REAL QUICK BEFORE EVERYONE GETS TO THE STORY.
This isnt a fanfiction i do with a light heart, i am aware it has mistakes and what it contains going forward, i will come back and do better editing when im able to get this whole story off of my chest , this story is made as a release of remorse and lingering guilt in the name of my best friend Shane who passed away recently due to a heart attack leaving everyone in shock and misery at his loss. i have made this story, combining his two favorite things apart from his two boys as a way to release and just ease my mind, i hope you enjoy this story as much as i do, onto the story .....
.... THE START ...
Impact still comes first, jarring and violent , rattling bones and squeezing teeth.
The BMW dropped off a rough patch of broken asphalt and landed hard enough that the whole chassis rang—metal complaining, suspension bottoming, tires slapping back into grip. Jacob Cooper's spine felt it as a single violent note, like someone struck a tuning fork inside his bones.
His hands were already on the wheel. Knuckles pale. Thumbs braced at the seams like they'd been there for hours. The cabin smelled like hot rubber and old leather, that sour-sweet tang of stress sweat lingering in the stitching. His jaw ached from clenching without realizing. His eyes we're wide with panic and feverish breathing.
He didn't remember climbing behind the wheel.
He remembered a different kind of ringing, one final and all encompassing: a courtroom's stale silence as the verdict was delivered, the thin clack of a pen against a desk, the weight of inevitability settling over him like dust. He remembered his lawyer's voice sounding far away—words technically meant for him, but already sliding off, useless in the speak a lawyess gives you when you both know they're not really trying. He remembered the bailiff shifting, the small squeak of shoes on polished floor, like the room itself was impatient to be done with him.
He remembered the word convicted hovering in the air like a vulture that hadn't landed yet.
His throat tightened around nothing, dry as the dessert and equally empty. He tasted old coffee and something metallic, like he'd bitten the inside of his cheek.
Then—nothing. a pitch black void for half a split second before the world exploded to life.
Not a blur. Not a fade. Just a hard cut. A missing reel.
The street rushed at him in smeared bands of sodium light and shadow. A flicker of a sign nlurring by quicker than he could even see it. A fence. A puddle catching headlight glare like a shard of glass. The speedometer needle trembled where it shouldn't have, as if it was nervous too. The engine roared like a beast wailing in a cage, shuttering as if it was trying to escape the hood.
He tried to pull in a breath and felt it snag halfway, like his body didn't trust air anymore, his heart hammered so much his chest ached.
"What the FUCK," he heard himself say in a voice alien to his own ears, like someone else had used his own lungs and body to cry out.
His memory offered him nothing useful. No last turn. No reason. No destination. Just the sensation of being in motion, already committed, already past the point where stopping would make sense.
The wheel kicked in his grip as the BMW found another seam in the road. For half a heartbeat he saw it—an image that didn't belong here: the judge's mouth forming a sentence, a gavel hovering as if it could end his life with one polite strike.
The chassis rang again over the next broken patch, sparks flying from the bottom of the car that lit up the road behind , a harsh metallic chord echoing through the cabin.
He blinked, vision layering between courtroom and open road before finally settling on the latter.
All that remained was the road, the vibration in his teeth, and the gnawing, breathless certainty that something had happened in the space between convicted and about to spend his life in a cell and now—
Something had acted, against the laws of the world he was familiar with in a way that made his hair stand on end.
And whatever it was… it had put him here, doing this with asking, with no memory of deciding to.
His hands were already on the steering wheel, clutching with all the strength he could muster—gloved, placed right, steady in the way muscle memory steadies you when your brain is still catching up. And yet, under that steadiness, the tremor lived in the small muscles between thumb and forefinger, the ones you can't bully into silence. The wheel buzzed beneath his palms like an agree bee in his grip with road-grit and engine vibration.
A black racing helmet caged his head like a snug towel. Tight at the cheeks. Padding pressing into his jaw until it felt like his own bones were being held in place. The strap bit under his chin every time he swallowed. His breath was thunder in his ears—too loud, too close—hot against the chin guard, fogging the lower edge of the visor with each exhale. He could taste himself in that air: stale adrenaline, copper, the ghost of panic.
He blinked once,startled and hard, like that would reset the moment.
It didn't, he blinked again to make it go away and failed once more.
Outside the visor, the night was harsh and old-fashioned— city streets he didn't recognize, old in a way he couldn't quite put tongue to. The city looked less polished than the world he knew as his eyes grazed over brick and mortar. Less LED and Less glass. More grit with older signage with edges worn blunt. Dirtier shoulders that looked like they weren't maintained. A strip of warehouses and loading docks hunched along the road, chain-link fences stitched with shadow, the silhouettes of parked semis like sleeping giants.
He blinked, gnawing at the back as his mind like he should recognize the place but just couldn't.
And behind him, the sound ever familiar to the life he had lived: sirens—raw, mechanical, not the clean warble of newer fleets but the older, angrier voice of patrol cars he knew hadn't been used in some time. The kind of noise that didn't ask. It ordered with an angry bark. It filled the air and pushed against his ribs like a physical thing.
Jacob's eyes flickered to the rearview mirror, pale eyes widening behind the black visor.
Red-blue strobes slammed across the glass in erratic pulses, painting the cabin in seizures of color. Two black-and-white cruisers first—big, squared-off bodies that looked like they were carved from steel blocks. Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, the kind of cars you saw everywhere, but not anywhere in recent memory. Heavy, stubborn, built to idle for hours and soak up abuse. Another unit further back, headlights bouncing, suspension bobbing like it was trying to keep its teeth in.
A helicopter spotlight swept the road in a wide, searching arc. Its beam was whiter, colder than the streetlights, crawling over fences and container stacks like a predator sniffing for blood. It skimmed the asphalt, slid up the walls of a warehouse, and for a heartbeat it felt like it might land on him and pin him to the earth.
Jacob's throat tightened and teeth grit, instinctively ducking as the light tore across the street ahead.
Not a thought. A reflex. The body deciding danger before the mind could dress it up with explanations. He swallowed, and the helmet padding pressed in harder, claustrophobic, intimate. His pulse hammered in his neck where the strap held him, thudding like it wanted out.
He dragged his gaze forward again as he leant back into the seat—because the BMW was fast, faster than anything he had ever dared steal or drive in his short twenty years of life, and speed demanded attention the way fire demanded oxygen, unapologetically. If he dared look back too long, if he let himself think too much, the road would punish him for it in the way all things ended up ... in the final tone of life... the end. The lane lines unspooled into a corridor of light and shadow stretching before his eyes, broken by patched asphalt and uneven seams that threatened to yank the car sideways if he got lazy. His headlights carved a clean wedge through dust and exhaust haze, turning the air into something textured, almost visible.
The engine screamed over it all, snarling and predatory, like a beast refusing to allow itself controlled.
And then he saw it—the reflection in the windshield, the ghost of the hood, a strip of blue circling black vents.
A flash of color in the glass that didn't match the darkness outside. A shape his brain recognized before it agreed to with memories long since buried from a better time flaring into the forefront of his mind.
Blue and silver livery. Jagged. Iconic in the way entire generations went weak at the knees of the very prospect of the thing.
The BMW M3 GTR ALMS.
