NOV 18, 2025
The Panel's shop required a minimum of four thousand virtual currency dollars to access the weapons catalogue's first tier. He reached it on a Tuesday morning, between Castillo's molecular systems lecture — which had been dense and precise and left him with twelve pages of notes and two questions he was going to need to look up — and a tutoring appointment with a freshman who was struggling with equilibrium chemistry and clearly hadn't been sleeping.
He was in a bathroom stall in Havemeyer Hall when the notification arrived. He sat on the closed lid with his notebook balanced on his knee and pulled up the shop interface, which materialized in that familiar translucent overlay at the edge of his vision, and worked through the weapons catalogue with the same methodical attention he gave everything.
The selection was, as promised, the full GTA V arsenal. Pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, heavy weapons, throwables, melee. Modifications available as separate purchases: suppressors, extended magazines, scopes, barrel modifications, grips. Delivery to a registered drop location within forty-eight hours, the Panel noted, in whatever real-world form was closest to the in-game item.
He studied the list for twelve minutes. Someone came in and washed their hands and left. He didn't look up.
What he needed, at this stage, was not firepower. What he needed was deterrence and precision and the option to de-escalate. A hand cannon was good for none of these things. He worked backward from the jobs he was planning and the situations those jobs were likely to produce: close quarters, speed requirements, the need to be able to conceal effectively. He settled on a suppressed pistol — a reliable semi-automatic with a proper threaded barrel and a custom suppressor, listed in the catalogue with a modification package that reduced the sound signature to something that would read as ambient noise in an enclosed space with any other sound covering it.
Total cost: three thousand eight hundred virtual currency dollars.
He purchased it, registered a drop location — a storage unit in the Bronx he'd rented under a false name for cash, the padlock keyed to a combination only he knew — and closed the shop interface.
Forty-eight hours later he stood in the Bronx storage unit at six in the morning with the door pulled halfway down behind him, the single bare bulb throwing orange light over everything, and a clean cardboard box sitting on the otherwise empty concrete shelf.
He opened it with a box cutter. Inside, packed in closed-cell foam cut to precise dimensions, was the pistol and the suppressor. He lifted the pistol with two fingers first — careful, knowing the safety was on, knowing nothing was chambered, knowing all the correct things and doing them anyway because correct habits were built in calm moments so they were automatic in urgent ones. It was heavier than he'd expected in the abstract, which was a failure of imagination on his part. He'd handled prop guns in his previous life, at a friend's bachelor party at a shooting range, and those had been heavier than the movie version and lighter than the real thing, and the real thing in his hand now was heavier than that.
He set it down carefully. He screwed on the suppressor with slow, deliberate turns, feeling the threads seat correctly. He dry-fired it once at the concrete wall, which produced a small mechanical click that was satisfying in a way he was not entirely comfortable with.
He held it with both hands, the way he'd studied — low-ready position, trigger finger indexed along the frame, stance wide enough to be stable. He was not a good shot yet. His Shooting stat, per the Panel, was at fourteen out of a hundred, which was approximately the level of someone who had fired a weapon a few times and understood the basic mechanics. Getting to the point where the stat meant something real would require the thing all the stats required, which was practice — a great deal of it, in conditions that were not a storage unit in the Bronx at six in the morning.
He disassembled it in the way he'd studied online — field strip, no further — checking that all the components were what they were supposed to be. They were. He reassembled it, loaded one of the two magazines he'd purchased, and set it aside. He didn't rack the slide. He was not going to carry it chambered until he was significantly more practiced, because that was how people shot themselves accidentally, and he had too many things going on to bleed out in a storage unit over carelessness.
He wrapped it in a cloth and put it back in the foam packaging and carried it out to the car he'd rented under a legitimately-acquired secondary ID — a step-up from the first set of documents, more expensive, cleaner — and put it in the footwell of the passenger seat, tucked under his jacket, which was not a sophisticated concealment method but was adequate for a ten-minute drive to a secondary location. He drove at exactly the speed limit.
He was not excited, particularly. He had examined himself for excitement during the drive and found instead a kind of steady alertness, the same thing he felt before an exam he was prepared for — present, clear-headed, not calm exactly but settled. He thought that was the correct relationship to have with a weapon. He thought excitement would have been worrying.
The Panel had not commented on the purchase beyond logging the transaction. It didn't offer congratulations, didn't flag a milestone. It simply updated his available currency balance and moved on. He appreciated that in the particular way he appreciated all of the system's most consistent quality, which was that it did not waste his time.
[Transaction Log
ITEM: SUPPRESSED SEMI-AUTO PISTOL + MODIFICATION PKG
COST: -$3,800 VC
BALANCE: $317 VC
DELIVERY: CONFIRMED — DROP POINT ALPHA
NOTE: SHOOTING STAT TRAINING RECOMMENDED BEFORE OPERATIONAL USE.]
He found a decommissioned industrial space in an area of the Bronx that he had identified during his city mapping as having minimal foot traffic and no working cameras within three blocks, and he spent two hours every Tuesday and Thursday morning — before his 8AM class, alarm set for four-thirty — running through dry-fire drills with the unloaded pistol and, once a week, live fire with the suppressor on, using subsonic rounds he'd sourced through the Panel's dark web connection. The sound was enough to startle a person in an adjacent room. In an open industrial space with traffic noise from the elevated highway two blocks west, it was manageable.
His Shooting stat moved from fourteen to twenty-three over the following month. His groupings on improvised paper targets tightened from embarrassing to merely mediocre. He was not a gunfighter. He did not need to be a gunfighter. He needed to be someone who, if cornered, could make the right decision at the right moment and not miss by so much that it didn't matter.
He was getting there.