Date: 16th July 2026
Location: The Cryptic Vault / London Metropolitan University
Time: 08:15 AM BST
The internal logic was flawless. The background math was absolute.
But cold logic, unfortunately, does not account for the miserable fact that my biceps currently possess the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.
In my HUD, the [Slow Time - Lv. 2] skill sat in the corner of my vision like a dormant, mocking god.
It was a Ferrari engine violently trapped inside a damp cardboard box. Sure, I could technically slow local time by fifty percent for a single second.
But with my current Vitality sitting at a pathetic 0.9, the kinetic recoil alone would likely turn my fragile bones into fine powder.
"If I can just boost my Stamina to the level of a moderately functional human being," I muttered to the empty room.
I stared at my pale, trembling reflection in the Cryptic Vault's cracked bathroom mirror. "I might actually survive using my own bloody powers. How hard can it possibly be?"
["Statistically speaking?"]
Eliza's voice purred through the Vault's cheap speakers.
["For you, Pryce, it would be considered heroic."]
Her AR avatar appeared directly on the lens of my glasses.
["Your current muscle mass is highly comparable to a wheel of well-aged brie."]
["But do proceed with this physical delusion, Architect."]
["I have already dialled the emergency services and placed them on standby."]
"Watch me," I growled.
I cleared a small space on the greasy concrete floor, right next to the violently humming Tesla 1.3 Core.
I stripped off my heavy coat, revealing a skeletal frame that Albie had recently described as a tragic collection of coat hangers held together entirely by spite.
I dropped slowly into a push-up position.
My [Mastery Step] passive tried its absolute best to optimize my physical form. It frantically calculated the perfect geometric angle for the deltoids.
But there was simply nothing to optimize. There was no actual engine to drive the car.
"One," I grunted through gritted teeth.
My thin elbows immediately shook like a cheap washing machine stuck on a violent spin cycle.
"Two..."
My vision instantly began to swim with dark, angry red dots. The damp, ozone-heavy air of the basement felt like it was actively crushing my lungs.
"Thr... urgh!"
THUD.
I didn't even reach three. My arms didn't just give out; they went on a permanent, aggressive strike.
I collapsed face-first onto the cold, dirty concrete. My chest heaved violently as if I'd just tried to sprint across the entire Atlantic Ocean.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL PHYSICAL FAILURE.] [HEART RATE: 180 BPM.] [STAMINA: 0.3 (CRITICAL DEBT).] "Three... bloody pushups..." I wheezed pathetically into the century-old dust.
"In the 400th loop... I successfully wrestled a Void-Bear... with one hand."
["And in this current loop, you are being utterly defeated by basic gravity."]
Eliza noted drily. Her AR avatar appeared to casually sit directly on the back of my head, adding phantom weight to my crushing humiliation.
["You have been a 'Mental God' for so long you entirely forgot that actual meat requires basic maintenance."]
["You are currently trying to run high-tier apocalyptic software on a damp potato, Mason."]
I rolled over painfully, staring blankly up at the ceiling of the vault. The rusted, leaking pipes looked back down at me with supreme indifference.
I desperately needed a shortcut. I needed a cheat code for my own biology.
And then, the Tesla 1.3 hummed a different tune.
HUMMMMM.
Sensing my acute physical distress through the smartwatch tether, the heavy silver coils of the core glowed a deep, bruising violet.
A sudden wave of cold, purified frequency washed directly through my veins. It wasn't magic; it was a brutal, forced energy transfer.
The Tesla Core was taking the excess, passive entropy siphoned from our early beta users and violently filtering it into pure bio-electric stamina.
The crushing fatigue didn't just slowly fade. It was instantly deleted.
One second, I was a dying man choking on basement dust. The next, my breathing was perfectly, unnaturally level.
The burning lactic acid in my legs completely vanished. My erratic, hammering heart rate dropped instantly to a steady 60 BPM.
"Optimization," I whispered, slowly standing up and checking my pale hands.
They were completely steady. No tremors. No weakness.
"I break down, the Core fixes me. It's a closed-loop biological system." I flexed my fingers, a dark smile touching my lips. "I am actively using my own suffering as a localized battery."
I quickly checked the HUD. The numbers hadn't miraculously jumped to Level 5, but the terrible strain was actively buffered.
[VITALITY: 0.9 (Terminal - Tesla Buffered)] [STAMINA: 0.3 (Critical - Tesla Buffered)]
"It's not much," I said, grabbing a dirty towel to wipe the concrete dust off my face. "But it's enough to walk to class without fainting like a Victorian widow."
Time: 08:45 AM BST
Thirty minutes later, the harsh morning sun over the London Met campus felt less like a personal insult and more like a massive, blinding spotlight.
I was walking—actually, physically walking—across the North Campus quad. For the first time in this entire loop, I wasn't actively contemplating a tactical collapse into the nearest decorative bush.
I adjusted my Vanguard AR glasses.
The S-Tier Skin Mod was active, making the advanced, highly illegal hardware look exactly like a pair of stylish, high-street spectacles.
My [Mastery Step] was deliberately throttled down to 'Casual Stroll'. It kept my skeletal alignment absolutely precise to minimize any unnecessary energy waste.
"Status check," I croaked quietly, my breath pluming in the cold morning air.
[TIMELINK NETWORK STATUS] REGISTERED USERS: 842
GRID STABILITY: 52%
MASON PRYCE: VIT 0.9 | STA 0.3 | INT 999
["You are walking quite upright today, Architect."]
Eliza's voice purred directly through the bone-conduction earpiece hidden in the thick frames.
["Did you finally remember that humans are supposed to have functional spines?"]
["Or did the Tesla-flush simply jumpstart your deadened nervous system like a rusted car battery?"]
