The undercity was buzzing. The arrest and disgrace of Guard Captain Tarsus was a seismic event, a decapitation of the established order that sent shockwaves through every guild, gang, and smuggling ring. Kael's reports, delivered with a breathless, almost giddy excitement, painted a picture of a power vacuum, of chaos, of a city holding its breath. To the Rat-kin, it was a golden age of opportunity, a grand, chaotic game where he was now a major player.
To Zero, it was just noise.
He stood in the center of his small, spartan dorm room, a single candle casting a long, flickering shadow on the wall. He had not left the academy grounds since his return from the Alchemist's Maw. His wounds were healing, the deep, bone-bruising ache dulling to a manageable throb. He had won. By every conceivable metric, he had achieved a total, resounding victory.
But he felt no triumph. The [Callous] skill, his perfect emotional shield, did not permit such inefficient luxuries. Instead, it provided a profound, unnerving, and beautifully cold clarity. And in that clarity, he did not see a victory. He saw a string of unacceptable, nearly fatal, errors.
On the floor before him lay a large, clean sheet of parchment, a stark, white battlefield upon which he was re-fighting his entire war with Tarsus and the Glimmer-Hulk. It was a flow chart, an after-action report, a brutal, unflinching deconstruction of his own performance, written in his own neat, precise, and mercilessly logical script.
At the top, the primary objective: Neutralize threats (Glimmer-Hulk, Marcus's assassins). Protect identity. A simple, green checkmark was beside it. The mission was a success.
But beneath that, the chart branched out, a complex, sprawling diagram of every decision, every action, every variable. And these branches were littered with the angry, red 'X's of his own judgment.
Variable: Tarsus, C. The 'C' was for 'Control'. The 'X' beside it was a damning indictment. Initial assessment: Irrelevant. Corrected assessment: Critical threat. Failure point: Underestimation of a conventional, intelligent adversary. He found the boot print. He deduced the location. His logic was flawless, even if his conclusion was wrong. I did not control him; I was simply a step ahead of him. The difference is unacceptable.
He had not defeated Tarsus. He had gotten lucky. He had used a chaotic, last-minute gambit to frame him, a brilliant improvisation born of pure, desperate necessity. But it had been an improvisation. A scramble. And in Zero's new, cold calculus, any plan that relied on scrambling was a failed plan.
Another red 'X': Variable: Glimmer-Hulk. Combat Performance. Initial strategy: Environmental attrition. Successful. Final confrontation: Forced improvisation. Resulted in significant physical injury and a near-total loss of psychological control.
He remembered the moment his [Callous] shield had flickered, the moment the screaming ghost of Ashe had broken through. It had been a single, three-second window of vulnerability, but in a fight against a true predator—a Celeste, a Leo—three seconds would be an eternity in which to die. His internal defenses were not absolute. His hardware was flawed.
He stared at the parchment, at the cold, hard evidence of his own inadequacies. He had won, yes. But he had won like a gambler who draws the one card in the deck that can save him. He had not won like a grandmaster who sees the entire board and forces his opponent into an inevitable checkmate.
He was a clever fox, and he had managed to outwit a wolf and a rabid dog. But he lived in a world of dragons. A world of divinely blessed Heroes, of ancient, powerful Saints, of assassins who could walk through shadows. His current arsenal—a few chaotic, glitched skills, a sharp mind, and a willingness to be utterly ruthless—was not enough. It was a fundamentally insufficient model for long-term survival against the opponents who were waiting for him in the future.
He needed a quantum leap. He needed to move from being a player who could cleverly react to the moves on the board to a player who could dictate the very rules of the game.
This realization led him to the one, great, unsolved mystery that sat at the heart of his entire existence. The source of his own power. He had been so consumed with the "how" of his survival—how to kill the thugs, how to evade the Captain, how to trap the beast—that he had neglected to ask the far more important "why."
Why him? Why a Glitch System? What was the Abyssal Dissonance the cultist journals had spoken of? What was the true nature of the cosmic war he was now an unwilling participant in?
He had been content to be a user, to wield the strange, broken tools his System gave him. But he now understood that to be a true master, he had to become a developer. He had to understand the code. He had to find the source.
He walked to his desk and pulled out a new sheet of parchment. He drew a single, central box. Objective: Power.
From it, he drew two branching paths.
The first path he labeled: Incremental Growth. This was the path he had been on. Hunting low-level thugs. Engaging in undercity politics. A slow, grinding, and relatively safe accumulation of strength and resources. It was the path of the fox, growing stronger, cleverer, but remaining a fox.
The second path he labeled: Exponential Leap. This was a path of immense risk and equally immense potential reward. It was a path that led not to the next street-level threat, but to the very heart of the mystery of his own existence.
He thought of the censored books in the library. He thought of the single, systematically erased name: Theron, the Cartographer of the Unseen.
The Cartographer. A man who charted the unknown. A man so dangerous, so heretical, that the powers of this world had spent decades trying to erase him from history. A man who had clearly stumbled upon a truth they did not want known. A truth that was almost certainly connected to the Abyssal Dissonance, to the Glitch, to him.
Zero looked at the two paths he had drawn. One was a safe, predictable, and ultimately doomed road of slow, linear progression. The other was a sheer, treacherous cliff face that led directly into the heart of a storm, but at its peak was the promise of a power that could change the very nature of the game.
He picked up his quill, dipped it in the ink, and drew a single, heavy, decisive line through Incremental Growth.
The decision was made. He was done with the shadows of the undercity. He was done playing games with corrupt guards and petty nobles. He was a scholar at heart, a theorist, and there was no greater puzzle than the one that was coded into his own soul.
His new hunt would not be for monsters of flesh and blood. It would be for a ghost. A ghost of history, a man named Theron. And the hunting ground would not be the filthy alleys of the undercity, but the silent, dusty, and far more dangerous labyrinth of the Royal Academy's library. He was abandoning the sword and picking up the scalpel, preparing to perform a surgical dissection on history itself. He was going to find the truth, no matter the cost. And he was going to weaponize it.