"The best way to predict the future is to create it." — Peter Drucker.
The underground tunnel spat Micah out into the financial district.
He pulled himself through a collapsed section of subway railing and rolled onto a street.
His Beast Analysis Talent was working overtime, scanning energy signatures in every direction.
Most were low-to-mid-tier mutants hiding in the collapsed structures, avoiding the open ground.
Micah kept low and moved from cover to cover, using concrete barriers and burned-out cars to keep himself hidden from view.
The Meridian Bank tower was visible now. It rose above the surrounding ruins.
The top half had been torn away, but the lower floors and foundation were still standing.
He circled the tower from the east side, avoiding the main entrance, until Beast Analysis found a secondary access point on the north side.
A maintenance hatch partially hidden by rubble, with a clean energy signature around it.
He cleared the debris, grabbed the wheel handle, and cranked it with everything he had.
GRRRRNK!
Chunks of rust fell away, but the hatch turned. The seal broke, releasing stale air.
Micah made his way into the darkness below.
The shaft was narrow and vertical, with steel rungs leading straight down. He descended carefully, testing each rung before committing his weight, because some were loose while others had corroded to the point where they bent under his boots.
Twelve meters down, his feet hit solid ground.
He stood in a maintenance corridor with a low ceiling and bare concrete walls.
Beast Analysis activated immediately and found the corridor clean for some meters, but then the energy signatures changed.
They grew thick and formed strange, mechanical patterns.
Micah crept forward with his knife drawn. The corridor opened into a wider hallway with reinforced steel panels bolted over concrete. Military-grade construction. Pre-war.
And then he saw the traps.
The first one was almost invisible. A thin tripwire ran across the floor at ankle height, connected to a recessed panel in the wall.
If his Beast Analysis hadn’t highlighted it in bright red, he would have walked straight into it.
He looked further down the corridor and saw more tripwires, pressure plates embedded in the floor, and about fifteen meters ahead, the hallway narrowed into a chokepoint where faint blue light bled from horizontal slits in both walls.
Laser grids.
"Damn it," Micah muttered.
The entire corridor was a kill zone. Pre-war automated defenses, still active after all these years. The tripwires would trigger projectile launchers, the pressure plates would trigger fragmentation mines, and the laser grids were designed to vaporize anything that crossed their path.
Disarming them one by one would take hours, and he didn’t have hours. Dexter and Myra were on the surface right now, heading this way with their black-market map.
Every minute he spent crawling through this corridor was a minute closer to them arriving at the vault first.
He studied the traps through Beast Analysis, and the system broke down each mechanism.
[Tripwire Trap: Kinetic projectile launcher. Trigger pressure: 2 Newtons. Response time: 0.3 seconds. Lethal range: 13 meters.]
[Pressure Plate: Dual-trigger fragmentation mine. Trigger weight: 35 kilograms. Blast radius: 9 meters.]
[Laser Grid: High-intensity thermal array. Vaporization threshold: contact. Reset cycle: 4.2 seconds between sweeps.]
The laser grid was the worst. The beams swept across the chokepoint in a crisscross pattern with four seconds between sweeps. Not enough time to run through, not enough time to crawl through, and there was no way around it.
Micah leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
The system rewards pain. The system rewards injury. If he triggered a trap and it hurt him, the system might register it as a physical injury from an external source. The trap was a weapon created by humans. Who knows ? It might work.
He opened his eyes and stared at the nearest tripwire. He could spend hours disarming every trap manually and risk Dexter and Myra arriving first, or he could trigger a trap intentionally, take the hit, and use whatever reward he got to bypass the rest.
The choice was obvious.
Micah crouched beside the first tripwire and studied the wall panel through Beast Analysis.
The launcher was set into the wall about two meters up, hidden behind a steel grate. He needed the projectile to hit something non-lethal, so he chose his outer thigh. It was the fleshy part. There was no major artery if he angled his position right.
He positioned himself with his left side toward the wall and his right thigh exposed to the firing line.
Then he flicked the tripwire with his knife.
TING!
The wire snapped and the wall panel slid open, giving a mechanical clunk. Micah saw the dart, a thin silver projectile about four inches long, launched from the wall so fast.
He didn’t move. He let it come.
THWIP!
The dart grazed his outer thigh, slicing through his pants and cutting a clean line across his skin. Blood welled up immediately and ran down his leg in a thin stream. It wasn’t deep, just a surface cut, but the pain was immediate.
Micah hissed through his teeth and braced himself against the wall.
Then the system spoke.
[Ding!]
[Physical injury detected. Source: Automated kinetic defense system.]
