A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0040

Chapter 40

Jack woke up before his alarm clock and regretted it the very next second.

His body responded to the first movement with a chorus of protests that began in his shoulders, went down his back, and ended in his calves, each muscle demanding with interest what had been spent the previous night. He lay there for a full minute, staring at the stained ceiling of the room, negotiating with himself the terms of getting out of bed, and when he finally managed to sit up, the groan escaped uninvited, deep and long, the groan of a man thirty years older than he was.

The painkillers I’d swallowed in the early morning, two at once, with warm tap water, hadn’t even tickled. It wasn’t that kind of pain. Pharmacy medicine was made for the pain of someone who twisted their ankle going down stairs, not for a body that had spent an entire night being pushed beyond its own roof and held there, on the edge, while something with a mouth in the middle of its torso tried to turn it into dinner.

He dragged himself to the kitchen, bracing his hand against the wall twice along the way, and found Kevin already seated at the table, facing a mountain of scrambled eggs that filled the entire plate and threatened to overflow the edges. His friend ate with a fork in one hand and his cell phone in the other, his bare feet crossed under the chair, chewing with the absolute serenity of someone who owes nothing to the previous night.

And it shouldn’t have. That was the spot that hurt almost as much as the muscles. The bandage Jack had put on Kevin’s flank, where Doug’s tongue had torn the flesh almost to the ribs, was now lying in the sink trash, peeled off by its owner upon waking, and underneath it remained only a pink line of new skin, thin as a cat scratch. Kevin’s body had spent the night stitching itself up, without asking for advice, and the owner of that body had woken up hungry and nothing else.

Jack pulled out a chair, sat down slowly, groaned again halfway between standing and sitting, and Kevin looked up from his phone just enough to record the scene.

“You look like my grandfather getting out of the bathtub,” Kevin said, and went back to eating.

“Your grandfather never faced this.” Jack reached for the serving dish, poured himself a portion of eggs, and felt a pang run down his shoulder just from stretching out his arm. “If I had faced it, I would have been stuck in the bathtub forever.”

Kevin chuckled through his nose, in his own way, without interrupting his bite.

Unlike his friend, Jack’s body remained that of an ordinary human. The last few months of heavy training had done all they could. The expensive protein, the carefully calculated meals, the morning runs and the nights of weightlifting had put real meat on his bones, and the Jack of today was no longer the stretched skin and chronic fatigue he had arrived from Huntington. But muscle built with sweat doesn’t change category. He remained thin, remained relatively fragile by the standards of what their lives had become, and the suit still didn’t care in the slightest. The suit took the body it received and lifted it to the ceiling, and the ceiling was always the same, and the bill for keeping him up there was always paid the next morning, in installments of pain spread through every fiber.

Abusing the suit as he had abused it yesterday was like that. It was waking up feeling his own arms as if they were borrowed. And that was just the movements. He still had to add the blows he couldn’t avoid, the ones that abomination had landed even with all the agility the fabric gave it, the lash of the tongue that had thrown him against the fence, the impact that the suit’s shock absorbers had half absorbed and the other half sent straight to his ribs.

Jack brought the fork to his mouth, chewed slowly, and let his gaze drift to the corner of the kitchen, where the bags had spent the night leaning against the wall, one on top of the other, heavy, discreet, ordinary.

At least it was worth it.

Fifteen kilos. He and Kevin hadn’t weighed it precisely yet, but Jack’s arm knew how to estimate weight, and the three bags together weighed heavily in that house. Fifteen kilos of drugs snatched from the cartel on the worst night of their lives, and if the system responded to value, and it always had, that thing leaning against the kitchen wall could be the turning point. The leap that training hadn’t provided. The step their money hadn’t yet reached.

He took another bite and groaned mid-bite, because even chewing pulled at some neck muscle that had decided to join the general protest.

“The vest didn’t survive,” said Kevin, pushing the empty plate aside and leaning back in his chair, which creaked beneath him. “I checked it earlier today. The left side turned to a strip. I’ll have to owe you a few more nights of sewing.”

“I saw it.” Jack had seen it right then and there, still in the yard, the patchwork of two vests that had taken him weeks to assemble hanging in tatters from his friend’s torso. “I’ll make another one. This time I already know where it tears first.”

“It’s almost a luxury, isn’t it? A custom-made vest.” Kevin scratched his red beard, and something passed across his face, a quick shadow that Jack knew well, because it was the same one that passed over his when the memory of the night returned uninvited. “Man. That thing yesterday. I can still hear the sound of when he swallowed the dog.”