Not just an M3. Not just a race-built coupe in his hands that was once denied the very right it had been built for. This was a silhouette that carried a weight all its own, it's very presence had weight, the kind of image that came with sound and feeling attached—hood lines cutting through light, paint like a scar, the promise of speed so sharp it felt unreal. A car so ingrained in his mind it felt more memory than real.
His stomach dipped, cold and heavy and he shivered as dawning realization struck him
This wasn't a screen. This wasn't nostalgia.
This was weight and heat and vibration and the taste of rubber in the air.
His stomach turned, hard, like his body was rejecting the idea before his mind could even name it, a rejection so instinctual he almost crashed as he realized.
"No," he breathed.
The word came out small, crushed by helmet padding and desperation. The engine swallowed it anyway—metallic and predatory, a sharp snarl that didn't belong on these streets. The sound filled the cabin and crowded his thoughts, as if the car didn't care what he believed. As if it had already decided what was real.
Because the BMW wasn't merely quicker than the police, not here and not now, no ... it outpaced them as they remained solely planted in his mirror.
It was wrong in a more frightening way that only he could truly understand.
It was from a different era of possibility—an artifact of a world where physics bent for spectacle, where speed was a superpower, where consequences could be reset with a button whilst you stayed up late past your bedtime to play.
And here, in this gritty sodium-lit corridor of warehouses and fences, it felt like a loaded gun in his hands, a threat he knew he couldn't simply reset.
It surged with the eagerness of something built to humiliate anything that tried to hold it back. The throttle response was immediate—violent. Every time his foot pressed down, the car answered like it was offended he'd ever asked politely. The rear squatted. The nose lightened. The whole chassis tightened, hungry, like it had been waiting for permission.
The speedometer needle climbed with a confidence that felt obscene, even as he considered slowing down if not outright stopping.
Behind him, the Crown Vics didn't accelerate so much as they committed to the chase—their V8s hauling mass forward with brute persistence, heavy frames refusing to quit out of sheer stubbornness. You could almost feel the effort in them: the weight shifting, the engines working, the tires protesting as they tried catching up to the silver blur mocking them.
But the BMW had something else, something they couldn't hope to compete with.
Razor power. Lighter weight. Grip that felt like cheating. And a willingness to be reckless that those heavy cruisers couldn't match even if they wanted to. It didn't just move forward—it pounced several meters a second.
The sirens faded a fraction as the gap stretched, then rose again as the cops refused to let go, he tried to think , to give pause to the situation he didn't understand. His foot rose ever so slightly, easing off the acceleration.. if he could pull over, maybe he could explain.. maybe they could let him go after some questioning.
In the next lane, one cruiser pushed up alongside him anyway, assuming him to be one of those racers , the driver stubborn enough to try for a read—close enough that Jacob could sense it without looking, like a pressure change, like another heartbeat syncing to his.
Jacob turned his helmet slightly, realising that even if he stopped, with the way that officer was looking, his chances were slim.
I'm not going to another fucking court room
The officer he saw was young, as his foot hovered over the accelerator, his eyes staring as he felt his breath robbed once more. Focused. A face lit by greenish instrument glow, low-tech and utilitarian, the kind of dashboard lighting that made everyone look a little sick. The car beside him was a standard black-and-white with steel wheels, roof bar lights— Nothing sleek. Nothing modern. Just workhorse brutality and flashing lights.
The driver glanced over as if trying to look into the cabin of the BMW.
And the world clicked, a jolt ran down his spine as he recognized the driver, news snippets and movies he watched as a child, imagining the life of the very man across from him.
Brian O'Connor. The face of Paul walker, just younger... someone he knew for a fact was dead.
Jacob recognized him with a cold, story-snapping certainty. As he realized for the first time that he may not just be inside a car he thought was nothing but a set piece in a game, but far far out of his depth.
Brian's expression was controlled, jaw tight. Not fear—assessment. The look of a man watching something already deemed criminal. The kind of calm that came from training, from instinct, from the steady acceptance that the situation didn't care about excuses.
Jacob's own face was hidden—helmet and visor, anonymity sealed tight, ever thankful he wouldn't be outed right here right now. Under it he didn't know, but his face wasn't quite his own, his features were sharp and pale, almost too young for the fatigue carried in his eyes: a twenty-year-old Cillian Murphy look-alike, all angles and intensity. But none of that mattered now. All anyone saw was a black helmet in a ghost-car that shouldn't exist.
He wondered—absurdly—if perhaps Brian would listen, but as he turned to look back again, those cold eyes said otherwise.
Then a metallic ping sounded, as he thought about pulling over , the noise all but stopped those thoughts.
Too clean. Too precise. Not a rattle. Not a loose panel. Not anything mechanical.
A notification. That layered over his vision like a see through screen.
Jacob's breath caught. He didn't mean for it to—his body just did it, like it had been slapped. The visor fogged at the edges from the sudden heat of his exhale, and for a moment the world smeared.
And then the world overlaid itself.
Not on the windshield.
In Jacob's vision.
Crisp text, faint blue accents, hovering as if the air itself had become a screen. It snapped into place with the casual certainty of a system that expected obedience—no hesitation, no are you sure? Just: here's what you are now.
NFS SYSTEM // SYNC COMPLETE
BOUND VEHICLE: BMW M3 GTR (ALMS)(MODIFIED)
STATUS: LOCKED // PRIMARY ASSET
HEAT: 3
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $25,000
CHASE EARNINGS: HIGHER BOUNTY = HIGHER PAYOUT
ABILITY READY: SPEEDBREAKER
Jacob's breath hitched again, sharper this time with disbelief, like his lungs forgot the rhythm. His heart hammered against the helmet padding, loud enough to drown out even the engine for half a beat.
He blinked hard.
Once. Twice.
The overlay didn't flicker. Didn't fade. Didn't care.
It remained.
Steady as a verdict.
His hands tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked under his gloves. The sound was small, intimate—like the car protesting being held too hard. A jagged laugh tried to claw its way out of him, sharp enough to hurt, because some feral part of him understood—the part that survived on late-night fantasies of speed and escape—wanted to believe this was mercy.
A gift.
A loophole.
Anything but the courtroom.
But another part of him—older, bruised, exhausted in ways a twenty-year-old shouldn't be—felt grief rising like bile. The kind that didn't announce itself as sadness. The kind that came as nausea and heat behind the eyes, as if his body was mourning before his mind could.
He was supposed to be in a courtroom.
He was supposed to be watching his life shrink into a sentence, the future compressing into a number and a date. He was supposed to become a name stamped onto paperwork, a body moved through hallways by people who didn't look at faces long enough to remember them. He was supposed to lose things quietly—freedom first, then dignity, then whatever pieces of himself didn't fit inside the rules.
And now he was inside a different system entirely without any kind of consent.
One that didn't care what he deserved, only what he could do.
He swallowed, tasting hot air and adrenaline. The helmet made it worse—every breath recycled, every exhale warm and damp against the padding. His pulse thudded in his gums. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.
"System, "oh he knew what it was, the impossibility of it and what it represented, and so he whispered into the helmet, voice muffled and thin like it belonged to someone smaller. "What… what is this?"
For a moment he half-expected silence. Static. Nothing, perhaps to confirm this was little more than a halucination.
Instead, the overlay updated—indifferent, efficient. A machine answering a question the way a machine always did: without pity.
OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE PURSUIT
WARNING: CAPTURE = FORFEIT CURRENT CHASE PAYOUT+SENTENCE GUARANTEED IN PLACE OF CASH
SHOP: UNAVAILABLE DURING CHASE
SPEEDBREAKER: ACTIVE ON COMMAND
NOTE: DURATION SCALES WITH CONTROL
Control.
The word landed like a cruel joke and a dare at the same time. His throat tightened around it. Control was what the court had taken from him with a single word. Control was what he'd spent months pretending he still had. Control was what he had spent his whole life chasing in vehicles faster than he had any right to travel, something taken since childhood along with his comfort.
Now a glowing interface was telling him to earn it back as if it was that easy.
The road ahead split.
To the left: open street—brighter, more lanes, more room to run… and more room for a net to close. A place where radios and cruisers and air support could coordinate, where speed alone would stop being enough.
To the right: a darker cut toward a container yard—narrow corridors, stacked metal walls, blind corners, places where a lighter, sharper car could vanish like a rumor.
It was giving him the choice , the illusion of control like it had promised.
Jacob didn't know this city as a local in anyway, he had a suspicion but that suspicion wouldn't help in any way. He couldn't tell you where the good exits were, which streets looped, which ones dead-ended into fences and locked gates.
But he knew the logic of a chase, had been in them since the ripe old age of fourteen.
He knew pressure. He knew the way fear sharpened your vision until the world became only what mattered: the gap, the line, the next decision. He knew what it felt like when life reduced itself to a single rule—hold the line or die.
He turned the wheel knowing his life depended on it.
The BMW dove into the yard like it belonged there, like the darkness had been built for it.
The sound changed instantly. Sirens slammed into steel and came back doubled, tripled—echoes stacking until the whole place howled. Headlights strobed across container doors painted in faded company logos, chipped letters and old rust streaks like wounds. The air tasted different here—rust and old diesel, wet concrete, something sour and industrial that coated the back of his throat.
The road was rougher too. Patched concrete and oil stains. Seams that tugged at the tires. Little bumps that made the suspension chatter.
Behind him, the Crown Vics struggled to follow at the same pace—not because they were slow, but because they were heavy. Their suspensions pitched and heaved. Their front ends dipped hard on braking, noses nodding like they were constantly saying no. They couldn't flick into narrow corridors the way the BMW could. They weren't built for precision; they were built for endurance, for wearing you down.
Yet they kept coming, stubborn as gravity.
And Brian's cruiser—Brian's—threaded in behind Jacob cleaner than the others. His line was tighter, his pace more confident. He wasn't trying to match speed. He was trying to predict exit points. Trying to think the chase instead of run it.
He was hunting like a man who understood you didn't beat a faster car by chasing its taillights, trying to mix the life of a racer into the thoughts of a cop.
You beat it by catching it where it had to breathe.
Jacob's mouth went dry as he saw the car maintain that exact concept in the mirror.
He took a corridor turn too tight, unfamiliar with how this monster responded to handling.
Instantly, the rear stepped out—tires snapping toward a slide, traction breaking like a promise. The BMW rotated just enough that the container wall filled his visor and make his eyes widen, steel and rivets rushing up with sudden, sickening certainty.
For a fraction of a second, panic flooded him—pure, animal certainty of impact. He saw it in his mind like a flash: the hood folding like paper against container steel. The shatter of glass. The helmet cracking. The world going white.
And beneath that, the ugliest thought of all:
Then you wake up in fluorescent light. Then it's over. Then it was never real.
His hands jerked, trying to correct—too sharp, too late.
Then the HUD pulsed.
A clean, bright flare of text that didn't care about his fear.
SPEEDBREAKER
He triggered it without thinking, more instinct engraved into his mind than anything else.
Not as a decision—more like a flinch. Like his body reached for the only lever it could find before physics collected its debt. His thumb moved and his brain caught up half a second later, too late to feel ownership over it.
Reality didn't turn cinematic.
It turned thick.
Like the air had been replaced with syrup. Like the world had taken a deep breath and decided not to exhale. Sound stretched into long, rubbery strands—engine note dropping into a warped growl, the siren's wail unspooling into a single haunted ribbon that seemed to go on forever. Motion slowed until it felt wrong to even call it motion. Dust became visible, suspended in the headlights like tiny stars that had forgotten how to fall.
The helicopter spotlight crawled across the top edges of containers with predatory patience, each inch of white light moving like it was thinking.
And Jacob—inside the helmet, inside the roar—finally had room to feel. Leaning forward with his mouth agape and thoughts free.
Not fear. Not the big, loud panic that had been drowning him.
The details.
He felt weight transfer like a language his body already spoke. He felt the exact moment the rear tires wanted to over-rotate—traction thinning, the car asking whether he was going to let it spin. He felt the steering go light, then bite. The texture of the wheel under his gloves. The minute flutter of the front end searching for grip.
It was like tripping on narcotics or some other substance the way the world felt.
His hands moved in small, exact corrections—counter-steer, breathe throttle, settle the rear. The kind of adjustments you don't make with thoughts; you make them with nerves and muscle memory and a thousand half-forgotten nights of chasing control at high speed.
The BMW responded instantly, as if it had been waiting for him to stop panicking and start driving.
In the slowed corridor of time, Brian's cruiser appeared behind him, nose dipping, braking hard. The Crown Vic's weight pitched forward, headlights bobbing, front tires scrubbing for purchase as it tried not to slam into the container wall. For a heartbeat Jacob could see Brian clearly through the windshield glare—eyes locked forward, jaw set, that same dead-calm focus like he'd accepted the situation and moved straight to the part where he solved it.
Brian wasn't reacting. He was calculating.
Jacob straightened the car, and in this stretched world, the car blatantly and with disrespect, began to roar forward as if the world crawled outside.
He felt the rear come back in line like a knot finally pulled tight. He felt the tires catch and hold. He felt the chassis settle, the whole machine agreeing with him.
Speedbreaker drained away.
The world slammed back into full-speed violence.
Sound snapped into place—engine screaming, sirens biting, the helicopter's rotors chopping the air into frantic pieces. The BMW rocketed out of the slide and surged down the corridor, and Jacob made a sound that surprised him—half laugh, half sob, dragged out of him like something he'd been holding back for months.
It wasn't triumph.
It was shock.
It was the strange, bruising ache of realizing he could still do this—still survive, still move, still be something other than a defendant waiting to be processed. Something other than a name on paper. Something with reflexes and choices and teeth. If only he could get out of this... a redo.
The overlay flashed, brisk as a cashier:
SPEEDBREAKER USED
COOLDOWN : 00:00
Then, almost cheerfully—almost kindly, in a way that made his skin crawl:
BOUNTY INCREASED: $30,000
PAYOUT MULTIPLIER: x2.0
TIP: PROLONGED CHASES = GREATER REWARD
Jacob's stomach twisted as he stared at the bottom message a second longer than the rest.
So that's the hook.
Not escape. Not safety.
Engagement and entertainment.
The more he was pursued, the more he earned. The system didn't reward getting away—it rewarded being chased. It turned danger into income. Turned adrenaline into currency. Turned the worst habit he ever had—running from consequences—into a loop with flashing numbers and a dopamine drip.
A game mechanic stapled onto his life and bleeding in real time.
Ahead, the yard opened toward a service road. A gap. A chance to break line-of-sight, to vanish into the city before the net closed. Freedom was right there, in the shape of darkness and distance.
