Punish the System - 8

Despite his interdimensional exhaustion, Connor got off the bus three stops early. He didn’t glance back. You never, ever glance back. That was how you gave the game away.

Instead, he strolled into Mr Habib’s corner shop, bought a bottle of Lucozade he didn’t want, paid in change to drag the moment out, and stood beneath the convex bubble of the ceiling mirror, sipping idly while his eyes did slow laps.

He spotted one pensioner with a tartan trolley moving at glacial pace. And one student in joggers chewing their sleeve and picking at split ends like their life depended on it. There was nobody watching the door. Nobody being too still. And nobody trying too hard to blend in.

Reassured, he stepped outside, cracked the bottle’s seal, and meandered along, drinking it. He cut left down a side street that looped back on itself, crossed over the main road twice, and bent down now and then to re-tie the laces on his new shoes, muttering curses that carried just far enough to be heard and ignored.

He picked up no footsteps following him in sync. No sudden reflections in shopfront glass. No phones held a beat too high. As far as he could tell, he’d picked up no tail from the hospital, which was definitely a win. And there’d been no more Dungeons appearing in his peripheral vision either. 

Win number two.

But still, the hair on the back of his neck itched as if he was being watched.

Getting shot, Connor decided, had done wonders for his paranoia. And that was without being tossed around by a nightmare creature. And he wasn’t talking about Moustache.

He suddenly veered even further off-script and slipped through a patch of wasteland behind the dental school. The path was technically a car park once, long before the tree roots cracked the tarmac like ice floes and the signage flaked down through three faded names: Dental School, Maxillofacial Annex, Staff Overflow. Now it just read "AL FLO."

One of the bollards out front still bore the blackened scarring of last winter’s bin fire, half-melted and listing sideways. Connor climbed the crumbling low wall, hand scraping concrete, and dropped down into the underpass beneath the bypass. The rain barely reached here, but the damp had found a way in anyway, trickling through hairline cracks and dripping from the pipes overhead like the place had sprung a leak in reality.

Connor figured he had a bit of recent context to work with on that simile.

To his certain knowledge, every security camera down there had been lovingly smashed, spray-painted, or otherwise blinded sometime last year. Nobody with any sense at all would try to follow him that way.

Thus, if someone did, he reckoned he’d be perfectly justified in doing something about it.

He paused for a moment, when he saw a couple of the local youth waiting at the far end of the underpass. There were two of them. Hooded, of course, and loitering by the far stairwell. For a moment, Connor wondered if they might have been paid to waylay him, but then he got a hold of himself. 

Paranoia was fine. Paranoia was good. His dad had always told him to trust the little voice in his head that said people were out to get him. However, the rational part of his brain reasoned that bad guys who could move at the speed of light probably wouldn’t be using a couple of teenagers with knives to see him off. 

So he kept walking forward.

The smaller of the Hoodies shifted as Connor approached, thumb tapping a message on his phone. Both were watching him with the slow, sour interest of people trying to decide if a little daytime mugging was worth the energy paperwork. Clearly, they decided it was.

They stepped half into his path, but Connor didn’t slow down.

The overhead light flickered. Maybe it was just the bulb, or maybe it was something else, but the taller one suddenly looked upward, squinted, and took half a step back. Connor kept walking towards them. Each and every one of his footfalls echoed louder and louder as he closed the distance. By the time he was ten paces away, neither kid looked remotely invested in confrontation. By five, they were both pretending to read something very interesting on the wall The taller one actually nodded a greeting.

Connor didn’t respond.

He passed through them like water under pressure, and they moved apart to let him. Whatever they’d initially thought he was, they’d revised it sharply downwards on their things-we-can-survive scale.

“Just saying,” Izzy said in his head, “That was some excellent ambient intimidation. I’ll have to check if you’ve unlocked a Passive.”

As he’d been doing since legging it from the hospital, Connor continued to ignore her.

