202 Not So Different
202 Not So Different
Yeah, Perry was cautious, I’d give him that much, but caution alone didn’t make someone sharp. If it were me, I wouldn’t have openly voiced suspicion on the person he was suspecting. I would have stayed quiet, watched longer, and waited for the other person to make the mistake themselves. Speaking it out loud only told me how he thought, and that information alone was worth filing away.
Snap emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, hair still damp, towel slung over one shoulder. Qilin paused his arcade game, reached into his bag, and pulled out a change of clothes before heading toward the shower without a word. The safehouse settled into a strange, almost domestic quiet once the door closed behind him.
Snap rummaged around until he found a chessboard tucked inside a crate, its pieces mismatched but intact. He glanced up at me. “You play.”
“Sure,” I said. “Better than staring at the walls.”
We set the board on a small table and began. The first game didn’t last long. Snap played aggressively, but his patterns were obvious, and I punished every mistake he made. I read his intent a few moves ahead and boxed him in without much effort. When I took his queen, his expression barely changed, though I felt the flicker of irritation beneath it.
The second game went differently.
Qilin returned midway through, towel around his neck, and paused behind Snap to watch. That was when everything flipped. Snap’s movements became tighter, more deliberate, his mistakes disappearing almost entirely. Within minutes, I was the one scrambling, reacting instead of dictating. He dismantled my position piece by piece until there was nothing left but inevitability.
I leaned back, studying him more closely. Snap was too good. Acoustokinesis alone didn’t explain spatial prediction, long-term planning, or how cleanly he adapted between games.
We played again, and I lost. Then again, and I won narrowly. By the end of it, the tally stood at four to three in my favor, though I wasn’t convinced the numbers told the full story. The last three games had felt off, subtly tilted, as if someone had been easing pressure at key moments.
I glanced at Snap, who stood quietly nearby, expression neutral. My psychic senses picked up on it then, faint but unmistakable. He’d been sandbagging. Just enough to influence outcomes without drawing attention. I recognized the tactic because I’d been doing a lot of it myself lately, and because my read on Snap had grown sharper over time.
I didn’t call it out. There was no point.
At some point, the quiet of the safehouse deepened into something heavier, the kind that came only when exhaustion finally won. Qilin claimed a corner near the arcade machine, using his backpack as a pillow, while Snap settled on the opposite side of the room with a blanket pulled halfway up his chest. I volunteered for lookout duty without hesitation, because sleep had never been something I truly needed.
Snap hesitated at first, his eyes lingering on me longer than necessary. “You sure about this,” he muttered, voice low. “Leaving my neck exposed and all.”
Qilin answered before I could. “If he kills you,” he said calmly, “I’ll avenge you.”
That seemed to satisfy Snap enough, or at least convince him there was no point worrying further. Knowing Qilin’s regenerative abilities, it would take a miracle for me to kill him with what I had on hand anyway. Back in Markend, I’d needed to phase a pocket nuke directly inside him just to give myself a chance. Even then, he hadn’t truly died, managing to regenerate from damaged brain tissue with the SRC’s intervention. That kind of resilience wasn’t something I could casually bypass.
I remained seated, back against the wall, eyes half-lidded as I stared into nothing. My mind ran through scenarios instead. Ways this operation could fail. Points where Urbanite’s game-logic might snap shut around us. At the same time, I mapped out opportunities, subtle angles where I could advance my own agenda without drawing attention. Every mission was a board, and every participant a piece, whether they knew it or not.
The faint hiss of running water broke the silence.
I tilted my head slightly. The sound came from the bathroom. A moment later, the door opened, and Perry stepped out, hair damp, expression unreadable as ever. He didn’t look surprised to see me awake, which told me he’d expected it.
“What’s the plan tomorrow?” I asked quietly.
He leaned against the wall opposite me. “Classic robbery quest,” he said. “We rake in as much money as possible.”
I frowned. “And the money’s for?”
“To extract the target,” Perry replied. “They’re in a… complicated position.”
That caught my attention. If robbing a bank was necessary just to reach someone, then the situation was worse than I’d assumed. Before I could press further, Perry continued.
“I want you moving separately tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll be stealing the cancer cure tech while the rest of us handle the robbery.”
I studied him carefully. “You trust me with something that important.”
Perry met my gaze without flinching. “I trust that you came here to prove yourself,” he said. “And that means you won’t fall short of the expectations placed on you.”
Morning came without ceremony, filtered through the cracked windows of the safehouse in a pale, artificial glow that never quite felt like sunlight. We moved with quiet efficiency.
Qilin, Snap, and Perry changed first, swapping out their usual attire for matching shirts and pants, each of them pulling a bonnet-style mask over their faces. The anonymity was deliberate, theatrical even, tailored to fit Urbanite’s expectations of what criminals were supposed to look like.
A few blocks from the safehouse, inside an abandoned warehouse that smelled of rust and old oil, an armored truck waited for them. The plan was blunt by design. Slam through the entrance, intimidate the NPCs, take the money, and disappear before the city decided to escalate. Urbanite rewarded adherence to genre just as much as it punished deviation, and this was the cleanest way to play along.