Behind him, the sirens were still there—older, harsher, carried by big American sedans that couldn't match his top end but could flood streets, block exits, call ahead. The helicopter eye swept, searching for the blue-and-silver ghost, the spotlight probing like a finger trying to find a wound.
And Brian was still back there trying to gain, to earn his pay and the respect of a clean grab.
Not giving up. Not falling away. Holding the chase like it mattered. Like he mattered.
Jacob's fingers flexed on the wheel, loosening, tightening again—an unconscious check that he was still real, still here. The gloves squeaked softly. His palms were damp inside them.
Under the helmet his face was hidden, but his emotions weren't. Confusion clung to him like sweat. Fear bit at his ribs. Grief pressed in from the memory of the life he'd left mid-sentence—courtroom air, the word convicted still hovering somewhere behind his eyes. Then there was the thought of his friend, the one who he had started that life with, the friend whom got swallowed up and dropped like it didn't matter, forgotten by the world, just trying to life without being forgotten.
And under all of it—beneath the panic, beneath the disbelief—there was a tremor of something Jacob hated himself for feeling.
Not relief. Not happiness.
Something smaller. Something more dangerous.
Hope,.
Not the gentle kind.
The dangerous kind.
The kind that doesn't soothe you. The kind that sharpens you. The kind that whispers, Maybe you can outrun what you were, and makes that sound like a promise instead of a trap.
He floored it, petal to the floor as the car barked a laugh, fire spewing from the exhaust as excess fuel lit and spewed.
The M3 GTR answered with a savage surge—no delay, no softness, just immediate violence—and the gap ahead rushed closer. An opening into Los Angeles. Into a world that isn't his, but was real enough to kill him.
Real enough to change him, real enough to remember but never forget, real enough to move forward in the only way he knew how.
And somewhere behind, in a heavy black-and-white sedan built for a different kind of chase, Brian O'Connor leaned into pursuit of a driver in a black helmet—someone no one could identify yet, in a car he couldn't put a name to.
..
The container yard spat Jacob out like a swallowed thing forced back into daylight.
One moment he was in steel corridors where sound ricocheted and the air tasted like rust; the next he was on a service road running parallel to the docks, the city opening up again into long stretches of cracked asphalt and orange sodium pools. The sudden openness felt wrong—exposed. Like stepping out from behind cover in the middle of a gunfight.
The helicopter's light found him almost immediately—an impatient, searching beam that snapped onto the blue-and-silver hood like it had been waiting, like it had known he'd reappear here.
Jacob's helmeted head tilted on instinct, a reflexive flinch away from that white glare. It was useless. The light didn't care about dignity or hiding. It didn't negotiate. It just painted him for the world.
There.
Him.
The M3 howled beneath him, a tight, high, predatory note that belonged to something lighter and angrier than the police sedans clawing after him. The engine didn't sound like effort. It sounded like appetite, like it was still being held back even now as the cops twisted around the corner he had taken.
In the mirror the Crown Vics looked like square shadows with teeth—big bodies pitching under acceleration, roof bars strobing, sirens flaying the night into strips. Their suspensions bobbed as they hit imperfections, whole cars rocking with the strain.
They were slower, but they had numbers.
And numbers mattered.
Numbers flooded intersections. Numbers boxed you in. Numbers called ahead. Numbers turned a straight road into a trap made of steel and red-blue light.
Jacob's breath was loud in the helmet, rasping through the padding. His pulse felt too big for his ribs, like it was trying to push him out through his own skin.
The HUD sat at the edge of his vision like a parasite that had learned manners.
HEAT: 3
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $30,000
CHASE PAYOUT MULTIPLIER: x2.0
WARNING: ROADBLOCK PROBABILITY INCREASING
He didn't need the warning to taste it. He could feel the shift behind him—the cops tightening formation, not all of them chasing his taillights anymore. Two hung back. One crept to the side. Angling. Patient. Like a shark that was done following and wanted to bite.
Jacob glanced left.
A Crown Vic edged up as he scoured entries and exits, taking his moment of distraction to blitz forward, front bumper just behind Jacob's rear quarter panel—exactly where it shouldn't be if the driver was playing safe. The big sedan's engine was lower, more brutish, and the vibration carried through the air and into Jacob's bones even from a lane away.
He knew what that angle meant even as his eyes widened.
PIT.
Precision Immobilization Technique—except these guys weren't going to be precise. Not at this speed. Not with a suspect in a car that looked like a myth with plates.
The officer in the Vic committed with thinned lips and a dipped head. The sedan surged closer, heavy nose drifting toward Jacob's rear wheel with the slow, inevitable confidence of mass.
His hands tightened on the wheel.
And there it was—an old spike of panic. Not the chase panic. The courtroom panic. The one that said you do not get to control this, the one that had lived in him every time something happened he couldn't even try to stop.
He felt the M3's rear twitch as the Vic's bumper kissed the BMW's quarter panel.
A violent shove.
A crack of metal.
The BMW should snap sideways. It should have turned into a spinning headline, it should have folded and skid and end.
It didn't.
Instead, the impact felt… wrong. Not harmless—Jacob felt it as he nearly bit his tongue, the hit shuddering through the cabin like a fist on a door—but the car didn't fold the way it should have. The rear didn't crumple. The chassis didn't buckle. The BMW absorbed the force like it braced for it—like it was reinforced in ways a street car had no right to be reinforced.
Jacob's visor caught a brief flash in the window reflection: the Crown Vic's fender grinding against the BMW's side, paint scraping away in bright streaks, the police car's own front end beginning to deform—steel complaining under its own weight.
Another shove. Harder.
The tires chirped. The BMW slewed half a lane, traction thinning into that nauseating moment where you're floating on nothing. But it didn't spin. It resisted like a living animal digging claws into asphalt.
The HUD pinged—almost smug, like it was proud of itself.
PASSIVE TRAIT TRIGGERED: BOUND VEHICLE DURABILITY
STATUS: IMPACT RESISTED
NOTE: DAMAGE REDUCED (SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZATION)
Jacob's breathed even as his stomach dropped.
So it wasn't just fast.
It was more like the game in other ways too.
The Crown Vic's driver tried again—angling for the full rotation, for the clean snap that would send Jacob into the barrier and end the story.
The shove hit. And he felt the rear finally start to break loose, the BMW slipping out of line, tire grip dissolving into a brief, terrifying float. His vision narrowed. The world tilted. The helicopter beam flared across his hood like a spotlight on an execution.
But instead of fighting it with fear, Jacob let his body do what it was born to do, do what his experience afforded him.
He drove through it.
He rode the slide for a heartbeat—just long enough to keep the car from snapping into a spin—then tore the wheel and stabbed the throttle at the same time, a brutal, decisive input that flipped the car's weight like a coin.
The BMW pivoted and turned.
Not a lazy fishtail. A knife-turn.
The rear swung wide. The front snapped around. And for a fraction of a second Jacob was staring directly into the strobing mouth of pursuit—headlights, grille, the flash of the cruiser's badge on the hood—and the startled, wide-eyed face of the officer who had just tried to end him.
Everything in Jacob went cold and hot at once, anger bubbling, hands shaking as teeth flashed and grit. His anger turned to action.
He didn't hesitate nor feel mercy.
He committed.