Now sweating through the bandage taped beneath his shirt, Connor finally approached his street from the far end. But he still didn’t feel like it was safe to head for home. Instead, he once again doubled back, looped round, and ended up walking past his own house twice, slowly and aimlessly like a man who’d lost his keys. Or possibly his mind. Fortunately, a man peering suspiciously into his own windows didn’t look remotely unusual on this street.

It was just that kind of neighbourhood.

The rest of the terraces Connor walked past on his road were proper old-school back-to-backs, ones that had been built by Victorian men with shovels and bricks, and no time to waste. They were all faded redbrick and crumbling mortar, with drainpipes running across their façades like stitched-together scars. A smattering of satellite dishes clung to upper windows like desperate limpets, and the occasional security light blinked in slow confusion, not sure whether to warn or welcome.

Out front, the wrought-iron fences leaned in every possible direction. Most were rusted to some degree, while one had a child’s shoe impaled on it like some sort of grisly totem. Another had been replaced entirely with a shopping trolley and an ambitious length of string.

Despite it all, Connor liked living around here. Not just for the atmosphere, though he did think the buildings had ‘character’ in the way certain facial injuries did. It was also the clearest possible signal that he didn’t own anything worth burgling. No one casing these streets was looking for intel on national security. They were after bikes, loose change, or decorative stones.

Joyful hated Connor’s living situation. He'd made that abundantly clear last Christmas that while deep cover was one thing, there was no tactical merit in voluntarily living somewhere the gas came in flavours. Connor had tried to explain his thinking - about camouflage through context, anonymity through apathy - but Joyful just shook his head, patted him on the back like he’d told him it was terminal, and said he hoped Connor’s inoculations were up to date.

Connor made his third pass down the road.

A house three doors down from his had curtains made of bin bags. Next door had a window full of porcelain clowns, facing out like a tiny, cursed jury. Connor opened his front gate and the drain burped something sulphurous into the air.

It smelled like home.

He walked up the path of his front garden which contained one empty plant pot with a cigarette burn in the rim, two stubbed-out butts from the neighbour who insisted she didn’t smoke, and a soil patch where nothing had grown since 1998.

Even then, though, he still didn’t go for his front door.

First, he stopped and retraced his steps to circle around his pool vehicle. It was a painfully average, grey Skoda with a dent in the passenger door that predated his involvement. He cocked his head to take in its profile and then, pulling out his phone and switching on the light, crouched to check beneath it for anything that might go beep or bang. 

Satisfied, he stood and ran a fingertip along the hair-thin gap in the window frame. He’d left a few strands of synthetic fibre lodged there, barely visible, even to him. He was pleased to see they hadn’t moved.

Half the battle of doing what he did for a living, and more to the point, staying alive while doing it, was not getting bored. Not letting the old mind wander. Not letting your edges dull just because nothing interesting had happened for a few hours and the streetlamp was making a weird noise.

It was a lesson his dad had drilled into him back when Connor was still a teenager. The Dane had later taken that same lesson and honed it to a knife-edge, usually while Connor was bleeding on the floor. Between the two of them, they’d carved the same truth: it wasn’t the genius assassin with a monocle and a blood feud that’d get you, it was complacency. The corner you didn’t check. The camera you assumed was dead. The sandwich that made you sleepy.

In the grand scheme of things, it was rare, genuinely rare, for someone like him to get taken off the board by someone better. Sure, it happened. Sometimes you drew the short straw and the other guy was faster, meaner, or had a rocket launcher. But statistically? It was much more likely sloppiness would punch his ticket. Sloppiness or a wet floor.

Play the odds, his dad had said. There’s plenty more bottom-feeders in the ocean than Great Whites. You’ve got to make sure you don’t get taken out by an opportunistic dogfish.

Now he thought about it, his dad really sucked at metaphors.

