The fluorescent lights in Chang's Corner Market hummed with the kind of aggressive persistence that suggested they'd outlive civilization itself. Derek Morrison stood in the energy drink aisle at 2:17 AM, comparing two nearly identical cans of chemical stimulation like they were fine wines.
Red Bull or Monster? The eternal question.
His stream had gone long tonight—a twelve-hour marathon grinding through the new Path of Exile league—and his brain felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to it. The chat had been particularly unhinged, which meant good viewer retention but also meant he'd need enough caffeine to kill a small horse just to edit the VOD tomorrow.
Well. Later today. Time was a social construct he'd stopped acknowledging around hour seven.
He grabbed both cans. Fuck it. His checking account could handle the extra two dollars, and if it couldn't, that was a problem for Future Derek. Present Derek had priorities, and those priorities involved enough taurine to restart his heart.
The store was empty except for him and Mr. Chang behind the counter, who was doing that thing where he pretended to organize lottery tickets while actually watching a Korean drama on his phone. Derek had a lot of respect for that level of commitment to not giving a shit about your job. Solidarity, brother.
Outside, the street was quiet. The kind of quiet that cities got in the dead hours between bar close and morning commute, when even the rats took a break. Streetlights cast orange pools on cracked pavement. A warm breeze carried the smell of garbage and that indefinable urban funk that Derek had long since stopped noticing.
He shuffled toward the counter, his beaten sneakers squeaking on linoleum that probably hadn't been mopped since the Clinton administration. The cargo shorts he'd thrown on were the same ones he'd been wearing for three days. Maybe four. Laundry was also a problem for Future Derek, who was really racking up the to-do list.
Mr. Chang glanced up, registered Derek's existence with the enthusiasm of a man who'd seen this exact scenario play out a thousand times, and went back to his phone.
"Just these," Derek said, setting the cans down.
"Four-fifty."
Derek fished a crumpled five from his pocket, along with some lint and what might have been a Cheeto. He left the Cheeto. Probably.
The first gunshot sounded like a firecracker.
Derek's brain, running on fumes and muscle memory from ten thousand hours of FPS games, immediately categorized it as Wrong. The second shot confirmed it. The third made Mr. Chang drop his phone.
"Get down!" The old man was already moving, surprisingly fast for someone who'd been vertical for probably sixteen hours straight.
Derek's body made the decision before his brain caught up. He dropped, cans forgotten, and scrambled toward the end of the aisle. His heart was doing something complicated and unpleasant in his chest. This wasn't supposed to happen. This was the boring part of the night, the mundane fetch quest between gaming sessions. NPCs didn't suddenly start shooting at each other during fetch quests.
Except they did, apparently, because reality didn't run on video game logic.
More shots. Shouting. The distinctive crack-crack-crack of multiple firearms having a very aggressive conversation. Derek's hands were shaking. His mouth tasted like copper and energy drink residue.
The smart play was to stay down. Wait it out. Let the people with guns sort out their differences while he practiced his floor-hugging technique. He was very good at floor-hugging. He'd been training for this his entire adult life, just horizontally and with more Doritos.
He risked a glance toward the front windows.
The street had transformed into a scene from a movie he definitely didn't want to be in. Two cars, one sedan and one SUV, both with doors open like metal shields. Muzzle flashes. At least five people, maybe more, all of them armed, all of them apparently very committed to perforating each other.
And in the middle of the street, frozen like a save point he couldn't interact with, was a little girl.
She couldn't have been more than six. Pink jacket. Sneakers with lights in them. The kind of kid who should have been asleep hours ago, dreaming about whatever kids dreamed about. Unicorns, probably. Or Minecraft. Did kids still play Minecraft?
She was screaming. Not the horror movie scream, but the lost scream. The where's-my-parent scream. The sound of a child whose world had just stopped making sense.
Derek's brain did something stupid.
It showed him a calculation, clear as a damage meter. The girl was maybe thirty feet from either car. The shooters were focused on each other, classic PvP tunnel vision. Their positioning meant most of the crossfire was going wide, hitting storefronts and parked cars. She was in a bad spot, sure, but not the worst spot. The odds of a stray bullet actually hitting her were—
Low. Probably low.
She'd be fine. She had to be fine. Someone would grab her. One of the shooters would see her and stop. Something. The universe couldn't be that fucked up.
"Stay down," he whispered to himself. "Just stay down."
Then a bullet hit the pavement three feet from the girl.
The ricochet screamed like a living thing, a metallic shriek that cut through the gunfire. Sparks erupted from the asphalt. The girl's scream cut off mid-breath as she dropped, curling into herself, hands over her head, small and terrified and right there in the kill zone.