Jack didn’t answer immediately. He helped himself to more eggs, though his appetite had waned, and let the memory pass him by like a wave when there’s no time to get out of the water.

“It’s over,” he finally said. “What’s left of him, is left lying down.”

And it was true, and he knew it was true, because he had personally verified it. He had emptied the entire magazine into what had already fallen—heart, lungs, head, one by one—calmly, like someone checking, not killing, because he had seen that body rise from things no body can rise from, and he wasn’t willing to risk his own life on the word of death. No one comes back from that. Not even him.

The thought settled, but not quite. It remained somewhat crooked in the pit of his stomach, the way thoughts we choose to believe do. Jack pushed it down with the rest of his coffee and stood up from his chair, this time without groaning, out of sheer stubbornness.

“That’s it,” he said, indicating the corner with his chin. “We have fifteen kilos of conversation waiting in the shed.”

…

It was at the central table, the largest one, that the three bags were opened.

The packages came out one by one, plastic on top of plastic, compact and identical bricks, and Kevin weighed each batch on the platform scale they used for the weight plates, noting the partial weights on a piece of cardboard with a stub of pencil. When the last package came off the scale, he added it up, checked it, added it up again, and whistled softly.

“Fifteen kilos. A little overweight, actually.” He put down his pencil and looked at the white plastic-covered table with the reluctant respect of someone who understands what he’s seeing. “Man. This is expensive. Really expensive.”

“How much?”

Kevin didn’t answer right away. He paused for a moment, doing the calculations in his head, his lips moving slightly, and Jack waited, because on this particular matter, his friend’s word was worth more than his own. Kevin knew the numbers of that market the way one knows what one has studied out of necessity: street prices, wholesale prices, how much purity multiplied, how much the market inflated, the whole invisible map he had been building since their first robbery.

“Given the quality those guys were bragging about yesterday, and the shortage of good merchandise in the city since the war started…” He waved his hand, adjusting his estimate. “Between four hundred and five hundred thousand dollars. Easy.”

It was Jack’s turn to whistle. The number was bigger than anything that had ever passed through their hands, bigger than Doug’s safe, bigger than the sum of everything they had risked up to that point. Half a million dollars in gross value, piled on a warehouse table, waiting to become fuel.

“And how do you want to do it?” Kevin asked, crossing his arms. “Just one bite or several bites?”

It was the right question, and Jack had already spent half his breakfast chewing on the answer along with his eggs. A single offer, with all that concentrated value, pushed the odds upwards. The system had already proven this: the higher the bid, the greater the chance of getting something of a higher caliber. But the system had also proven the rest: that roulette was still roulette, that a high bid was no guarantee of usefulness, and that a single spin carrying half a million could return some marvel utterly useless for what they needed, and then there would be no second chance, no third, no consolation.

“I’m going to diversify,” he said. “It doesn’t always turn out to be something useful, and I doubt luck will be on my side all night. If I bet everything on one hand and it’s rubbish, we’ve wasted the whole night for nothing. Four medium bets give me four chances to hit something worthwhile.”

Kevin nodded slowly, agreeing. “Yeah. I was going to say the same thing. Just one bite is something only someone who trusts casinos would do.”

Jack went to the table and began to sort. He divided the packages into four piles of similar size, adjusting a brick here and another there until the piles were balanced in his eye and hand, each one worth, by Kevin’s calculations, something in the range of a hundred or so thousand dollars. When he finished, he took a step back, looked at the whole thing, and felt in his chest that mixture he had already learned to recognize but had never learned to tame: the expectation and the fear intertwined, the coldness of betting and the hunger to win.

He took the notebook out of the inside pocket and left it open on the counter, within reach, with the pen inserted in the spiral binding. Then he returned to the table, placed the palm of his hand on the first mound, and closed his eyes.

The darkness behind his eyelids had never been just darkness again. The mere thought of forming vanished, the weight in his hand vanished—the plastic, the bricks, everything, swallowed by nothingness with an ease that still sent a slight chill down his spine—and in place of the darkness, the die appeared. Spinning. The twenty faces rotating at high speed, numbers streaking across the darkness too quickly to be read, and Jack held his breath without realizing he was holding it, as he always did, while the spin lost momentum, and lost, and lost, until it finally stopped on a number he didn’t even register.

