His phone rang while he was still in New Jersey.
"Locke, are you home?"
"No. What's up, Gwen?"
"My mom made some pastries, as a thank-you. For the other night." A pause. "When will you be back? Or just give me an address."
Locke looked at the situation around him and decided an address was not something he was giving out right now. "Don't worry about it."
"Too late. If you don't tell me, I'll have my dad track your phone."
He believed her.
"Half an hour," he said.
"Great!"
He put the phone away and looked at the taxi driver, who had been sitting very still and very quiet since Locke had gotten back into the cab.
The Fraternity's intern program, it turned out, was not particularly selective. This one had been driving assassins around New York for two years without mastering the Gun-Flicking Technique, which made him a liability who knew too much and could do too little. Locke had verified what he needed to know, and then he'd handled the situation in the alley with the same clean efficiency he brought to everything else.
He got out of the cab.
A few blocks later he flagged a different cab, picked up supplies from a supermarket, and was back on the highway to Manhattan before the sirens started. In the rearview mirror he watched two police cruisers blur past in the opposite direction, heading toward an alley in New Jersey that would take forensics a while to make sense of.
He rolled down the window and let the cold air in.
Gwen was standing at the entrance of Starlight Tower in a knitted hat, holding two insulated containers, when the R8 pulled up. She looked up at the sound of the engine.
"You look fine," she said, studying him. "I was a little worried."
"I'm fine." He took the containers from her at the door. "Tell your mom thank you."
"She'll be glad you said that." Gwen hesitated for a moment, then: "You sure you're okay?"
"I'm sure."
She looked at him for one more second with the expression she got when she suspected there was a longer answer available and had decided not to push for it tonight.
"Okay." She stepped back. "See you tomorrow."
He watched her walk back to the car George had sent for her, he'd caught the unmarked sedan parked across the street, engine running and then rode the elevator up to the twenty-eighth floor.
The bourbon was a year old and expensive enough that it would have been a problem for his budget if he'd bought it this week. He'd brought it from Texas. Two ice cubes, one glass, the view of Central Park settling into dark.
He pulled up the System.
[Name: Locke Broughton - Sole Player]
[Achievement Points: 300]
[Potential Points: 4,300]
[Talent: Tenacity - Level 3]
[Skills: Driving (Beginner) / English, History, Mathematics, Chemistry (9th Grade) / Shooting (Intermediate) / Sniping (Advanced)]
[Supernatural Skill: Gun-Flicking Technique - Blue Quality, Intermediate]Ordinary marksmanship travels in a straight line. Yours doesn't.[Active Mission: My Fate Is Mine to Command - In Progress]
He stared at the Achievement Points figure for a moment.
Three hundred.
He'd had 2,800 going into the week. The Chemistry class had added 500. The Every Debt prerequisite had added 1,000 and given him the Treasure Refresh Voucher. Then he'd used the voucher to knock an Advanced Imprint Card from 50,000 points down to 5,000, which he'd spent on the Butcher's technique, leaving him exactly here.
Three hundred Achievement Points and a skill that would have cost him a year of grinding to acquire otherwise.
He took a sip of bourbon.
Worth it. Probably.
The regret wasn't about the Gun-Flicking Technique. That was the right call — he needed it and he'd gotten it at the only price point he could afford. The regret was about opportunity cost. He'd been thinking, lately, about what else the Imprint mechanic could do. The Ancient One, for instance. Mirror Dimension magic. That was the kind of thing an Imprint Card was genuinely built for — something so far outside normal skill acquisition that no amount of grinding would get you there.
He'd spend the next voucher more carefully.
If he lived long enough to get another one.
He opened his palm and looked at the three-hundred-point figure like it owed him something.
The Gun-Flicking Technique upgrade to Advanced required 10,000 Potential Points. He had 4,300. That gap was annoying but closeable with consistent mission throughput. The Achievement Points situation was the real problem, three hundred was barely enough to matter, and the bloodlines he was saving for required tens of millions.
He needed a big score. He needed it soon.
He looked at the Helen's pastries on the counter, took one, they were excellent, the kind of thing that took actual skill and actual care and thought about the Textile Factory in Chicago.
The math was straightforward.
The Fraternity had 167 registered employees, according to public incorporation records. In practice the headcount would be lower, some of those were support staff, administrative cover, people who didn't know what the building was actually for. Call it a hundred and twenty active members. The mission structure paid per elimination of a hostile faction member.
Two hundred Achievement Points per person.
One hundred and twenty people.
Twenty-four thousand Achievement Points.
Plus whatever the mission completion bonus was on My Fate Is Mine to Command, plus any secondary bonuses from the scale of the operation.
He asked the System.
[Ding!]
[Mission Generated: Destiny Is Mine]
[Basic Reward: Achievement Points ×200 / Potential Points ×200 / Treasure Refresh Voucher ×1 - per hostile faction elimination]
[Mission Note: You are a Player. Destiny already belongs to you, they just don't know it yet. Go tell them.]
[Bonus Structure: Plot-relevant mission. Reward scales with scope of completion.]
[Note: Rewards from My Fate Is Mine to Command will also process at mission completion.]
Locke read through it twice.
Then he set the bourbon down.
Before this week he'd had a plan that looked like: settle in, build a routine, find a sustainable mission grind, be patient. That plan had assumed a low-friction establishment phase where nothing tried to kill him for at least a month.
Instead, on day three, his car had been destroyed by a body falling out of a plane, Cross had apparently thrown a Fraternity operative named Mr. Y off an aircraft, and by pure geometric coincidence, Mr. Y had landed on Locke's R8. Which had triggered the Fraternity's interest, which had put his name in front of Sloane's people, whether that meant it came from the Loom or Sloane's more private inventory of problems, the practical result was the same.
The Fraternity had tried to kill him.
He'd killed the Butcher instead and learned their signature technique in the process.
And now the System was telling him that storming the Textile Factory was not only viable but actively rewarded at scale.
He looked out at the dark park, the lights of the city beyond it, the distant outline of Stark Tower past Columbus Circle.
There was a version of this where he waited, rebuilt his points buffer, upgraded the Gun-Flicking Technique to Advanced, found two or three more contracts to stabilize his finances, came at the Textile Factory from a position of greater strength. That version was safer and probably smarter.
There was another version where he moved now, while the Fraternity's operational picture was disrupted by the Butcher's disappearance, before Sloane had time to recalibrate, before they sent someone better.
Locke was pragmatic but he wasn't passive. Patience was a strategy, not an identity. And the System had just handed him a bonus structure that scaled with scope.
The bigger the scene, the bigger the bonus.
He finished the bourbon.
He picked up another of Helen's pastries.
Chicago, he thought. Soon.