The darkness of the blacked-out hotel suite was absolute, a perfect canvas for the cold, hard light of Leo's System interface. The warning from Julian pulsed with a quiet, deadly urgency. An intruder was on the move. The Board was initiating a sanitization protocol, and their first target was the loose end sleeping in a hospital bed under police guard—Marcus Thorne.
"He's a liability," Leo muttered, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying speed. "If he talks, he connects the Titan Tower collapse to a wider conspiracy. They can't let that happen. They're going to erase him."
He looked at the Hunter, still writhing silently on the floor, a predator declawed and defanged. He was yesterday's problem. A new, more immediate threat had just entered the game.
"Evelyn," Leo said into his phone, his voice sharp and decisive. The lingering weakness from his [Energy Debt] was a distant echo, drowned out by the flood of adrenaline. "The hospital is compromised. The Board is making a move on Thorne. I'm going in."
"Leo, no," Evelyn's voice was a tight wire of controlled panic. "You're not in any condition. Your tactical value is minimal. Let the police handle it. Let my people handle it. I can have a private security team there in fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen minutes is an eternity," Leo countered, his eyes already scanning his [Portfolio] for usable assets. "A Board agent isn't going to be stopped by men with guns. This requires a systemic solution. I have to be there." He paused. "We have to be there."
"Julian," he commanded. "Transport. The hospital. Now. Bring the Hunter with us; he's a potential asset we can't leave unsecured."
"Acknowledged," Julian's mental voice replied. "However, direct physical translocation of multiple biological entities through populated areas carries a high risk of paradoxical detection. A more subtle method is required."
"Then be subtle," Leo snapped.
Julian glided towards him and the still-imprisoned Hunter. He placed a hand on Leo's shoulder. The world dissolved.
It was not a violent lurch like his temporal edit. It was a smooth, nauseating disassembly of reality. The opulent hotel suite—the walls, the floor, the ruined furniture—deconstructed into a shimmering, infinite grid of cyan light, a wireframe model of the universe. For a terrifying second, Leo felt his own body lose its cohesion, his atoms threatening to drift apart into the cosmic blueprint.
Then, with a sickening lurch, reality reasserted itself.
The smell of sterile antiseptic and floor polish flooded his senses. The gentle, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor replaced the silence. They were standing in a dark, empty hospital janitor's closet, the air thick with the smell of bleach. The journey across 2.7 miles of city had taken less than three seconds. Julian stood beside him, perfectly still. The unconscious form of the Hunter lay at their feet, bound in what looked like hardened janitor's coveralls.
Leo leaned against a metal shelf, his stomach churning. [Conceptual Travel] was efficient, but it was deeply, fundamentally wrong.
His phone vibrated. A new encrypted message from Glitch.
> You're in. Impressive entry vector. Bypassed all physical security. According to hospital blueprints, you are in Janitorial Closet 3B, west wing, seventh floor. Thorne's room is at the end of the hall, Room 712. You have company.
A new window opened on Leo's System view, displaying a live, slightly grainy feed from the hallway's CCTV camera. Glitch was already inside the hospital's network.
> Meet your new friend, the text continued. The maintenance worker. He just entered the seventh-floor corridor from the service stairs. No one saw him. No one stopped him.
On the screen, Leo saw a man in a standard hospital maintenance uniform pushing a large, covered cleaning cart. He looked utterly unremarkable. Balding, slightly paunchy, with a bored, disinterested expression on his face. He could have been any one of a thousand city workers.
"Julian," Leo whispered. "Analysis."
"Scanning target..." Julian's voice came a moment later. "Entity is a Tier-2 Board Agent. Designation: 'The Janitor'. Primary function: Infiltration and silent asset removal. This is not a hunter. This is an exterminator."
The Janitor on the screen moved with a slow, deliberate purpose. He wasn't rushing. He didn't look threatening. But as Leo watched, he saw the man pass a potted plant in the hallway. The moment he was past it, the plant's leaves began to curl and turn black. The life was simply… draining out of it.
[System Alert: Hostile ability detected.]