He yanked the handbrake—quick, surgical—while counter-steering into the rotation.
Not a panicked tug. Not a desperate rip. A clean, practiced motion that came out of him like he'd done it a hundred times in places that didn't matter. His wrist flicked. His shoulders stayed locked. His eyes didn't leave the path his brain had already drawn in front of him.
The BMW's tires shrieked.
A high, painful sound that climbed over the sirens and made the hair on his arms try to stand up under the suit. Rubber tearing at asphalt. A scream that said this is wrong, this is too much, stop— and then kept going anyway.
A J-turn.
A complete 180 executed in one violent movement, the kind of thing that belonged in training videos and games and late-night fantasies—not on an imperfect service road with real lives on the line and no reset button waiting offscreen.
The car rotated like a blade.
For half a second his stomach tried to climb into his throat. The world swung sideways in his visor—headlights, shoulder line, the bright slash of the helicopter beam—then the BMW snapped straight. It came down hard on its suspension, settled, and stopped facing the opposite direction.
Nose pointed back the way he had been previously facing before activating speedbreaker intentionally this time, he slammed on the brake, confusing the cops as it came to a near instant halt, slamming the car into reverse as the officers flew past... before he performed yet another J-turn and slamming it into gear and launching forward into the gap that used to be behind him.
He drove straight past several more cars.
The Crown Vic that tried to PIT him veered, too slow and too heavy to correct. Its suspension rolled as the driver overcompensated, body leaning like a drunk trying to regain balance. The sedan skidded toward the shoulder, tires screaming, momentum carrying it like a falling building.
Jacob flashed past—so close he could see the officer's hands white on the wheel through the windshield, fingers clenched like they were trying to hold the car together.
A face behind glass. Eyes wide. A split-second of oh shit.
Then it was gone.
He rocketed through the collapsing formation and tore away down the road the cops had just come from, the M3's engine shrieking like an exorcism. The sound wasn't just loud—it was dominating, a furious, high note that made everything else in the world feel smaller.
Behind him, the radio chatter exploded through the radio wedged into the center console—tinny, frantic, voices cracking with disbelief and anger.
"HE TURNED AROUND—HE'S COMING BACK—"
"UNIT DOWN—UNIT—WATCH IT—"
The helicopter light scrambled, swinging wide like a frantic eye trying to refocus. It lost the car for a second as he dove under an overpass, the darkness swallowing him whole, and in that brief darkness Jacob felt something like quiet.
Not peace.
Just… a gap. A pocket. A half-second where his thoughts could fit without being immediately crushed by sirens and speed and consequence.
His breath rasped in the helmet. Sweat trickled down his temple and had nowhere to go, trapped by padding, making his skin itch. His hands ached from gripping the wheel like it was the only thing keeping him anchored to reality. The strap under his chin felt tighter than before, like the helmet was trying to remind him: You can't leave this. Not now.
He stole a second like it was the most precious thing in the world. That's all.
In this world, seconds were currency.
The HUD flickered again, as if applauding.
BOUNTY INCREASED: $35,000
CHASE PAYOUT MULTIPLIER: x2.2
CHASE BONUS: EVASION MANEUVER (J-TURN)
The system rewarded him for being hunted and clever about it.
Jacob felt a sick twist of understanding—an ugly clarity that slid into place like a puzzle piece he'd been avoiding: this wasn't a gift. It was a set of rails. A path that led deeper into danger, dressed up as freedom with numbers and dopamine and a little ding of approval.
A game that only ever got harder.
A sign flashed by—older style, reflective green, the kind he remembered from the era before digital billboards swallowed everything. The letters jumped in his headlights for a heartbeat.
He caught the street name.
He didn't have time to keep it or ponder.
He just drove, letting the city's veins carry him away from the docks, away from converging sirens—toward noise that wasn't police noise. Toward people. Toward chaos that belonged to someone else.
Then he heard it like a prickling on the edge of his senses.
Not sirens.
Music.
Low bass thumped through the night like a second heartbeat, heavy enough to feel through the seat. A crowd's murmur layered on top of it—laughter, shouts, that rising, restless sound of a hundred people waiting for something to happen.
Engines revved—different from the pursuit. These weren't working engines; they were performing. The sound was ritual: throttle blips like nervous ticks, laughter that came too loud, the crackle of tension before a race.
Headlights ahead.
A wide industrial stretch blocked by bodies and parked cars angled like a makeshift arena. Neon underglow in patches—cheap, uneven, but proud. The air was alive with cigarette smoke and spilled beer and that electric smell of anticipation you got when everyone in the crowd believed they were about to witness something worth remembering.
A street race.
A street race in the sense of things he only ever saw in movies. Before everything got complicated. Before the story's first domino fell.
He didn't know he was about to slice through the center of something important until he was already there.
His headlights slammed across faces.
A hundred heads turned at once—like a flock startled into motion. Someone shouted, the word lost in the bass. People stepped back instinctively in fear, hands lifting as if they could ward off a car with palms.
A couple of cars at the line—import coupes with glossy paint, mufflers throaty and loud—were staged nose-to-nose. Their drivers were locked in, eyes on a starter's hands, bodies coiled for the launch as they were about to start the race.
And then the BMW M3 GTR hit the street like a goddamn meteor.
He blasted past the start line mid-count, a blue-and-silver streak with an engine note that didn't just dominate the other cars - It erased them.
The wind of his passage whipped loose shirts and hair. People stumbled back, sneakers scraping, beer sloshing. Someone nearly went down and got yanked upright by a friend's arm.
For a heartbeat, everything froze—not because time actually slowed, but because the entire crowd's brain needed a second to process what had just cut through their world.
Then the roar of the BMW's exhaust ripped that silence apart and left it in pieces behind him.
On the edge of the crowd, a man stood with his arms crossed, posture calm but coiled—broad shoulders, shaved head catching the sodium light. He didn't flinch like the others. He didn't throw his hands up. He just tracked the BMW with a stillness that was more dangerous than movement.
Dominic Toretto, blinking a slow blink as his head turned to follow the streak the edged the farthest corner quicker than it should have been able to.
Near him, a young woman with a watchful face, beautiful with a heart shaped face and soft features—Mia—stepped forward half a pace, eyes narrowing the way you narrow them at something you can't place but don't like. Like her brain was trying to grab the image and pin it down before it vanished.
Another woman, harder in her stance and beautiful in the way wind but dangerous things were, confidence like armor—Letty—tilted her head as if she'd just heard a new kind of threat and decided she wanted to meet it on her own terms.
For them, this wasn't a game overlay or a system prompt.
It was a car that just flew by faster than anything they'd ever seen in their small world—too fast, too controlled. Not a lucky pass. Not some kid with a heavy foot.
Something disciplined.
Dom's eyes followed the fading taillights like he was measuring the sound, the line, the discipline—measuring the driver behind it even without a face. Like he was trying to decide whether that driver was reckless…
…or terrifyingly skilled.
Mia's lips parted slightly, a quiet, incredulous breath she didn't seem to notice she'd taken.
Letty's expression sharpened. Not impressed. Not awed.
Alert.
Like her body had already filed it away under remember this.
And Jacob—helmeted, anonymous, heart hammering—didn't even realize who he'd just flashed past. Barely avoiding the people he could've just killed if had missed by an inch. He only felt the crowd as a sudden wall of heat and eyes, the visceral sensation of being seen by a hundred strangers at once. It hit him like a physical shove, that momentary weight of attention, like hands reaching for him without touching.
