“Commerce was the last language left to us when the system came. I spoke it fluently.”

  — CEO of Palistra Apex

  I stood there awkwardly, still half in fight mode, half in shock.

  “Erika… I know how this looks, but—”

  Thunk.

  A dagger flashed past my face and sank into the helmet of an incursor sneaking up behind us. I whipped my head around as he dropped like a puppet with cut strings. Erika spun, eyes still burning. “Dash! No time for nostalgia!” She leapt again, vanishing mid-air with a shimmer of distorted light.

  One blink, she was gone. The next, she reappeared above the closest enemy, daggers reversed in her grip. She plunged both into the back of its neck, twisting as she rode the collapsing body down. Her boots hit the floor with a slide.

  Pop. One less problem.

  “This is my practical assignment,” she yelled over the sound of cracking permacrete. “You’re not supposed to be here! Well, neither am I without my mentor, but…”

  She turned toward me, probably ready to yell more, but paused. Her eyes locked on my still-smoking rifle, its coil chamber pulsing dimly with leftover heat. Her gaze slid to the corpse I’d left behind; half-melted and still sparking. “…Wait. You took one down? Alone?”

  I gave a shaky shrug. “Kinda. Maybe.”

  A hint of a smile tugged at her lips. “Good job.”

  Then, the terminal trembled.

  A shockwave blasted through the terminal as a detonation ripped across the upper floors, sending a rain of debris and dust spiraling downward and from above, a figure moved and then dropped from ten floors up, cutting through the air like a falling god.

  He landed hard. The floor cracked beneath his boots, sending spiderweb cracks through the tile in a small radius.

  He straightened slowly, lifting a staff longer than I was tall, topped with a crystalline focus that glowed with layered glyphs and circling rings. He wore a white mage robe embroidered with silvery glyphs that shifted subtly in the light. Power rolled off him in waves, like heat from a reactor.

  But it was the band on his arm that locked my spine upright: a black armband with a glowing silver insignia… IC.

  Incursion Control Corp.

  Proper authority, the real deal. The only corporation tasked with defending the solar system from incursions. He didn’t look at me at first, but just stared at Erika, voice low and commanding. “Erika. Explain.”

  She flinched just a little, then stepped forward, posture suddenly far more formal. “Shirogane-sensei. On assignment. Incursion classified gray-one to gray-three.”

  He tilted his head, just slightly. “No civilians allowed.” His eyes finally locked on me, and I swear my blood froze solid. The weight behind his stare was worse than the Incursion monsters. Worse than a collapsed tunnel. Worse than Mom after she found out I’d pawned the water filter again.

  I took an instinctive step back.

  “I—I—I’m…” I stammered, throat bone-dry. “Licensed?” It came out more like a question than a statement. I’d bought a license from Eddy last month. It was cheap, so probably stolen, but at least I had something.

  The pressure didn’t ease.

  He turned back to the incoming wave of Incursion. At least twenty more had entered the terminal, leaping down the central shaft like armored demons.

  The man sighed, lifted his staff with one hand and cast without words, chant or visible buildup.

  The spell tore through the terminal like a silent scream. A wave of force erupted outward from his staff in a wide arc. Ten incursors were caught mid-air and ripped apart, their bodies twisted and scattered across the floor like broken dolls.

  Unlike in the movies, there was no light or fire, just pressure. Brutal obliteration. “Thought you could make some easy money?” he asked, barely glancing back. “Hate Scavantis divers. You’re all the same.”

  I opened my mouth, but then shut it again. He wasn’t wrong.

  “But whatever. You’ll get your reward,” he continued. “Eri, your reading was wrong.” He looked at Erika, his tone flat. “These aren’t gray-ones or threes. These are gray-fours.”

  Erika’s eyes widened. “What?” She spun mid-step to throw another dagger, one I hadn’t even seen her draw. Another incursor dropped, still twitching. “But I’ve been handling them—”

  He laughed, but with a mysterious, quiet laugh only old wizards did. At least those in holo-movies. “Look at their names, and you handled them because you’re better than you think, Eri. You hit level twenty-one recently, so you should be able to handle two ranks below with ease.”

  He lifted his staff again.

  And then something shimmered; an invisible surge of force that raced along the ceiling and walls, circling the entire terminal like a net cast wide.

  The remaining enemies didn’t even react.

  They just… fell.

  No dramatic collapse, or last-minute roars. Just like someone had flipped a kill switch on an army. The noise was gone without alarms or shrieks of the dying. Just silence echoing across broken tile and torn ads.

  I looked around, eyes wide, trying to process it and to believe I was still standing.

  Erika turned back to him, looking flushed, angry, but underneath, just a little proud. He gave her a look that almost passed for soft. Almost. “Told you,” he said. “You’ve got it.”

  [Attention! The emergency is over.]