Tension starting to ease, Connor slid his front door key into its lock. It resisted in just the right way, stiff, reluctant, and crusted with all the usual grime. That was good. Obviously, no one had tried to oil it. And no one had tried to pick it. As far as he could tell, no one had quietly let themselves into his house in the days he’d been in hospital.

The post slot was empty, which was to be expected, and his doormat still bore the vague, squashed impression of the neighbour’s cat, an entitled ginger tabby who’d taken Connor’s front step as a personal kingdom.

He turned the key with his left hand and angled his body sideways. Then, after taking a few cleansing breaths, he drew his gun and went through the doorway low and fast. It wasn’t one of his prettier entrances, but it was tight, fast, and awkward enough that any waiting shooter would’ve landed a shot into the doorframe, not his spine.

Nothing and nobody was waiting.

Just plenty of silence.

Connor stayed frozen in the narrow shadow of the hall. One breath. Two. Three. In through the nose, out through the mouth, slow and steady, like he was defusing a bomb. The house smelled completely familiar. Dust, long-cooled takeaway cartons, and that ever-present waft of garlic from next door’s eternal war against blandness.

Still he waited. Listening to nothing but the hum of his own blood.

Then he moved into the kitchen first. Clear. The fridge was still making that dying-walrus noise it had perfected around 2018. Lounge. Clear. Curtains undisturbed. TV blinking amber. He went up the stairs, taking them slow and soft-footed, each creak already memorised from a hundred late-night returns. Nothing new. No pause that hadn’t always been there.

At the landing, he swept right into his bedroom. Clear. The smell of cheap deodorant and gun oil, just like he’d left it. He knelt, flicked up the bedskirt, and checked. Go-bag still there, zips still tied shut with the same fraying nylon loop.

He walked back into the hallway and ran his hand along the carpet runner. The loose floorboard by the airing cupboard gave a little under his weight, same as always. Still loose. Still his.

Undisturbed.

So far so good. Which, in his experience, was when things usually went bad. He only started to properly wind down when he reached the loft and found everything exactly as he’d left it.

It appeared no one - human, Troglonn, or anything else - was waiting to kill him. Good times. 

“Welcome home,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr Connor! And may I just say, your threat mitigation protocols are deeply endearing. I particularly liked the mirror stall and the false limp you performed near the garage. You were very much giving ‘retired hitman with trust issues.’” Connor wasn’t sure, but it looked like Izzy had added a tommy-gun to her ensemble.

“Enjoying yourself, Izzy?”

“I am. And I’m learning so much. Your house is deeply underwhelming, by the way. Have you considered a feature wall?”

“Please shut up.”

“Absolutely. I will happily shut up. However, before I do, I thought you’d like to know that all of your excellent counter-surveillance techniques have, in fact, generated your first XP not connected to a Dungeon. Small steps, for sure. But well done, you!”

Connor paused halfway through shredding his discharge notes. 

“I’m getting a gold star for avoiding being followed?”

“Well, not exactly. But it’s all about contextual experience, you see. You have been acting in line with your neuro-imprint, using system-recognised tactics consistent with your embedded skill archetype. And since I technically don’t have a Class structure to restrict you with…”

That sentence didn’t get any less confusing as it went on.

“...I have been able to use the accumulated XP to force a Spine Point your way. Just one, for sure. But! It’s a start. Would you like to know more?”

“Absolutely!”

There was a brief flicker in his vision, like static trying to form a shape, and then a pane of transparent glass appeared, burnt in retro-blue. Izzy stood to its left, gesticulating like she was the hostess on a gameshow.

There were six stats. 

His six Spines, he supposed. And all of them were now sitting politely at +1, except for Cognition, which apparently had the game to reach a mighty +2.

“Hang on,” he said. “Is this… it? This is my big reward?”

“Well, Mr Connor. In a standard Integration event, you would have undergone full statistical benchmarking. Your existing aptitudes, skills, reflex calibrations, and psi-trace imprint would have been run against the Planetary Core’s profile matrices to more fully flesh this out. On Earth’s scale, I should note that a five would be considered species-average.”