[Injury severity: Minor. Surface laceration, outer thigh.]
[Mid-tier Gacha pull granted.]
Mid-tier. The system had registered the trap as a valid source. His gamble had paid off.
The golden roulette wheel appeared in his mind and spun fast, faster than any of the low-tier pulls. Gold, purple, and white blurred together until the wheel slowed and locked into place.
A glowing purple orb sat in the center. It pulsed once, twice, then shattered like glass.
[Item Acquired: Shadow Step Boots (Rare, Mid-Tier)]
[Shadow Step Boots: Advanced tactical footwear equipped with micro-directional thrusters. Eliminates ground friction during directional changes. Enables near-instantaneous pivots and lateral bursts at maximum velocity. Afterimage generation during sustained sprint.]
Matte black boots appeared in his hands. They were light and well-made, with thick soles and tiny thruster ports that gave off a faint purple glow.
He pulled off his worn military boots, slipped into the Shadow Step Boots on, and laced them tight.
The difference hit him immediately. The ground beneath his feet felt responsive, like the boots were reading his weight and adjusting in real-time.
He took a step, then a quick pivot.
WHOOSH!
His body snapped sideways so fast he nearly lost his balance. The thrusters fired for a fraction of a second, killing all friction between his foot and the floor.
The turn was instant and inhumanly precise.
"Holy shit," he breathed, catching himself with a grin.
He looked down the corridor at the remaining traps and broke into a sprint.
The first tripwire snapped under his boot and the dart fired, but it hit nothing but air.
Micah was already gone. In the split second it took the dart to move, he had already blurred three meters to the left.
CRACKKK!!
The projectile slammed into the opposite wall loudly.
Second tripwire, same result. The dart flew through the purple afterimage his body had left behind, which lingered just long enough to draw the projectile before dissolving.
Third. Fourth. Fifth. Each one triggered and each one missed.
The pressure plates were even easier. Beast Analysis marked each one in red, and his feet found the safe zones between them instinctively, the thrusters adjusting his stride with mathematical precision.
Then the laser grid.
He slid to a stop at the chokepoint.
Blue beams swept across the narrow passage in a crisscross pattern, humming softly. He could feel their heat from several meters away.
Four seconds between sweeps.
But the Shadow Step Boots didn’t need four seconds.
Micah waited for the beams to complete their sweep, and the moment they reset, he dashed forward.
The thrusters fired at full capacity and his body rocketed forward so fast the air seemed to bend around him.
He crossed the six-meter chokepoint in under half a second. The beams began their next sweep behind him, cutting through nothing but the purple afterimage he’d left behind, which dissolved into sparks the moment the light touched it.
He cleared the grid, landed in a crouch, and slid to a stop on the smooth concrete.
The corridor beyond was clear. Just a long, empty hallway leading to a huge set of titanium blast doors.
As he straightened up and started forward, his Beast Analysis picked up something faint behind him.
Two energy signatures, far back near the surface entrance, moving slowly and deliberately through the outer perimeter of the building. The system tagged them instantly.
Dexter and Myra. Still up top, meticulously and agonizingly disarming the exterior defenses one by one with careful, methodical precision. They hadn’t even reached the corridor yet.
Micah allowed himself a brief, cold smile. He had a full twenty-minute head start on them, maybe more. They were being careful, and careful was slow.
He limped toward the blast doors. Three meters tall, two meters wide, solid titanium reinforced with steel crossbars.
The electronic lock was dead, so Beast Analysis scanned the doorframe and highlighted four heavy steel bolts, all engaged, all rusted solid.
No electronic override. No key card. No bypass code. Just raw force.
Micah wrapped his hands around the manual override wheel and cranked with everything he had.
The rust fought him like it was alive, but after two solid minutes of brute-force pulling, all four bolts retracted with loud clunks.
He grabbed the edge of the left door and pushed.
The titanium door groaned as it started to open. Dust and bits of debris fell from the ceiling, but it kept moving. It opened a little at first, then slowly widening until Micah had just enough room to squeeze through sideways.
He squeezed between the doors and stepped into the black abyss beyond.
The air inside felt like stepping into a sealed tomb that hadn’t been opened since the world ended.
Beast Analysis couldn’t detect any energy signatures ahead. No beasts, no traps, no automated defenses.
There was nothing but darkness. Farther inside, a faint bluish-white light cast long shadows across a huge, open chamber.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
Micah had gotten here first. So, he took a deep breath, tightened his grip on his knife, and adjusted his posture into a low stealth stance, completely determined to secure the Astral Prism and run away long before the arrogant elites ever breached the surface.