  I glanced at the system, but I had the searing embarrassment of standing there like a sweaty, bruised idiot in front of a first-class spellcaster and a girl I hadn’t seen in person since I left Creston system prep.

  The IC mage, Shirogane, I caught from Erika’s formal greeting, turned his gaze back to me. Even that glance had pressure, like air thickening around my skin, a buzzing weight crawling across my chest. “Kid, I didn’t forget about you.” My spine locked up as he looked me over. I could feel his eyes skimming over my gear, reading me like a scan line as I handed him the counterfeit license.

  “Dash,” he drawled. “Miner school. Creston also? But pending… weird. That explains the cobbled junk. License…” His eyes narrowed slightly, then he gave a nod. “Valid. Barely. Says here you’ve got thirty years of field experience.” He gave me a blank look. “You’re what, twenty? Nice forgery.”

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  I opened my mouth with no idea what to say, but he waved it off.

  “I’ll let it slide because that was a good kill.” He nodded toward the half-splattered corpse. “Rank four isn’t easy to take down with conventional weapons, but next time, leave it to IC. We’re professionals.”

  Behind him, Erika let out a very obvious snort and immediately tried to stifle it with a cough. He turned to shoot her a glare. She pressed her lips together, but her eyes were still laughing.

  “Most of us,” he said with a sideways glance at me. “As Eri could tell you, some of my coworkers are... disasters in uniform.” The man sighed and shifted his stance, planting his staff into the cracked floor. It let out a soft, harmonic chime, like a giant tuning fork settling into reality.

  I could feel it immediately.

  The air thickened with gathering mana, not the raw, wild kind I’d seen from Erika’s teleportation, but something... controlled? Refined?

  The mana didn’t just swirl. It spiraled, twisting upward in thin streams of faint blue-white light, curling around his arm and drawing into the staff like a vacuum. Symbols lit up along its length: complex glyphs etched deep into the white metal.

  He was casting with one hand, the other relaxed at his side.

  The sheer casualness of it sent shivers up my neck. “Dash is okay,” Erika said suddenly, breaking the reverent silence. “I know him. We went to Creston Prep together.”

  I glanced at her warily. “…Erika?”

  The IC mage snorted, clearly unimpressed. “Don’t get involved with Scavantis divers, Eri. They’re…” He glanced at me. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t kind either. “…not known for long lives. Throwing themselves into danger just for scraps.”

  He turned back toward the still-charged staff. “Oh,” he said casually, “that reminds me.” He flicked his fingers… but nothing happened. He frowned slightly and tried again.

  Still nothing.

  Then he looked at me, really looked, and his eyes narrowed at my armor. “Kid... are you offline?”

  I felt my face heat. “Uh. Yeah. The network chip is... technically in my left armpit right now. I kinda melted it into the shock absorber when I was rebuilding—”

  Erika burst out laughing. Actual, genuine laughter that echoed across the broken mall.

  The IC mage stared at her.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she managed between giggles. “It’s just… he was always like this. Back in prep, he’d take apart his entire kit just to make one servo work better. I once found him in the workshop at 3 AM rewiring his HUD because he ‘didn’t like the boot-up sound.’”

  I wanted to sink through the floor.

  The mage sighed, pulled out a physical credit chip, the kind shady dealers and Scavantis divers used when they didn’t want transactions tracked, and tossed it to me. The chip was worn smooth at the edges, probably changed hands a hundred times in back-alley deals.

  “Offline transfer,” he muttered. “Haven’t had to do one of those in months.”

  I caught it, fumbling slightly, and checked the balance.

  [Received: ￠80]

  “Wh-what…?”

  “Standard compensation,” he said, already turning back to his staff. “You killed one. That’s the rate... after fees.”

  It wasn’t the amount that shocked me… it was what it meant. A day's worth of mine stipend. For one kill. So either my school was screwing me, or divers were loaded.

  Probably both.

  Then his staff flared with a low hum, and the spiraling mana abruptly collapsed inward, forming a visible ring of condensed light. It pulsed once… then exploded outward in a ripple of raw reality-warping power.

  I threw an arm up instinctively, but not that kind of explosion. It didn’t burn, but it reversed. The reality tear slowly closed, as if it had never happened.

  I stood there, stunned stupid.

  “No second wave for ‘em, kid,” the man said, sounding extremely smug as he glanced at me. “Eri, say goodbye. We need to check the rest of the building.” He turned and walked away.

  The moment the mage’s attention shifted away, I pulled up the system interface. It flickered into view, translucent and glitching at the edges like a broken holo-display.

  [Emergency Minor System - Status: LIMITED]

  [Core Functions: MANFULCTION]

  [Trait Access: AVAILABLE]

  [Leveling system: ERROR]

  [Skill System: ERROR]

  …

  I stared at the list of red ERROR tags.

