The System had teeth. It sharpened them and showed them to me like a tutor demonstrating anatomy. Anchors, drones, penalty buffers—so many little devices meant to bind and measure. Cute, in a way. Useful, in another.
Pain prickled in the hollows of my skull whenever I pushed too hard, a reminder that this ten-year-old shell had limits. That was the System's arrogance: it thought the body mattered more than the mind. It thought it could press a child into submission.
I smiled.
If the world sent tools to hold me, then those tools were materials. Materials could be broken down and rebuilt. Even gods left spare parts.
[
The Symbols along my wall hummed with containment. Observer drones wove like ghost-threads at the edges of perception. The Administrator watched with patient hunger. All of it fed the System: logs, neural feedback.
I reached into that feed.
Not with a knife. Not with noise. With the simple, absolute thing I had been given.
Disintegrate.
Not wood this time. Not a twig. Not a cup. I focused on the smallest observer drone that hummed like a cough in my sight—the point of awareness, the question—and pulled at its existence.
Light folded. Code from another order of being shattered like glass. The drone blinked out of the weave as if someone snipped a thread. The pain was immediate; the penalty buffer flared, a high, bitter sting jagging across my temple. The System responded with the cold efficiency of a machine insulted.
[
I tasted iron. I tasted the sharp tang of being punished. The ten-year-old body convulsed, breath hitching, but I kept my focus. Pain was a variable; suffering was a cost. I could pay.
And then I reached again.
Integrate.
The dead drone's essence did not vanish into nothing. It folded into my will, into my perception, and I remade it as something else: a sliver of rune-etched script no larger than my thumbnail, hovering at the edge of my sight like a seed. It hummed with the drone's last log, a whisper of vision that I had plucked and preserved. I tucked it away inside my mind as if sliding a key into a pocket.
The System screamed in text across my vision, alarms flashing. An Administrator's voice—disturbed now, precise—cut into my skull.
"Unauthorized reclamation. Reconstitution of System assets is prohibited. Initiating forced reclamation protocols."
So it would scream. So it would throb. Let it. Its scream was data, and data could be harvested.
I worked methodically. Each drone I could isolate—each transient anchor node I could reach without collapsing into permanent pain—I snipped and reshaped. I did not attempt the Administrator. I did not try to eat the anchor symbols themselves; they were too large for the fragile body to pry from the world. I took only the pieces that could be hacked and resewn: observer logs, perception slivers, fragments of procedural script.
With each theft the System pressed its penalty harder, and with each theft my body paid. My vision swam, my small lungs hurt. But by the time the sun sank and the village chimed its tired bells, I held a collection of half-living things—dead drone echoes reformed into tools that would obey no System but me.
I integrated one into a coin—a coin dark as old iron—that whispered route-logs whenever I held it. I remade another into a thread, thin as a hair and sharp as a promise, that could tie a man's gaze for a heartbeat.
They were crude—imperfect, hacked-together artifacts—but they were mine. Each bore the System's original telemetry like a watermark, and each carried a cost: the penalty buffer, still hot in my sight, ticked upward with red misery. The System was not passive. It cataloged each loss, bled me with feedback, and sent queries up the chain: User is reappropriating assets. Authorize recapture?
The answer did not come. Someone had paused on that decision, and in that pause lay a slender mercy I would exploit.
Pawns required signals and gaps. People moved readily into patterns; they obeyed rumor, habit, ego. Anchors could suppress magic in an area. They could not suppress superstition, bickering, shame, or curiosity. Those were human vulnerabilities—cheap levers.
I started small. I walked to the market with the iron coin wrapped in my palm. I let it clink against the wooden stall where the boy I had already schooled—my first pawn—sold second-rate trinkets. The coin hummed faintly, and the boy's hand brushed it. A whisper of the route-logs entered his peripheral mind as if a passing thought: Go to the forest at dusk. Take the left fork. Do not bring torches.
He paused. The suggestion lodged like a seed and sprouted hope. I nudged the seed with a look, feigned bewilderment, and let him run off to prepare. He carried my rumor and, unknowingly, my thread.
At the same stall, the old gossiping woman clucked over the coin's shine. I thumbed the pin into a scrap of paper and left it near her. When she opened it, the trailing sentence vanished from her mind the moment she glanced at the final line. She muttered, confused, and took the story up to the magistrate's wife—without the ending. The wife's imagination filled the gap with scandal. The seed had been planted.
Each pawn I used was given a tiny artifact—an object that whispered my intention without shouting. A coin for the route, a thread for attention, a pin for forgetfulness. The artifacts did not shout the truth; they suggested patterns. People followed patterns. The System could flag statistical anomalies and raise shields, but it could not, without escalation, micromanage every human furtive thought.
The red numbers of the penalty buffer glowed like a heartbeat in my vision. I could feel the System's hunger for reclamation, the itch to authorize capture and to rip the tattoos of my ownership from the world. It wanted to brand me back into its ledger.
Let it hunger. Let it itch. Hunger, like all desires, could be directed.
I arranged my pawns into a mosaic: a boy with courage, a gossip with influence, a blacksmith's apprentice prone to heavy hands. I fed each a half-truth, a nudge, a schedule. They would move when the night bent low. They would create a hole in the village's watchfulness, a corridor that smelled of human error. Through that corridor I would move unseen, or I would let them bleed for me if it amused me.
I would not destroy the System outright. Not yet. To eat a god whole with a child's teeth was madness; even madness requires timing. No—the System would be a quarry, hunted for pieces and used. Its teeth would become my tools. Its logs would become my maps. Its penalties would teach me exactly how far a child could reach.
By dawn I had a map of people—little nodes with faces—and a handful of artifacts turned from stolen code. The penalty buffer still sang its warning, but the chain of command above had not authorized reclamation. They were watching, not acting.
I slept then, briefly, in the borrowed warmth of the ten-year-old bed. The body complained; the mind did not. In dreams I tasted the System's scripts like metal and imagined how, little by little, I would strip its armor and wear it as mine.
When I rose, the village breathed in small, ignorant rhythms. My pawns would move tonight. The System would notice. And when it noticed, I would be somewhere it had not thought to look.
That was the difference between me and the world: I knew how to make misdirection a weapon.
Let them decide whether to break me or watch. I smiled, and the smile was a blade. Either way, I win.