“So a +2 in Cognition is…”

“Functionally braindead. But wait! There’s nuance!”

“There better be.”

“In your case, there is no functioning System, so you weren’t benchmarked. You simply activated. So yes. Your initial stats are +1. But! That will still be a not insignificant uplift over non-Integrated humans.”

“So you’re saying my stats suck. But because no one else has stats, it’s a limited value of sucking. I’m alive because I got a single point in ‘not immediately dying’. Very encouraging.”

“It’s also worth noting that, in the presence of a Planetary Core, you could have expected your Spine profile to scale much faster. Currently, though, any gain will be forced manually through whatever localised XP I can scavenge from your actions. Fortunately, your little scrap, both outside and inside the Dungeon, has given me tools to work with, so this will improve as I learn more about how this all works, but that will also be why your points are currently so few.”

Connor nodded slowly. The numbers made a bit more sense now. They still weren’t good, but he thought he was starting to understand the game. A vision of Leather Jacket slid, unwanted, into his head.

CANDIDATE: Connor Keene

STAT SPINES
Dexterity: +1
Resilience: +1
Cognition: +2
Instinct: +1
Presence: +1
Will: +1

UNALLOCATED XP: 0

RECENT ALLOCATIONS
+1 Cognition: System-level tactical analysis and situational inference.

“I mean, look at that! How pretty is it!”

Connor tilted his head slightly. The HUD followed. It was retro-modern like a Fallout pip-boy had married a Bond gadget and raised their child on spreadsheets.

“And an extra point in your Cognition isn’t nothing! That’s an improvement to your ability to perceive patterns, thread logic under pressure, and mentally parse complex inputs. Spy brain go brrrr! Isn’t it exciting?”

“I really hope you're not just a tumour.”

Izzy blew another raspberry. “Now, that wasn’t very kind, was it?”

“Sorry. But, well, shall we try and dial down the enthusiasm a little bit?”

The colour of Izzy’s avatar dimmed noticeably. “How’s that?”

“It will do.” 

Connor moved to his fridge and took out the only thing in it, a bottle of lager. He popped off the top with his thumb and settled down on his sofa. As he looked around he wondered whether Izzy might have a point. Maybe he did need a feature wall? 

“I’ve been thinking about when I got shot, and I’m factoring in what you keep saying about there having to have been a powerful magic surge to trick you to have come online early.”

“Mana. It’s called ‘mana’.”

“Okay, well ‘mana’ then. You said there must have been a surge near me to have tricked your programming into thinking the Planetary Core was online. And something must have happened to get the Dungeon to exist too, right?”

“Yes,” Izzy agreed. “Although they can’t have been the same event. That Dungeon had been online for a long time. They don’t expel mobs until they’ve sat uncleared for months. Years even.”

Connor thought back to the man with the gun. With the wink. With the ability to move too quickly for him to track. “I’m thinking that Leather Jacket might have an Integration Sprite that has been bootstrapping his XP. That’s how he was able to drop me without a second thought. And him using some sort of… Ability to do it caused the mana surge which woke you up?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, I don’t know about that, Mr Connor. But if I have been able to theorise this, then surely another Sprite awakening into a similar situation is certainly probable. And if the man who hurt you has access to their own Sprite, then what you suggest would be credible. It is an alarming aberration, though. I do not believe I have ever heard of a species gaining access to System powers before their scheduled integration.”

What did that even mean to Connor? Her not having heard of it didn’t mean it was improbable. No, the truly improbable was him getting stuck with a Sprite.

“As you say, though, it’s good to be first right?”

“Perhaps, but to be clear, forced allocation is not an easy process. Should it go wrong then you will grow very weird, very fast, and I will have to euthanise you.”

“Have I mentioned how terrifying you are?”

“Thank you! It’s so nice to be appreciated.”

