Minh Truong didn't go home after the contact window closed.
He walked—aimlessly at first, then with a pattern he didn't admit to himself. He kept to routes with low foot traffic, crossed streets where cameras were broken or angled away, and avoided places where crowds naturally formed. The habits were automatic now. Not paranoia—maintenance.
He had learned something the hard way: the system didn't need to chase you everywhere.
It only needed to chase you where you mattered.
A cold wind rolled off the river, carrying the smell of damp concrete and old metal. Minh Truong's interface stayed mostly closed, its presence a low pressure behind his eyes rather than a bright overlay. He didn't want it to learn more than necessary tonight.
Still, the afterimage of the meeting lingered.
"We don't want a leader… we want a fault line."
Minh Truong understood what they meant.
A leader was a node. Nodes could be erased.
A fault line, however, was a crack that spread through whatever tried to contain it. Not safe. Not stable. But expensive to fix.
He hadn't agreed to anything. There had been no handshakes, no names, no promises.
Yet the system had noticed the proximity of anomalies. It had felt the hum, circled, and backed away.
Not because it feared them.
Because it was calculating what they would cost.
Minh Truong was halfway down a side street when the first sign appeared: a billboard that couldn't decide what it was advertising.
The screen flickered through three different ads in less than a second—banking, medicine, travel—then froze on a blank white frame. For a moment, the entire panel was pure nothing, a rectangle of light like a dead window.
Then text appeared.
Not an advertisement.
Not a slogan.
A number.
A countdown.
Minh Truong stopped walking.
The digits didn't belong there. They weren't in the style of the city's systems. They weren't even in the visual tone of the lifespan overlay.
They were raw.
Functional.
And they were counting down from 00:59.
People passed beneath the billboard without looking up. Some glanced, frowned, then kept going, their attention sliding away as if the white rectangle had no meaning worth holding. The world's tendency to ignore abnormality was almost comforting.
Almost.
Minh Truong kept his eyes on the timer. It ticked down steadily. Every second was clean, perfectly spaced.
This wasn't a glitch.
It was a signal.
He tried opening the interface.
The overlay appeared—numbers above pedestrians, stable and obedient—but the residue layer beneath them thickened unnaturally, as if the system was forcing itself to remain coherent.
Then a new line flashed near the edge of his vision.
Environmental Anomaly Detected
Category: Unregistered Broadcast
Unregistered.
Minh Truong's pulse quickened.
The billboard timer hit 00:30.
The air felt wrong—lighter, like the city had lost pressure without realizing it. The streetlights hummed slightly out of rhythm. A car alarm in the distance began to chirp, stopped, and began again with a different tempo.
Minh Truong turned his head slowly, scanning the street for the source of the anomaly. He saw nothing unusual—until he noticed a man standing beside a public trash bin, staring at his phone as if waiting for something to happen.
The man looked ordinary: dark jacket, short hair, posture slightly slouched. Yet above his head, the lifespan display lagged. Not by half a second.
By almost two.
Minh Truong's interface tried to correct it and failed.
The number appeared, vanished, then reappeared with different digits, as though the system was picking from incompatible results.
Minh Truong took one step forward.
The man's gaze snapped up, meeting Minh Truong's instantly.
There was no confusion in his eyes—only recognition, sharp and practiced.
Minh Truong's interface pulsed hard.
The billboard timer hit 00:10.
A word rose in Minh Truong's mind without permission:
Breach.
The timer reached zero.
Nothing exploded.
No sirens. No smoke. No cinematic collapse.
Instead, the entire street seemed to stutter—as if reality itself had dropped a frame.
People paused mid-step for a fraction of a second. A bus at the intersection lurched forward, stopped, then continued as if the driver had blinked too long. A woman's laughter cut off abruptly and restarted at a slightly different pitch.
Minh Truong felt it like a knife of cold water sliding down his spine.
The interface flashed a warning he had never seen before.
Data Integrity Compromised
Synchronization Drift: Increasing
Containment: Attempting
The billboard went from white to black. Text appeared again.
A sentence this time.
"THE PRICE IS LATE."
Minh Truong's breath caught.
That line didn't come from the system he knew. It didn't feel like the cold machine tone of enforcement. It felt like a message written by someone who understood the system—someone who hated it enough to mock it.
The man by the trash bin put his phone away and began walking—calmly, confidently—straight toward the intersection where the drift had started.
Minh Truong followed, keeping distance.
As the man walked, something else happened: the lifespan overlays above nearby pedestrians began to show micro-changes.
Not big drops.
Tiny oscillations.
A second lost. Two seconds gained. Then corrected again.
Minh Truong's stomach tightened.
In Vol 1, numbers were destiny.
In Vol 2, numbers were struggling to keep pretending they were.
