Insomniac Player

Hamari did not hear Damien approach.

She stood outside the Central Command briefing hall, one eye closed, adjusting the sight on a compact rifle with the small, absorbed frown of someone convinced the universe owed her a perfectly calibrated scope. Damien stopped beside her and waited, close enough to read the serial number stamped along the barrel.

Twenty seconds passed.

"Your weapon is crooked," he said.

Hamari jumped far enough to strike the wall, her shoulder cracking against the paneling hard enough that a nearby officer glanced over before deciding not to get involved.

The rifle appeared in her hands before her feet had even finished landing. Its barrel stopped an inch beneath Damien’s chin.

"Bro."

"Hello."

"You cannot become silent without informing the emotionally vulnerable."

"You are armed."

"Emotionally vulnerable and armed. Those aren’t mutually exclusive."

Her full registration floated above the door, called up automatically by the building’s security field.

➤[Name: Hamari Nakamura]

➤[Alias: DeluluGirl_404]

➤[Level: 35]

➤[Class: Armament Regina (Epic)]

Damien read the final line twice, just to make sure he hadn’t misread it.

Hamari lowered the rifle and let it dissolve back into her inventory, smiling the way she did whenever she’d successfully startled someone into using more than three words.

"Admire respectfully."

The others were already inside.

Doctor Smoke sat with a cigarette between her fingers beneath three separate signs prohibiting smoking, all three angled directly at her chair as though the building itself had given up arguing. Her status showed Level 33. She had retained her existing Class, refusing every advancement option offered at Level 30.

"My Class works," she said, before Damien had even finished asking. "Changing its name would not make patients bleed more conveniently."

Naked Nun’s updated military profile displayed a name Damien had never seen before, floating above her in the same clean government font as everyone else’s.

➤[Name: Grace Marley]

➤[Alias: Naked Nun]

➤[Level: 34]

➤[Class: Evil God’s Paladin (Epic)]

Damien looked from the profile to her white-and-red armor, then back again, as though the two pieces of information refused to sit comfortably next to each other.

"Grace?"

She smiled, delighted. "Disappointed?"

"Nah, just surprised."

"My parents expected gentleness. The System corrected them."

Her Epic Class combined defensive authority with increasingly violent counterattacks. The more damage she received while protecting someone, the stronger her next strike became. A black halo appeared behind her whenever the effect accumulated enough, faint at first, then unmistakable.

"It is religious," Grace explained, with the tone of someone describing a minor scheduling conflict.

"Which religion?"

"The fun one."

Grace had received three Class Change choices. One offered healing, one improved defense, and the third had appeared only after she refused to retreat from a Gate boss while shielding two unconscious Players, standing over them long past the point where retreat would have been the sensible option.

"The description said the Evil God rewards unreasonable devotion," she explained, clearly pleased with the phrasing.

Doctor Smoke exhaled a slow ribbon of smoke toward the nearest prohibited-smoking sign. "It recognized a compatible personality disorder."

Daria entered last.

Her status silenced the room the moment it appeared.

➤[Name: Daria Lebedeva]

➤[Alias: Madam Marvel]

➤[Level: 36]

➤[Class: Elemental Deity (Legendary)]

The elemental staff in her hand had changed since Damien last saw it. Four narrow rings, red, brown, blue, and pale green, turned slowly around its crystal without ever touching one another, each holding its own quiet orbit.

"Legendary," Damien said.

"I can read," Daria replied, not looking up.

Hamari leaned toward him, voice dropped to a stage whisper. "She has been pretending this is normal for two days."

"It is a Class," Daria said. "Not an actual claim to divinity."

"That sounds like exactly the sort of thing a secret deity would say to avoid the paperwork."

Daria’s advancement allowed her to maintain two elements simultaneously without one disrupting the other. Fire could move inside wind without guttering out. Water could reinforce earth instead of turning it to mud underfoot. The Class had also doubled the strain of every mistake, a fact she mentioned with the same flat tone she used for everything else.

"Legendary does not mean effortless," she said. "It means the consequences have better names."

Reaching Level 30 opened Class Change for most Players. Common and Rare Classes usually advanced along predictable paths. Epic choices were exceptional. Legendary awakenings could alter the standing of entire guilds.

