Chapter 4: Party Finder

The city looked wrong in daylight.

Chicago had always worn grime well. Rain-slick alleys, stained brick, train tracks rattling overhead—those belonged to it. But this was something else. The System had lacquered everything with a thin, unnatural clarity, as if the world had been scrubbed too hard and the skin had come off. Street signs shimmered with faint blue outlines. Cracks in the pavement glowed when Elias looked at them from the corner of his eye. A Starbucks on the next block had a hovering icon above the door that read Safe Commerce Node, while the pharmacy across from it flickered between its old logo and a translucent banner declaring Consumables Vendor Pending Unlock.

People moved through it all with the stunned, brittle energy of survivors pretending they still had errands.

A man in a suit jogged past with a kitchen knife tucked into his belt and a golf club over one shoulder. Two teenagers in soccer shin guards huddled beside an idling bus, whispering over a glowing status screen only they could see. Somewhere farther south, a siren wailed, clipped off, then wailed again.

Elias stood in the mouth of the alley behind the station entrance and breathed air that smelled like hot metal, garbage, and the sharp ozone tang left behind by System notifications. His hoodie was torn at one sleeve. Dried black blood crusted his knuckles—not all of it his. In his right hand he carried the broken weapon he’d pulled from the station mini-boss, a length of bent iron wrapped in glitching light that refused to settle into one shape. Sometimes it looked like a pry bar. Sometimes a short spear. Once, just for a blink, it became a wrench with too many heads.

Prototype Item Identified: Bent Logic

Quality: Unstable

Type: Adaptive Improvised Weapon

Effect: Slightly changes form to suit recognized flaws in target structure.

Warning: Compatibility with live environment not guaranteed.

Not guaranteed. That made two of them.

He flexed his left hand. A transparent menu still lingered in the air near his wrist, visible only when he focused.

Hidden Role: Beta Tester

Class Thread: Fault Delver

Primary Skills Available:

• Identify Fault — Expose a structural, behavioral, or systemic flaw.

• Stress Fracture — Worsen an identified flaw through targeted action.

• Patch Leak — Briefly force hidden-layer mechanics to interact with live objects.

Instability: 17%

Seventeen percent. It had been eleven when he crawled out of the station.

Great. Five more hidden boss fights and reality files a complaint.

He should have gone home. Checked on his apartment. Looked for supplies. Done something normal enough to convince himself this was still his city and not a game with bad balancing.

Instead he kept scanning the street with the greedy, exhausted alertness of a man who’d discovered that the impossible paid better than common sense.

Patch Zero had rewards. Real ones. Better ones than the clean, public version everyone else was seeing. The station had proved that. What he didn’t know yet was whether he could keep diving alone without eventually getting himself eaten by a prototype nightmare or torn apart by his own hidden mechanics.

A scream answered that question for him from half a block away.

It came from the shattered glass front of an urgent care clinic. Not the theatrical kind of scream from movies, but the ragged, furious sound of someone too busy staying alive to be scared properly.

Elias ran before he finished deciding to.

The sidewalk was littered with dropped bags, a stroller on its side, blood in dark spatters across the curb. Above the clinic doors a live-world icon spun slowly:

Event Encounter: Feral Scavengers

Difficulty: D

Participants: Open

Inside, the waiting room had become a kill box. Chairs were overturned. Magazines and intake forms made a wet mosaic underfoot. Three things moved among the debris on all fours with the jerky speed of rabid dogs but the wrong anatomy—too many elbows, too much spine. Human once, maybe. Their hospital gowns hung in strips from gray, swollen bodies webbed with blue System veins. One had a patient ID bracelet embedded in the flesh of its neck.

A woman in dark blue scrubs stood on top of the reception counter, one sneaker braced against the monitor stand, swinging an IV pole like she meant to cave the world in. Brown skin gleamed with sweat. Her braids had half escaped their tie. She had the rigid posture of someone who’d hit the point past panic and found pure irritation on the other side.

“Back!” she snapped as one of the scavengers sprang. “I am not getting tackled by a corpse on my day off.”

The pole connected with a crack. The creature hit the floor, rolled, and came up snarling.

Blue text flashed around the woman’s forearms.

