The cursor blinked.
Locke read the dossier twice, not because he needed to, but because he'd made a rule early on never to act on the first read. The second pass was for details the first pass missed: the target's patterns, the gaps in his security rotation, the places where a careful man got careless. Once he was satisfied, he closed the file, set the laptop to sleep, and went to bed.
The city could wait until morning.
Two years ago, the name "Unparalleled" had started showing up in certain circles.
Not loudly. It never does, with the ones who are serious about it. Just a thread here, a whisper there, someone handled the Whitmore job, no trace, clean exit and then the same name again three months later attached to something else that should have been impossible. Within six months, people who paid attention to such things were paying attention to that name specifically.
In the two years since, Locke had taken fifty-three contracts. Texas was where he'd started, it made sense. He knew the terrain, knew the networks, knew which doors to knock on and which to walk past. Smugglers, mid-level cartel operators, a handful of men who had built small empires out of things that destroyed people. Not one of them had seen him coming.
Not one of them had seen him at all, technically. That was the point.
Nobody in the circuit knew what Unparalleled looked like. His age, his background, whether he operated solo or ran a team, all of it unknown. The only consistent data points were the results and the small card he left in every target's pocket, listing their crimes in neat, plain language. It was the kind of detail that made people in his profession uncomfortable, because it implied something about motivation that most contractors preferred not to think about.
Locke had thought about it plenty.
He'd arrived in this life with nothing, no parents, no family, no safety net of any kind. The system that was supposed to protect kids like him worked fine on paper and barely at all in practice. The people running the group homes were mostly fine. A few of them weren't, and the ones who weren't were the ones you remembered. He'd learned to read a room fast. Learned what certain kinds of attention meant and how to be somewhere else before it landed on him.
By fourteen he'd been self-sufficient. By fifteen he'd taken his first contract, a man in San Antonio who had been doing very bad things to people who couldn't stop him, and who had underestimated what a quiet kid with a sniper's natural stillness and nothing left to lose looked like. The payment had felt like a lot at the time.
He had zero moral crisis about any of it.
That probably would have troubled him in his first life, but he'd left that version of himself somewhere he couldn't get back to. Morality, in his experience, was mostly a luxury good, something you got to maintain when you were comfortable enough that the cost of it was low. He wasn't interested in pretending otherwise. What he was interested in was a clear line: the people he took contracts on were not good people. The System agreed. Every assassination mission the System had ever generated for him involved a verified target, it had never once flagged an innocent, never pointed him at someone who didn't have it coming.
That was enough of a moral framework for now. He'd revisit it if the System ever surprised him.
So far, it hadn't.
The hit went clean.
Locke moved through the target's neighborhood the way he always did, unhurried, just another person going somewhere with somewhere to be. The suppressed M1911 was under his jacket. The System's low-profile glasses sat on his face, unremarkable from the outside, feeding him a clean overlay of the target's last confirmed position and the security gaps he'd mapped the night before.
It took eleven minutes from the moment he entered the block.
He caught the target in a side street off Ninth, supported him into a seated position against the wall with the professional gentleness of someone helping a drunk friend, tucked the card into the man's breast pocket, and walked out the far end of the alley at a pace that wouldn't register on anyone's memory.
Behind him, somewhere around the corner, he heard the sound that meant someone had just found what he'd left.
[Mission Complete - Assassination Contract: Target Neutralized]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×300 / Potential Points ×300]
New York, he thought. Not bad.
Back at Starlight Tower, he uploaded the confirmation to the Continental's system and poured two fingers of bourbon while he waited for the acknowledgment.
It came back in under a minute.
Received. Verification pending. Upon confirmation, the $100,000 bounty will be processed. Thank you for your service, Unparalleled.
Locke raised the glass slightly, not quite a toast, just an acknowledgment and drank.
Texas had been slow. The circuit there was thinner, the contracts spread out, the daily missions sparse. He'd been patient because patience was the job, but he'd always known New York was the right move. First day in the city: a daily mission, an assassination contract, and enough potential triggers in his immediate environment to keep the System busy for years.
He thought about the hundreds of open contracts the Continental had posted for Manhattan alone.
He'd have to be selective. Taking too many too fast drew attention even in circles where attention was expected currency.
But still.
The grind just got significantly faster.
The next morning, Locke checked his account before leaving for school. The $100,000 had cleared, routed through the usual chain of intermediaries and conversion steps that transformed Continental gold into traceable income. By the time it reached his bank card, it was $80,000.
He accepted this without complaint. Money laundering had overhead. That was just accounting.
Midtown High. Morning.
Gwen was at her locker when he came in, already sorted, books stacked, bag organized, the look of someone who had been awake and functional for at least an hour before arriving. She glanced over when she heard him.
"Morning."
"Morning," Locke said.
She turned back to her locker and he kept walking, and that was fine. He'd been running a quiet background check on Peter Parker since the night before, cross-referencing school enrollment databases and the results were strange. Parker existed. He just attended a public school in Queens rather than Midtown High, which didn't match what Locke knew about how that particular story was supposed to go.
Transfer student, maybe. Or the timeline had drifted somewhere along the way.
He filed it as an open variable and moved on.
In English class, the teacher handed back the mock exams.
[Daily Mission Complete - Mock Exam]
[Grade A+ - Triple Reward Multiplier Applied]
[Achievement Points ×1,500 / Potential Points ×1,500]
Locke looked at the paper. Then at the updated totals.
[Achievement Points: 3,800]
[Potential Points: 2,800]
Not bad for thirty-six hours in the city.
He was aware of Gwen glancing sideways at his paper from the corner of his eye. He turned his head, and she was caught, just for a beat before she covered it with a small smile.
"Good result," she said.
"Lucky, I guess."
She gave him a look that said she didn't entirely believe that, which was fair, because it wasn't true. But the actual explanation wasn't something he was going to get into.
After class, he caught up with her in the hall.
"Hey, which AP courses did you sign up for?"
Gwen glanced at him sideways. "Why?"
"Trying to figure out my schedule."
She considered this for a moment, then rattled off her list. He listened, cross-referencing it against the mission trigger logic in the back of his head, AP Chemistry in particular, given her standing invitation to the lab group.
High-achieving students. Science-adjacent environment. Consistent schedule. Good trigger density.
"Thanks," he said.
Gwen watched him for a second. "You're not actually asking about classes, are you."
It wasn't quite a question.
Locke smiled. "I'm asking about classes."
She didn't look convinced. But she let it go.
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