New Novel
Chapter 20: An Unexpected Target

Chapter 20: An Unexpected Target

"The fuck?"

He said out loud. Mostly to himself.

Wait. He searched through the message once more.

Skill, Enhanced Physique, Cannot be used at the moment. ⓘ

There’s that ⓘ again.

The same icon that had already cost him one full mission’s worth of confusion before he’d learned to trust it over the headline text.

He tapped the small ⓘ sitting next to the error line. The screen updated.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❗️ERROR❗️

Enhanced Physique cannot be initiated while the Host is within public observation range.ⓘ

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He read it twice. Looked up from the phone and actually took in where he was standing.

Joggers cutting past on the path, a couple walking a dog with zero interest in being walked, two people on a bench doing something on their phones that wasn’t watching him but existed close enough to count, apparently.

Seriously.

Whatever the enhancement actually did to his body, it didn’t want witnesses for it. Fair, in theory. Kind of scary though.

Still, he didn’t mind. He wasn’t really angry. Too tired for angry. Mostly just annoyed that finishing the box hadn’t come with some extra facial definition.

Another trip, then.

He locked the phone and started walking home.

He didn’t make it far before the morning caught up with him properly.

Mouth dry somewhere around the second block. Throat scraping a little on every breath.

It took him embarrassingly long to connect the dry mouth and the scraped-out throat to the fact that he hadn’t had water in two hours.

A small shop sat on the corner ahead, hand-painted sign, the kind of place that had clearly outlasted the block around it. He went in, grabbed the first bottle of water he saw, paid.

Cracked it open right at the counter and drank half of it standing there, head tilted back like the bottle owed him something.

The shopkeeper gave him a brief, unbothered look. The kind that suggested he might want to slow down before he choked. He didn’t particularly care. Didn’t explain either.

Stepped back outside, bottle still in hand. His phone buzzed again as soon as he stepped back outside.

He paused.

He checked it half-expecting another cryptic condition to decode. Instead the mission screen was still sitting open from earlier.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

REMINDER

Time remaining: 18:22:14

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He stopped walking to actually register that.

Ninety minutes had eaten more of the clock than he’d budgeted for, and the actual requirement hadn’t moved an inch in the meantime.

Find investment candidate.

Candidate must be made aware.

Candidate must consent.

He took another drink, mostly to buy himself a second, and ran the wording through his head, trying to find a way it wouldn’t sound absolutely insane to say.

Hi. You’re my investment candidate.

No.

The system says you’re worth money to me.

Somehow worse.

He started walking again. Capped the bottle, pocketed the phone, and kept turning the wording over, hoping a better version of the sentence would show up eventually.

His phone buzzed a third time before he’d walked a single block.

He checked it on reflex, bracing for the system again. Instead, a group chat notification sat on the screen, one he hadn’t opened in long enough that his thumb almost swiped it away out of pure habit.

Then he actually read the names.

Jenna.

Drew.

Adrian.

His old friend group. The one he hadn’t touched since before the move, before Maya, possibly before he’d stopped remembering what normal conversations with people who weren’t a system or a fake girlfriend sounded like.

He stood there a second, thumb hovering over the notification.

How long had he been off. Weeks. Maybe longer.

He opened it. His eyes landed on the ongoing conversation.

Drew: You’re coming.

Jenna: That’s a strange way to ask.

Drew: Fine. Please come.

Less than a moment later.

Jenna: No.

Drew: You didn’t even think about it.

Jenna: I did. That’s why I said no.

Adrian scrolled through it without typing anything yet.

Drew was still Drew. Three messages before Jenna could even answer the first one. Jenna hadn’t budged an inch either, still shutting him down in as few words as possible, still somehow winning every single time.

Nothing about either of them had changed.

That, for reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, felt like the first genuinely good thing to happen to him all morning.

He kept scrolling. Past the gym argument. Further back than he’d meant to go, just to see what he’d missed since he’d gone quiet on everyone.

Drew: where’d you disappear to bro?

Jenna: did you get my texts?

Another text.

Jenna: I stopped by your parent’s place. You couldn’t even come down?

A missed call from Jenna, sitting there flagged red, three weeks old.

None of it dramatic. No group intervention, no dramatic "we need to talk." Just a scattered handful of small attempts, spread out over weeks, all landing on the same silence.

He hadn’t just gone quiet on Maya, then. He’d gone quiet on everyone, and apparently nobody had actually stopped trying. He’d just stopped being anywhere they could find him.

I’d really been a pain in the ass.

Drew sent something else right then, something about Jenna’s squat form that had nothing to do with anything, and the thread carried on without him the same way it apparently had for weeks.

He watched two more exchanges scroll past, thumb hovering over the keyboard the whole time.

Typed something. Deleted it.

Typed something shorter. Deleted that too.

He couldn’t explain why texting two people he’d known for years suddenly felt harder than talking to a stranger had been yesterday. The waitress, the sales assistant, even Rose the first time. This should’ve been easier. It wasn’t.

He stopped overthinking it and just sent the first thing that wasn’t a full sentence.

Adrian: You two still arguing about this?

Sent.

The typing indicators vanished. Both of them, at the same time.

He watched the empty space where a reply should’ve been, phone held a little too still for someone who’d claim he didn’t care how this landed.

Drew: ...

Drew: No fucking way.

Drew: IS THAT ACTUALLY YOU? BRO???

Drew: Jenna. You seeing this too??

Adrian stared at the screen, letting Drew burn through his entire allotment of exclamation points before Jenna’s name finally showed up under his.

Jenna: Adrian?

Jenna: Are you there?

He paused. He thought about the missed call. The unanswered texts, stacked up over weeks he hadn’t even noticed passing. She’d actually tried the most to check on him, and he’d let all of it sit there unread like none of it mattered.

He really was an asshole. But he couldn’t exactly go quiet now. Could he?

No.

Adrian: Hi.

Sent.

The chat detonated.

Drew: WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN

Drew: DID YOU DIE??

Jenna: Drew, calm down.

Drew: I WILL NOT

Adrian answered in fragments. Moved into his first apartment, been busy, yeah I’m fine. Nothing that came close to the actual size of the last two weeks.

Drew: We need to meet. Gym. an hour. you’re both coming.

Jenna: Don’t use Adrian to get me there.

Drew: I would never do that.

Jenna: You are doing that right now.

Adrian watched the argument restart with fresh material, same energy as fifteen minutes ago, and could’ve just left it there.

Then something else surfaced, quieter, underneath the ongoing reunion.

The target. The countdown. The requirement sitting open on a different app entirely, ticking down whether he answered this thread or not.

Then. His eyes landed on Jenna’s name and didn’t move.

Hold up.

She was a girl. Someone he already knew, not some stranger he’d have to build an entire relationship with from nothing in the next eighteen hours.

The system had never actually said stranger. He went back and checked, just to be sure he hadn’t imagined the loophole out of pure convenience.

Candidate must be made aware.

Easier, maybe, doing that face to face with someone who already knew him than cold-approaching a woman and asking her to say yes to being his target.

Not easy. He wasn’t delusional about that part.

A tag to his last message caught his attention.

Drew: so? you coming?

He looked at Jenna’s name one more time. Then he thought about the countdown, the reward and... the penalty. Losing his two thousand dollars? Not a chance.

Adrian: I’m in.