Because at that very moment a noise rang out beside him. A heavy, dry thud, of solid wood hitting the concrete floor.

Jack opened his eyes.

And he was impressed by what he saw.

🔱 THE LUGGAGE 🔱

Origin: Discworld (Terry Pratchett) Type: Wondrous Item (Sentient Construct Companion) Rarity: Rare Attunement: Required (binds to an owner for life)

Description: The Luggage is a large suitcase made of sentient pear wood. Hundreds of tiny feet sprout from its underside, and it moves with surprising speed, creaking with teeth embedded in its lid. Described as “half suitcase, half homicidal maniac,” it’s a savage fighter. Despite its aggressive nature, it’s an ergonomic masterpiece: self-supporting, lightweight, and with a seemingly bottomless interior, capable of holding nearly nine hundred kilograms without ever becoming heavier for its bearer. It devours potential thieves with savage pleasure, becoming the ultimate solution for anti-theft storage.

Chaotic Ally: Forms a peculiar bond with its owner and becomes fiercely protective, attacking and devouring anyone who threatens it. Not the ideal companion for most groups… but it’s extremely funny.

❖ Note from the Gate of Chaos: “A loyal and hungry companion who carries your treasures, follows you through cities and worlds, and devours anyone foolish enough to touch what is yours. Just… don’t anger him. Or leave him hungry. Or bored.”

Estimated lot value: US$180,000 – US$350,000

Before him, on the concrete of the shed, lay a chest.

It was large, about the size of an old suitcase, made of light, ornate wood, with dark hardware on the corners and a domed lid. Standing there, motionless, it looked exactly like what it appeared to be: a beautiful and expensive trunk, the kind of furniture found in the bedrooms of wealthy people, and nothing more.

Jack took a step, stretched out his hand, and touched the lid.

And at that very instant he pulled his hand back and leaped back, because the lid swung open by itself, and from its dark recess projected rows of large, square, wooden teeth, which snapped shut in mid-air with a biting click a hand’s breadth from where his fingers had been. Before Jack had finished retreating, the bottom of the chest bubbled, and feet sprouted from beneath the wood. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Tiny, absurd, pink feet that all touched the concrete at once and lifted the chest off the ground like a centipede lifting its own body.

And the trunk started to run.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”, Kevin yelled, climbing onto the nearest bench with an agility that his size wouldn’t suggest.

The trunk shot around them in circles, swiftly, its tiny feet drumming on the concrete in a continuous thud, the lid opening and closing with dry jaw clicks, spinning ever tighter, leaping over a fallen washer, ricocheting off the side of the table without missing a beat. Jack already had his notebook in hand, pen uncapped, his eyes darting from the creature to the screen and from the screen back to the creature, trying to copy the information before it disappeared, but it was impossible. He couldn’t write with that thing orbiting them like a crazed wooden dog, he couldn’t take his eyes off a thing with teeth that changed direction every second, and when he finally managed to steady the pen on the paper and looked up to reread the first line on the screen, the screen was no longer there.

Disappeared. Dissolved into thin air like all the others, only this time taking with her everything he hadn’t had time to record.

“Damn it…” Jack squeezed his eyes shut, frustration rising bitterly. The damn information. He’d skimmed it, quickly, just enough to grasp the essentials, but the details, the exact capabilities, the fine print disclaimers that always mattered more than they seemed—all of that had vanished with the screen, and the creature responsible kept circling around them as if it were the most amusing thing in the world.

“STOP!”, Jack shouted.

And the trunk stopped.

It stopped abruptly, in the middle of a curve, all its little feet planted on the ground at the same time, the trunk lid slightly open, and it stood there, facing Jack, in such complete and sudden stillness that the silence that followed seemed to have texture. Kevin, still standing on the seat, looked from the creature to Jack and from Jack to the creature, unable to decide whether to get off.

Jack took a deep breath. Something had happened the moment of the first touch, he realized now, at the end of his breath. It hadn’t just been the shock. It had been a connection, a brief, profound sensation of something clinging to him, the way the suit had clung to him on the first day, and the word the screen used for it was still fresh in his memory. It bonds with an owner for life. The bite in the air hadn’t been an attack. It had been a handshake.

He approached again, slowly, and this time, when his hand landed on the lid, the chest yielded. The wood was warm under his palm, warm in a way that no wood has the right to be, and it vibrated slightly, in a low, steady rhythm that absurdly resembled a purr.

