Quinn couldn’t breathe.
The air in her lungs felt like ground glass.
She stared at the woman standing in the center of the ruined living room.
The black tactical suit fit her perfectly.
Her posture was flawless.
She wasn’t coughing up blood.
She didn’t have dark circles under her eyes.
Five years.
Five years of Quinn working double shifts at Rusty’s Diner to pay for fake chemo pills.
Five years of crying herself to sleep because she thought she was going to lose her only family.
It was all a lie.
“Mom.” Quinn whispered the word.
It tasted like ash.
Maria Carter looked down at her bleeding daughter.
Her face was completely blank.
There was no pity.
No maternal warmth.
Just cold calculated calculus.
“Get up Quinn.” Maria’s voice was sharp.
It sounded like a military commander.
“Stop looking at me like a wounded dog.
You are a Trailblazer now.
Act like it.”
Quinn pushed herself up onto her knees.
Her arms shook wildly.
Blood dripped from her nose and splattered on the cheap carpet.
Harrison stood next to Maria in his stupid white suit.
He kept the silver pistol pointed right at Jax’s head.
Jax was tied to the chair.
His right eye was swollen shut.
He looked at Quinn with a mixture of pure terror and desperate apology.
He really had been a pawn this whole time.
“The cancer,” Quinn choked out.
“A necessary cover story.” Maria walked forward.
Her black combat boots crunched on the broken window glass.
“Your father stole the Prime Core from Cranston Industries.
He knew it belonged to me.
He knew I was going to use it to open the Gates.
So he hid it inside his stupid police necklace and gave it to you.”
Maria crouched down so she was eye-level with Quinn.
“The bio-chip needs a host with Trailblazer blood to incubate properly,” Maria explained.
She spoke like a scientist studying a bug.
“I couldn’t just cut it out of your neck Quinn.
It would have died.
I had to wait.
I faked the illness to keep you poor.
To keep you desperate and close to home.
I needed you to trigger the System on your own.
Quinn felt a tear slide down her cheek.
It mixed with the blood.
The Solo Fighter class inside her brain screamed.
It wanted to rip this woman’s throat out.
But it was her mother.
Her brain was completely short-circuiting.
“Why do you want the ledger.” Quinn spat the words out.
“Because Silas is an idiot,” Maria said coldly.
“He wrote down the GPS coordinates to the Trailblazer Academy in that book.
The global faction wiped the location from every digital server on Earth.
That physical ledger is the only map left.
Hand it over.”
Quinn looked at her blue glowing screens.
They flickered weakly.
[HP: 30/355]
[Status: Critical Bleeding.
System Exhaustion.]
She was dead if she fought.
She had thirty hit points left.
A single bullet from Harrison’s gun would do fifty damage minimum.
She reached her shaking hand into her wet backpack.
Her fingers brushed against the heavy leather spine of the ledger.
She also felt the cold titanium plates on her knuckle gloves.
“If I give it to you,” Quinn rasped.
“You let Jax go.”
Maria stood up.
She looked completely bored.
“I don’t care about the street rat.
Give me the book and you can both rot in this cheap apartment.”
Quinn pulled her hand out of the bag.
She held the black book out.
Maria reached for it.
Quinn didn’t let go.
She looked up at the woman who lied to her for five years.
The tears stopped falling.
The sadness vanished completely.
Pure dark hatred took its place.
“You killed Dad,” Quinn whispered.
Maria didn’t blink.
“He was in the way of progress.”
Quinn dropped the ledger on the floor.
She didn’t punch her mother.
She didn’t punch Harrison.
She activated Sonic Strike and punched the cheap wooden floor of the apartment directly between her knees.
“BAM!.”
The sonic shockwave at point-blank range was devastating.
The cheap apartment building was eighty years old.
The floorboards were rotten.
The entire living room floor collapsed inward with a deafening roar.
Wood splinters and drywall exploded everywhere.
Gravity took over.
Quinn fell through the massive hole.
She grabbed the leg of Jax’s wooden chair as she dropped.
She dragged him down into the darkness with her.
Harrison shouted in panic as the floor vanished beneath his feet.
He fired the silver pistol blindly.
The bullet grazed Quinn’s shoulder in midair.
[HP: 12/355]
They crashed violently into the apartment below them.
It belonged to old Mrs.
Gable.
Thankfully she was deaf and usually asleep in the back room.
Quinn hit the dusty carpet hard.
Her ribs screamed in agony.
The wooden chair shattered into pieces.
Jax rolled across the floor groaning in pain.
The zip tie around his neck snapped from the impact.
Dust choked the air.
Quinn forced herself to stand up.
Her vision was swimming with dark spots.
She looked up through the jagged hole in the ceiling.
Maria Carter stood at the very edge of the broken floorboards above them.
She didn’t fall.
She balanced perfectly on a single exposed wooden beam.
Quinn stared in pure horror.
Maria’s eyes were glowing.
But they weren’t blue like Quinn’s.
They were burning with a terrifying blinding gold light.
[System Warning: Entity Scanned.]
[Class: Warlord (Gold Tier)]
[Level: ERROR.
Too high to calculate.]
“You always were a stubborn little brat.” Maria’s voice echoed down through the hole.
It sounded distorted.
Almost demonic.
“Keep the ledger Quinn.
You just gave me the perfect excuse to stop playing house.”
Maria raised her hand.
The gold light around her fingers condensed into a solid physical blade of energy.
Quinn grabbed Jax by the collar of his ruined hoodie.
He was barely conscious.
“Run.” Quinn dragged him toward the front door of the downstairs apartment.
A massive golden shockwave ripped through the ceiling right behind them.
The energy blade sliced the entire apartment building perfectly in half.
[System Alert: Fatal Evolution Bottleneck Triggered.]
[To survive Level 12 you must discard the ‘Solo Fighter’ Class.]
[Will you accept the Trailblazer Path?]
[Warning: If you accept the global hunt will begin.]