*

Connor didn’t sleep too well. He had too many thoughts, too many questions, and, just maybe, a touch too much “helpful encouragement” from the overenthusiastic hitchhiker in his skull.

It was three in the morning before he gave up trying and sat up in bed. Somewhere out there, someone was coughing like they’d lost a lung and were looking for it in the recycling bins. A car alarm had been going off twice every hour in an irritating little rhythm, and every time Connor started to drift off, it went off again, smugly, like it knew. 

And his mattress felt too firm. Or too soft. It seemed to keep changing. He blamed the extra Cognition. He’d never cared about such things before.

“I’ve taken the liberty of reviewing your neurological rest state and I must say, Mr Connor, your sleep hygiene is atrocious.”

“Izzy,” Connor said, “Can you be quiet?”

“Technically,” Izzy said, and Connor couldn’t help but notice the suit and the trenchcoat was gone to be replaced by fluffy pink pyjamas, “I was quiet for six hours and eight minutes. But then you started twitching and muttering about leather jackets and Spine point allocation and I became concerned.”

Connor knew the problem wasn’t Izzy. Not entirely. His mind had been whirring since he got back from the hospital. Ever since the moment they’d discharged him with a pat on the back, a signed letter of apology, and no medical explanation for what was occurring whatsoever. 

Not for the healing.

Not for the gunshot wounds that hadn’t ruptured a single organ. 

And definitely not for the total lack of neurological damage from a round that had apparently passed within millimetres of something that almost certainly mattered.

Connor kept replaying the scene over and over. 

Him drawing his weapon. Then the target’s impossible pivot. The moment where the man in the leather jacket had just changed orientation, as if the laws of movement didn’t apply. One second, back turned. Then the same second, his gun was drawn and firing. It was insane.

Would an extra point in Cognition have helped him avoid that?

Maybe. Maybe not. But he was damned well going to find out.

“Izzy,” he said, “This whole gaining XP thing. Walk me through it one more time.”

“Certainly, Mr Connor! XP stands for eXperience Points, although there’s some minor regional variance in the etymology. It’s the universal currency of growth within the System. Accumulate enough XP through meaningful activity and I - well, traditionally, the System - can allocate Stat increases, unlock Abilities, or synthesise Traits.”

“And there’s no strings?”

“Well, as explained, forcible allocation is not an exact science. I’m essentially making changes to your Core Profile blindfolded, at the edge of my remit, in violation of about forty-seven separate integration protocols. But it appeared to work! So far! One out of one, anyway.”

Connor ignored a twinge in his ribs. 

“And if I keep doing things like defeating Dungeon Monsters you’ll keep jamming these points into my Core like dodgy RAM?”

“Metaphor slightly flawed there, but emotionally accurate!” 

There appeared to be a cup of cocoa in his Sprite’s hand. That was the last straw.

“Okay,” Connor said, getting out of bed and dropping to the floor to start doing press-ups.

The first few were shaky, his Joyful-provided socks skidding slightly on his carpet. But his arms didn’t give out, and his chest didn’t cave in, and nothing internal tore or burst. Which probably counted for something.

Izzy bounced away in the background, narrating his vitals like a documentary voiceover audition. 

“XP farming is it, Mr Connor? Very grind-core. Very... grassroots. I can report that your heart rate is elevated and your cortisol response is very healthy. Can’t help but say that I do take responsibility for that. It is me who saved you, after all.”

Connor ignored her and kept going. Forty push-ups. Then fifty. He added a few crunches, then plank holds. After twenty minutes, he moved to run drills in his overgrown garden, short sprints, step-feints and shoulder turns. The neighbour's cat yelled at him once. He waved and promised to stop. Then did another circuit.

Back in his kitchen, sweat soaking through his t-shirt, he accidentally caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink. Which made him pause.

Nondescript. 

That was the first word to describe him that came to mind. Always had been. He was tall and athletic, true. But he still had a relatively slight build and brown hair with a side-part that could be tactical or lazy depending on the day. He had no tattoos, no scars and no earrings or weird teeth or any of the things people tended to remember.

