Kael stepped out of the service alley and into the relentless surge of New York City. Its atmosphere was a physical assault. The noise of traffic, the blare of sirens, and the hurried, anxious energy of a million people on the move hit him, magnified by his senses.
Through his Karmic Sight, the city was a screaming, pulsating tapestry of greed and anxiety. Every hurried glance, debt-fueled purchase, and hollow promise was a shimmering thread. He had left the concentrated sorrow of the Black Sands, only to step into the volatile, concentrated debt of modern life. The sheer volume of lies, half-truths, and unfulfilled contracts felt overwhelming.
Kael forced himself to filter the noise. He had to find the signal the single, precise manipulation thread of the Broker. He knew it wouldn't be a single, massive thread like Julian's tyranny. The Broker was subtle.
He made his way toward the heart of the financial district. The towering glass and steel structures were monuments to the system the Broker sought to devour. The immense karmic density here was almost palpable.
It was here, amidst the monuments to global finance, that Kael realised the Broker's strategy. The target wasn't a physical asset; it was trust the invisible glue holding the electronic web together. Through his Sight, he saw millions of minute, dark threads highly leveraged derivatives, speculative trades, and interconnected liabilities all weaving through the global data stream. A house of cards built on small, manageable lies. The Broker's plan was simple: expose those lies simultaneously, break the global faith in the system, and press the panic button on the world's psyche.
As Kael moved through the canyon of skyscrapers, his unique signature a point of pure, untainted karma was a beacon in the storm of debt. And the scavengers were already circling.
"Well, well, well. Look what the dimensional cat dragged in."
A thin, wiry man stepped out of the shadow of a granite column. He wore clothes that were too expensive, too loud, and his eyes, bloodshot and frantic, were fixed on Kael. He was a Scavenger, a low-tier Player drawn by the smell of easy chaos.
"You're screaming purity, friend," the man cackled, rubbing his hands together. "A fresh-caught anomaly in the Big Apple. The panic's about to hit, and I need a boost. Hand over your karma, and maybe I'll let the Broker finish you."
This was Vex, a Player whose entire power was built on consuming Panic. The impending economic collapse was his feast.
Vex lunged. He didn't use a physical weapon; he used his power. A wave of irrational, paralysing terror slammed into Kael. Suddenly, the towering buildings seemed to lean, the ground felt unstable, and the sound of the traffic became a deafening siren of doom. Vex was amplifying the ambient anxiety of the city, focusing it like a weapon.
Kael stumbled, momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer, amplified anxiety. He realised that fighting Vex with force was useless. He had to fight the lie of the panic.
He focused his depleted Absolution. He didn't target Vex's debt or his past. He targeted the immediate, surrounding panic that Vex was generating.
"Absolve the Fear!"
With a quiet internal command, the blinding terror surrounding Kael dissolved. The buildings remained standing, the ground stabilised, and the traffic became just noise. He wasn't absolving the source of the fear, but the immediate, raw consequence Vex was trying to generate. Kael was left in a small bubble of perfect, terrifying calm.
Vex stared, his eyes wide with incomprehension. "What...what was that? You cleared the air! You broke the harvest!"
Kael didn't answer. He simply moved forward, his action now unburdened by fear. He delivered a swift, focused blow to Vex's temple. Deprived of the panic that fueled his speed, the Scavenger was too slow to react. Vex crumpled instantly.
As Vex hit the ground, a small, metallic object clattered out of his pocket. It wasn't a weapon, but a high-tech, encrypted flash drive a small, physical key used to remotely access global networks.
Kael grabbed the drive and focused his Karmic Sight on it. The drive pulsed with a concentrated, black thread of debt. It wasn't Vex's. It was the Broker's. This drive was a low-level Access Key to the final point of manipulation.
He knew what he had to do. He had to infiltrate the network hub the Broker was using before the clock ran out.
The small drive in his hand pulsed, its energy guiding him to a massive, nondescript data centre, one of the silent nerve centres of global finance, hidden beneath the bustling streets of Manhattan. The target was no longer a philosophical problem. It was a physical place.
Kael's seven-day clock had just turned into a seven-hour infiltration window.