Current Status: Loop 48
Location: Ventilation Shafts / Level 42 (The Drowning Zone)
Time: 11:45 AM
Mist Density: 92% (Critical)
We slid.
The ventilation shaft was a rusted throat swallowing us whole. It was steep, slick with condensation and black grease, angling down at forty-five degrees. The heat was suffocating—exhaust from the massive server farms that powered the crypto-miners in the Mid-Levels.
My Italian leather shoes, designed for boardrooms and galas, had zero traction. I was basically skiing on my heels, one hand gripping a frantic Mei Chen's jacket, the other shielding my face from the flying grit.
"Brake!" Mei screamed.
I slammed my heels into a corrugated seam. We skidded to a halt, hanging suspended in the dark.
Above us, far up the shaft, a rhythmic clang... clang... clang echoed.
"He's in the vents," I whispered. "He's too big to fit, but he's tearing the metal apart to widen it."
"He's brute-forcing the pathfinding," Mei panted, wiping grease from her cybernetic eye. "Just like an AI. No finesse, just infinite energy."
She kicked a grate open next to her feet. "Out here. Level 42."
We tumbled out onto a catwalk.
The transition was violent. We went from the dry, searing heat of the vent to a wall of freezing, wet vapor.
This wasn't just fog. This was The Silver Mist at near-maximum density.
In the Upper Levels (200+), the Mist was an aesthetic choice—a wisp of clouds below the windows. In the Mid-Levels (50-100), it was weather.
Here, in the Lower Levels (0-50), it was an ocean.
It pressed against my eyes, my ears, my skin. It tasted like battery acid and old pennies. My tactical watch—which I had abandoned—would have stopped ticking here. Even my own internal monologue felt muffled, as if the neurons were firing through syrup.
"Keep moving," Mei grabbed my arm. Her cybernetic limb was twitching, the servos seizing up in the dampness. "If we stop, the static builds up. You'll hallucinate."
"I don't... hallucinate," I gritted out. "My mind is... structured."
"Your mind is hardware, Mercer. The Mist is software. And down here, the firewall is gone."
We ran along the catwalk. Below us, through the swirling grey, I could see the vague shapes of Level 42—"The Drowning Zone." Ancient tenement buildings from the 2020s, half-submerged in rising brackish water, connected by rope bridges and rusted gantries.
Constraint Check: No Lies.
"I feel... heavy," I said. It was the truth. My limbs felt like lead.
"Atmospheric pressure," Mei dismissed, pulling me toward a fire escape.
"No," I stopped. The sensation wasn't physical. It was conceptual.
I looked at my hands. They were vibrating. Not shaking—vibrating.
"Alex, move!" Mei hissed.
But I couldn't.
The Mist swirled around me, and suddenly, it wasn't grey anymore. It was data.
It wasn't digital code like Concordia used. It was older. It was geometry. Fractals of light spiraled in the air. I saw the railing of the catwalk, but I also saw the potential of the railing—the rust eating the iron, the probability of it snapping (14%), the history of the worker who welded it forty years ago.
Information Overload.
My brain, trained to analyze market trends and stock fluctuations, tried to process the raw data of reality itself.
System Alert: Cognitive Load at 300%.
"Alex!" Mei's voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
Then, I saw them.
Shadows.
Not the assassin. These were human-shaped voids in the mist. They were walking behind me.
One had a bullet hole in his forehead. (Loop 47).
One was blue-lipped and frothing. (Loop 46).
One was burned to a crisp. (Loop 34).
They were walking in a single file line, tethered to my waist by silver threads.
My corpses.
"Forty-seven," I whispered. The number tasted like iron.
The ghosts didn't attack. They just... existed. They were heavy. Immense dragging weights on my soul. Every time I had died, I hadn't just reset. I had added weight to the loop.
The Lesson of Level 1: Pattern Recognition.
I realized with a jolt of horror that the "Brain Fog" wasn't a punishment. It was a filter. It was my mind protecting itself from this. From seeing the accumulation of failure.
