The weapon came out of the holster.
It wasn't a pistol.
It was a compact device of white-and-blue polymer, with a concave lens where a barrel should be.
Blue LEDs pulsed along its body, synced to the soft rhythm of the System Shop.
A scanner. A container.
The agent didn't aim it at Leo. He kept it low, beside his thigh.
His finger rested on a tactile button.
His other gesture was almost polite. Civil. Non-negotiable.
"Just a few questions. For the sake of district compliance."
Leo measured the distance.
Three meters. Too far for the pipe. Too close to run.
The pain in his ribs kept time, reminding him exactly how slow he was.
"Your interface," the agent began, voice low, conversational.
"It's attenuated. Almost a ghost on my peripheral scan. That's unusual after initial sync. Are you experiencing latency?"
The question was technical. Clean.
This man wasn't a bounty hunter chasing Points.
He was a System problem-solver.
Leo forced his voice out, rough but level.
"Delays. Since the start."
True, in a crooked way.
The agent tilted his head.
"HUD render lag? Or data refresh latency?"
"Data," Leo said. His analyst brain slipped into old habits.
"Location. Mission alerts. They come in bursts. Not a steady stream."
"Interesting," the agent murmured.
His gray eyes studied the empty space above Leo's shoulder.
"Application-level packet latency. And squad mapping? If you were grouped, would your position update correctly for others?"
A trap.
A question meant to catch someone infiltrating a Loyalist cell.
Leo swallowed.
"I didn't try to join a group."
"Wise. Unstructured groups are inefficient."
The agent stepped closer. Two and a half meters.
"Most sync issues can be resolved with a low-level reboot of the neural interface module. Uncomfortable, but fast. Or—"
He lifted the scanner slightly.
"We can run a remote diagnostic. Non-invasive. Identify the root glitch."
The word hung there. Charged.
He said it like a clinical term.
His eyes said something else.
Leo kept his breathing steady. Shaking hands would be a confession.
"The diagnostic," he asked, keeping his tone technical. "Does it require… access to my profile?"
"Just a handshake verification with the I.A.R.A. central servers," the agent said with a nod.
His HUD now discreetly labeled him: RODERICK.
"Confirms identity, checks local data integrity, applies corrections. Standard."
His thumb brushed the device's button.
A near-silent hum came alive.
"Ready to begin?"
Begin meant scan.
Scan meant identification.
Identification meant Anomaly-Zero, account-null, database error.
It meant the device switching from diagnostic mode to paralysis.
Leo's location ping timer ticked down in the corner of his vision.
00:03:12.
Three minutes. He needed three minutes.
"The handshake," Leo said, injecting concern. "Is it sensitive to network interference? The district server cluster—before the transition, router B-7 in the East Sector was reporting buffer faults."
He was speaking the language of his dead life.
Network support jargon.
The voice of a confused employee, not a reality error.
Roderick's eyes narrowed by a fraction. Evaluation.
"The physical infrastructure was… assimilated. But residual network anomalies can persist."
He sounded almost interested.
"You're IT?"
"Tier-two support. E-Net Corporation," Leo offered.
A sliver of truth to anchor the lie.
Roderick hummed.
"That explains the symptoms. You may be experiencing cache conflict. Legacy corporate data interfering with System sync."
He lowered the scanner a few centimeters.
Not relaxation. Reassessment.
"A manual module reset might be safer. Less risk of profile corruption."
He extended his left hand, empty, palm up.
A gesture meant to look open.
"I'll need physical contact with your neural access point. Usually behind the left ear. Do you consent?"
Consent meant touch.
Touch meant proximity. Pulse. Tension.
All the tells a scanner might miss.
And the reset itself could expose him.
00:01:58.
"I consent," Leo said quietly, tilting his head, exposing the left side of his neck.
Submission. Prey behavior.
Roderick closed the distance.
His smell reached Leo—industrial soap, faint metal from the uniform.
A black-gloved hand rose.
Fingers neared the spot behind Leo's ear.
In the corner of Leo's vision, the Shop's glitch-lines pulsed.
The central terminal flickered.
Someone in line completed a purchase.
A pack of bandages blinked into existence.
In that microsecond of rendering, the dirty white glitch-line spat from the base of the Shop, sharper than ever.
And the timer hit zero.
TRANSMITTING: PASSIVE LOCATION PING. RADIUS: 1 KM.
No sound.
Just a massive, silent data update rippling through the district's digital fabric.
Roderick reacted instantly.
His eyes flicked away from Leo's ear.
A small alert window had to have bloomed in his pristine HUD.
His hand froze centimeters from Leo's skin.
The professional neutrality on his face collapsed.
First came stillness. Raw processing.
His gray eyes jumped from Leo's ear to empty space between them—to his squad map, his private overlay Leo couldn't see.
He saw it.
The red point. Critical. Maximum-priority target.
Then the overlay snapped into place.
The point on the map and the thin, broken, filthy man in front of him occupied the same coordinates.
Roderick's hand snapped back as if burned.
The scanner rose, no longer diagnostic.
The LEDs flared red.
A hard mechanical click rang out as it armed.
But it wasn't the weapon that scared Leo.
It was the smile.
The professionalism. The technical curiosity. The compliance-agent mask.
All of it melted away.
What replaced it wasn't rage or hunter frenzy.
It was delight. Wide. Controlled. Deeply wrong.
The smile of an archivist who found the lost manuscript.
Of a surgeon spotting a rare tumor.
His eyes shone with pure, undeniable triumph.
"Oh," Roderick said softly, savoring it. "It's you."
The device now pointed directly at Leo's chest.
The hum sharpened into the high whine of a charging capacitor.
"Don't move, Anomaly-Zero," Roderick instructed, smiling still.
"The Contingency Entity Capture protocol is very specific. I truly appreciate you coming directly to a System Shop. It simplifies custody logging immensely."
He wasn't joking. He was talking to himself, narrating the paperwork of victory.
"TARGET-ZERO LOCATED," he said, voice projecting now as a channel opened.
"COORDINATES SYNCED WITH SHOP 7-GAMMA. REQUESTING MISSION ASSET LOCK AND ALPHA CONTAINMENT TRANSPORT."
Heads turned in the Shop line.
Confusion. Then recognition. Then raw greed.
The red point was on all their maps now.
And it was here.
Roderick ignored them. His world had narrowed to Leo and procedure.
"You'll be transported to the District Verification Center. Your anomaly will be studied. The data will be invaluable."
His finger pressed the tactile button.
The device's whine peaked.
"This will hurt. Only briefly. Think of it as… forced data correction."
The lens bloomed with blinding white light.
Leo had nowhere to run. Nothing to block.
The crowd had become a living wall.
All he had was the pipe in his left hand, the ground under his feet, and the knowledge of the Shop's glitch—now pulsing weakly, dying, after the last transaction.
Roderick fired.
It wasn't a beam. It was a wave.
A dome of blue static force bursting from the lens, meant to wrap and paralyze.
Leo didn't dodge.
He lunged forward, into the attack, and with everything he had left, he drove the tip of the metal pipe not into Roderick, but into the concrete—into a thin crack perfectly aligned with the Shop's pulsing glitch-line.
The paralysis wave hit him.
And the world collapsed into blue static and pain.