Episode 11 — House Calls
Timeline: Minutes after Episode 10. Zack (Level 12) has forged the Hearthbreak Vow and unlocked Hearthchain (R1). Rain keeps time.
⸻
Sirens braided the night into a red-blue migraine. Zack sprinted east, boots slapping water, the Hearthchain humming at his sternum like an eager, metallic heartbeat. Neon storefronts smeared by; puddles caught his reflection and didn't recognize it.
His HUD rode the edge of vision:
LEVEL 12
EXP: 0 / 1000
OATH VECTOR: Active
Hearthchain R1: Range 15 m | Duration 4 s | Cooldown 12 s
Steel Surge: Phase 2 (Ready)
Luna pounded a step behind, axe bouncing off her shoulder with a rhythm that said she'd throw it or marry it. Silas didn't run. He was where he needed to be each time Zack blinked—a punctuation mark the sentence hadn't earned.
"Ambulance crews hit three blocks," Luna said, breath fogging. "Fourth rig headed to the river. They're loading civilians like takeout."
"Then we ruin their delivery rating," Zack said.
The rain thickened into sheets. Horns wailed. A city bus brayed at ghosts. Zack took a corner fast enough to rip water from the asphalt and saw the first hijacked rig fishtail through an intersection.
The Map-of-What-Matters tilted in his head—four living hearts in the back. The oath translated the math into pressure.
"Loud," he told himself.
He stepped into the street. The rig bore down, grille a grin of chrome and poor decisions. The driver was a Shade in a paramedic jacket; it turned its blank face toward him and pressed the gas like a dare.
Hearthchain snapped out, silver line drawing from his chest to the rear door handle—click. He set his heels and yanked, a big brother disciplining a rollercoaster. The ambulance fishtailed, rear end dragging sideways on a tether only vows could see. Tires screamed. The driver overcorrected. Zack whipped the line and the rig slid neatly into a parallel park against a row of dumpsters, kissing them with the grace of a professional.
Luna whooped. "Chrome-teeth just parallel parked a kidnapping."
Silas perched on the hood before gravity filed a complaint and peered through the windshield. "No human behind the wheel. Easy mode."
The Shade driver reached for a phantom throat—habit—and found none. Zack tore the door off and threw the Shade into a puddle so hard the rain unionized in protest. One punch unmade it.
+150 EXP
EXP: 150 / 1000 (Oath Bonus: +20% — rescue context)
He ripped the rear doors open. Four civilians blinked: gagged, strapped, eyes raw with fear. The oath made their heartbeats loud; it tuned the world so saves were louder than kills.
"Hold still," Zack said, already slicing straps. "You're going to hate the next three seconds."
"Hate—?" one guy began.
Hearthchain latched to the stretcher rails—click—and Zack dragged the whole load out like a fisherman hauling a screaming net. The group slid across slick asphalt into Luna's hands; she began cutting ties, swearing at the knots like they were a political party.
Silas flicked a coin at a second Shade creeping out from under the rig. It folded like a cheap chair. "Two more blocks," he said. "He's testing scale."
"Then scale breaks," Zack said.
The night obliged with a new verse: sirens behind, sirens ahead, two more rigs converging like predators scenting panic. A third threat bled into view: pizza delivery cars rolling slow with hazard lights on, back seats full of bound shapes. Budget abduction.
"We split," Luna said.
"No," Zack said, too fast. He tasted the vow like a razor. The Oath tugged: if he chased a kill while a reachable save existed, debt would incur—power throttled, luck turned, steel sulking.
He scanned. Right rig: two lives. Left rig: one life. Pizza convoy: six. The math had a face.
He looked at Silas. "Take the left rig. No flair—just save."
Silas's mouth tilted. "Asking me to carry is new."
"I don't care," Zack said, honest. "Just do it."
Silas vanished toward the left rig with a speed he had never admitted to, a shadow conducting triage. Luna threw the axe into the pizza convoy's lead car, burying it to the handle in the hood; the car died with a hiss like gossip, and she hauled a woman out through a window with a one-liner about no-tipping zones that would have slayed a better audience.