Kevin got off the bench. He approached with measured steps, curiosity overcoming prudence inch by inch, and stopped beside Jack.

“Dude,” he said, his voice still a little too loud. “What is that?”

And he reached out to touch it as well.

The trunk spun on its own feet with a sharp speed and snapped at the air where Kevin’s fingers had been half a second before, its wooden teeth clicking like a door slamming, and Kevin took two full steps back, his hand pressed against his chest, cursing in one breath.

“I don’t know exactly,” Jack replied, a hint of laughter underlining his words, the nervous laughter of someone still deciding whether the situation is dangerous or hilarious. “The screen disappeared before I could write it down. From what I read, it’s some kind of extradimensional compartment. A cargo hold. Except…” He looked at the creature, which had now turned back to him and settled on the floor, its little feet tucked in, the lid ajar. “Except it’s sentient. And apparently it decides who touches it.”

“He decided that I wouldn’t.”

“He decided that you wouldn’t.”

The chest, as if wanting to end the matter, opened its lid a little more, and a tongue unrolled from within. A long, red, moist tongue, absolutely impossible in a wooden box, which hung out of the lid and swayed slightly while the creature breathed, if it breathed at all, in a rhythmic panting like a dog in the heat. A drop of saliva trickled from the tip of the tongue and dripped onto the concrete.

Kevin stared at that for a long moment.

“Is he… drooling?”

“Yes.”

“The trunk is drooling, Jack.”

“I can see that, Kevin.”

The two stared at the creature, and the creature stared back at them, in whatever way it could look, and their tongues kept dripping, and at some point in that impasse, laughter won. It started with Kevin, a snort through his nose that escaped control, and infected Jack soon after, and for a few seconds the two truly laughed, in the middle of the shed, next to a table with a third of a million dollars worth of drugs and a love-struck trunk, and the accumulated tension of the previous night came out along with the laughter, a little of it at least, enough.

“This is really interesting,” Jack said when he caught his breath, crouching down in front of the creature to examine it closely. “What will its limit be?” He searched his memory for what he had managed to read before the screen disappeared, forcing the details to return. “There was a number there. Close to nine hundred kilos, if I read that right. Nine hundred kilos in a space that, from the outside, is this size.”

Kevin whistled softly, keeping, Jack noted, a respectful distance. “Impressive. Weird as hell, but incredibly useful. Think about it. We’ll never carry a bag on a getaway again. Just throw everything in and it… follows?”

“Looks like it’s going after him.” Jack stood up and jotted down in his notebook what his memory had saved, writing quickly, in bullet points, before anything else slipped out. Extradimensional compartment, capacity close to nine hundred kilos, sentient, aggressive towards strangers, permanent bond with its owner. He underlined the last part twice. Then he looked again at the trunk, which had crept half a meter toward him while he was writing, as discreet as a cupboard could be. “And it devours thieves. That’s what I remember being written. With pleasure, the screen said.”

“Devour it.” Kevin repeated the word slowly, looking at the row of wooden teeth under the half-open lid. “Like, eat it.”

“Like what.”

“We found a safe that eats people.”

“We got a safe that eats people,” Jack confirmed, and tucked the pen into the spiral binding of his notebook. In his mind, its usefulness was already unfolding in layers: transport, hiding place, bodyguard, and each layer alone was worth the mountain of drugs it had cost. He turned to his friend. “Shall we move on to the next one?”

Kevin nodded, and the two returned to the table, where now three piles remained. The trunk followed, its little feet drumming softly on the concrete, and settled two steps from Jack as if taking up a post.

Jack placed his hand on the second mound and closed his eyes.

The weight vanished. The die spun in the dark, its faces marking numbers, the spin loosening turn after turn until it settled on a result, and this time the sound from outside was faint, a light tap of an object landing on the wooden table. Jack opened his eyes, and the recognition was instantaneous, and a smile came with it.

🔱 MEESEEKS BOX 🔱

Origin: Rick and Morty Type: Wondrous Item Rarity: Rare (Chaos) Attunement: Not Required Usage: One activation per day (renews at dawn)

Description: A small blue box covered in strange symbols. When activated and a clear, specific task is spoken aloud, it instantly creates a Meeseeks: a blue humanoid being whose sole purpose is to complete that exact task and then cease to exist.

Effect: Upon opening the box and setting a single clear task, a Meeseeks appears and works tirelessly to complete it. As soon as the task is finished, it happily disappears in a cloud of smoke.