Without the fog—because I had told the truth, because I hadn't engaged in manipulation—I was seeing the raw causal threads of my own existence.
"I'm carrying them," I said, my eyes wide, staring at empty air. "I never dropped them."
"Carrying who?" Mei slapped my face. Hard. "Snap out of it! The Mist is scrambling your temporal lobe!"
The slap grounded me. The pain was sharp, immediate, and real.
The ghosts flickered and vanished, dissolving back into grey vapor. But the weight remained.
I looked at Mei. She looked terrified.
"I saw my deaths," I said. (Truth). "All of them. They're dragging me down."
Mei stared at me, her blue hair plastered to her forehead by the damp. She didn't mock me. She didn't call me crazy. In the Deep Mist, "crazy" was just a frequency you hadn't tuned into yet.
"That's not a hallucination," she whispered. "That's a 'Ghost Trace.' The monks in the temples talk about it. They say time isn't a line down here; it's a stack."
Clang.
A heavy impact shook the catwalk.
Thirty meters back, the ventilation grate exploded outward.
The Erasure Protocol assassin dropped onto the metal walkway. He landed in a crouch, his armor smoking from the heat of the vent. He stood up, seven feet of matte-black death.
He didn't run. He walked.
Because he saw us. And he knew there was nowhere to go.
"Dead end," I said. (Truth).
The catwalk ended ten meters ahead, severed by a collapse years ago. Below was a fifty-foot drop into the black, oily water of the submerged district.
Mei looked at the assassin, then at the drop.
"Can you swim?" she asked.
"I was the captain of the Harvard rowing team," I said.
"Rowing isn't swimming, rich boy."
She grabbed my hand.
"Wait," I said. "The water—toxicity levels are—"
"Better than a plasma bolt to the brain!"
She pulled.
We jumped.
Location: Submerged Sector, Level 42
Time: 11:48 AM
The water hit me like concrete.
It was freezing. Pitch black. And thick with sludge.
I went under, the breath driven from my lungs. The darkness was absolute. I thrashed, orientation gone. Up? Down?
Something grabbed my collar—Mei's metal arm, acting as an anchor—and hauled me upward.
We broke the surface, gasping. The air was foul, smelling of sewage and chemical runoff. We were bobbing in a flooded alleyway between two crumbling tenements.
Above us, on the broken catwalk, the assassin stood silhouetted against the grey light.
He raised a weapon—a sleek, compressed-air rifle designed for silent kills.
Thwip.
A needle-flechette hit the water inches from my ear.
"Dive!" Mei yelled.
We went under again, swimming frantically beneath the surface of the black water. I kept my eyes shut, guided only by Mei's grip on my jacket. We swam until my lungs burned, until the red spots dancing in my vision threatened to knock me out.
We surfaced under a rotting wooden pier, deep in the shadows of a building's foundation.
We clung to the pylons, shivering violently.
"He... he can't track us... through the water," Mei chattered, her teeth clicking. "Thermal... doesn't work... in this soup."
I wiped the slime from my face. I was alive.
Status Check:
Weapons: 0
Credits: 0
Lies: 0
Dignity: -100%
"We need... dry land," I wheezed. "Hypothermia... onset in... ten minutes."
"I know a place," Mei said. "My old safehouse. But..."
She hesitated.
"But what?"
"It's occupied. By the Triads. The 'Red Lotus' clan."
"Are they friends?"
"I stole three million credits from them in Loop... well, in a past life," she corrected herself. "In this timeline? I haven't done it yet. But they know my face."
I looked at her.
"So we walk into a den of gangsters who hate you, with no weapons and no money?"
"Basically."
I laughed. It was a wet, hacking sound. "Master Yuan has a twisted sense of humor."
"Who?"
"My teacher." I looked at the dark water swirling around us. "He said if I wanted to survive, I had to stop playing the game and start playing the people."
I looked at Mei.
"Lead the way, Glitch. Let's go make some friends."
Constraint Update:
Time Elapsed: 5 hours / 24 hours.
Lies Told: 0.