Cute Lazarus, the nurses had called him. He figured he could work with that.

Connor tilted sideways slightly, looking at himself in profile. Good-looking, he supposed. If you liked your looks profoundly understated. But what struck him now, what made the breath hitch in his wounded chest, was how much he resembled the man in the leather jacket. 

Not the face, of course. Not in his posture or in the eyes. But in the vibe. In his anonymity. Like they were both a default skin before the player added colour. If anyone had passed either of them in the street, they would not have looked twice.

That, the Dane had said to him once, was his most profound blessing.

“Forgettable is useful, Connor. Pretty boys get noticed. Ugly ones get remembered. You? You could walk through a murder scene carrying a sign that said ‘I did it’ and no one would bother to take a second glance.”

He’d thought it a backhanded compliment at the time. Now, he wondered.

He dropped to the floor again. Fifty more press-ups. Then a full-body isometric sequence that he remembered from boot camp. He was drenched within minutes, his muscles burning.

“Would you like me to track your progress on a stat-projection graph? I can do colours.”

“Not right now, thank you.”

“Are you sure? I could add music. Something with a beat. I could make it extremely motivational. My sources suggest I should say ‘Rocky-adjacent’, although I’m not sure what that means.”

“Still no.”

“You are proving to be less fun than could be hoped, Mr Connor. But, in good news, I’ve been logging your XP progress and by my projections, if you keep up this level of exertion, you might be eligible for a Resilience point by this time tomorrow!”

“What? Hang on! How does that work!” Connor collapsed at his kitchen table, breathing heavily. He'd pushed himself harder than he had in months and there was still blood pounding in his ears. “I did some half-arsed counter surveillance on my walk home and I got a point in Cognition. I'm nearly killing myself here and I might get a point this time tomorrow? How is that fair?”

“Ah, you see, context matters! XP accumulation is not evaluated in isolation, Mr Connor. When you thought you were being followed, you were experiencing authentic threat pattern elevation. Your heart rate, sensory attention, and synaptic activation showed genuine survival anxiety. And that makes all the difference. You weren’t just walking. You were surviving. And the System will always love rewarding that.”

Connor stood and retrieved a bottle of water from his fridge, draining half of it in one go. 

“So, what, this workout, as knackering as it is, doesn’t count for anything XP wise?”

“Well, it does. But not in the same way. Your little workout is very commendable. And if you keep it up, you will grind a Resilience point, which will be very much worth it, I promise you. But this is a low-stakes kind of XP generation, Mr Connor. There’s no danger to it. No stress-triggers. And, and this is vital, there are no consequences to it. Certainly, there’s nothing I can use here for my own evolution. Think of it as planting seeds, rather than surviving the storm.”

“So I need to be running for my life in mortal danger to actually level up Resilience quickly? I might as well go straight back to that Dungeon and run the whole thing naked!"

“That’s the spirit, Mr Connor! Hmm, I am not sure that I would appreciate you running around naked, but…if you must.”

Connor tipped the rest of the water over his head, trying to cool down. 

“You know you’re basically describing a reward-motivated PTSD cycle?”

“Indeed. The System is, at its core, an existentially meritocratic framework. It rewards meaningful exertion. Intention matters. Danger matters. Suffering matters. The more authentically challenged you are, the more likely the System will be to notice. And reward via XP.”

Connor sighed and looked at his reflection again. He still looked the same. A bit angrier, maybe.

“You must remember, Mr Connor, you are playing all of this on Hard Mode. I have no backend scaffolding and no Core support. But should you continue to generate XP, there is nothing in my programming that says I will not, for example, eventually be able to forcibly generate a Class for you. Isn’t that outstanding!”

“Great. And all I need to do is keep nearly dying in clever ways in order to get smarter and harder to kill?”

“Exactly! Isn’t this all very exciting!”