His grip tightened.
Because behind him, far off but coming, the sirens were returning—older, harsher, getting louder as the police reoriented. The helicopter spotlight swept again, hunting the blue-and-silver phantom that had just torn through a street race like it was nothing.
His world narrowed into the next decision as they finally caught on.
Run deeper into the city where people could hide him—alleys, traffic, chaos, places where a spotlight had to choose.
Or keep to the open where speed was his only shield, where distance was the only lie he could tell that might hold.
The HUD sat at the edge of his vision, patient.
Tempting.
A quiet little presence that didn't judge him for wanting to run. Didn't ask if he was tired. Didn't care how close he was to breaking. Just offered him numbers and incentives and a clean, cold logic.
As he shot down the next stretch of road, he didn't see Dom's mouth tighten into the faintest line that could've been respect—or warning. He didn't see Letty memorizing the sound of his engine like a signature, cataloguing it the way you catalogue a face you might meet again in the dark. He didn't see Mia's worry bloom, because even she could feel it: whatever that was, it wasn't just some random racer who stumbled into their night.
But he did feel something he couldn't name—a shift, like he'd just brushed against fate at two hundred miles an hour and it had turned its head.
And for the first time since he'd woken up behind this wheel, He realized the scariest part wasn't the cops.
It was that this world had witnesses now. And he felt alive.
He didn't get to savor the feeling or the moment he'd stolen from the yard.
The street race he tore through was already behind him—bass thumping, startled shouts, headlights whipping as people scattered back from the road. For a heartbeat it had felt like he'd sliced through a living, breathing pocket of the city… but the sirens were still out there, reorganizing, hungry, and Los Angeles at night had a way of remembering where you'd been.
The helicopter spotlight found him again as he cleared a long curve—white light washing over the hood, turning the blue-and-silver paint into something unreal, like a comet dragged low across asphalt. Jacob's black visor reflected that beam back in a dull sheen. The helmet made his breathing sound like a storm trapped in a box—each inhale too loud, each exhale too hot.
Behind him, the wail swelled. As they took short cuts only natives knew.
They'd reentered the chase.
Crown Vics again—more of them now—big, square silhouettes pooling into the road like spilled ink. They weren't trying to match his speed in the streets anymore. They were changing tactics. They were spreading, shaping the flow, pushing him with presence and sirens and sheer inevitability toward wherever they wanted him to go.
Herding.
Jacob's fingers flexed on the wheel, a nervous motion he didn't fully control. His gloves squeaked faintly. The wheel vibrated under his palms like a live wire.
He saw the highway entrance before he fully decided to take it: a ramp rising toward a river of headlights, the glow of overhead signage in that older reflective green, the kind of signs he remembered from childhood trips before everything became sleek and digital. The ramp looked like an invitation and a threat at the same time—wide, open, visible.
A place with nowhere to hide but where speed unfurled like a clenched fist.
The ramp was a risk.
But it was also honest.
Highway meant fewer corners. Fewer ambushes. Fewer blind turns where a roadblock could bloom out of nowhere and take his legs out from under him. It meant the car could be what it was built to be, stretched out, breathing, letting its power speak plainly.
And if the BMW was truly his—if the system really had bound it to him—
…then the highway would prove it.
And so he committed.
The M3 GTR climbed the ramp like it was being pulled by a cable. The engine note tightened and sharpened, the sound cleaning itself into a higher, hungrier scream. He felt the car settle under him—less skittish, more certain—like a predator stretching out after being forced to fight in a hallway.
He merged into the right lane between two clusters of traffic, threading the gap with terrifying ease. Too close. Too smooth. The kind of move that made other drivers flinch a beat late, their headlights twitching as they realized something had just passed them that didn't belong.
In his mirror, the first Crown Vic hit the ramp and immediately felt their mistake—too tall, too heavy, its front end lifting and dipping as it tried to gather speed. More units followed, sirens echoing off the concrete barriers, the sound turning the highway into a tunnel of warning.
Jacob's HUD flickered at the edge of his vision like a hungry little thought.
HEAT: 4
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $45,000
CHASE MULTIPLIER: x2.6
BONUS: HIGH-SPEED EVASION (+$2,000 / 10s)
His stomach clenched at the numbers—not because they were small, but because he could feel what they were doing to him.
They weren't just tracking him.
They were shaping him.
Turning his fear into profit. Turning his pulse into a meter. Turning the urge that had once dragged him toward a courtroom—toward consequence—into something that felt, dangerously, like purpose.
He hated that part most of all.
Because a piece of him—quiet, shameful—liked how clean it felt.
He pushed the throttle.
The BMW lunged.
And the difference became obvious in the most brutal way: the police cars didn't just fall behind—
They aged behind him like old men who couldn't keep up with the younger generation.
Their headlights shrank like someone was dimming them. Their sirens thinned, stretched into a distant complaint. The BMW's acceleration was clean violence—each upshift a snap, each surge a declaration that the laws other cars lived under didn't apply here. The M3 didn't build speed. It took it.
Jacob blew past a pickup in the middle lane, then a sedan, then another—lane changes crisp and surgical. No wobble, no hesitation. Just a flick of input and the car obeying like it had been waiting for direction. Traffic was thicker than he expected for such a time of the night like the city didn't sleep—but the M3 treated the gaps like they were designed for it. Like the whole freeway was a puzzle meant to be solved at triple digits.
The first cruiser tried to follow his line and immediately lost it—not spinning, not crashing, just being forced to brake harder, being forced to accept the truth of its own mass. The Crown Vic was a battering ram. The BMW was a blade. The Vic couldn't do delicate. Not at this speed. Not between civilian cars that would panic and drift and create new hazards with every flinch.
Jacob watched it happen in the mirror like a lesson delivered in real time—one harsh second of "they can't" and "you can."
Above, the helicopter kept pace better than the cars, spotlight sliding along him like a leash. The beam stayed glued to the hood, unwavering, as if the sky itself had decided he didn't get to be unseen anymore.
Then a second helicopter appeared in the distance—different angle, different movement, smoother in its tracking. It didn't hover like police air support hunting a corner.
It paced.
Not police.
A news chopper from a news station somewhere in this city.
Jacob didn't realize it at first. He just saw another set of running lights and assumed the sky was filled with eyes—because it was. Because that was what it felt like: the whole city turning its head.
But then he heard it—not over the police radio chatter, not through sirens, but through a strange bleed of sound as the cabin picked up a nearby frequency. A faint voice, excited in a way cops never were.
"…we're live—yes, we're live right now channel five news —this is unprecedented—"
The voice was thrilled and scared in equal measure, like the person speaking couldn't decide whether they were witnessing history or a tragedy.
A second voice—older, anchoring—slid in with practiced calm.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are interrupting our scheduled programming with breaking news out of Los Angeles—an ongoing high-speed pursuit on the freeway. You are looking at live helicopter footage—again, live—of a suspect vehicle—"
Jacob's eyes flicked up instinctively, finally, finally he knew where he was and felt cold dread pool as he realized just how and why he recognized that officer earlier, catching his own car's reflection in the windshield—hood's blue-and-silver ghost staring back like a brand.
" No fucking way ....."
