The hallway was a tunnel of hollow silence, lit by flickering LEDs and the faint hum of cooling vents. Vincent moved like a memory through it, barefoot on tile, the janitor's smock clinging loosely to his frame. The ID tag bounced once against his chest and settled.
With every step, the glyph beneath his skin pulsed, not with urgency, but recognition. The system wasn't just present. It was listening.
His thoughts turned inward, and the interface expanded. No words, no sound. Just awareness. A shift in perception, a narrowing of the world until only relevance remained.
He navigated the interface with thought alone, brushing past locked modules. A flicker responded to his focus. The Knowledge Grid, Tier C, opened before him like an anatomical diagram stitched into the air.
Information didn't appear in lists. It downloaded into impulse. He knew, suddenly, how to choke a man with a wire crafted from headphone cord. He knew the angle to split a carotid with a snapped plastic stirrer. He knew how to vanish behind dumpsters, alleys, service elevators.
It wasn't abstract learning. It was recollection, as if he'd once lived these lessons in another life. The system didn't teach. It reminded.
He turned a corner, and a convex mirror reflected his image in warped distortion. For a heartbeat, the figure beside his own moved differently. Vincent froze. When he looked back, the hallway was empty.
He didn't panic. He remembered the rule Cicero once wrote of the Republic: truth wears the mask of silence when the gods are watching.
Vincent resumed walking. Each door he passed had no plaque. Each corridor bled into the next like a hospital designed to forget its own architecture.
The system responded again. This time, it showed him his vitals, his breath patterns, the exact number of footsteps since the kill. Efficiency wasn't suggested. It was required.
Somewhere beyond this labyrinth, there would be another test. Another target. Another lesson. He could feel it.
Though his pulse remained steady, something in his mind shifted. An echo formed in the quiet recess between thoughts. A voice that had not yet spoken. A presence he would one day have to name.
Vincent didn't smile. He had learned enough to know when something was watching. And whatever it was, it hadn't decided yet whether to call him pupil or weapon.