[Primary Concept: [Entropy]. The Janitor passively exudes a field of accelerated decay and order-dissolution.]
This was a completely different kind of threat. The Hunter was a physical force. This thing was a walking, talking plague. He didn't break things; he unmade them.
"Evelyn, Glitch, are you seeing this?" Leo subvocalized into his phone's mic.
"I see him," Evelyn's voice came back, tight and low. "He's heading directly for Room 712. There are two police guards stationed outside the door."
"They won't be a problem for him," Leo muttered, his eyes locked on the monitor.
On the screen, the Janitor reached the two cops. He didn't even look at them. He simply continued pushing his cart. As he passed between them, both officers suddenly slumped against the wall, their eyes rolling back in their heads as they fell into a deep, unnatural sleep. He hadn't touched them. He had simply exposed them to his entropic field, causing the electrical order in their brains to momentarily dissolve into chaos.
He arrived at the door of Room 712 and placed a hand on the electronic lock. There was a faint fizzing sound, and the lock sparked and died, its internal mechanisms corroded into uselessness. He pushed the door open and entered, closing it silently behind him.
He was in. With the target.
"Damn it," Leo cursed. "We're out of time. We have to go in hot."
"Negative," Evelyn's voice commanded from the phone. "That's what he wants. He's a specialist. You can't fight him on his terms. Leo, you're an architect. Don't fight the man. Fight the building."
Evelyn's words were a splash of cold water. She was right. He had been thinking like a soldier, not a strategist.
He closed his eyes, his consciousness expanding beyond the janitor's closet. He didn't just see the hospital; he felt it. He felt the hum of the electrical wiring in the walls, the flow of air through the HVAC system, the stress points in the load-bearing columns, the latent potential in every object. The entire floor was his new battlefield.
"Glitch," Leo commanded. "I need a distraction. A big one. Two floors down. Can you trigger the fire alarm system on the fifth floor?"
> Triggering a fire alarm is amateur hour, Glitch's text flashed back. Give me ten seconds.
"Julian," Leo said. "When the distraction hits, we move. Your job is to run interference. Don't engage the Janitor directly. Your conceptual integrity might be vulnerable to his entropic field. Your job is to keep him occupied. I am the primary weapon."
Acknowledged. Awaiting your signal.
Leo took a deep breath. He focused his will, pouring his energy into the very structure of the building. He began to lay his traps. It was time to show The Board what a hostile architectural takeover really looked like.
Inside Room 712, the Janitor looked down at the unconscious form of Marcus Thorne. His mission was simple: inject the proxy with a custom-designed protein that would cause a massive, untraceable heart attack. The asset would be erased, the link to The Board severed permanently.
He reached into his cart and pulled out a sterile syringe. As he moved towards the bed, the entire hospital suddenly roared to life around him.
Every television on the floor, including the one in Thorne's room, snapped on at maximum volume, blasting a cacophony of static and distorted noise. The lights began to flicker in a frantic, strobe-like pattern. The automated PA system began to blare a corrupted message in a dozen different languages.
It was Glitch's masterpiece. She hadn't just triggered an alarm; she had turned the entire fifth and sixth floors into a sensory-overload bomb, a digital poltergeist designed to create maximum chaos and draw every security guard and staff member away from the seventh floor.
The Janitor, unfazed, continued towards the bed. The chaos was irrelevant to his mission.
That's when the room itself started to fight back.
As he took a step, the linoleum tile directly under his foot suddenly lost all its structural cohesion, turning into a sticky, tar-like substance. [Edit: Apply Concept [Viscosity] to Object [Floor Tile]]. His foot sank into it, trapping him for a precious second.
He grunted in annoyance, pulling his foot free, and took another step. The metal frame of the hospital bed suddenly extended a thin, sharp spike, aimed directly at his hand. [Edit: Apply Concept [Malleability] to Object [Bed Frame]]. He jerked his hand back, avoiding the impromptu caltrop.
This was not random chaos. This was intelligent, targeted. The anomaly was here.
