The alley emptied fast after she ran—heels clicking wildly into the night until the sound dissolved into the city's constant roar—and Alex was left alone with three broken men sprawled at his feet like discarded puppets, rain still hammering down but now sounding muffled, distant, as if the world had turned the volume knob on everything except the low, relentless thrum inside his own skull; he looked down at the shaved-head guy who'd taken the first hit, chest rising in shallow, ragged pulls, blood bubbling dark at the corner of his mouth, pooling with rainwater in little crimson swirls, and Alex waited for the emotion to come—guilt, satisfaction, even a flicker of righteous anger—but it didn't arrive; there was only a flat, clinical observation: the man was still breathing, his pulse visible under bruised skin, and that fact registered without heat or revulsion, like noting the weather or the time; the system chimed softly, almost intimate, the text scrolling across his inner vision with the same cold precision as before: [Minor Harvest Done. Energy production is enough for secondary augmentation. Reward: Better sensory acuity (+25%) and a reflex prediction matrix (Level 1). Price: Neural desensitization stage 2: expected loss of 3–5% of the emotional range. Accept? Y/N; his mental thumb hesitated over the invisible Y, and for a heartbeat he tried to push something—anything—to come up: rage at these thugs for what they were going to do, sad for the woman whose fear he'd seen, perhaps a little bit of pride in how well he had done what he had just done; but it was like reaching into fog, His fingers passed through mist and closed on empty air. The feelings were still there, but they were thinner and fainter, like echoes bouncing off walls that were getting farther away. He accepted anyway, because refusing would mean going back to the old Alex—the one who had deleted his mother's last voicemail in shame instead of answering it, the one who had spent years surviving by looking away—and shrinking felt worse than losing another piece of himself. The upgrade rolled through him like a cold electric wave, lighting up his nerves one by one. Colors getting sharper till the neon turned into separate shimmering threads, and sounds became more detailed, like the sound of water dripping from a rusty fire escape. three storeys up, the lifeless man's throat was wet and gurgling, and the faint metallic smell of gun grease clung to the dropped guns. Suddenly, time seemed to stretch, ghostly shapes flickering at the corners of his vision: a head with no hair moving, a hand moving toward the secret dagger attached to his ankle, the path obvious as day before the movement even started; Alex stepped on the reaching wrist before it moved more than an inch, pressing down with enough force to grind bone against pavement without breaking it clean. The man hissed awake, his eyes wild with pain and sudden fear, pupils blown wide in the violet glow reflected off Alex's own irises. "Who the fuck are you?" he spat, voice thick and wet with blood, trying to twist free; Alex slowly crouched down, and rain dripped from the edge of his hood onto the man's face in slow, deliberate drops. He met the man's gaze without blinking, and the violet threads in his eyes pulsed faintly like dying stars. "Nobody," he said, his voice quieter than he meant it to be, flat but with an edge he didn't recognize, like a blade that had been sharpened too many times and forgotten what dull felt like. "Just a guy who used to look away." The man tried to lunge anyhow, in a desperate and sloppy way, with his throat muscles pulling against Alex's slack grip; Alex's hand moved faster than he could think, and his fingers closed around the windpipe with just the right amount of pressure—not crushing, just holding, enough to feel the frantic pulse hammering against his palm like a trapped bird. He leaned in close enough to smell the sour fear-sweat cutting through the blood and rain and whispered, "You were going to sell her." I could hear the exchange in my brain as clearly as if it were happening again: your boss's cut, her price tag, and the van waiting at the port. Tell him that the next girl he snatches might not have someone like me stroll by. Or maybe she will. And next time, I won't stop at shattered bones. He let go. Stood. Stepped back. The man gasped, curled up, and cried like a little, broken thing; Alex turned away and left them there in the rain like trash that no one would care to pick up. He moved farther into the alley toward the lamps that bled yellow into the rain. The city opened up around him. Taxis splashed through puddles, laughter came from a bar doorway far away, and the low growl of a motorcycle cut through traffic. For the first time, he realized how loud everything had gotten. Every sound had weight and texture: the heartbeats of people fifty feet away, the soft click of a lighter being flicked in an open window above, and the faint chemical bite of cocaine residue on a passing stranger's breath. But the louder the world got, the quieter he felt inside, like someone had slowly turned down the volume on his own feelings until they were just faint background noise, barely audible over the mechanical rhythm of his upgraded pulse. He stopped under a flickering streetlamp, looked at his open palm, and flexed it once. It was still his hand, still calloused from years of holding nothing worth holding, but it didn't feel like it was his anymore. It was like the skin was a borrowed suit that fit too well and not well enough at the same time. The system pinged one last time for the night. text scrolling with a calm sense of urgency: [Humanity Index: 91%. Trend: Going down. Recommendation: Find sources with larger yields to speed up evolution before baseline threats become too much for present capability to handle. Opportunity found: a Quinjet signature overhead at an altitude of 800 meters and a bearing of north-northeast. SHIELD's patrol pattern. Should he engage or avoid? Alex raised his head to the sky, rain streaming down his face, and his violet eyes narrowed as he picked out the faint engine hum above the storm. It was too high for normal ears, but his weren't normal anymore. Something inside him stirred, not quite hunger, not quite curiosity, but a cold, inevitable pull toward whatever came next. He muttered to the empty night, his voice low and steady, "Higher yield, huh?" Okay. "Show me where the real monsters are." The Quinjet flew over him, hidden in the clouds. Alex stepped out of the alley and into the street, which was already shifting and wet with rain. The city stretched out in front of him like an open wound waiting to be explored or taken advantage of.
[To be continued...