"—moving at speeds that appear to be well over one hundred and twenty miles per hour—"
In 2001, live TV still had a rawness to it. Less polish. More static around the edges. You could almost hear the analog. But the country loved a chase. It was something primal: watching a man try to outrun the net, watching fate unfold from the safety of a couch, pretending it wasn't real until it turned into a crash and then turning away with a hand over the mouth.
Jacob felt the realization sink in with sudden, cold weight. As he finally clocked just where he was... and when, faces from that crowd he had blown by early clearing in his head like an edit.
" FUUUUCK, there's no FUCKING WAY"
He wasn't just being hunted anymore.
He was being seen.
Across the city. Across the state. Across the country—because cable networks would pick up the feed, replay it, loop it, let people call in and speculate. They'd zoom in on the paint job. On the way the car moved. On the black helmet that hid a face. They'd freeze-frame him and argue about the model and the year and whether the driver was a professional or just insane.
He imagined his old world for a second—some version of him in a different timeline—watching this chase in a bar, half drunk, pointing at the screen and saying, That guy's crazy.
The thought made his stomach go hollow.
Jacob's breath turned ragged in the helmet, fog thickening at the visor's edges. His heart hammered like it was trying to outrun his body.
And the HUD pinged again—like it had been waiting for this exact escalation, like it was pleased.
EVENT: NATIONAL BROADCAST
SPONSOR INTEREST DETECTED
CASH BONUS: +$5,000 / MINUTE (LIVE PURSUIT)
NOTE: STAY VISIBLE TO MAXIMIZE EARNINGS.
Stay visible.
The words slid under his ribs like a cold wire even as panic flared at the situation.
The system wasn't merely rewarding survival—it was rewarding spectacle. Turning him into content. Turning his escape into a performance that paid better the more people watched. It didn't want him safe, it didn't care for it.
It wanted him memorable.
And part of him—the part that hated quiet, the part that feared stopping because stopping meant thinking—felt a sick, magnetic pull toward it. A little dark thrill that made him hate himself immediately for feeling it, it was nicer not to think, just let the powers that be take control of a situation far beyond his control.
He shifted lanes again—clean, barely a twitch of the wheel.
A car honked, an angry startled blast, as Jacob slid past inches from its front bumper. He saw the driver's face for a heartbeat—shock, anger, fear—then it vanished behind him like everything else.
" sorry ..."
The BMW didn't wobble. It didn't argue. It simply went—stable at speed in a way the police cars couldn't even dream of.
Behind him, the lead Crown Vic finally hit its limit. You could see it in the way it stopped gaining. In the way it started to hold position like a man sprinting against a treadmill that kept speeding up. The driver wanted more, but the machine had already confessed it didn't have it.
The siren became a distant complaint.
The helicopter light remained—because the sky didn't need to corner him; it only needed to track him.
Jacob glanced at the mirror again, and for a moment, in the far flicker of emergency lights, he saw the same steadiness from before—one cruiser holding a smarter line, not pushing to match speed, just refusing to vanish.
" fast and furious huh ... i see " His brows knit as he finally registered the face staring through the cops windshield.
Brian.
Still there.
Still hunting.
Jacob's jaw tightened under the helmet padding, and his throat ached with emotion he didn't have time to name. Confusion. Fear. The tremor of exhilaration that felt like betrayal of every promise he'd ever made to "do better." The awful certainty that he was good at this in a way that made the rest of his life feel like a failure.
The news voice kept talking somewhere above and behind, describing him like a storm.
"…the suspect vehicle appears to be a BMW with a distinctive blue-and-silver paint scheme—"
"…we have never seen a unit fall back like that—"
"…police are advising motorists to clear the area—"
Jacob's HUD ticked upward like a hungry clock.
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $60,000
CHASE MULTIPLIER: x3.1
LIVE BONUS BANKED: $10,000
TOTAL CHASE EARNINGS (CURRENT): $78,400
Numbers that would've meant salvation in his old life.
Numbers that now felt like chains made of gold—heavy, gleaming, tightening.
Traffic thickened ahead, red taillights compressing into a slow-moving cluster. The freeway curved and narrowed under an overpass, concrete pillars rising like teeth. Brake lights glittered like a warning.
Jacob's hands tightened.
His instincts screamed: this is where speed stops being a shield and becomes a blade that can cut you.
And somewhere behind him, the cops were counting on that.
Because even if they couldn't outrun him—
They could wait for the road to do it for them.
He inhaled, helmet filling with the sound of his own fear. His lungs felt too small. His vision narrowed to the seam between lanes as bright brake lights streaked across his vison, the next gap, the next breath.
Then he made a choice not with words, but with pressure—foot, throttle and commitment.
The BMW surged toward the bottleneck like a loosened arrow.
The helicopter spotlight held him as it watched.
The news chopper kept filming despite the impending tragedy.
Across the country, millions of eyes were about to learn the shape of a myth: a black-helmeted driver in a car that looked like a blur, moving faster than anything on the road had any right to move.
Taillights compressed ahead—an artery clogging.
The freeway bent under the overpass, lanes tightening, concrete pillars rising like blunt teeth. He saw it the way you see a trap closing: not as a single obstacle, but as a chain of consequences. Brake lights bloomed red in waves. Cars tightened their spacing instinctively, people sensing something wrong before they understood why. The air itself felt heavier, the kind of pressure that comes right before something breaks, like a gut feeling you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Behind him, the sirens were chasing futilely—because chokepoints were where heavy cars earned their keep. Crown Vics couldn't win a sprint, but they could win a squeeze. They didn't need to catch him on open road if the freeway could do the slowing for them.
Above, the helicopter spotlight still pinned him—an accusing white circle sliding across his hood, refusing to let the night swallow him. It made him feel exposed in a way the sirens didn't. Like the sky had its finger on him and wasn't going to lift it.
And somewhere just off to the side of the sky, the news chopper hung back at a safer angle, its camera locked, its voice spilling into living rooms across the country. He could almost imagine it: families on couches, beer cans on coffee tables, someone leaning forward and saying, holy shit, like this was entertainment instead of a man trying not to die.
Jacob's breath was loud inside the helmet.
Too loud.
Like the helmet was trying to reduce him to nothing but a heartbeat and fog. Inhale—storm. Exhale—heat. The visor hazed at the edges, and for a second it felt like he was drowning inside his own gear.
He flicked his eyes to the HUD.
HEAT: 4
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $60,000
CHASE MULTIPLIER: x3.1
LIVE BONUS: +$5,000 / MINUTE
TOTAL (CURRENT): $78,400
The numbers made his stomach twist with a kind of shame. In his old world, that money would've saved his life and people who needed it to survive—lawyer fees, bail, the chance to buy time and oxygen. A clean start. A chance to wake up without panic already sitting on his chest.
Here, it was a leash made of gold.
He forced his focus forward with bulging veins.
He didn't slam the brakes—braking was surrender at this speed—but he bled off just enough velocity to become a needle instead of a hammer. The BMW's nose dipped, suspension compressing, then settled. The car stayed obedient, poised, like it trusted him even when he didn't trust himself.
His hands moved in small, exact increments—left, right, left—finding the seams between cars like he was reading a language the road was speaking directly into his palms. He could feel the micro-corrections in his fingertips, the tire contact patches talking back through the wheel, the car's weight shifting in clean, predictable ways.
