Evan didn't stop until the river haze thinned into the stale morning breath of Lowwater. Smoke from cookfires mixed with the vinegar sting of street-side dye vats. The roofs gave way to a ragged run of tenements whose windows blinked like tired eyes.
He dropped to the street in a roll and came up smooth.
Overflow (3%) → (4%).+1 Speed.Speed: 118 → 119.Daily Overflow Streak: 2/7.
The panel's gentle chime rode the thump of his pulse. He flexed his hands inside the new wraps, feeling the way the cloth bit and held. Every stride fed the burn. Every breath filed the edges off pain and left a clean heat in its place.
He should have kept moving—away from the docks, away from the Bronze with the coat and the bored eyes—but the city ahead offered him something he suddenly wanted more than distance.
A cluster of Hook Street Dogs lounged at a corner where the road pinched tight between buildings. It was the kind of corner where weak people got taught lessons they were meant to remember. Evan recognized three faces even before their laughter snagged his attention: crooked-nose with the scarred lip; chain-wrapper with stale blood crusting his cheek; and Toby—Knife-Eyes—stiff neck, greedy gaze.
The same boys who'd watched Pike cut him open and tossed him to the stone.
They saw him almost as one. Their expressions went from lazy to confused to angry as a hand flipping pages.
"Sharp?" Scar-Lip said, like he was testing something sour. "You got a death wish coming back here."
Chain-Wrapper grinned slow. "Dogs don't forget what's theirs."
Toby's shoulders bunched, knife already halfway out of habit. "You should be in a gutter."
Evan walked toward them. Not rushed. Not thrown by adrenaline. Each step was a decision. His shadow stretched long and clear on the cobbles.
The system's glow hung just at the edge of his vision, waiting humbly for him to want it. He did.
Micro-Objective: Assert dominance over hostile peers.Condition: Win without taking damage.Reward: +1 Level.
He stopped at conversational distance. "Yesterday I was prey," he said. "Today is yesterday with the part you like removed."
Toby laughed too loudly. "Big mouth for a rat." He flicked the knife. Sunlight crawled along its edge. "Let's see how fast you squeal."
He lunged.
To the boys he probably looked fast. To Evan he looked like a child throwing a tantrum through molasses. White arcs traced the knife's intended path through the air; another faint line gave the angle of Toby's next step if the first failed.
Evan took a single Quickstep to the right.
Steel carved empty space. The glinting white arc passed where ribs would have been. Evan's counter was a breath after, short and simple: he turned his hips and put his wrapped knuckles into Toby's jaw.
The sound was meat and stone and a brittle little click. Toby pinwheeled and met the street with a loose-limbed sprawl, knife skittering a yard away.
[DING] Critical execution.+5 Speed.Speed: 119 → 124.
Scar-Lip swore and reached behind a barrel, coming up with a broken bottle in one fist and a length of rusted pipe in the other. He surged with the wide, confidence-drunk swing of someone who'd never been made cautious by loss.
Chain-Wrapper's chain sang as he spun it up, links blurring into a steel halo. "Hold him, Brant! I'll take his legs out!"
Evan let himself feel the moment the way the system wanted him to: each sound stretched thin, each motion spelled out in ghost-light. The chain's orbit drew a bright ring; Scar-Lip's pipe made a crude semicircle with a wobble at the apex where his shoulder would drop.
He stepped into them.
Scar-Lip's pipe kissed nothing. Evan's elbow drove under the swing, popped Scar-Lip's diaphragm like a bellows. The man wheezed and bent double. The chain whooped toward Evan's shins—
Skill hint:Momentum Shift (F) available (1/1).
He took it.
He caught the chain's motion not with his hands but with his step, heel-to-hip, the way a dancer receives a partner's weight. The chain's pull became his propulsion. He slid around the arc as if the steel had invited him through, Burst Step compressing what his legs wanted to spend into a single explosive glide.
Chain-Wrapper blinked and swung through a ghost. Evan was already inside his guard. He tapped the man's cheek with two knuckles and felt teeth click together. Chain-Wrapper's eyes rolled; he folded neatly to one knee, chain slackening into his lap.
[DING] Clean counter.+2 Speed.Speed: 124 → 126.Momentum Shift — cooldown (confrontation): complete.
The corner went quiet except for Scar-Lip gagging and Toby groaning into cobbles.
Someone across the street dropped a bundle of laundry. A market auntie froze with a sack of onions on her hip. A ragged kid with a mouth full of sugared rice stared so hard he forgot to chew.
Scar-Lip tried to straighten. Rage hauled him upright where air could not. He spat pink. "You got tricks," he forced out, voice ragged. "But you bleed. Everybody bleeds."
He lunged again, wild.