Limitations and Chaos: The task must be specific and achievable. Vague or impossible requests cause Meeseeks to become frustrated, violent, and chaotic. A Meeseeks that remains in existence for too long goes insane.

❖ Note from the Gate of Chaos: “Existence is a pain for a Meeseeks… unless the task is simple. Then they become disturbingly cheerful.”

Estimated lot value: US$90,000 – US$160,000

On the table, where there had previously been a pile of packages, there was now a small blue box, about the size of a music box, its surface covered in symbols that didn’t belong to any alphabet Kevin could recognize, with a round button on top.

This time Jack left nothing to chance. Before anything else, even before touching the item, he copied the entire screen into his notebook, line by line, his pen moving rapidly, and only let his attention wander when the last detail was securely on the paper. Then he allowed himself to smile again, satisfied, looking at the object as if rediscovering an old joke.

Kevin approached him over his shoulder. “Dude, what’s that?”

“That, my friend,” said Jack, “is a Meeseeks Box.”

“And what exactly does she do?”

Jack opened his mouth to explain. He didn’t have time. Kevin, driven by the same curiosity that had almost cost him his fingers ten minutes earlier and seemingly unable to learn from it, had already grabbed the box from the table, turned the object over in his large hands, found the button on top, and pressed it.

There was a puff. A soft, almost comical sound, and a small cloud of bluish dust dissolved in the air beside the table, and where there had been nothing, there was now someone. A humanoid being, the height of a man, entirely blue from head to toe, a smooth body without too much detail, a wide face open in a huge smile, large, round eyes fixed on them with an enthusiasm that no living creature should be able to sustain.

“Hellooo!”, said the thing, raising its hand in a wave. “I am Mr. Meeseeks! Look at me!”

Kevin stepped back two meters across the warehouse without his feet seeming to have participated in the process, bumped into the bench, almost fell, balanced himself on the sewing table, and pointed at the creature with his arm fully outstretched.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”

In that same fraction of a second, the trunk moved. It slid half a meter toward the newcomer, its little feet poised, the lid slowly opening in a toothy yawn, and Jack had to divide his own voice between the two problems.

“Calm down! Calm down. You, be quiet.” This was directed at the chest, with his palm outstretched towards it, and the wooden creature froze halfway down, annoyed, if wood even knew how to be annoyed. “And you, calm down too,” he said to Kevin. “He’s just a Meeseeks.”

“Just one what?”

“A Meeseeks.” Jack positioned himself between his friend and the blue creature, which remained standing in the same spot, smiling, swaying slightly on its heels, waiting. “Basically, the sole purpose of one of these beings is to complete a goal. Just one. You give it the task, it completes it, and disappears. That’s what it’s there for. That’s all it wants.”

Kevin looked at the creature over Jack’s shoulder. The creature nodded to him, beaming.

“What do you mean, it disappears?”

Jack smiled, turned to the blue creature, and pointed to the nearest pile of packages on the table.

“Mr. Meeseeks. Get that package for me and hand it to my friend.”

“You can leave it!”, sang the creature, and off it went. It crossed the shed in bouncy steps, circled the trunk with a cheerful sway, completely oblivious to the wooden teeth that accompanied every inch of the journey, picked up the package from the top of the pile with both hands, crossed back across and placed it, with ceremonious delicacy, in Kevin’s hands, who received it the way one receives anything from a hallucination, with rigid arms and a body leaning back.

“All done!”, announced Mr. Meeseeks, widening his grin to show another tooth, and then he exploded.

There was no violence in the explosion. It was a puff identical to the first one, the little blue cloud opening and dissolving in the air, and where there had been a creature, there was now nothing, no smell, no remains, no sound, only Kevin holding a packet of drugs with the expression of a man who needs to sit down.

“Basically, that’s it,” Jack said. “It fulfills its purpose and ceases to exist. Happy, in fact. You saw his face. There’s no creature more satisfied in the multiverse than a Meeseeks the second he’s finished his job.”

“Dude. This is insane.” Kevin dropped the package back on the table and rubbed his hands on his pants, as if they’d touched something that needed to come off. “What world is this from?”

“It’s a long explanation. I’ll explain the whole thing later.” Jack picked up the small blue box from the edge of the table where Kevin had dropped it in fright and carefully put it away. “What matters is this. As long as the requests are simple, quick, and specific, they work. Get this, open that, distract so-and-so. It takes minutes. Now, pay attention, because this part is serious.” He waited for Kevin’s eyes to meet his. “We use them sparingly. A Meeseeks that stays alive for too long, let’s say, without being able to finish the task, starts to go crazy. And a crazy Meeseeks doesn’t disappear. It stays. Frustrated, violent, and getting worse and worse. So no vague requests, no long tasks, no ‘solve my life.’ Surgical requests or no requests at all.”

