be. The wind sliced between the leaning buildings, tugging at my coat, carrying the sour tang of diesel and the faint sweetness of frying dough from a vendor still stubbornly open. Sodium lights painted the puddles gold; neon bled red and green across cracked asphalt.
We moved quickly, boots splashing through shallow streams, running toward the gutters. Kael kept talking, voice a lazy counterpoint to the sharp rhythm of rain.
"You know," he said, "the last guy who tried Pier 22's gate didn't make it back."
"Encouraging," I replied, scanning the cross streets.
"Not saying we will, either. Just saying… makes it interesting."
The wind picked up, rattling loose tin against a half-collapsed awning. My tracker pinged faintly — target movement registered near the waterfront. We slipped past shuttered stalls and flickering holo-ads, the noise of the inner districts fading into the low rush of the tide ahead.
Pier 22 waited under a lattice of crane arms, its wet planks reflecting the world like broken mirrors. Somewhere out there, the System was already watching, logging every heartbeat, every footstep.
I clench my case tight. "Let's make it worth the data."
Kael grinned. "Now you're talking."
We cut downside streets slick as oil, the rain chewing at the edges of my coat. The city's buzz was different tonight — not the slow grind of traffic and markets, but something that made my mind heavier than usual.
The Norse Head had gone to ground after Pier 14, but the mage's babbling had given us a fragment: Pier 22, midnight tide. It wasn't much, but in a city this size, even a breadcrumb was worth bleeding for.
Kael walked like we had all the time in the world. I kept pace, eyes tracing every reflection in the puddles, every shadow that moved wrong.
"You're still thinking about the card," he said.
"I'm thinking about how a system that knows everything somehow didn't stop us from getting it."
"That's the beauty of it." He tilted his head at a passing holo-ad, its glitching model stuttering between a fashion smile and an error code. "It's so obsessed with recording, it doesn't understand when something's missing from the picture."
"And you think that's how we kill the Norse Head?" I asked.
"I think that's how we get close enough to try," Kael said, stepping over a gutter-stream, "and maybe pickpocket the whole game while we're at it."
The waterfront smell hit before I saw it —thick ink brine, old rope, and the metallic breath of rain on rust. Pier 22's cranes rose out of the mist like black rib bones.
My tracker pulsed: faint heat signatures moving fast toward the far dock.
Kael smirked. "Looks like the party started without us."
I chambered a round. The System's overlay blinked across my vision — [Mission 618: Progress Recording] — and I felt the same cold certainty as before. Every move we made here would be carved into its memory. But maybe, if Kael was right, we could carve back.
The rain sharpened as we closed in, cold needles working through my coat. Pier 22 loomed ahead — a half-lit carcass of steel and concrete. Containers sat in crooked stacks, their paint peeled and stenciled warnings blurred into nothing. The tide gnawed at the pilings below, a slow, hungry sound.
The tracker in my palm pulsed red — three signatures clustered near the loading cranes, one larger than the rest.
Kael crouched beside me, squinting through the mist. "That's him."
The Norse Head. Even blurred by the rain, his silhouette was too still, too anchored. A predator that didn't need to move. Two men with rifles paced at his flanks. Behind them, a single figure in a hood worked over a portable console, tethered by glowing cables to the briefcase. The air around it shimmered faintly, like heat over ice.
"Data broker," Kael whispered. "That's backend code. He's locking the gate down."
So that's why the Norse Head was here. Not for a shipment, not for territory — he was here to seal away whatever the coffee mage failed to deliver. The matte card's shadow loomed over everything. It isn't the only card that existed.
The System's overlay flickered across my vision:
[Mission 618: Target in Sight]
[Chaos Potential: Medium]
[Observation Rate: 78%]
"Seventy-eight," I muttered.
Kael's grin was quick. "Means it doesn't see everything. Room to play."
We moved. The slick planks whispered underfoot, my breath syncing with the hiss of the rain. Kael peeled left, vanishing between two stacks of containers, while I stayed low and cut right.
I eased the Prism Aim from its case. Even through my gloves, the spiral glass felt alive, its surface shifting between cold silver and smoke-dark with the sway of the lamps.
One of the guards broke from his post to light a cigarette. A mistake. My rifle coughed once, the round whispering through his knee. He dropped without a sound. I thumbed the calculated modulation dial — the Prism's beam folded in on itself, sharpening into a single thread of white so fine it could cut through raindrops. I squeezed.
