The reward was bullshit.
That was my professional assessment.
Concentration +25%Distraction resistance +30%Task-switching penalty -20%
People didn’t work in percentages, and forty XP meant nothing when I had no idea what happened at one hundred.
I should have ignored the Quest.
Instead, five minutes later, I was still staring at it.
The tasks were real, which was the problem. The second one was also exactly the kind of work I normally wouldn’t waste my own time doing.
I opened Teams.
Evan Cole
I typed:
can you check the segmentation assumptions before lunch?
My thumb hovered over Send.
Then I remembered the condition.
Personally completed tasks only.
Delegated completion does not count.
I stared at the message.
"Seriously?"
I deleted it.
That wasn’t laziness. It was delegation.
Successful people didn’t personally do everything that crossed their desks. Rachel didn’t. Naomi Bennett certainly didn’t. At some point, apparently, people started calling it leadership instead.
I minimized Teams and looked at the Future Leaders ranking already open on my screen.
6. CAMILA REYES
Sixth out of twenty-four.
My mother had been impressed. A few friends had been impressed. I’d been impressed for approximately ten minutes.
Then I’d looked at the five names above mine.
Only two positions mattered.
Two people would move directly into NEXT.
That was what I wanted.
Not congratulations for being promising. Not another development program or a better line on my résumé.
The office. The salary. The title.
I wanted to walk into a meeting and have people know I mattered before I had to prove it again.
Naomi Bennett could do that.
People changed around her. They sat straighter, stopped wasting time and waited for her reaction before deciding how confident they were in their own opinions.
I wanted that.
And if some impossible app was offering me an advantage for completing work I already had to finish anyway, refusing it because the situation was strange would be stupid.
I took advantages when they appeared.
That was one of the reasons I intended to be in the Top Two.
If the reward was fake, I lost nothing.
If it wasn’t—
I pressed ACCEPT.
QUEST ACCEPTED
Deadline: 1:00 PM
"Fine. Show me."
The assessment revisions took thirty-one minutes. The recommendation summary took twenty-six.
The segmentation assumptions were worse, mostly because halfway through them I became determined not to ask Evan.
I found the source issue he’d probably have spotted first.
Then another one.
That felt better than it should have.
At 12:41, I submitted the final file.
My phone vibrated immediately.
QUEST COMPLETE
+40 XP
FOCUS SURGE ACTIVATED
01:29:59
I waited.
Nothing happened.
No rush. No sudden burst of inspiration. No magical feeling that my brain had just become twenty-five percent better at anything.
I smiled. "Thought so."
Then I opened the next document.
Twenty minutes later, I noticed four unread Teams messages.
I could see them.
I just didn’t care.
An email arrived.
Ignored.
Someone laughed behind me. Normally I would’ve looked.
I didn’t.
Rachel stopped beside my desk.
"Did you finish the revised assumptions?"
"Sent them twenty minutes ago."
She checked her phone. One eyebrow lifted slightly.
"Good."
Then she walked away.
I returned to the document.
Usually an interruption cost me something—a minute rereading, finding the right cell, remembering why I’d opened a second tab in the first place.
This time, I simply continued exactly where I’d stopped.
Ten minutes later, the document was finished.
I checked the clock, then the timer.
00:59:37
That wasn’t right.
I opened the file again and checked for mistakes.
Nothing obvious.
I moved to the next task, then another.
The strange part was that I didn’t feel smarter.
There were no brilliant ideas appearing from nowhere. The System hadn’t suddenly made me better at analysis than Evan. If he looked at the same data, there was still a good chance he’d find something I’d missed.
What had changed was everything surrounding the work.
Notifications existed without requiring me to touch them. Someone could walk behind my chair without taking part of my attention with them. I could switch to a source document, find what I needed and return without forgetting why I’d gone there.
It felt easy.
My eyes moved back to the timer.
Something had changed the way my mind worked.
My hands stopped.
That thought landed differently.
An app I couldn’t delete had altered my concentration because I’d pressed a button.
Maybe hacker wasn’t the right word anymore.
I didn’t know what the right word was.
For the first time since accepting the Quest, I seriously considered stopping.
Then I looked at what I’d finished.
A document I’d expected to spend most of the afternoon on. A cleaned model. Half the emails I’d been putting off.
My gaze drifted toward Evan.
Still working, head down.
He was better at the ugly analytical parts. That was why I kept giving them to him.
Focus Surge hadn’t changed that.
What it had shown me was how much time I lost on everything surrounding those parts.
And if this was what the System could do at Level One, maybe I wouldn’t need him nearly as much as I thought.
The idea pleased me more than it probably should have.
I looked at the ranking again.
Sixth.
If I could get rewards like this regularly, that wasn’t going to last.
Maybe second wouldn’t either.
FOCUS SURGE EXPIRED
There was no crash.
No headache.
Nothing dramatic.
I was simply myself again.
Five minutes later, I checked Teams while Excel loaded, answered one message, opened an email and returned to Excel.
Then I stared at the formula for several seconds, trying to remember what I’d been checking.
"Oh."
Nothing had gotten worse.
This was normal.
I’d just spent ninety minutes discovering how inefficient normal felt.
I picked up my phone.
CAMILA REYES
PLAYER — Lv.1
XP: 40 / 100
ACTIVE QUEST
None
I should stop.
Whatever this thing was, it knew confidential work information and could alter how my mind functioned. A reasonable person would take the phone to IT, maybe replace it entirely.
Definitely not press more buttons.
I locked the screen and put the phone down.
Twenty seconds later, I picked it back up.
ACTIVE QUEST
None
I refreshed.
Nothing.
I frowned. It was ridiculous. I had enough work without an app inventing more for me.
I put the phone down again.
My eyes drifted toward the ranking.
Sixth.
I picked the phone back up.
"One more."
Refresh.
Nothing.
I waited a second, then tried again.
"Come on."