The man stopped at the intersection and glanced up at the traffic light.
Green.
A young woman stepped forward to cross.
Minh Truong's interface flashed her lifespan—and the value dipped sharply for the first time he had seen outside direct penalties. The dip lasted less than a second, then snapped back upward.
The woman didn't notice. She kept walking.
Minh Truong's instincts screamed.
He moved—one step, then another—ready to pull her back.
But the system didn't give him a micro-decision prompt. No "intervene / ignore." No cost estimate.
Nothing.
The absence was its own warning.
He stopped himself.
The woman reached the middle of the road.
A car turned unexpectedly, faster than it should have, as if the driver had made the decision late. The car swerved.
Minh Truong's body moved before his mind could argue. He grabbed the woman's arm and yanked her backward.
The car missed her by centimeters.
Everything froze for a heartbeat.
Then the city continued.
The driver shouted. The woman gasped, shaking, then began yelling at Minh Truong for grabbing her. The crowd's attention flared and then dispersed like heat escaping a vent.
Minh Truong didn't care.
He looked at his interface.
The system did not display a cost.
It displayed something else.
Interference Logged
Breach Conditions: Confirmed
Cost Assignment: Deferred
Deferred.
His blood went cold.
He had seen deferred costs before. They always came back worse.
The man who had walked into the intersection watched the scene from the curb, expression unreadable. Then he turned and walked away, blending into the flow of pedestrians as if the near-death event had been a planned experiment.
Minh Truong followed.
The man entered a narrow side lane and stopped beside a vending machine that looked too clean for the neighborhood. He didn't press any buttons. He simply waited.
Minh Truong stopped a few meters behind him.
"You triggered it," Minh Truong said quietly.
The man didn't turn. "Triggered what?"
"The drift," Minh Truong replied. "The broadcast."
A faint smile tugged at the man's mouth.
"Broadcast," he repeated, tasting the word. "That's what you call it."
Minh Truong's interface flickered again, like a nervous reflex.
Unregistered Entity Detected
Visibility: Low
Threat Classification: Unknown
Minh Truong lowered his voice. "Who are you?"
The man finally turned.
Up close, he looked tired—not exhausted, but worn in a way that suggested he had been living with delayed consequences for a long time. His eyes held the calm of someone who had watched systems fail repeatedly and learned to stop being surprised.
"I'm not your enemy," the man said.
Minh Truong didn't move. "That's what everyone says."
The man's smile faded. "Fair."
He glanced up at the sky, as if checking an invisible clock.
"You saved her," he said. "Good reflex."
Minh Truong frowned. "That was the point of your test?"
"Not mine," the man replied. "The system's."
Minh Truong's jaw tightened. "I didn't see a prompt."
"Exactly," the man said, and for the first time his tone sharpened. "When the system stops pricing your choices in advance, it means it can't. Either the variables are too many… or something else is writing over its assumptions."
Minh Truong's interface pulsed, then steadied.
"Something else," Minh Truong echoed.
The man leaned closer—not threatening, but urgent. "You met others, didn't you? The ones it can't count."
Minh Truong didn't answer. Silence was safer than lying.
The man exhaled through his nose. "That's enough. You're part of it now whether you like it or not."
"Part of what?"
The man looked at Minh Truong with a strange mixture of pity and calculation.
"The breach layer," he said. "The places where the numbers don't hold."
Minh Truong felt his chest tighten.
"And what happens when it finds you?" he asked.
The man's eyes flicked briefly to Minh Truong's temple, as if he could see the interface pressure without needing the overlay.
"It already did," the man said. "It just hasn't billed you yet."
As if on cue, Minh Truong's phone vibrated.
One vibration.
Then another.
The interface lit up with a line that made his stomach drop.
Deferred Cost Ready for Settlement
Category: Breach Interference
Settlement Type: Pending
Minh Truong's fingers curled into fists.
The man stepped back slightly, as if he didn't want to be within range when the system decided what "pending" meant.
Minh Truong stared at the line, breathing slow.
In Vol 1, the system priced everything upfront to control behavior.
In Vol 2, prices were arriving late.
And late prices were always higher.
Minh Truong lifted his gaze.
"Why show me this?" he asked the man.
The man hesitated, then answered with blunt honesty.
"Because if you get settled here," he said, "the blind zones shrink faster. The system panics."
Minh Truong's mouth went dry.
"So you're not saving me," he said.
The man nodded once. "No."
"Then what?"
The man's eyes hardened. "I'm trying to keep the world from snapping back into perfect control."
Minh Truong looked at the settlement notice again.
The system wasn't just reacting now.
It was retaliating.
And whatever came next would decide whether Vol 2 stayed a slow divergence… or became a full-scale breach.