Nova Corps now contained two Epic Classes and one Legendary Class.

Doctor Smoke remained, by a wide margin, the most pleased person in the room, entirely on the strength of having refused to change anything at all.

Damien opened his own status briefly, mostly out of habit.

➤[Name: Damien]

➤[Alias: Sleepless]

➤[Level: 37]

➤[Available Stat Points: 51]

He dismissed it.

"No Class Change?" Grace asked.

"My Class is incomplete."

"Then we should test whether incomplete loses to Epic."

She attacked before anyone had a chance to approve the test, closing the distance in a single stride with the cheerful disregard of someone who considered "ask first" an optional courtesy.

The System recognized the friendly spar instantly.

➤[Player opponent identified.]

➤[Murderer designation: Absent.]

➤[Player Killer penalty activated.]

➤[All attributes reduced by 10% against the innocent Player.]

Damien felt strength leave his limbs all at once, like a rope going slack.

"My title dislikes friendly people," he said.

Grace’s armored fist crossed the space where his face had been a half-second earlier.

He used the movement pattern from Walk of Night. His step produced no sound at all. Grace turned toward the noise she expected, some reflexive tracking built from years of fights that always announced themselves, and found nothing there.

Damien tapped the First Blood Dagger’s sheathed handle against her back, light as a knock on a door.

Her black halo appeared, flickering into existence along her shoulders.

He immediately stepped away.

"You hit me," Grace said, delighted rather than annoyed.

"Barely."

"It counts."

Her return strike cracked the training floor where Damien had stood a heartbeat earlier, a spiderweb of fractures spreading out from the point of impact.

Daria trapped Grace’s boots in ice before the spar could become structural damage to the building itself.

Damien released the spar. His attributes returned immediately, the missing tenth of himself sliding back into place.

➤[Player Killer penalty deactivated.]

The title did not judge morality beyond its stated condition. Grace was an innocent Player, so Damien became weaker against her. A marked Murderer made him stronger. He disliked the simplicity of it, the way it flattened an entire person down to one flag, but the System did not request his approval before applying it.

Hamari raised both hands. Four small weapon windows opened around her shoulders, each one connected to a different firearm sitting ready in her inventory.

"Armament Regina lets me synchronize weapons," she said. "Swap without delay, share targeting data, and eventually control several at once."

"Eventually?" Doctor Smoke asked, one eyebrow rising.

Two rifles appeared and immediately collided in midair with an ugly clatter of metal.

Hamari dismissed them both before either hit the ground. "The crown has a learning curve."

At its current level, Armament Regina could maintain two independent targeting lines and change equipped weapons without the usual inventory delay. Hamari had already used it to fire a sniper round, replace the rifle with twin pistols, and continue shooting before the first bullet had even reached its target.

"I missed the second target," she admitted.

"By six meters," Daria said.

"The second target was emotionally difficult."

Daria demonstrated nothing at all, which was somehow more impressive than a demonstration would have been. The temperature, humidity, and air pressure in the room all shifted at once the moment she rested one hand on her staff, a small pressure change Damien felt in his ears before he understood why. That was enough.

Damien looked at the four women around him.

Ten days earlier, they had worried about reaching his level. Now every one of them had crossed thirty and come back out the other side with a stronger, stranger identity than the one they’d gone in with.

They looked at him for instructions anyway.

Not because he possessed the rarest Class in the room. He very clearly did not.

Because Nova Corps needed one person to decide where all that power actually belonged.

"Daria controls the field," Damien said, thinking it through out loud as he went. "Grace holds anything that reaches us. Hamari changes weapons according to range. Doctor Smoke decides who remains capable of fighting."

Hamari pointed at him. "And you?"

"I go where the plan fails."

Doctor Smoke crushed her cigarette into a government ashtray with more force than strictly necessary. "At least he understands his specialization."

The briefing doors opened.

Sir Martin entered beside Prime Minister Elias Rowe, their footsteps falling into an accidental unison across the polished floor.

Both men stopped before the team.

Then, to everyone’s visible surprise, they bowed.

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