Zack turned to the right rig and sprinted straight at it. The Shade driver aimed to clip him. He jumped, planted both feet on the bumper, Hearthchain clicked to the rear roof ladder, and he pole-vaulted his whole furious life onto the roof.
The driver swerved. Zack rode the slide, peeled the siren off like a scab, and drove it through the windshield. The Shade didn't die; it regretted. The rig kissed a streetlight and turned off to think about its choices.
People spilled. He saved them. The HUD rang like a register while refusing to celebrate.
+200 EXP
EXP: 350 / 1000 (Oath chain bonus: Active — continuous rescue)
+250 EXP → 600 / 1000
+150 EXP → 750 / 1000
"Help!" A child's voice, wrong street, two cars back.
Zack pivoted and saw why the oath had left oxygen in his lungs—a Shade paramedic had a kid in a blanket in the crook of one arm and a bone syringe in the other. The world slowed, his choice sharpened: kill and maybe miss the save, or save and risk the Shade bolting to harvest another block.
He chose save without blinking. Hearthchain snapped to the blanket's woven edge and yanked the kid into his arms so fast the wind didn't consent. He spun, shielded the child with his ribs, felt something whistle past his back—the bone syringe slammed the street where his spine had been.
He set the kid behind him. "Close your eyes," he said, turning to the Shade.
The Shade ran. He let it. The vow roared in his veins like approval. He hated it and loved it and didn't learn the difference.
Luna reappeared with a pizza boy under one arm like a sack of lies. "Convoy done. Silas?"
Silas strolled from the left rig behind a trail of knotwork that had spontaneously decided to untie in his presence. "Four alive. One fracture. The driver is a problem we don't have anymore."
Zack looked past them at the river. A rig's lights flickered away into the wet dark—the one going to water. It carried… three. He felt it; the oath had turned him into a lighthouse with a grudge.
"River," he said, already moving.
⸻
The Bridge of Bad Ideas
The rig barreled toward the old drawbridge, sirens off, lights low. Marrow didn't need attention; he manufactured it. Zack pounded after it down the center line, Luna keeping pace, Silas skipping physics.
A scream tore across the bridge—not human. The river throbbed wrong. Zack didn't have to look to know the water had grown teeth where it met the pilings.
"Marrow's fishing," Silas said.
"So we cut the line," Zack said, and leapt.
He hit the rig's rear bumper again, grabbed the ladder, hauled himself up. The roof slicked his palms; his steel dug purchase anyway. He crawled hand-over-hand to the passenger side, bent low, punched through the window, and dragged the Shade out by its collar. It clawed at his wrist; sparks fountained into the storm. He introduced it to the road. It left.
The driver gunned it. The rig hit the drawbridge seam and bounced. In the back, something heavy slid and screamed. A human. Alive.
Zack didn't wait for permission. He ripped the rear door off and the river's breath blasted his face: cold, rot, spell. Inside, three civilians strapped on gurneys—one old, one middle-aged, one young, all wide-eyed and gagged. Shadows crawled the floor like snakes.
"Hearthchain, now," he said, and the tether clicked to the nearest gurney. He yanked and the whole thing slid out into the rain. Silas was already there somehow, taking the weight, flipping the gurney upright in one motion a circus would kill to hire.
Zack snapped the tether again and pulled the second. Luna caught it, swore, cut straps, kissed the old woman's forehead because sometimes you do that for strangers who lived long enough to earn it.
The last gurney caught—its strap tangled on a hook. The driver noticed they were bleeding cargo and cranked the wheel, aiming for the low railing ahead. River teeth waited.
Zack slid inside, slammed his shoulder into the gurney, and the strap gave. He kicked the Shade nurse into the wall, grabbed the third captive by the shirt, and threw him out the door into Silas's arms. Silas made a sound like annoyance and softened anyway.
