Morning arrived beneath a clear sky.
Sunlight slipped through the gaps in the rolling shutter and spilled into the dim storage unit.
Jason lay asleep on the old sofa, his face deathly pale and his brow tightly furrowed.
Even in his sleep, one hand remained wrapped around a Glock 20 pistol.
[Ding! Quest completed: Escape the Russian Mafia’s manhunt. Reward: 500 Villain Points. Current progress: 2,460/2,000.]
[Ding! Congratulations, Host. You have reached Level 3 and received 10 Attribute Points. Current progress: 460/3,000.]
Jason jolted awake and shot to his feet.
Click*.*
The Glock was chambered in an instant.
He swept the muzzle around the storage unit, aiming for several seconds before confirming that nothing was wrong.
False alarm.
Jason exhaled in relief, ejected the chambered 10mm round, and returned it to the magazine.
He sat back down on the sofa, used bottled water to wash his face and rinse his mouth, then removed his shirt to inspect the wound on his left arm.
Fortunately, there were no signs of infection.
Jason settled back onto the sofa with some bread and water, then opened the system interface.
Now that he’d reached Level 3, the system had awarded him another ten Attribute Points.
The question was, where should he put them?
Jason opened the Shop and began studying it carefully.
Ability Levels in the Shop ranged from Level 1 to Level 10.
The higher the Level, the more Credits required to purchase it.
Levels 1 through 5 cost between 10 and 50 Credits respectively, in other words, between $100,000 and $500,000.
Starting from Level 6, however, the prices skyrocketed.
Level 6 cost 100 Credits.
Level 7 cost 300.
Level 8 cost 500.
Level 9 cost 800.
And Level 10 cost 1,000.
In other words, raising a single Ability all the way from Level 1 to Level 10 would cost a total of $28.5 million.
The last thing he needed to pay attention to was the attribute requirement for purchasing each Ability.
Every Ability had different requirements, but they could generally be divided into Primary Attributes and Secondary Attributes.
Take Firearms Mastery, for example.
When it came to a gunfight, speed was everything.
Draw fast.
Aim fast.
Fire fast.
Kill the enemy before they could shoot, or preferably before they even managed to draw their weapon.
The importance of Agility was obvious.
At the same time, accomplishing all of that within such a short window meant accounting for the weapon’s characteristics, target distance, wind direction, resistance, and countless other factors.
Without a sharp mind capable of processing information quickly and clearly, it simply couldn’t be done.
That was why Firearms Mastery had high requirements for both Agility and Intelligence.
Those were its Primary Attributes.
Strength helped reduce the effects of recoil and improve shooting accuracy.
Endurance, meanwhile, offered some assistance during extended periods of high-intensity shooting.
Neither contributed nearly as much to overall marksmanship, so the system’s requirements for Strength and Endurance were considerably lower.
They were Secondary Attributes.
The requirements for Combat Mastery, on the other hand, were almost the exact opposite.
Strength and Endurance were the Primary Attributes, while Agility and Intelligence were Secondary Attributes.
That was even easier to understand.
All those elaborate punches, dodges, and fancy footwork belonged in movies and television.
In a real fight, once two people were within a meter of each other, it was almost impossible to completely evade an incoming punch or kick.
Even if your eyes could follow the movement, your body might not react quickly enough.
That was why Strength and Endurance mattered most for Combat Mastery.
Agility and Intelligence only became decisive when both fighters were otherwise evenly matched.
Truthfully, Jason loved close-quarters fighting.
He loved the feeling of fist meeting flesh.
To him, that was how men were supposed to settle their problems.
The ones who hid in the distance and took potshots were pussies.
Unfortunately, ideals were one thing.
Reality was another.
In modern society, the simplest and most effective tool for killing someone would always be a gun.
For the sake of his own survival, Jason decided to temporarily set aside Combat Mastery and continue developing Firearms Mastery instead.
━━━━━ SHOP ━━━━━
Firearms Mastery | Level 6 (Not Acquired)
[Requirements]
Credits: 100 ✘
Strength: 35 ✘
Agility: 40 ✘
Endurance: 35 ✘
Intelligence: 40 ✘
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Jason considered it for a moment.
He decided to raise Strength and Endurance to 35 first, then put the remaining three Attribute Points into Agility.
━━━━━ SYSTEM ━━━━━
Host: Jason Walter
Level: 3 (460/3,000)
━━
[Attribute]
✪ Strength: 33 → 35
✪ Agility: 35 → 38
✪ Endurance: 30 → 35
✪ Intelligence: 35
✪ Remaining Points: 0
━━
Notoriety: 13 → 37 (Next recruitment: 100)
Accomplices: None
━━
Credits: 3
[Skill]
𖦏 Combat Mastery (Level 4)
𖦏 Driving Mastery (Level 3)
𖦏 Firearms Mastery (Level 5)
𖦏 Melee Weapons Mastery (Level 2)
[Shop: Click here]
━━━━━ QUEST ━━━━━
[Don’t Die Without Knowing]
How did Kingpin find out?
Discover the answer and complete the Quest.
🎁 Reward: 500 Villain Points
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The words on the translucent screen sent Jason deep into thought.
Just as the system said, he hadn’t told anyone about Vanessa.
The two of them had also been extremely careful whenever they were together.
By all rights, no one should have known a thing.
So how had Kingpin discovered them?
Did someone in the gang notice something and secretly follow us?
Jason thought that was unlikely.
Because he’d known he had something to hide, his counter-surveillance instincts had been unusually sharp during that period.
Even when heading out for a date, he’d switch taxis several times along the way.
And throughout all of it, he’d never noticed anything suspicious.
Besides, Jason knew everyone in the gang.
If any of them had so much as crossed his field of vision, he would have recognized them immediately.
So the leak probably hadn’t come from inside the organization.
Jason sat on the sofa for an entire hour, yet still couldn’t figure out where he’d slipped up.
“I’ll have to go out after dark,” he muttered to himself.
“As long as I find him, I’ll get the answers to everything.”
Jason lay back down on the sofa to rest and pulled out his new phone to check the news.
Something that big had happened in Midtown Manhattan yesterday.
The newspapers and television networks had to be losing their minds.
He opened CNN’s website.
The first image on the page was a photograph of thick black smoke pouring from the windows of his apartment.
Damn shame.
That was a really nice place.
Jason felt a stab of genuine heartache.
Including renovations, the apartment had cost him more than two million dollars.
He’d saved for five full years to buy it.
And now he’d blown the damn place up himself.
Jason sighed helplessly and opened the article.
The report was obscenely long, more than ten thousand words accompanied by twenty or thirty photographs.
It took Jason half an hour to finish reading the whole thing.
Only three pieces of information actually mattered.
First, the owner of the apartment involved in the incident was Jason Walter, a notorious Hell’s Kitchen gangster whose current whereabouts were unknown.
The NYPD suspected that Jason had either been abducted or killed.
As a result, authorities currently believed the violent incident that had shocked the entire country to be nothing more than a gangland feud, with no connection to any foreign al-Qaeda cell.
The American public, especially New Yorkers, was urged not to panic.
Second, after investigating the identities of more than a dozen masked men found dead at the scene, the NYPD had essentially identified the perpetrators.
The attackers belonged to a Russian criminal organization led by the brothers Vladimir and Anatoly Ranskahov.
Anatoly had been killed during the firefight.
Third—
A white woman’s body had been discovered on the roof of the apartment building.
She had been tortured to death.
Her face had been deliberately mutilated beyond recognition.
DNA testing had since confirmed her identity.
The dead woman was the owner of an art gallery in Manhattan.