A minivan drifted, startled by sirens, the driver's head whipping in mirrors.
He slipped past it so close he saw the driver's face flash pale in his peripheral vision—wide eyes, mouth open around a silent swear. The side mirror missed his fender by inches. Air buffeted the car as he went by, a sudden shove of wind and fear.
The BMW's engine stayed sharp—angry, contained. Like a knife held still.
Behind him, the first Crown Vic reached the same bottleneck and lost its courage. Its front end dove hard under braking, tires squealing, the big body rolling with the kind of weight that didn't forgive sudden decisions. It couldn't do what Jacob was doing without turning every civilian car into shrapnel. Not without taking half the freeway with it.
The pack bunched.
Police radios erupted, overlapping voices through older microphones and harsher static—panic fighting procedure.
"Traffic—traffic—he's threading traffic—"
"Air unit, where is he—?"
"He's still on the freeway—northbound—he's—he's cutting through—"
Jacob's throat tightened as he listened to them broadcasting his location. He swallowed and tasted stale heat. His hands ached from tension, tendons burning under the gloves. The muscles in his forearms trembled from holding too hard, like he was trying to strangle the steering wheel into obeying.
His world narrowed to gaps and timing and the brutal certainty that one mistake would end in metal and fire and a headline.
The helicopter light above jittered as it adjusted to the crowd of moving vehicles below. He could feel that light like pressure on his skin even through metal and glass—could feel it tracking, could feel it refusing to let him slip into anonymity.
And then—
A ping.
Clean. Bright. Unfairly calm against the chaos.
Another system message sliding into his vision like it owned the space behind his eyes.
Not from the police. Not from the radio.
From inside him.
The HUD pulsed so brightly it felt like a camera flash behind his eyes—white-blue light flaring across his vision until his stomach lurched and his brain flinched away like it had been struck. For a split second he saw nothing but that glare, like the world had been wiped and rewritten.
VEHICLE EXP GAINED: +250
LEVEL UP AVAILABLE
BOUND VEHICLE: BMW M3 GTR
LEVEL: 1 → 2
His breath caught so hard the visor fogged in a sudden bloom. The fog rolled up from the bottom edge like smoke, stealing the corners of his view, and for a heartbeat he couldn't inhale again—like his lungs had stalled on disbelief. Like his body was waiting for permission to keep living.
"Now?" he whispered, voice muffled in the helmet, small and helpless and furious all at once—like he was talking to a god that only spoke in menus.
No answer.
No reassurance.
Just the cold, merciless continuation of a system that didn't care how overwhelmed he was—only that it was time.
Text scrolled with calm inevitability, the way a printer spits out a receipt no matter what you're feeling, no matter what it costs you.
LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED: STAGE-1 SYNCHRONIZATION
AUTO-INSTALLED: ECU CALIBRATION (2026-LEGAL EMULATION)
AUTO-INSTALLED: DRIVETRAIN REINFORCEMENT
AUTO-INSTALLED: AERO STABILITY (+HIGH-SPEED CONTROL)
PASSIVE: DURABILITY INCREASE (MINOR)
NOTE: SHOP ACCESS REMAINS LOCKED DURING CHASE
He felt it before he understood it. As that stubborn hope that maybe just maybe he could indeed get out of this resurfaced.
The car tightened.
Not louder—sharper. Like someone had taken a blade to the edges of everything and honed it. The throttle response became almost rude—an instant, impatient bite instead of a request. The BMW's pull stopped being enthusiastic and became feral, like something deep in the engine bay had just been unclipped and told it was allowed to be what it was.
The chassis felt… braced. Like it had set its shoulders. The way a fighter squares up after taking the first hit. The way a predator settles into the run once it decides it's done playing.
He stomach dropped with the realization, cold as swallowed water:
The system was upgrading him in real time.
And it was doing it while he was surrounded by civilians.
A sick heat crawled up his neck under the helmet padding. Sweat prickled under the suit, trapped and slick. His thoughts tripped over each other—this is insane, this is dangerous, this is— and then that other thought, the poisonous one, slid in underneath like a hand finding a weak spot. Like temptation always did when you were scared.
Use it.
Prove it.
Disappear.
The BMW surged at the slightest increase in throttle, as if it had been waiting for permission to stop pretending. The car didn't accelerate so much as lunge, devouring the space ahead with a kind of offended urgency—like it resented the idea of limitation.
He cleared the bottleneck as hands gripped the wheel, slammed back into the seat as the G-force swallowed him.
Open lanes appeared ahead—brief, blessed stretches of freeway where the city lights smeared into streaks and the horizon became a single dark promise. For a heartbeat it felt like he'd broken the net, like the road had finally chosen him instead of them, like the city itself had blinked and looked away.
He exhaled, shaky.
And the car answered by eating distance.
The speedometer climbed through numbers that felt irresponsible to even look at. One-twenty. One-thirty. One-forty. Past the point where speed is thrilling and into the place where it becomes religious, where you stop thinking in miles per hour and start thinking in survival.
Beyond what felt sane.
Beyond what felt like living.
The older police sedans faded behind him completely, sirens thinning into a distant complaint, a nagging sound that couldn't reach him anymore. Like a voice yelling from the other side of a closing door.
But the helicopters remained like an annoying fly refusing to fuck off.
The spotlight continued to track him, as he screeched across the road.
For a few seconds, it felt like the sky was the one place that could keep up—like gravity had its own police department, like the only thing faster than him was consequence.
Then the Level 2 tuning fully took hold.
The BMW's top-end pull—already brutal—became obscene. The engine note stretched higher, cleaner, a hard sustained scream that didn't wobble with effort. The car settled into a long, relentless acceleration that felt less like driving and more like being launched, like the freeway had turned into a runway and he'd just crossed the point of no return.
Jacob's vision tunneled as the world began to blur. The freeway signs flicked past so fast they blurred into green flashes, too quick to read, too quick to process. Wind noise rose into a constant roar that pressed against his helmet like hands trying to shove him back into the seat, flattening him into the machine.
He didn't feel like he was going fast.
He felt like the world was slowing down out of fear.
Then the helicopter spotlight began to lag, At first it was subtle—the circle of light drifting backward on the hood, sliding from center to the rear edge as the chopper struggled to maintain position without dipping too low, without risking itself over traffic.
Then it became undeniable.
The beam slipped off him entirely for a heartbeat, scrabbled back, caught him again… then slid away as if pulled by an invisible tide. Like the sky itself was losing its grip.
On the police frequency, the air unit's voice cracked with something that wasn't procedure.
"Air-One to ground, he's—he's pulling away. I'm at max safe speed—he's—Jesus—we're losing him!"
Another voice, sharper—authority fraying into panic:
"How the hell is he outrunning AIR?" The news chopper's audio bled through again, excited and suddenly uncertain, like the story had just stopped being fun.
"—we're… we're having difficulty maintaining visual—our pilot says the suspect vehicle is accelerating beyond" He paused in disbelief"—beyond what we can safely match—"
You could hear the disbelief on live television. Hear the moment where those watching had their breath robbed from their lungs.
The anchor tried to keep composure, but their voice rose anyway, a curse biting behind their lips.
"Are you telling us the vehicle is—what—outrunning the helicopters?"
The pilot's voice came through—strained, professional, with the undertone of someone doing mental math…