The rig hit the railing hard enough to make it consider a new career. The front wheels went over. The back wheels thought about it. The engine died; the river didn't care.
Zack was inside a metal coffin tipping toward water that ate oaths for dessert. He could jump. He could live. He could let the driver perish and tally kill-credit the oath would scowl at but not forbid.
He looked at the driver. It wasn't a human under a Shade mask. It was a Marrow surgeon, face white and smooth as a lie, eyes like polished bone. A human once. Maybe again. Maybe not. It smiled at him with a mouth that had studied bedside manner and decided it was a weapon.
"You can't save them all," it purred. "That's the point of triage."
Zack grabbed its jacket. "Here's mine: I treat cause."
He bit. Not to kill. To mark. Steel fangs tore a crescent in its collarbone and left a thread of his oath in the wound. The surgeon shrieked, not in pain—in outrage. He'd tagged it with Hearthchain at a deeper layer; now the city itself would whisper directions to Zack: this way, later, when saving time isn't the price.
Then he jumped.
The rig went off the bridge. The river's teeth met it like an old bill. The splash was applause that hoped everyone drowned.
Zack landed on wet steel, rolled, came up in a crouch. The surgeon's scream dopplered down and cut off. Good. Not dead. Not tonight. Tracked.
He turned. Three civilians alive behind him. Luna staring like he was some new religion she refused to join and still might visit on holidays. Silas measuring him with professional respect and personal annoyance.
The HUD blinked like a heartbeat and finally allowed celebration:
+300 EXP (Multi-Rescue)
+250 EXP (Rig Save)
+200 EXP (Convoy Save)
OATH BONUS: ×1.4 (No collateral, triage optimal)
EXP: 980 / 1000
Hearthchain → Rank 2 Unlocked
R2: Range 30 m | Split tether (2) | Drag weight ↑ | Cooldown 10 s
NEW: Oath Mark — bite tags a perpetrator for delayed pursuit (duration 48h)
Zack sagged against the railing and laughed once, ugly and alive. "We keep going."
Luna wiped rain from her mouth with the back of her hand. "You just jumped off a bridge to bite a doctor and call it philanthropy."
"Never said I was well," Zack said.
Silas flicked water from his sleeve like it had offended him. "He's evolving into his vow. Good. Annoying. Necessary."
Zack looked east. The river took the rig and didn't give it back. He pictured the surgeon clawing through sewage tunnels, clutching a wound that wouldn't stop pointing at itself.
"Next," he said.
⸻
Grid of Fire
Marrow adjusted. He stopped sending obvious rigs. He flooded the grid with lures—false dispatches, phony calls, Shades in scrubs banging on tenement doors with "wellness checks." The map of the city became a static hiss.
The oath cut through noise. It sang when a real pulse sat too close to a real knife.
They moved as a three-body problem that had found a rhythm. Zack dragged, shoved, Hearthchained and was the blunt instrument hero cops dream about and therapists invoice. Luna flanked, axed, and swore like a liberation theology. Silas cut angles and debt, his hands doing math on living bodies with the precision of a bad angel.
A tenement stairwell: Hearthchain snag—click—Zack yanked a kid out from under a Shade paramedic's knee, then used the same line to pull the Shade into the landing rails hard enough to reset its career goals.
A corner bodega: Luna brained a Shade trying to ring up a screaming woman by barcode; "Not on sale," she said, and shoved the woman into Zack's path, where Hearthchain roped her to safety between racks of stale chips.
An alley: Silas appeared midair, toes barely brushing a fire escape, and clothed a man in a new angle called alive.
EXP climbed without feeling like it was the point—because the vow made saves the metric and kills the paperwork.
+200 → 1180 / 1000 → LEVEL 13 (+SPD | Surge control ↑)
+180 → 360 / 1000 (L13)
+240 → 600 / 1000
+260 → 860 / 1000
The rain thickened into a curtain. It was nearly dawn in the way three a.m. pretends it's an answer.