Micro-Objective: End the fight without taking a step backward.Reward: +3 Speed.
Evan didn't give ground. He let Scar-Lip come. The pipe's sloppy arc sketched itself a beat ahead; Evan rode the space between its bright line and Scar-Lip's momentum. He slapped the pipe aside with wrapped knuckles, felt the ache of impact pass through him and out his legs like water down a gutter, then he put two clean punches on Scar-Lip's face that sat him down hard against the barrel that had held his courage.
[DING] Objective complete.+3 Speed.Speed: 126 → 129.
Toby groaned and tried to crawl toward his knife. Evan put a foot on the blade before fingers reached it. Those fingers froze. They trembled.
"Don't," Evan said. He didn't raise his voice, but it carried.
Toby looked up. He'd been mean his whole life in the way it is easy to be mean when nothing has ever moved too fast for you to follow. His eyes now were the eyes of a boy staring down a cliff he hadn't known he stood on.
"IMPOSSIBLE," he whispered. It sounded more like a prayer than a protest.
The system offered him an indulgence.
Optional Quest: No Witnesses.Objective: End the pursuit within 3 seconds once it begins.Reward: +10 Speed, Skill: Echo Step (F).Note: Pursuit begins when a hostile attempts to flee or signal allies.
Scar-Lip's breath hitched. His eyes flicked to the mouth of the street. His chest expanded in a way that promised a shout.
He inhaled to scream.
Evan moved.
He didn't sprint. He took three steps.
First, a half-step that primed his balance. Second, a full Quickstep that pulled the street under him like sheet cloth. Third, a Burst Step that turned all the motion he hadn't spent into a tear through space. An aftertaste of himself—heat and motion—hung in the air where he'd been standing.
He was at Scar-Lip's side before the man's lungs could decide how to use the air they'd pulled. Evan's hand touched his throat with the precise weight of a warning.
"Don't," he said.
Scar-Lip's body believed him. The scream died unborn.
[DING] Pursuit ended in 2.7 seconds.Quest complete.+10 Speed.Skill acquired: Echo Step (F).Description: Leave a 1-second afterimage when accelerating. Confuses hostile targeting.Speed: 129 → 139.
A ghost of Evan still stood at the spot he had left, flickering through the position of his shoulders, the turn of his head. Scar-Lip's eyes darted between ghost and Evan's real hand on his throat and then went very, very wide.
He nodded without meaning to, a ridiculous little bob of his chin against Evan's fingers.
Evan lifted his hand and stepped back. The ghost he'd left behind bled away into sunlight.
He dragged Toby by the collar and dropped him beside Scar-Lip. Chain-Wrapper crawled to them on elbows and knees, chain clanking as if shy now.
Across the street, the auntie with onions made a show of not having seen anything. The kid with sugared rice finally remembered to swallow and immediately choked. Somewhere farther up, a window shutter creaked and stilled.
Evan looked down at the three boys who had, twenty-four hours ago, been the whole world's shape to him—boys who had said words that felt true because he had believed nothing else could be.
"Listen," he said. "There's not going to be a second lesson. Not for you, not for any of the Dogs you tell. You see me, you walk the other way. You try to hunt me, you get hurt. If Pike wants to finish what he started, tell him to bring everything he has in one basket. It won't be enough."
Scar-Lip swallowed. The motion hurt. "Pike'll—" he began, then tasted his words and changed them. "We'll walk the other way."
Evan nodded once. Not for them. For himself.
Micro-Objective chain complete: Assert dominance without damage.+1 Level.Level: 3 → 4.Free Stat Points: +5.
Status — Evan SharpLevel: 4Free Stat Points:5Speed:139Skills: Quickstep (F), Burst Step (F), Momentum Shift (F), Echo Step (F)Title: [Uncatchable I]Path: Velocity — Tier 0 (Overflow 4%)Perk:Overflow (1%) (compounding)
The numbers looked like something someone else should own. He felt very precisely like himself anyway.
"All into Speed," he said.
Points allocated.Speed:144
A murmur rippled through the little crowd that had pretended it wasn't a crowd. Not words. Just the way a room inhales when a promise is made.
Evan turned to leave.
His system pulsed a faint warning before his ears could give it to him.
[DING] Hazard Advisory: Registry scan attempted.Source: 30m east — administrative slate.Title [Uncatchable I]: Suppression active.
He shifted his gaze without moving his head. At the mouth of a side lane, a man in a short blue coat stood with a polished slate in his hand, thumb stroking its edge. He wasn't a Bronze like the fire-thrower—no aura of casual violence—but he had the official look of someone whose power lived in rules sharp as knives.
He peered at his slate and frowned, as if what it told him made less sense than the world he could see.
"Warden," Scar-Lip whispered, suddenly small. "City Registry."