Class Selected: Vitalist

Subclass Path Available: Triage / Preservation / Excess

The words flickered violently, as if the class itself was still deciding what she meant by healing.

The nearest scavenger heard Elias’s footsteps and whipped around. Its jaw unhinged wider than it should have. He saw the fault immediately—left hind leg lagging half a beat behind the others, movement desynced where flesh and System mesh didn’t agree.

Identify Fault successful.

Target flaw: Mobility loop mismatch.

Elias stepped in and brought Bent Logic down hard across the limb. The weapon lengthened in his hands at the moment of impact, head flattening into a hooked bar. Bone burst through skin with a pop. The scavenger shrieked and collapsed sideways, its charge turning into a skid through blood and pamphlets.

“Took your time,” the woman called.

“Sorry, traffic.”

The second scavenger lunged from behind a row of overturned chairs. Elias ducked. Claws skimmed his hood. The thing smelled like antiseptic and rotten meat. He shoved his left palm toward its rib cage and triggered Stress Fracture. A hot, needling sensation ran up his arm, like his nerves were being threaded through a live wire.

Stress Fracture applied.

Existing flaw worsened.

The creature’s twisted torso spasmed. One side caved inward with a crunch, as if invisible pressure had found a seam and leaned on it. It hit the floor screaming.

The woman didn’t hesitate. She hopped off the counter, planted one foot on the scavenger’s back, and slapped her glowing hand against the thing’s exposed shoulder.

Light flooded the room in a clean medicinal white.

For one absurd instant Elias thought she’d healed it.

Then the flesh around her hand swelled, overfilled, stretched glassy thin, and burst. Blood hissed into steam. The scavenger convulsed once and went still, its entire upper body cooked from the inside by too much life forced into dead tissue.

The woman stared at her own palm.

“Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s deeply unethical.”

The last scavenger launched itself at her head.

Elias moved without thinking. He caught it in the side with Bent Logic and drove both of them into the wall. The impact rattled framed certifications to the floor. Teeth snapped inches from his face. The thing was stronger than it looked. He jammed the weapon up under its jaw, teeth gritted, and met wet white eyes that reflected a fractured version of his own face.

Find the break. Find the bad line.

The System overlay bled through the monster in a grid of translucent stress marks. Most shifted too fast to use. One didn’t—a tiny frozen hitch where the neck joined the spine.

Identify Fault successful.

Target flaw: Severance threshold exceeded.

He twisted. Bent Logic abruptly became blade-like for half a second. The head came off with a spray across the wall.

Silence dropped hard.

In the back somewhere, a heart monitor started beeping at empty air.

The woman in scrubs exhaled, wiped blood off her cheek with the back of her wrist, and gave him a look that started at the glitching weapon and ended at his face.

“You don’t look like a first responder.”

“You don’t look like a healer.”

“Rude.” She crouched by the corpse she’d exploded and frowned at the hovering text above it. “Though fair.”

A notification chimed between them.

Event Encounter Cleared.

Participants: Elias Voss, Mara Kade

Rewards distributed.

Then another message appeared, but only for Elias. The blue was darker. The font was wrong—older somehow, with tiny distortions crawling along the edges.

Patch Zero Observation: Compatible support candidate detected.

Would you like to flag party potential?

Y / N

Elias did not move his hand. He did not blink. After everything in the station, he had learned that hidden prompts were the equivalent of alleyway deals with gods.

Mara caught the change in his expression anyway. “You seeing extra weirdness, or is that just your face?”

He looked at her properly then. Mid-to-late twenties, maybe. Lean, quick. The kind of composure that got built in loud rooms with too little time and too many bleeding people. There was dried pen ink on the side of her hand under the blood. Her class icon hovered over one shoulder now, steadier than before.

Name: Mara Kade

Class: Vitalist

Chosen Path: Excess

Level: 3

Excess. That sounded healthy.

“Maybe,” Elias said. “Your healing just turned a ghoul into a pressure cooker.”

“Scavenger,” she corrected automatically. “And yes, apparently I can overfill biological systems. Which is not on any nursing exam I remember taking.” She glanced toward the treatment hallway. “I had three patients in here when the sky started handing out menus. Two ran. One turned into that.” Her mouth tightened, but only for a second. “So if this is the part where I say thank you, thank you. If it’s the part where you ask me to follow a stranger carrying a haunted crowbar, absolutely not.”