Kevin nodded, and nodded again, but his eyes kept returning to the point in the air where the creature had existed. There was something about that form that had lodged itself within him and didn’t want to leave, Jack realized. The blue color, the overly wide smile, the way it resembled a human without quite being one, and how every detail, whether missing or superfluous, pulled the whole thing toward a place that instinct refused to accept. Kevin had faced a man with a mouth on his stomach the night before and had fought him hand-to-hand. But the mouth-man was a monster, and instinct understands monsters. A smiling thing that is born happy, serves happily, and dies happy was another kind of wrong.

“He was… happy to disappear,” Kevin said, half to himself.

“It was the best time of his life.”

“That’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever said to me. And believe me, you’ve said a lot of crap to me.”

Jack laughed and returned to the table. Two piles. The day had been incredibly lucky for him, something he couldn’t remember ever having in his life: two rare items in two rolls, both useful, one possibly transformative, and an old, wary part of him, the part raised in Huntington, immediately went on guard, because all that part knew about luck was that it charges. Let’s see if it holds up.

He placed his hand on the third hill. He closed his eyes.

The weight vanished, the die spun, the spin died. And this time the replacement happened in his own hand, the bulk of the packages exchanged for something small, compact, with a smooth, cold surface, that fit entirely in his palm. Jack opened his eyes, and the recognition came even before the screen, it came from the depths of childhood, and brought with it a warm and immediate wave of memory, entire afternoons in front of a tube television at a neighbor’s house, a skinny boy running away from his own address to watch a boy with impossible hair searching for spheres around the world.

🔱 DRAGON RADAR 🔱

Origin: Dragon Ball Type: Wondrous Item Rarity: Uncommon Attunement: Not Required

Description: A small, portable radar device with a bright screen. Originally designed to locate the Dragon Balls.

Effect: When activated, it indicates for a few minutes the direction and approximate distance of the nearest Dragon Balls within a radius of a few kilometers.

❖ Note from the Gate of Chaos: “Sometimes, the greatest treasure is knowing where the real treasure is hidden.”

Estimated lot value: US$45,000 – US$85,000

In the palm of his hand rested a light green metal disc, with a round glass screen in the center and a button on top, small enough to fit in a pocket, unmistakable to anyone who had had the childhood he had. The animation inside it lasted exactly as long as it took reason to catch up with it.

Because the truth has arrived, and it has arrived with the bill.

There are no spheres here.

There were no Dragon Balls in this world. There was no dragon to summon, no wish to make, nothing that made that object, in its universe of origin, possibly the most valuable item in existence. What Jack held in his hand was the key to a door that didn’t exist on this side, and disappointment slowly crept over him, strangely mixed with affection, because it was difficult to truly be angry with something that had once been one of the few refuges in his life.

He wrote everything down in his notebook anyway, every single line, because a rule was a rule and information kept inside didn’t take up space.

Kevin reached over his shoulder, looked at the object, and frowned.

“Is it a clock?”

“No.” Jack shook his head, twirling the disc between his fingers. “This here, if we were in his original world, might be the most valuable thing we’d ever laid our hands on. Like, no exaggeration. People would destroy cities for it.”

“And here?”

“Here it’s only good as a paperweight.”

“And what does he basically do?”

“In his world, he tracks down these orbs. Seven. You gather all seven, summon a giant dragon, and the dragon grants a wish. Any wish.” Jack let the sentence sink in and watched Kevin’s eyebrows rise at the exact speed of understanding. “That’s right. Resurrecting people, becoming immortal, whatever you want. If we were there, this little thing here would be the ultimate treasure map. But we’re not there. No orb, no dragon, no wish.”

Kevin nodded slowly, glancing at the radar with the brief grief of someone who understood the magnitude of what had happened. “An item that can’t be used is a useless item.”

“Yes.” Jack pressed the top button once, just to be sure. The screen lit up a soft green, drew a thin grid of lines, swept a complete circle with a discreet beep, and showed nothing. Empty. Not a single dot. He waited for the scan to complete another turn, and another, and the screen remained clean, confirming with its machine honesty that within a radius of kilometers around that shed, there was absolutely nothing legendary besides them.