That's when Marrow's surgeon—the one with the mark—tugged the cord Zack had tied to fate. The HUD ticked—an arrow under the skin.
Oath Mark: Active
Direction: Southeast (Old Mercy Medical, condemned)
Signal Strength: Rising
Luna saw his head tilt. "He twitching?"
"Tagged one," Zack said. "Old Mercy. He's going to ground to cut the string."
Silas's eyes cooled by a degree. "He'll try to buy time with lives."
Zack's jaw flexed. "Then we buy time back."
⸻
Old Mercy
The hospital had died the year the river found its basement. Windows boarded, doors chained, foundation settling into a lean like a drunk trying to remember how ribs work. The sign still hung: Mercy. Irony went to work on overtime pay.
They pushed through a side door Luna opened with an axe and a prayer you couldn't teach in catechism. Inside, dark, wet, lights like dead eyes. The smell of mildew and medicine out of time. Somewhere deep, a generator thrummed and a choir hummed itself into bravery.
The HUD sharpened: down and left. The mark pulsed. Zack followed it through halls with peeling paint and into a ward where beds waited like teeth.
People lay strapped to gurneys. Six. IVs dripping clear fluid that didn't belong in any formulary. The surgeon stood between them with a clipboard and a smile that had lived in better rooms. The bite on its collarbone glowed faintly, ugly with truth.
"Welcome back," it said, warm. "Would you like to finish your oath? Trade those six for a name worth breaking dawn over?"
Luna's axe creaked as her grip tightened. Silas's hands went still.
The HUD snapped a scarlet banner Zack had been hoping to never see on its first night:
OATH DEBT TEST
Choice: Prioritize kill vs. reachable saves
If kill chosen → Oath Debt (Severe) | Surge control ↓ | Hearthchain disabled until debt repaid
If save chosen → Kill window narrows
Zack didn't debate. He didn't choose the good thing. He chose the only thing that let him keep choosing good things later.
"Hearthchain," he said, and the tether split—Rank 2 flexing—two lines snaking out to latch two gurneys at once. He yanked. Wheels squealed. The surgeon twitched in disappointment.
Silas moved, faster than rumor; he cut a strap mid-air, lifted a body with one hand like the world owed him better weight distribution, and set it down behind a line Luna was drawing with a salt packet she'd stolen from a diner.
Shade orderlies rolled from under the beds like centipedes. Luna chopped one through the clavicle; it exploded into flies that immediately regretted their career path. Zack body-checked another into a crash cart, then used Hearthchain to rip a third gurney across the floor while the patient's eyes tried to climb out of their face.
+300 EXP → LEVEL 13: 1160 / 1000 → LEVEL 14 (+VIT | Oath resonance ↑)
+260 EXP → 420 / 1000 (L14)
The surgeon sighed, set the clipboard down with ritual gentleness, and dropped the smile. "Your type always thinks sacrifice looks better on other people."
"You're not people," Zack said, and meant it without hate. Just a filing decision.
It moved. Not fast. Slippery—angles cheated, doors tried to be in the way and arrived late. It jabbed a needle at Luna's neck; Zack's hand closed around the syringe barrel, steel squealing. He crushed it; liquid hissed on the floor and turned the tile gray.
The surgeon's face twisted. "Do you know how hard it is to source this purity?"
"Fuck purity," Luna said, and head-butted it. It staggered, stumbled into a salt line, hissed like steam.
Silas appeared at its flank, touched its temple with two fingers—and pain unpacked inside its skull. It collapsed to one knee, spasms jerking. He lifted his hand, part surgeon, part priest, part liar.
"Now," he said to Zack, not smiling.
Zack could feel the kill—how clean it would be. Bite. Twist. End. He'd tagged it so he could finish this exact sentence. He looked at the last two gurneys. He looked at the surgeon.
"Save," he told the steel.
Hearthchain snapped to both and ripped them across the floor into the safe pocket Luna had drawn. Silas exhaled—maybe annoyed, maybe proud. Luna's laugh was a ragged, wet victory.