“Adaptive weapon,” Elias said.

“That makes it worse.”

A crash boomed outside. Shouts followed—one raw with pain, one with laughter so wild it almost sounded delighted.

Mara winced. “That also sounds worse.”

They reached the front doors in time to see a convenience store across the street lose its entire front window.

A huge man came through the glass backward in a storm of snacks and promotional stickers. He hit the hood of a parked Prius hard enough to crater it, rolled off, and somehow found his feet. He was broad in the chest, thick in the neck and shoulders, with the flattened nose and scar-webbed brows of someone who’d spent a lot of years being punched professionally. His T-shirt hung in shreds. Blood ran down one arm. Across his bare forearms glowed bronze UI bands pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.

Three goblins burst from the store after him.

They were not the cute green kind from bad fantasy movies. These were hairless, jaundiced things with needle teeth and long, humanlike hands that looked designed for prying rings off corpses. They wore pieces of sports equipment as armor—hockey pads, a bike helmet, one shin guard strapped to a forearm. The leader clutched a box cutter in each fist and hissed in furious little bursts.

Hovering over the storefront was a widening ring of red text.

Localized Dungeon Bloom Detected: FreshMart Express

Type: Goblin Nest

Status: Expanding

Recommended Party Size: 3-5

“Well,” Mara said. “I hate that immediately.”

The big man spat blood onto the street, rolled one shoulder with a grimace, and bared his teeth at the goblins in a grin too mean to be sane.

“That all you little sewer punks got?” he barked. “My ex hit harder.”

The lead goblin shrieked and slashed. He didn’t dodge. He stepped into the blow and let the box cutter drag a red line across his side, using the impact to drive a brutal right hook down onto the goblin’s skull. The thing dropped like a unplugged puppet.

Bronze text erupted over him.

Class Selected: Vanguard

Hidden Path Triggered: Flagellant Guard

Condition Met: Converted received damage into threat and force.

“Oh no,” Mara murmured. “They made a class for bad coping mechanisms.”

“You just weaponized bedside care,” Elias said.

“That’s called efficiency.”

The remaining goblins swarmed the big man, climbing him like rats. He tore one off and slammed it into a parking meter. The other latched onto his back and stabbed downward, screeching with glee. He roared, more anger than pain, and staggered.

Elias was already moving.

One goblin’s feet barely touched pavement between leaps. Too quick. The other overcommitted every time it attacked, carried forward by feral momentum and a center of balance too high for its frame. That one first.

Identify Fault successful.

Target flaw: Forward bias / recovery delay.

He cut in low, caught the goblin’s shin with Bent Logic as it morphed into a hooked blade, and yanked. The creature pitched face-first into the street. Before it could recover, Mara thrust out her hand.

White light flashed.

The goblin swelled grotesquely, veins shining through its skin like lit wires. It screamed once. Then a bloom of red steam burst from its mouth and ears, and it lay twitching in a pool of boiling blood.

The big man ripped the rider off his back, turned, and saw Elias coming. Instinct took over. He swung.

Elias barely got his weapon up in time. The punch rang off Bent Logic and numbed his arms to the shoulders.

“Friendly!” Elias shouted.

“Could’ve led with that,” the man snapped, then headbutted the last goblin so hard the bike helmet cracked in half.

The creature staggered. Elias saw the world snag around it for a breathless instant—public dungeon texture overlaid with hidden beta geometry, the goblin’s left eye rendered twice, one image a fraction behind the other.

Patch leak.

He could feel the skill like a splinter behind his eyes.

He triggered it.

Patch Leak active.

Live-layer interaction with hidden faults enabled for 4 seconds.

Warning: Instability increased.

The goblin’s duplicate eye lagged visibly now. The flaw became real. The world stuttered around it.

“Hit the left side!” Elias barked.

The big man did. His fist smashed through the goblin’s face as if he were punching through wet drywall. The corpse folded over itself and dissolved into pixels and black grit that the wind immediately dragged toward the open FreshMart doors.