“Last,” he said, turning to the table.

The last pile awaited. Jack approached, and this time, instead of just placing his hand on it, he gripped the entire bundle against his chest, feeling its weight one last time, the weight of over a hundred thousand dollars about to become a wager. He closed his eyes. He concentrated.

The die spun. It spun longer this time, or seemed to spin, its faces swirling in the dark in a buzz of numbers, and Jack watched the spin slowly, slowly lose momentum until it stopped.

The weight vanished from his arms.

And nothing appeared.

No thud on the floor. No tapping on the table. No new volume against his chest. Outside his eyelids, the shed continued to emit exactly the same sounds as before, and Kevin’s voice arrived with the audible grimace of someone watching a die fall wrong.

“I think this rollout was worse than the previous one.”

But Jack didn’t open his eyes. Because inside, in the darkness where the die had stopped, a screen was being drawn.

🔱 TALENT: FIGHTING EXPERT 🔱

Origin: Gate of Chaos (combat talent) Type: Talent (permanent, engraved on the bearer) Rarity: Uncommon Attunement: Not Required

Description: Accustomed to bar fights and using anything as a weapon, or your own fists when nothing else is available, you have honed a brutal and pragmatic fighting style.

Effect: You receive the following benefits: • Permanently strengthen your body: choose between strength or vigor. • Your unarmed strikes become significantly more dangerous, and any object in your hands becomes an efficient weapon. • When striking an opponent with an unarmed strike or an improvised weapon, your instinct naturally finds the opening to grab and control them.

Fighting Style: You fight dirty and efficiently. Chairs, bottles, pool cues, and your own fists are all valid weapons in your hands. You excel at transforming chaotic brawls into controlled violence.

❖ Note from the Gate of Chaos: “Sometimes, the most dangerous weapon isn’t a blade or a spell… it’s the guy who’s been in so many fights he’s lost count, and knows exactly how to end one.”

Estimated lot value: US$35,000 – US$70,000

“No, man,” said Jack, still with his eyes closed, his hand already feeling around on the counter behind the notebook. “Completely the opposite.”

He blindly typed the first words, then opened his eyes and wrote the rest, looking alternately at the paper and the screen, quickly, without paying attention to the neatness of his handwriting, because he didn’t know how long that information would be available and he wasn’t willing to lose two screens in the same day. He copied everything. Every line, every caveat, and when he finished, he reread it, checking, and only then relaxed his shoulders. The screen lingered in his mind for a few minutes, patiently, and then dissolved in its usual way, without warning, confirming that the haste had been the right decision.

Kevin was already bent over the notebook.

“Wow.” He ran his finger along the lines, his brow furrowing and unfurrowing as he read. “This is interesting. This is not useless at all.”

Jack was about to answer. He couldn’t. Because it was at that exact moment that things started to happen.

There was no ready word for it, and he would spend the rest of the day searching for one without finding it. It wasn’t memory, because memory has an owner, and this had no face behind it, no specific bar, no night he could say he lived through. And it wasn’t learning, because learning has a beginning, and this arrived ready-made, whole, already known. It was as if someone had opened his skull and poured inside the distilled experience of a man who had fought his whole life, a thousand nights in bars compressed into an essence without images, and this essence was now spreading through his body and presenting itself to his muscles one by one.

He looked at the bench Kevin had climbed on earlier, and knew, without thinking, without choosing to know, that the bench weighed enough to break a collarbone if twisted left with both hands, and that his leg, detached, served better, and that the right way to detach it was by stepping on the crossbar. He looked at the water bottle on the counter and knew where it breaks and where it doesn’t, and how to hold it after it’s broken. He looked at his own hands, open before him, and the hands looked the same, the same long fingers, the same new calluses from training, but what resided in them had changed. There were angles in them now. There were answers.

“Jack?”

“I’m here.” He closed his hands, then opened them again. “It’s just… it’s arriving. The talent. It’s settling in.”

“Setting up.” Kevin raised an eyebrow. “Like a program?”

“Like…” Jack tried. He really tried, searching for the words with the care of someone describing a new color. “Like I always knew. Except I know I didn’t. It’s fighting knowledge. The knowledge of a seasoned fighter, of many fights, inside and outside bars, of improvising weapons with whatever you have at hand. And it didn’t come as a lesson. It came as if it had always been here and I had just forgotten to look.” He gave up mid-gesture, shaking his head. “I can’t explain it any better than that. It’s the first time I’ve received power like this. Directly. Without any object in between.”