My setup was simpler. A tracksuit, a solid helm obscuring my face, and a bike leaning against a support pillar. The sight of it stirred memories I hadn’t touched in a while, flashes of the lawless roads I’d ridden through.
We each popped the pill for the day. The familiar warmth settled into my gut, and the system flickered faintly at the edge of my perception, stable enough to pass as normal.
Snap glanced at me as he adjusted his mask. “Urbanite’s basically an urban fantasy parody sandbox,” he said. “Genres shift depending on where you are. You’ll see noir, cyberpunk, magical realism, even straight-up horror if you wander too far off-script.”
“And the hospital,” I said.
“Interchanging genre,” Snap replied. “Randomized patterns. As long as you stay sharp and follow the local rules, you’ll be fine.”
Perry stepped forward, his presence grounding as always. “Our side might look louder,” he said, “but the odds are in our favor. Yours aren’t. You’re dealing with unknown variables.”
I caught the subtext easily enough. Concern wrapped in provocation, a subtle way of reminding me where he thought I stood. “If you’re in danger,” he added, “you retreat.”
“I’m going to handle it,” I said, my tone firm enough to end the discussion.
For a moment, Perry studied me, then nodded once. The trio climbed into the armored truck, the engine roaring to life as it pulled out of the warehouse and vanished down the street, swallowed by Urbanite’s ever-shifting backdrop.
I waited five minutes, just as planned, letting the city’s rhythm settle into place. Then I swung onto the bike, pulled the visor down until the world narrowed into a tinted frame, and started the engine. I drove toward Urbanite General Hospital with the city unfolding around me like a poorly rendered dream that refused to acknowledge it was fake. I tried to recall everything I had learned from the library and from Snap’s warnings, piecing together theory and rumor as I moved through the streets. Urbanite was governed by rules that weren’t written anywhere obvious, rules you learned only by observing this place directly.
The NPCs were everywhere. They walked, waited, and occupied space with unsettling fidelity, so lifelike that, at a glance, I could have sworn they were real people. Up close, though, something was always off. Their eyes rarely blinked. Their movements looped just a little too cleanly. When they spoke, their words followed preset patterns delivered in cadences that didn’t quite match natural speech. I tried talking to a few of them while stopped at a red light, my voice echoing out from beneath my helm, but they ignored me completely, staring straight ahead as if I didn’t exist. Whatever the pill was doing, it wasn’t enough to fully bridge that gap.
Players were different. I passed several groups interacting with NPCs, and the contrast was immediate. The NPCs responded to them with emotion, fear, irritation, gratitude, their dialogue branching naturally in ways it never did with me. That disparity made my skin crawl more than the artificiality ever could. It wasn’t that the NPCs weren’t alive. It was that the city had decided who they were allowed to be alive for.
I slowed as the road ahead clogged. Three players were gathered near the sidewalk, laughing loudly. They were beating an old woman, an NPC by the look of her, treating it like a game within a game. When another NPC approached, begging for help in a shrill, looping voice, one of them slit his throat without hesitation. The body collapsed, blood pooling in a way that was disturbingly detailed for something supposedly fake.
One of them noticed me watching. He had a bright mohawk and a grin that was all teeth. “What’re you looking at,” he snapped.
Another, with a buzz cut and a lazy posture, glanced my way. “Quest zone,” he said. “We marked it. Fuck off.”
The third laughed openly, pointing at me. “Look at this guy,” he said. “Stopping at a red light like a fucking NPC.”
The light changed. Green washed over the intersection. Cars moved forward smoothly, flowing around me as if I were a fixed object rather than an obstacle. I didn’t move.
Last night, I had retrieved every tarot card I’d smuggled beneath my skin, peeling them out of myself one by one and restoring them to their proper form. My fingers brushed the edge of one now as I reached inside my jacket. The Hanged Man slid into my palm, familiar and reassuring in its weight.
The mohawk took out his bat, flames licking along its length as he swung it experimentally. “We got a weirdo,” he laughed.
I flicked my wrist. The card left my hand and punched cleanly through his throat, embedding itself in the wall behind him before he even realized he was dead. His laughter cut off in a wet gargle as he collapsed.
“Fuck,” the buzz cut swore, already raising a machine gu from nowhere.
He never fired. I flicked my finger, and the tarot card tore free, severing his spine as it passed through his neck. His body folded in on itself, weapon clattering uselessly to the ground.
The last one screamed and jumped, his body performing an impossible double jump that sent him arcing toward an elevated skyway. He didn’t make it far. The card was faster. I recalled it mid-flight, teleporting it back into my palm, flooding it with electrokinesis while I boosted my own body with enhancer and biokinesis in tandem. I threw once more, and the card took his head clean off before returning obediently to my hand.
I pocketed it without ceremony, revved the bike, and pulled away as if nothing had happened.
No witnesses remained alive, player or otherwise. More than that, I finally understood Urbanite for what it was. It wasn’t just a city with game rules layered over reality. It was a place that rewarded cruelty, trivialized suffering, and encouraged people to treat life as disposable content.
“So, not so different from the real world, then, is it?”