Chapter 2 — The First Shift
The rain at Reddmere was the wrong kind of cold, the kind that hollowed the bones and made metal taste of old blood. Ashton stood beneath an awning a block from the docks, watching the cranes move like tired giants, watching men in tattered coats move like little pieces on a board. He had a cheap key in his pocket for a cheap apartment with a cheaper view of a worse block. It would do for now. It had to.
He thought about permanence and laughed, softly, to himself. Permanence was a myth the world sold between mortgage papers and luxury ads. He didn't want permanence. He wanted leverage — a site he could claim as an Anchor, a place the System could track and seed with the foundations of a shelter. He wanted the beginnings of a fortress, not a home. The System called it something colder: a Base Anchor. He would make it the root of everything he built.
The first week after his move was small work: surveys, steps, and the theft of dignity. At day he kept his job in Vaarhon because nothing screamed "odd" like quitting a steady payroll two hours before something nobody believed would happen. At night he walked the docks, cataloging the decay like a man making a checklist before a funeral.
He learned how to look for the wrongness. The first body he saw was not yet a thing to fear. It lay half-hidden behind stacked shipping crates, arms twisted at angles that made a child's howl rise in his chest. When he approached it, the man's eyes fluttered, pupils strange as spilled ink. Crystalline lesions arranged like frost along his jaw, and when he touched his cheek the flesh broke like sugar. The man gasped, an animal sound caught in human lungs.
The System reacted instantly, anonymous lines of white text in the corner of his vision. He had stopped startling at it; the interface was as familiar as pain.
[ TARGET ACQUIRED: HOSTILE BIO-ENTITY ]
[ REWARD: +1.0 Attribute Point | +1 Viral Essence | +10 System Coins ]
Ashton didn't hesitate because hesitation was a luxury he could not afford. He had seen the same look on Midas' face the night the militia took him, those last hours when the world made impossible decisions for you. He reached down, grabbed a rusted pipe, and felt the animal inside the man curl and try to rise. One strike across the temple, another across the throat. The body went slack. The sound of his heart in his ears was a slow drum. The System pinged like a dead metronome.
[ INFECTION ELIMINATED: REWARD DELIVERED ]
[ ATTRIBUTE GAIN: +1.0 Strength ]
[ VIRAL ESSENCE ACQUIRED: 1.0 ]
[ SYSTEM COINS +10 ]
He nearly vomited then, not because he regretted it but because the mouth's muscles remembered the first time he'd been forced to take life and his chest still ached where grief had lived. This was work. This was practice. He scrubbed his hands on the cloth of his jacket and walked away. He counted the coins later, a small childish calculation that made his face go slack with satisfaction. Ten System Coins did not buy much. Ten System Coins bought a sliver of ability, a sliver he could trade for supplies or for the means to upgrade the Anchor he planned.
The Fortress Creator tab remained grayed out—locked behind some algorithmic gate he didn't have clearance to open. But the System gave small rewards for small kills, and the System liked anchors. That was his opening: buy the cheap place, let the System feed him materials through rewards and trade, and then watch the methods unfold. The System would not hand him Fort Valens. It did not hand anyone salvation. It measured, and it paid in cold units for cold work.
Word of the "chemical exposure" spread outward as officials tried to stitch a narrative. Containers had burst, they said; hazardous waste, they said, and all with that practiced politeness that was another kind of lie. A week into his rooftop observations, he watched a quarantine team pull a tarp over a shipping container and seal it with an HDC tag. Men in hazmat suits loaded a pale stretcher into a black van and took it away. A press van idled, a reporter muttering into a lens about "minor incident contained." The city carried on as if the sound was background noise.
Ashton didn't trust reports. The System's memory from his first life had stored patterns—datapoints of broadcast phrasing, timelines of infection growth—like a map burning into his eyes. He made his own map: the dock workers who didn't come to work, the vendor who stopped selling smoked fish, the sudden movement of security patrols. He wrote it down in a spiral notebook—ink cheap and black, with a list of names and times. The notebook would be the first thing the System indexed. When the time came, he would feed it into the Fortress Creator and let the algorithm place his walls where the truth already showed the weak spots.