Kevin’s eyebrow remained where it was, but he didn’t argue. At that point in both their lives, the bar for the unbelievable had already been raised so many times that discussing description was a waste of time.

But there was one line in the notebook that Jack kept rereading, and it was to that line that his eyes now returned, above all others. Permanently strengthen your body: choose between strength or vigor.

He had no attributes. That was the strange part, the part that made the sentence creak. He wasn’t a character sheet, he didn’t have numbers hanging on his body, he’d never seen any value assigned to himself on any screen. And yet the choice was there, offered, waiting, and something in him knew it was real and that all he had to do was choose. It must work somehow physically. Directly in the flesh. Like a month of training delivered all at once, I don’t know. I had no way of knowing before choosing. I could only choose correctly.

And he thought. He actually stopped to think, Kevin’s pencil twirling forgetfully between his fingers, the trunk rumbling softly two steps away.

Strength was tempting. Strength was what was lacking on nights when the suit did seventy percent of the work and his body barely sustained the remaining thirty. Strength shortened fights, and a short fight was a safe fight.

But strength was worthless in a body that was fading. And the memory of the previous night was still too fresh to ignore: the tank emptying in the middle of the yard, his arms failing between blows, the chilling certainty, at least twice, that if this lasted another ten minutes he simply wouldn’t have anything left to give, and the most advanced suit in the multiverse was worthless on an unconscious man. His bottleneck had never been hitting harder. His bottleneck was enduring. It was holding onto the suit longer, it was having fuel for when the leak went wrong, it was surviving his own equipment.

It’s no use being strong and dying exhausted.

“Vigor,” he said. Out loud, not knowing if he needed to say it out loud, but saying it anyway, both inwardly and outwardly at the same time. “I choose vigor.”

The answer came before the sentence was finished.

It began in the center of his chest, a warmth that didn’t burn, and spread from there to the rest of his body like warm water flowing through his bones, arms, legs, back, and wherever the warmth passed, the pain from the previous night softened, didn’t disappear, but softened, receding from a scream to a groan, his shoulders relaxing, his thighs unlocking, as if someone had sped up three days of recovery in thirty seconds. And along with the relief came something else, harder to name. A settling. The distinct sensation of being firmer within one’s own body, denser, heavier.

Jack looked down at himself and frowned.

“Grab that scale,” he said.

Kevin followed his gaze to the platform scale leaning against the wall, next to the training area, the same one that had weighed the drug half an hour earlier, and dragged it across the concrete. Jack took off his shoes, climbed up, and waited for the display to make its decision.

The number stopped. He read it. He read it again.

Five kilos. Five kilos more than he had weighed three days ago, in the routine weighing that Kevin forced him to do, at the same time, on the same scale. Five kilos that didn’t exist in the morning, because in the morning he had looked in the bathroom mirror and seen the same old Jack, and that were now there, registered, distributed throughout him in a way that he felt but couldn’t pinpoint.

And to understand the magnitude of it, you had to have lived through the last month in his shoes. Jack’s body burned calories like wildfire, it had always been that way, his metabolism was an oven that turned everything that went in into nothing, and gaining weight, gaining real mass, had been by far the hardest and slowest part of the entire training. Kevin force-filling his plate, the supplement containers, the six meals a day counted, all that to shave off eight hundred grams in a good month. And that alone had given him five kilos between one sentence and the next.

He didn’t know how it worked. He had no attribute, no number, no record. But something had happened, something had been written on him in ink he couldn’t read, and the result was beneath his feet, on the display of a scale he’d bought to weigh concrete weights.

Jack stepped off the scale. He flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders, and the pain answered from afar, politely, an echo of what it had been at breakfast. He looked at the empty table, where half a million dollars had existed that morning, and then at the day’s inventory scattered around the shed. A blue box that manufactured disposable servants. A radar pointing to treasures that perhaps didn’t yet exist. A carnivorous chest dozing with its tongue hanging out two steps away, faithful as a puppy and illegal as a weapon. And a body, his own, which had woken up broken and was now standing, five kilos deeper in the ground, with a thousand bar fights stored in its hands.

He smiled at his friend.

“Wow. This is getting more and more interesting.”

And Kevin, looking from Jack to the trunk and from the trunk to the scale, nodded in agreement, because there was no better word in the world than that for the direction their lives had taken.