A low hum filled the room. The Janitor looked up. The suspended ceiling tiles were vibrating ominously.
He abandoned the mission to kill Thorne. His new priority was the primary threat. He turned and strode towards the door.
The door, however, was no longer there. The entire wall where the door had been was now a smooth, seamless surface of drywall and steel studs. [Edit: Apply Concept [Structural Integration] to Object [Door/Wall Assembly]].
The Janitor was trapped.
He placed his hand on the new wall, and his entropic field went to work. The drywall crumbled to dust, the steel studs rusted and flaked away in seconds. He stepped through the newly created hole into the hallway.
The hallway was a deathtrap.
The overhead sprinkler heads suddenly burst, not with water, but with a thick, conductive, saline solution that had been rerouted from a medical supply closet. [Edit: Reroute Plumbing. Edit: Change Fluid Properties].
At the same time, Leo, hiding in an adjacent room, slammed his will into his next command.
[Edit: Apply Concept [Massive Electrical Charge] to Object [Floor Polisher's Power Cable]].
The severed, live electrical cable, left behind by the cleaning staff, writhed on the floor like a snake and touched the spreading pool of saline solution.
The entire hallway erupted in a blinding flash of blue-white light as thousands of volts of electricity instantly arced through the conductive liquid. The air filled with the sharp smell of ozone and steam. It was a massive, improvised arc flash, turning the corridor into an industrial-grade stun gun.
The Janitor was caught in the center of it. His body convulsed violently as the electricity coursed through him, short-circuiting his sophisticated biological systems. He collapsed to his knees, smoke rising from his uniform.
Leo watched from the doorway, his heart hammering. It was a brutal, efficient trap.
But the Janitor was not down. Slowly, unsteadily, he began to get back up. His uniform was scorched, his movements jerky, but his entropic field was still active, causing the very air around him to seem to shimmer and decay.
He was damaged, but he was still functional. And he was now looking directly at Leo's hiding place.
"Julian," Leo whispered, his adrenaline running cold. "Plan B."
Julian materialized from the shadows at the far end of the hallway, standing between the Janitor and Leo. He held no weapon. He simply stood there, a silent, golden-eyed sentinel.
The Janitor saw him and paused. He recognized the energy signature. A Cleaner. But a rogue one. Corrupted.
This momentary hesitation was all Leo needed. He wasn't focused on the Janitor anymore. He was focused on the asset the Janitor had come to erase. He was focused on Marcus Thorne.
Leo's consciousness plunged into the hospital's network, guided by Glitch. He found the live feed from Thorne's vital signs monitor. Heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity. A stream of pure data.
An asset.
The System, his System, which saw the world in terms of finance and corporate structures, presented him with an option so audacious, so terrifyingly logical, that it made his previous exploits seem like child's play.
It wasn't about killing him. It wasn't about saving him. It was about ownership.
He focused his entire will, pouring every last drop of his energy and his cosmic credit line into the command.
[System Command: Initiate Hostile Takeover. Target: The Biological and Neurological Systems of Asset 'Marcus Thorne'.]
A new window opened, a new progress bar.
[Acquiring... Controlling Interest in Target's Autonomic Nervous System.]
In the hospital room, Thorne's rhythmic, sedated breathing hitched. On the monitor, his heart rate spiked erratically.
The Janitor sensed the shift, the intrusion of a new, powerful system into his target. He turned his head from Julian back towards the room, realizing he was a pawn in a much larger game.
He was too late.
[10%... 25%... 41%...]
Leo felt a wave of nausea. He was doing something monstrous. He wasn't just influencing a mind; he was seizing the very code of a man's life.
The progress bar hit 51%.
[Acquisition Successful. You now possess a Majority Stake in 'Marcus Thorne'.]
[New Asset Unlocked: [Puppet].]
In the hospital bed, Marcus Thorne's eyes snapped open. They were vacant, empty pools. Then, slowly, mechanically, he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. He turned his head and looked directly through the wall, through the chaos, at the Janitor in the hallway.
And then, Marcus Thorne smiled. But it wasn't his smile. It was Leo's.