He met a man at a low-lit stall off the Rust Belt; Philippe Ardeaux. The consultant had the kind of accent that belonged to other countries and other lives. He claimed to have logistics contracts and a disdain for optimism. Philippe watched Ashton as if cataloging a specimen. He asked questions that were small and surgical, questions about shipping manifests and about the HDC's sudden movement of personnel, and he smiled like a man who had been given a dangerous secret by fate itself.
"You're far from home," Philippe remarked, eyes clipped to Ashton's jacket. "These docks… something unsettles them. People move like they have seen a storm coming."
"Something like that," Ashton said, leaving the rest blank between them. The half-truth would be enough. Philippe would scratch at it later and would be useful or useless depending on the price. For now, he was a curiosity.
The nights in Reddmere got worse. The once regular flicker of neon cut through mist and the smell of oil was a steady undercurrent. The bodies came in trickles at first—drunk men, a snatched vendor. Then the trickle became a tide. Each kill tightened his hands on the rusted pipe, each kill fed the System, each kill improved him. The System rewarded him with Viral Essence—slick, viscous droplets collected in a vial he kept under his floorboard. They shimmered blue in the lamplight like a promise. Essence could be used, the UI had told him, to purchase resistance to the virus or to trade for upgrades. Viral Essence and System Coins were the currency of a new kind of power. Attribute Points were the blunt instrument of evolution.
He didn't become a monster overnight. He woke some mornings with the taste of copper in his mouth and listened to the hum under his skin, the tremor of adrenaline that had newer reflexes. He would run through the narrow alleys at midnight, testing how the city had become a series of shadows he could cross without thinking. The System cataloged everything—the miles, the exertion, the times he had held back. It measured that too: not just victory but restraint, and it recorded when he did not strike for sport. That restraint counted for something; there were invisible weights and balances the UI favored and penalized: cruelty for cruelty's sake meant nothing. Efficiency, effectiveness, the cold calculus of survival—those were rewarded.
He found ways to use the Trade Market anonymously. He uploaded blueprints salvaged from derelict containers, translated them with code, and traded for components—reinforced beams, salvaged servo-motors, reactive seals. They came in small shipments that a crooked dockhand could smuggle into the stairwell of his cheap apartment. He paid with System Coins and a few favors. The Fortress tab flickered the first time the foundation poured itself into the System's memory. A small status line updated: Rank F Shelter—Establishment Successful.
Vanessa called once while he was wiring a motion sensor into the stairwell. Her voice on the line sounded too bright against the wet concrete. "You sound tired, Ash," she said. "You should come back to the city. We could—" She broke off, listening to something he couldn't hear, and the pause made his throat clench. She knew something was wrong with him even if she didn't know what. "Promise me you won't disappear on us."
He almost told her the truth—almost told her about the guilt and the memories and the way he could taste the future. Instead he said, "I'm fine. I'm doing work that matters." A lie for now was a necessary thing.
On a glassy night he climbed the warehouse roof and watched the harbor by moonlight. Somewhere below, a salvage crew fought the dark, torches slicing at rust. The system pinged again:
[ LEVEL UP: 4 ]
[ Strength: High ]
[ Agility: Above Average ]
[ Viral Resistance: 2.3% ]
[ Infected Eliminated: 5 ]
A small line blinked after the stats, more private than the rest. He had not noticed it before, something the System rarely displayed until thresholds were passed.
[ Observation: User behavioral patterns deviate from human baseline. ]
[ System Evaluation: Evolving Classification... ]
He laughed, a short sound that tasted like metal. It was not triumph exactly. It was recognition. The System was watching him change, and for the first time, he felt the shift like a second skin—one that might fit comfortably or choke him. He touched the vial beneath his floorboard and thought about the work ahead, the cheap apartment, and the skeletal frame of a fortress that was already starting to dream itself into being.
Reddmere roared softly under the rain. He felt its heart beating with his own. Outside, the cranes kept moving like tired giants. Inside, the System hummed like a metronome. The world was starting to crack. He had chosen a place at the fracture and had, for the first time since waking, felt like he might be the one making the break.