By the time Reese Reed arrived home, news of the attacks had spread throughout the town and indeed the world.

As he’d already inferred from the leaderboard, people from all around the globe had been affected. And the second message had further confirmed this.

There was still very little official word from the government and no presidential address. He wasn’t sure if that was strange or not. History had never been a subject that had interested him. He would simply cram for tests then promptly forget it all when they were done.

While Reese himself hadn’t spent much time watching or reading the news since getting home, it was all his father was doing. That and making and taking phone calls.

Reese had told him what he’d seen, the students being taken and what he’d overheard, and at first his father hadn’t seemed interested. Then for some reason Reese couldn’t intuit, he’d become very interested. He’d talked to Cal Winston, Mitchell High’s police officer, but all he’d gotten so far was that the FBI were in charge.

This did not please him.

“I’m the mayor, dammit!” Reese heard him yell now down in his office.

Reese was up in his room, and knew for a fact it took quite a bit of noise to reach all the way up here.

Reese himself was more interested in the system, but was curious what exactly the FBI were doing. At least his father was being kept busy with his quest for information, allowing Reese to continue on his own quest to learn and explore in relative peace.

He wasn’t ready to tell his father he’d joined the system. Not yet. He needed to learn more, gather information.

He knew several of his classmates had been taken by the police, or FBI, or whoever was really running things. And that several more had been injured, many bad enough to need to be taken to the hospital.

And, some had died. Reese didn’t know if they had a count yet. But he wasn’t surprised. Whatever that monster was, stopping it wouldn’t be easy.

The good news was there’d been no sign of it since it disappeared, nor any of the other monsters involved in all the other attacks around the world.

Perhaps they had been taken back by the system. This was Reese’s theory, given the second message implying that the first test was over.

And Reese was doing his best to prepare for the next one.

To wit, trying to find information online. He’d found many Discords and many less popular alternatives where people were discussing it, but most information was disappearing rather quickly. Or at least, anything that seemed like credible information.

Reese found this odd, as it seemed it would be a better strategy to simply let all the information flood online, truth and wild theories mixing until no one could tell the difference.

But that wasn’t what was happening. Anything that seemed remotely truthful related to the system’s workings was removed.

He knew the NSA had the means to scan the internet for things like this, and it made him glad he also had a VPN on. Though in this case, he wasn’t sure that would be enough. So he was careful.

But, with pretty much the whole world starved for information, he imagined they would have a lot to sift through. By the time they identified him—if they ever did—he planned to be strong enough that it wouldn’t matter.

That was assuming of course they didn’t beat him there.

“Yeah,” he muttered to himself, “just pitting myself against the entire US spy and military complex. No biggie.”

He did have an advantage, however. His title. Being able to turn invisible wasn’t the best of abilities—more strategic or defensive than offensive—but he could use it to his advantage.

The problem was its Unity requirement. He wasn’t sure, precisely, what Unity was. Something like mana. He could feel it, he thought. A twisting sensation he wasn’t in control of, like he was wringing out a towel. It was a subtle feeling, but when not running for his life it was easy to notice.

He’d only been able to maintain the invisibility for less than a minute, but it was still unreal and amazing. He as well as everything he was wearing or holding turned completely invisible.

He didn’t have a thermal camera to see if there were other ways of being detected, but he’d test that out. Eventually.

For now, he was looking for information online. He’d discovered he could long-press on items on his stat screen to get more information on them, and even found what seemed like a way to get a class, but it didn’t present a list of selections to choose from, instead it prompted him to write it in.

There was no indication he’d get a second chance or be able to change classes later, so he was hesitant to experiment. Which was why he was now online. But if anyone had discovered the class selector, they weren’t posting about it.

Most of what he found was junk. So far the most reasonable posts he’d come across had been ones with theories on how the Unity thing was like cultivation, the ancient Daoist practice of cultivating a long life through meditation. And indeed, the system message had specifically mentioned cultivation.

But that didn’t mean they were one and the same. You could cultivate many things. Disdain, annoyance, an air of self-importance. Food.

If only the messages and posts didn’t keep disappearing before he could screenshot all of them. He’d taken to simply recording his entire screen, but it was not the best experience. He was using his old laptop—given his current one had a bullet lodged in it—and it was seriously struggling to keep a bunch of tabs open and cycle through them while recording.

He’d been tempted to go downstairs and grab his dad’s new MacBook which he never used, but didn’t feel like risking his wrath. Especially now.

He was still yelling at someone about being looped in.

Reese sighed. He loved his father, but he did not know how to deal with people. He let his family’s wealth and his position as mayor cloud his judgement. He was used to ordering people around and having them—mostly—obey with a smile. That wasn’t going to work with the FBI.

Reese’s attention caught on a post on a Chinese forum he was scanning, his browser translating. Things on Russian and Chinese-based sites seemed to stay up for a bit longer, likely because their citizens were already used to getting around government censorship of the internet.

The thing everyone knows about

You know that feeling when running, feel like die, but keep running. Not die. Run and run.

These are similes. You feel the same thing.

It is source power.

It was posted only seconds ago, but there was a response already.

Are you saying to get more powerful we need to run? Or push ourselves?

He didn’t know if the strange grammar was intentional, or a side-effect of the translation. If only he’d learned Chinese and Russian instead of Japanese and Spanish.

Still, whoever posted it was smart enough not to use any trigger words that might activate government bots. Unfortunately the person who responded wasn’t as oblique.

He wondered why anyone bothered to share at all. Did they not care about getting beat with the very information they were sharing?

“Some people have no ambition.”

Not that he wouldn’t use it to his advantage. If people wanted to give away the secrets, he was more than happy to use them.

Though, it could eventually become a problem if it was something he already knew. Then that would be taking away his advantage.

He began formulating ways he could get them to stop, but then realized it didn’t matter. Not many people would see it before it was taken down if it were on mainstream sites, and not many people visited non-mainstream sites, by definition.

He copied the text of the post and pasted it into a text document, then opened a new tab with the same page to turn off the translation to copy the original. But when he did, not only was the post gone, the entire site was offline.

He quickly switched back to the old tab and hovered over each line of text, letting the little translation pop up and be recorded by his screen recorder. He wanted the original, just in case.

There was a treadmill in the basement he could use to test out the running theory, though he didn’t love the idea.

He read the message again.

Simile. So then maybe it wasn’t running, but pushing yourself in some way until you felt like you couldn’t go on, like you were going to die.

He tried using his title ability again, and tried to hang onto it.

It didn’t work. He didn’t feel anything. His grip on the Unity simply vanished after a little less than a minute.

Could it be possible that abilities from titles were somehow different?

He grunted in frustration.

This was a lot harder than figuring out the meta of a new game.

Whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it fast. He was slipping farther and farther behind on the leaderboard. His rank was now 2,016 and dropped each time he checked it.

He wanted to not look, but couldn’t help himself even though all it did was anger him.

Use it as fuel, he told himself. As motivation to get ahead. He would become the strongest, whatever it took.