The warden looked up and scanned the street like a man smelling smoke. His eyes didn't catch on Evan. They slid past him—caught on the ghost of motion still unspooling near where he'd first stood—and then moved on with a puzzled crease in his forehead.
[DING] Title effect confirmed: Visual tracking interference successful (below Level 10).Note: Registry will escalate if anomalies persist.
"Time to go," Evan said.
He took a step. Echo Step left a smear of him behind that the warden's eyes tried very hard to prefer. Evan slid into the nearest alley like water through reed grass.
Lowwater unfolded around him in its usual thrum, but the system turned it into a map of lines and arcs waiting to be chosen. He moved, and moving made him stronger. He breathed in rhythm, and breathing untied the nerves that tried to knot.
He didn't get three corners before the system offered him something new.
Quest — Make a Statement (Follow-up)Objective: Leave an unmistakable mark on Hook Street within 24 hours without being caught.Examples: Break a gang tax run; outrun a patrol in full view; claim a lane with speed alone.Reward:Title: [Swift Claimant], +1 Level, +15 Speed.Failure: Registry escalates; pursuit intensifies.
A reckless part of him grinned. The careful part remembered the Bronze's fire and the way the warden's slate had sniffed at the edges of his existence.
He found that the reckless and careful parts wanted the same thing.
They wanted the world to fit the shape of his stride.
"Then we start carving," Evan said softly.
He angled his path toward Hook Street proper, where the Dogs liked to run their morning tax—a slow-moving collection through the market, shop by shop, pockets turned out and agreements enforced with smiles that showed teeth.
He reached the top of a low warehouse and crouched, eyes on the thin river of people below. The Dogs came into view like a stain spreading: six boys ringed around Pike, who wore his arrogance like a cloak. He twirled his knife as he walked, flashing it into the sun not because he needed to but because he wanted to be looked at.
Evan let his breath lengthen. His legs hummed. The panel's ghost-light traced six arcs—a collection route that would circle the block and funnel coin into a brown sack on Pike's belt.
Micro-Objective (Chain):
Intercept the sack unseen.
Circulate once around the block before they notice.
Return the coin to merchants.Reward: +10 Speed, Hidden Title Progress.
He smiled without teeth. He'd wanted to stop running away. He hadn't gotten to try running through yet.
"Let's see if you can count," he whispered to the world.
He stepped.
The roof blurred into alley into storefront awning into street. Echo Step left a smear where his first decision had been; his second decision already lived ten yards away where his foot touched down with a softness that made the awning do no more than whisper.
He slid between two Dogs whose heads were tilted toward Pike's words. Quickstep stacked into Quickstep; the sack's mouth brushed his fingers. The drawstring kissed his knuckle. The weight of coin jumped from one world to another and the sack went light as a lie.
No one noticed. Then someone noticed.
"The—" a Dog began, voice high with confusion, hand patting the empty space at Pike's belt. "The take—"
Evan was already on the bakery stoop across the lane, placing three coppers in a palm that had learned too long to be empty.
The merchant blinked. "Bless you," she said, startled and automatic, then looked as if she needed to ask who she had just blessed and how.
He was gone before the question formed. Coin dropped like rain in a drought along his path: into a butcher's hand, into a grocer's bowl, onto a weaver's counter. A boy at a peanut cart gaped as coins clinked into the tin beside his feet as if thrown by a polite ghost.
Pike's snarl broke like a rope snapping.
"FIND HIM!"
Evan brushed the command like wind. The Dogs turned and turned again, each seeing only what Echo Step wanted them to: a smear of motion where he was not, a hint of a shadow that had already gone, a breath of someone's laugh where there was only air.
He completed the block in less than twenty heartbeats and found himself exactly where he'd started—above them, on the low roof, watching Pike storm and point and fail.
[DING] Micro-Objective chain complete.+10 Speed.Speed: 144 → 154.Hidden Title Progress: 40%.
The coin sack lay where he'd left it resting in the crook of a sleeping dog's back, fat with something that wasn't coin—bakery chits and butcher's promises and the heat of a market deciding to like him.
He let himself laugh, brief and breathless.
Somewhere behind and above, a thin pillar of smoke drew his eye—far off, smudging the sky. Bronze fire. He hadn't been forgotten.
And at street level, two men in blue coats conferred over a slate that refused to write the name the city wanted from it.
[DING] Quest — Make a Statement progress: 1/1 acts performed in view.Hold without capture: 23:41 remaining.Reward pending.Advisory: Registry escalation likelihood ↑.
Evan stepped backward off the roof. Echo Step left a laughing smear up there for anyone who looked. He landed in shadow, breath steady, legs hungry.
Speed had gotten him out of the alley.
Now it was going to redraw the map.