He let his drop. The Lurkers saw him. They charged. The first one’s claws raked his chest, drawing blood— his blood. The System pinged.
Not for him, of course. The System—a galaxy-spanning, game-like interface that granted Skills, Classes, and Power Levels—had descended upon humanity ten years ago, turning every sixteen-year-old into an “Awakened.” It was humanity’s great equalizer. Everyone got a System.
When he woke, he was in the colony’s waste-tunnels, covered in the drained husk of a giant sewer-rat. His own reflection, caught in a puddle of oily water, showed eyes the color of fresh-spilled blood. My Vampire System
Quinn Talen had two problems.
First, he was dying. The bone-white lesions on his forearm had spread to his neck, a slow, calcifying rot the doctors called “Cellular Decay Syndrome.” It was a death sentence for anyone without the credits for gene-therapy. Quinn, an orphan scraping by on the fringe colony of Atlas-7, had no credits. He let his drop
While other students at the Atlas-7 Combat Academy trained their flashy Firebolts and Steel Skin, Quinn lurked in the margins. He fed in shadows. He grew stronger. By the end of month two, his Blood Rank rose to C-Rank (Fledgling). New skills unlocked: Mist Form (escape), Claw Rend (combat), and the most terrifying of all— Blood Puppetry (control a bleeding target’s body for 3 seconds).
The Lurkers’ own blood, black and viscous, erupted from their wounds. Quinn shaped it into a dozen spinning discs, each one a razor of frozen gore. He didn’t just kill them. He harvested them. Every drop of their blood became his ammunition, his shield, his sustenance. The first one’s claws raked his chest, drawing
He stared at the screen. Then, with a thumb that trembled only slightly, he pressed . The pain was not transformation. It was deconstruction.
Except Quinn. His Awakening screen had remained stubbornly dark. A Null. A zero. In a world where your job, your status, even your right to breathe clean air was determined by your Level, Quinn was already a ghost.
He looked at his bloodstained hands. The hunger purred.
And that was his power.