The beam hit the briefcase first, fracturing the shimmer into a spray of harmless static. The mercs reacted instantly, rifles swinging toward my position. Kael's laughter broke the tension as he vaulted the crates, scattering them with a flashbang.
The Norse Head didn't flinch. He turned his head slowly toward the noise, as if he'd been expecting it.
"You've been making ripples," he called, voice carrying over the water. "The System likes ripples. Easier to track than shadows."
Kael's voice buzzed in my ear. "Two minutes before the trigger man reaches the cranes. You handle the big one, I'll chase the climber."
I kept my scope on him, silent while holding my breath with a step forward, rain streaming off the Prism Aim's coil. A twist of the grip woke the embedded sensors — my HUD flooded with data: three heat signatures, pulse readings spiking under tension, the faint glow of weapon capacitors.
"Still water runs deep," he said. "And deep things don't get caught in nets."
Kael's voice crackled in my comm. "He's stalling. The third heat signature's moving toward the cranes—looks like a trigger man."
I shifted my angle, catching a glimpse of a figure scaling the crane ladder, something heavy strapped to his back.
"Bomb?" I asked.
"Or worse," Kael replied.
The System overlay glitched. For half a second, my vision fuzzed with static — and then I saw it: the matte card's shimmer bleeding into the feed, distorting the observation grid. The System was blind in a single, perfect wedge.
Kael's doing.
I didn't wait. I shifted my stance. Light from the nearest lamp bled into the weapon's spiral, refracting into a thousand strands. The Prism Aim drank it, folded it, and focused it into a needle-thin beam that hissed through the rain.
The left guard dropped before his weapon cleared his shoulder — the beam punched through his chest plate, steam curling from the wound.
The right guard fired wildly, rounds sparking against the pier. I pivoted, tilting the Aim to catch his muzzle flash. Light refraction bloomed, and the next beam bent in midair, searing into his thigh. He collapsed, weapon clattering.
Shots cracked behind me. Kael drew fire, keeping the Norse Head locked.
The climber turned, startled, fumbling with the strap. Too slow. My blade hummed awake, refracting rain into a lattice of light, and the next heartbeat carved silence into the pier.
When I looked back, the System feed jittered. Static washed over my HUD. When it cleared, the Norse Head was gone. Only the echo of his voice lingered, riding the wind:
"Climb higher. The card's not a key — it's a debt."
The System flashed:
[Mission 618: Partial Success]
[Rank Increase: Pending]
Kael jogged up, soaked and grinning with a head held in his grip. "Partial. Which means we get to do this again."
I glanced at both the matte card and the Norse head in his hands. Its eyes were already clouding, but the edges of the neck still twitched, muscle fibers curling like worms in the rain. With dramatic flair, he stuffed it into a dripping canvas sack and cinched it tight, the way you'd bag fresh game. It thumped against his leg as he slung it over his shoulder.
The shimmer was steadier now, like it started breathing in time with us.
"Or," I said, lowering my aim, "it just decided we owe it something."
Its surface went dim, snuffed out as if the fight had never happened.
The cranes groaned above us. The rain kept falling. The shimmer of the matte card in Kael's hand looked almost the same. Almost.
He turned it over, his grin faltering for the first time all night. "Huh."
I wiped the Prism Aim's barrel, scanning for more hostiles. "What?"
"Check your rank," he said. His voice had that false-casual edge — the one he used when he already knew I wasn't going to like the answer.
The System overlay blinked back into place.
[Rank:56 ( –2 Positions)]
[Chaos Points:37, 321 (–427)]
I felt my stomach dip. "We lost points?"
"Not 'lost'," Kael said, eyes flicking over the matte card. The shimmer was dimmer now, threads of light weaved along the edges. "Burned. The card doesn't run on nothing. It eats chaos points. More we bend the rules, the hungrier it gets."
I stared at him. "You didn't think to mention that before you used it?"
He winced, rain dripping from his lashes. "Thought it was a flat cost. Turns out… it scales. The stunt at Pier 22? That wedge we cut in the System's vision? Took way more than I planned. At least more than the moment I tested."
The Norse Head's sack thumped against his leg. His smile was back, but it was smaller, tighter now.
"So we're down rank and in debt to a card we can't pay off forever," I said, pinching my nose bridge. Feeling my wallet colder than any winter.
Kael flicked the card once. The shimmer pulsed — once, twice — in time with our heartbeats. I could almost swear it was warmer than before.
"Hah," he said with a sheepish grin, "I still have twenty bucks for wings."
I just stared at him. The shimmer didn't feel like it was laughing, nor did my wallet.