"Strategic optimization, Eliza," I muttered back.
My fingers twitched slightly inside my trench coat pocket. I was subtly scrolling through the massive streams of crowd data via the haptic interface on my phone.
"I can't very well lead a global revolution if I'm constantly staring at everyone's muddy trainers."
"Mason! Wait up!"
I turned my head slowly—deliberately avoiding the neck-cracking whiplash of my highly unnatural 32 Dexterity stat—and saw the squad quickly catching up.
Ramona and Dominic flanked me on either side. Dexter walked a few heavy paces behind, as silent and immovable as a walking mountain.
Albie was jogging to catch up, clutching an overpriced iced coffee like a medical lifeline.
They were all wearing their own versions of the Vanguard glasses. To the oblivious world around us, they were just another group of tired uni students.
To me, they were a walking, highly weaponised HUD of raw potential.
"You're actually... moving on your own?" Dominic laughed, adjusting his heavy backpack.
Through my glasses, I could clearly see his [Static Veil] passively pulsing. It made his physical edges slightly, almost imperceptibly blurry to the CCTV cameras mounted on the campus lamp posts.
"I honestly thought we'd have to carry you to the lecture hall in a wheelbarrow."
"I'm feeling... generous today," I replied dryly, not breaking my measured stride. "And the Tesla 1.3 gave me a bit of a necessary jumpstart."
"Check this out," Ramona grinned.
She was casually tapping the empty air with her fingers. To anyone else, she looked like she was conducting an invisible, silent orchestra.
"I'm fully linked to Eliza's secondary feed. I just scanned that loud group of girls over by the library."
Ramona smirked. "Two of them already have the early beta app installed. But you really need to look at their raw stats."
I activated the Architect's Eye with a rapid double-blink.
The normal, boring world instantly dissolved into a sharp wireframe of glowing frequencies. I saw the Status Bars of every single student we passed floating above their heads like gamified, neon nameplates.
A massive rugby player walked past us, loudly laughing with his mates.
[USER: STUDENT #402] VIT: 1.5
STR: 1.4
INT: 0.2
["Look closely at that tragic specimen, Pryce."]
Eliza sneered in my ear, her voice dripping with aristocratic disdain.
["Vitality 1.5."]
["He physically possesses nearly twice your biological durability."]
["And yet his brain activity strongly suggests he is currently only thinking about... a ham sandwich."]
["It is an absolute tragedy, really."]
["All that impressive hardware, and absolutely no software installed."]
"They're physically stronger than you, Mason," Ramona teased, clearly reading the same data Eliza was actively feeding her.
"Literally everyone on this campus is stronger than you. Even the miserable art students struggling to carry those giant portfolios."
["She has a highly valid point, Architect."]
Eliza chimed in, aggressively broadcasting to the group's secure comms channel so everyone could hear her insult me.
["I have run the complex calculations."]
["Based entirely on Mason's childhood activity levels, he spent the last twenty years acting as a very intense, highly intelligent paperweight."]
["You lot are physically competent."]
["He is a walking miracle of modern medicine and sheer, unadulterated spite."]
"Thank you, Eliza," I sighed, aggressively rubbing my temples to ward off the incoming headache. "I am so incredibly glad my own AI finds my severe muscular atrophy highly amusing."
"It's not just the personal stats though," Albie interrupted, taking a loud, obnoxious slurp of his iced coffee.
"The localized hacking potential is absolutely insane. I just quietly pinged the main vending machine in the student union."
Albie grinned wickedly. "I know exactly how many Snickers bars are left inside. Spoiler alert: It's exactly three."
"Think significantly bigger, Albie," Ramona said.
Her voice dropped lower as we passed a tight group of senior professors arguing over a syllabus.
"Eliza just completely cracked the Dean's private cloud server in under three seconds."
Ramona looked at me, her eyes wide with disbelief. "He's been secretly using the university's discretionary budget to fund a massive addiction to collectible porcelain cats."
"He calls it 'Project Whiskers'. Thousands of bloody pounds diverted from the science block."
"No way," Dominic gasped, nearly tripping over a loose paving stone. "Porcelain cats? The same guy who rigidly runs the University Ethics Committee?"
"I have the direct financial receipts," Ramona smirked. Her finger flicked a sharp 'Save' command in the empty air. "We officially own him now."
"Keep that data deeply encrypted," I ordered.
My finger flicked a subtle command inside my pocket to aggressively archive the files securely in the Vault. "Information leverage is the only actual currency that matters anymore. And speaking of leverage..."
I casually glanced back over my shoulder at Dexter.
He was walking with a heavy, rhythmic thud that seemed to shake the concrete. He didn't look at the floating data streams. He didn't care about the Dean's stupid cats.
He was exclusively scanning the crowd for physical threats.
I checked his status again, desperately hoping the recent Tesla 1.3 update had finally fixed the glaring glitch.
[USER: DEXTER] [STATUS: ERROR / UNREADABLE] "You good back there, Dex?" I asked quietly.
Dexter looked up. His dark eyes were completely clear, devoid of any AR distraction.
"Just watching the perimeter, Mason," Dexter grunted. "You handle the messy code. I handle the collision."
We walked in a tight, diamond formation. We were a secret, highly illegal cabal hiding in plain sight.
The oblivious students rushing around us had absolutely no idea that the five tired people walking toward the Physics block were currently monitoring the entire campus network.
My squad was thoroughly enjoying the new power. The intoxicating ability to see the world's hidden data, to instantly know the dirty secrets of passing strangers.
They didn't feel the crushing weight of the sky looking back at them yet.
To them, they were just lucky kids with god-tier toys. And for a brief, fleeting moment in the cold London morning, the vibe was actually good.