  A minor system. I’d never even heard of those. Earth 2.0 only had one system, and Corpos hunted any mention of a system on the net. But this? This looked like something cobbled together from spare parts, as if it were someone’s garage project that somehow worked.

  Made sense it’d find me, I guess.

  I focused on the one thing that wasn’t grayed out: [Personal Trait: Hoqalo].

  The description scrolled up, the same florid text as before. “...brilliance in creation... weapons and tools infused with your very essence... bound to your soul alone...”

  Trait.

  The word stuck in my head.

  Great-grandpa had talked about a trait in his journal. Called himself a “tinkerer,” said it was why his weapons worked better than they should. Weird that the only info I’ve ever got was from the journal; the corps must’ve been trying really hard to suppress information.

  But why?

  I tried to dig deeper into the interface, searching for details, explanations, something that would tell me what I was supposed to do with this broken system—

  [Access Denied: Core Functions Offline]

  Note: Try tomorrow

  The window blinked out.

  I tried pulling it back up. It flickered weakly, barely visible, then stabilized just enough to show the same useless status screen.

  I had a system… I just couldn’t use it.

  Story of my life.

  “Dash?” Erika’s voice pulled me back from the system interface.

  I blinked, refocusing on her.

  She was observing me with the look she used to give me in prep when she knew I was about to do something stupid. “I know you came here because I’m here. I saw you in the comments on my Pulse post. You told me you’ll catch my level.”

  I hesitated. Then gave a slow shake of my head, feeling the blush coming. “…It’s half true.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly, curious. “At first, yeah,” I continued. “After I left Creston, I heard you were training in the area. I wanted to prove something to everyone back there. To myself.” I looked around the mall. “Dunno.”

  I paused, taking time to think, but I noticed the mall's structural integrity was holding with minimal damage, corporate engineering at its finest.

  No, focus on the topic!

  “But I kept coming because I liked it here. I hate the corpos that run it—” my eyes flicked to the glossy Palistra plaque, naturally undamaged, “—but there’s something about this place. Eddy’s shop is here. The train ride’s short. It feels…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish.

  “Like home?” Erika offered quietly.

  I nodded.

  For a moment, neither of us spoke. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, just… heavy with things we weren’t saying. I couldn’t keep looking at her, and my hands needed something to do. The rifle lay nearby, barrel still smoking faintly from the overcharge. I crouched and picked it up, cradling it like an injured animal.

  The grip was melted in spots. The side panel fused shut, but the coil was intact, the feed chamber operational; it would survive.

  Probably.

  “This mall has a good ice-cream stand,” she said.

  I laughed despite myself. “Fair point.”

  She crouched down beside me, close enough that I could see the scorch marks on her armor, the fresh scratches on her bracers. Real combat damage. “My mentor’s right, you know,” she whispered. “It's not just about the danger.” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “I’m three years older than you, and you don’t have a system.”

  There it was.

  I kept my eyes on the rifle. “I know.”

  “I don’t mean it like you’re less than me,” she continued quickly. “But Dash… my life is fighting things that can kill me. Every day. I can’t—” She stopped, frustrated. “I can’t worry about you like that. Do you understand?”

  I did. Of course I did.

  I set the rifle down and walked over to where my pistols had landed. Bent down. Picked them up one at a time. Scratched, scorched, rattling loose in their housings.

  Still functional, just like me.

  “The mines changed me,” I said, not looking at her. “Six months of crawling through dark holes, fighting bugs for scraps. It beat the arrogance out pretty fast.” I checked the pistol’s charge coil; miraculously, still working. “I thought I could brute-force my way through fate. Turns out fate hits harder.”

  I turned back to her. “But I hope I changed for the better.” Erika’s expression softened. “We were good friends, right?” I asked. “Before all this?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We were.”

  “Can’t we still be?”

  Her smile returned, warmer this time. “Of course we can, you idiot.” She stood, brushing dust off her armor. “Besides, now I get to flex on you.” She winked. “I can teleport.”

  I laughed. “Show-off. And I’m happy for you,” I added, meaning it. The last six months had dragged me through rock and despair, but this moment? Standing here, talking to her again? It felt like breathing after being underwater.

  “I haven’t given up, you know,” I said. “On the system thing. You’ll see,” I continued. “Maybe we can meet up again. Like old times?”

  She glanced back toward where her mentor had gone, then back to me. “Message me, no more lurking in the comments, oki? Most importantly, don’t die before I see you again.” Her tone was light, but her eyes were serious. “I mean it, Dash. Be careful and get a proper license.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good.” She started backing away, that crimson braid swinging. “I’ll check on you soon. Promise.” Then she turned and jogged after her mentor, her form growing smaller against the sterile mall backdrop until she disappeared around a corner.

  I stood in the Ashford Terminal, ￠80 richer, a broken system flickering in my vision, and the ghost of a friendship I thought I’d lost.

  Not bad for a Monday.

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