A voice came from the corridor. Clear. Unhurried. No room to argue.
“Jack? Jack, my little darling—where are you?”
His expression dropped. The hard mask was gone. He sounded eager and small.
“Nova, ma’am!”
“I need you. Now.”
“Yes! Coming!” He fumbled with his jacket, wiped dust from the lapel with his sleeve, fixed a grin that never touched his eyes, and hurried out.
Leo stood there, still as a post. A minute ago, the man had looked like a war god pulled off a coin. Now he moved like a bellhop. The line of worship Leo had just drawn on his chest cracked down the middle. Something about Jack Harlan was wrong in ways Leo couldn’t yet name.
Jack had reason to smile. A private task was done. Yesterday, in a closed sim, that bookish prodigy had torn him apart. Leo’s macro game was neat, clean, and cruel. “Loki” had lost. First time ever.
He fixed it.
He didn’t delete a report. That leaves fingerprints. He used the GM pod, stepped around the locks, and dropped a minor fault into the fight log: an unhelpful “quantum noise” tag no one in QA would chase. A few minutes later, the system found the error and voided the match. Scores rolled back. The legend stayed whole.
A pinch of shame. Then the better feeling: ground recovered, name unmarked.
Now he needed a public stage.
The Nexus
A week later, Crucible: Infinite War brought PVP out of the box.
The Nexus wasn’t a lobby. It was a hub the size of a town square, built out of glass code and sponsorship. The spectator walls scrolled interstellar-standard languages and military brevity codes, with a bottom bar that auto-switched localized subtitles. A ring of feed towers threw match data into the air—latency, loadouts, heat maps, win curves. Light bridges hung over a black floor. The crowd noise came in waves that made your headset buzz.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Loki walked in. The chat went white-hot.
[Scyllan—Dezh Technate]: “There. Server rot. Bolt thief.”
[Alliance—Fenix]: “Anti-Loki, form up. Tonight, he spits the screws back out.”
[Terran Military Academy]: “Hold the slurs. His win rate is 100%. Study him.”
[Unknown—Pirate]: “I love the fat man. He breathes free.”
He didn’t look up.
“Summon mech,” he said.
The platform deployed a frame and poured light into it. Junkyard Dog came up in stages: spine, shoulders, arms, the big pack on its back sliding into place with a hard clunk. The thing stood tall and ugly on a Beast III skeleton. The arms were long—too long—ending in multi-purpose claws meant for peeling plates and yanking cores. The pack was a shipborne reactor with civilian tags still stamped under the paint. Armor didn’t match. Some plates were military, some were just shaped steel, some were whatever he found in a hangar and cut to fit. Welds were blunt. Cables ran where no engineer would leave them in public.
Gasps, then shouting. Because they knew what Beast III meant. It was a restricted chassis, not on any player list. To field one, you either had a thousand friends in procurement—or you took what you needed and made it fit.
And to take a stand-off gun frame and turn it into a clinch fighter? That wasn’t a mod. That was a rebuild.
HUD feeds split and zoomed:
- Core output: 78% idle → 84% warm.
- Joint temp: rising in the forearms.
- Pack cooling: staged fans 1–3 green; 4 amber.
- Shielding: none.
- Mass: +19% over stock.
- Note: noncompliant parts detected.
The Nexus light rigs swung down. Advert particles fell like slow rain—guild sigils, discount codes, “Report Loki” buttons—and melted on the floor. The crowd didn’t know whether to boo or save the footage. Half the Anti-Loki Alliance was on this ring. More than a few players shut their mouths and watched. If a thief builds this well, is it a shame to be robbed?
Junkyard Dog lifted one arm and made a crooked little bow. It was rude. It worked. The ring howled.
The challenge board came up, a vertical torrent of names and ranks, guild crests flickering past so fast you had to scroll with filters on. Loki stared, then shut his eyes. He jabbed a finger down like a man at a roulette table.
System voice in his ear:
Match confirmed.
Opponent: Hammer of the Gods
Guild: Draconian Imperium — Royal Guard
Rank: Diamond I
Map: Nova City — Ruins
Status: Transferring…
Jack grinned. Dice, wheel, coin, lot—didn’t matter. What mattered was the swing in his chest and the fight in front of him.
(HUD: CAST LOT // LONG THROW // SEED A9C // RESULT: PROCEED)