The surgeon crawled out of the salt line, snarling like it had finally earned an emotion. "You think vows make you clever? They make you slow."
Zack stepped between it and the door. "Nah. They make my priorities expensive."
It lunged. He met it with steel and teeth.
The fight wasn't pretty. It was hospital—close quarters, fluorescence, too much breathing. The surgeon used scalpels of light and words that reached for his nervous system; Zack used elbows, guilt, and the sound a jaw makes when it realizes it isn't the boss of the room.
It cut his cheek. He let it, rolled with it, marked it again with a second bite—deeper—oath filaments knitting into its blood. "In case you get lost," he said, breathing metal.
It screamed, not mortal, not monster, something between. "I will fillet your oath and dentist with it."
"Book me a cleaning," he said, and drove it into the defibrillator. The machine woke like a saint seeing an opportunity. Electricity chewed the surgeon's spine; it convulsed hard enough to throw paint off the walls, then slumped like a mistake.
It wasn't dead. He left it that way. Tracked. Terrified. Useful.
+200 EXP (Neutralize)
EXP: 620 / 1000 (L14)
Oath Debt: Avoided
Hearthchain → Rank 3 (Provisional)
R3: Range 45 m | Split tether (3) | Shield yank (intercept projectile once / 30 s)
Zack turned to the saved. Six breathing strangers stared at him with expressions people bring to miracles they aren't sure they deserve. He felt the vow burn through him like purpose traded for pain at a rate he'd signed for.
Luna put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, brief and brutal. "You did the stupid, right thing."
Silas looked down at the twitching surgeon and then at Zack. "Now you're a habit I'll have to schedule around."
Zack's eyes went to the wall. Someone had finger-painted MERCY there years ago when the staff had left in a hurry or the water had made them. He wanted to hate the word. He didn't. He wanted to weaponize it. He could.
He picked up the clipboard. Names. Times. Routes. Boltholes. He smiled without a mouth. "Invoices."
The HUD agreed like an accountant who had always wanted to punch something:
NETWORK NODE LOCATED: Mercy Hub
Routes to: Dock 17 / Cold Storage (South) / Riverside Catacombs (East)
Chain Mission Unlocked — House Calls
Rewards (Oath path): Rescue XP Multiplier stacks per hub cleared without civilian death
The building exhaled. The generator coughed and quit. Dawn had started whispering at the edges of night, testing the concept of sky again.
Zack walked into the corridor, the six saved moving behind him like a small fleet. Luna herded, Silas cleaned up lies that had been left on the floor.
He stopped at a window flooded with first light. Rain had finally dropped a key and changed tempo. The city breathed different, with a stitch new inside it.
The HUD slid one last prompt into his blood, polite and immovable.
OATH PATH: Confirm escalation?
Set City-Wide Objective: "Shut down every Marrow route feeding human traffic"
Effects: XP source prioritization, bonus surge control, increased Oath Debt penalty for neglecting rescue when within reach
Zack stared out at the waking blocks and the ambulances that meant it and the ones that didn't.
He clicked Yes.
The word didn't echo just in him. It passed through the concrete into the rebar and through the rebar into the river and along the river into the dark places where names rot and found Marrow, who smiled like a man tasting a new spice.
"Good," Marrow said somewhere deep, to nobody who wanted to hear him. "We love when they name the game."
Zack turned away from the glass. "We take Dock 17," he said. "Then South Cold Storage. Then the catacombs. We keep pulling people out until his name is broke-backed."
Luna spun the axe, worship and mockery in equal parts. "I'll bring snacks."
Silas rolled his sleeves. "And I'll bring consequences."
Zack's steel sang—not loud, not wild—in tune. He felt tired enough to die and too busy to schedule it. His mother's face lived behind his eyes, lifted like a pilot light that didn't ask what fuel cost, only burned.
He started walking.
The city moved with him. House calls. He could do those.