Derek's stomach dropped into his shoes.
She wasn't fine. She wasn't going to be fine. Nobody was coming for her. The shooters couldn't even see her past their own tunnel vision, and the next bullet might not miss by three feet.
"Fuck," Derek said.
His body was already moving. His brain was still screaming at him about probability and self-preservation and how this was the dumbest possible decision, but his body wasn't listening. His body was apparently running a different build than his brain, one specced into Heroic Stupidity with no points in Self-Preservation.
He pushed himself up. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, someone who made better life choices. The door was ten feet away. The girl was thirty feet beyond that. The shooters were—
Not looking at him.
Yet.
Derek's sneakers hit pavement, Mr. Chang's shout behind him ignored. The night air was warmer than the store's AC, thick with humidity and gunpowder. His ears were ringing from the shots, each one feeling like someone was testing his skull's structural integrity with a hammer.
The girl saw him. Her eyes went wide. She was crying, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her face, and Derek thought absurdly that someone should really teach kids not to trust strangers, especially strangers who looked like they'd been raised in a basement by energy drinks and poor decisions.
"Hey," he called, or tried to. His voice came out wrong, too high, too tight. "Hey, it's okay."
It wasn't okay. Nothing about this was okay. But that's what you said to scared kids, right? He didn't have kids. He barely left his apartment. His entire experience with children came from that one time he'd babysat his cousin and let her watch YouTube for six hours straight.
Twenty feet.
The shooting had paused. Reloading, maybe. Or repositioning. Derek didn't know shit about actual gunfights. His tactical knowledge came from games where you respawned after thirty seconds and the biggest consequence of death was a slightly annoyed teammate.
Fifteen feet.
The girl was reaching for him now, her small hands grasping at air. She'd made the calculation too, the one that said this weird pale guy in a Metallica shirt was better than the alternative.
Ten feet.
Derek heard the shot before he felt it.
That was wrong, wasn't it? Movies always showed it the other way around. But his brain registered the sound first—a sharp crack that cut through the ringing in his ears—and then his back exploded into white-hot agony.
He stumbled. Didn't fall. His body was still running on adrenaline and whatever the fuck was keeping him upright, some combination of momentum and spite. He reached the girl, scooped her up in a motion that was more collision than rescue, and kept moving.
Five feet to the sidewalk. There was a car there, parked, civilian. Cover.
Another shot. This one hit his chest, left side, and Derek's brain helpfully informed him that this was bad, this was very bad, this was the kind of bad that didn't have a respawn timer.
He made it to the car. Dropped to his knees behind it, the girl clutched against him. She was still screaming, but quieter now, muffled against his shirt. He could feel her heart hammering, or maybe that was his heart, or maybe both their hearts were trying to escape their respective chests and find somewhere safer to be.
"Mom!" The girl was shrieking it now, and Derek's fading vision caught movement—a woman, running from a doorway, her face a mask of terror and relief.
He pushed the girl toward her. Tried to. His arms weren't cooperating anymore. The woman grabbed her daughter, pulled her close, and Derek saw her mouth moving, saying something, maybe thank you, maybe oh god, maybe both.
Derek slumped against the car. The metal was cool against his cheek. That was nice. Everything else was very not nice.
His chest felt wet. His back felt like someone had replaced his spine with broken glass and regret. His breathing sounded wrong, raspy and bubbling, like a coffee maker that needed descaling.
The woman was gone. The girl was gone. That was good. That was the objective. Extract the civilian, complete the mission. His stream chat would have been proud, if they could see this. Probably would have spammed F in the chat.
F.
Derek tried to laugh. It came out as a cough, and the cough brought up something dark and copper-tasting.
His vision was doing that thing where it tunneled, edges going dark, like someone was slowly closing the aperture on a camera. He could still hear the shooting, but it sounded distant now, underwater. His hands were cold. That seemed wrong. It was summer. Wasn't it summer?
"Well," he thought, or maybe said, he couldn't tell anymore. "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done."
His last coherent thought was that he'd left his stream running. The VOD was going to be a nightmare to edit. Future Derek was going to be so pissed.
Then Future Derek stopped being a concern, because Derek Morrison—Crash_Override88, professional underachiever, energy drink enthusiast, and apparently, for about forty-five seconds, a hero—stopped being anything at all.
The pavement was warm beneath him. The streetlight above flickered once, twice. His hazel eyes stared at nothing in particular, seeing everything and nothing, and somewhere in the distance, sirens began their too-late wail.
His phone, still in his pocket, buzzed with a Twitch notification.
Viewer_420 has subscribed for 6 months!
Derek didn't notice.