Chapter 150: Mark Them All.
I stood naked in the small glass room, steam curling thick and heavy around me. The thermometer on the wall beeped at steady intervals, each tone cutting through the hiss of hot mist. Heat pressed into every pore, working through layers of plain dust, dried sweat, and old blood that had settled into my skin over the past week.
I looked down at my arms. Shoulders. The places where Vince Vale had snapped bones, where infected nails had torn flesh, where the sand had ground me raw. All of it gone. Skin smooth and unmarked. Whatever had happened in Eleanor’s tent had done something the system never managed on its own.
"Done," a female voice announced from outside the glass.
I wrapped the white robe around myself, the fabric soft and slightly stiff from sterilization. I stepped out into the cooler air of the quarantine wing.
Sherry emerged from the opposite glass room at the exact same moment, wrapped in an identical white robe. Our eyes met. She smiled, small, tired, real, before turning toward her assigned doctor’s table.
I went to mine.
Short red hair, messy, late twenties. Dressed head to toe in white. She looked up from her pad when I sat down on the examination table, the paper crinkling under my weight.
"You’re Abram?" she asked.
"Yes."
She tapped something on her pad, then looked up again with the expression of someone who had decided to speak her mind.
"Nice name," she said. "I’d wish an Abram would give me a proper fuck one day."
I looked at her.
"You’re completely healthy," she continued without missing a beat, moving on like the comment had never happened. "Quarantine room tonight. Tomorrow morning you’re free."
"Okay."
"You’re sharing with Code." She pointed toward a door at the end of the hall. "Oh, how I wish it were me instead."
I stood.
"Imagine three rounds," she muttered to herself as I walked away, apparently unconcerned whether I could still hear her.
I pushed the door open.
Code was already inside, sitting on one of the two narrow beds, arms folded across his chest, eyes open for once. He looked at me when I entered, then turned his gaze back to the blank wall.
Two beds. One night. The man who had killed Major without hesitation and jumped off a wall like gravity was optional... and me.
Fine, I thought, crossing to the other bed. I always get strange roommates.
I sat down. The mattress was thin, the sheets stiff and cold. The overhead lights hummed faintly. Code didn’t speak. I didn’t either. We simply sat there in the quiet room, two survivors processing the weight of everything that had happened since we left these walls.
Outside, the city continued its controlled, artificial night. Inside, the mission was officially over.
I lay back on the thin mattress and closed my eyes, legs still hanging off the edge, the plain white ceiling of the quarantine room the first safe ceiling I had been under in days. The lights hummed faintly overhead. The air smelled of sterile plastic and recycled oxygen.
"I think you’re a good person."
I sat up.
Code was looking straight at me. He lifted one hand and pushed the long hair back from his face, the first time I had seen his full face clearly since the mission began. Sharp cheekbones. Pale gray eyes. A stillness that felt carved rather than born.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"You’re a good person," he repeated. Not a compliment. More like a quiet conclusion he had reached and was simply reporting.
"Nobody’s told me that before," I said.
He gave a small smile, the first I had ever seen from him that wasn’t connected to something bleeding.
"We were told you grew up outside," he said.
"Yes."
"I respect that," he said, and turned his gaze back to the wall.
I studied him. The hair falling forward again across his eyes. The blades I knew were still somewhere on him, even now, probably even while he slept. The man who had sung quietly to himself while cutting through infected in that stairwell like it was just another day’s work.
"Can I ask you something?" I said, not waiting for permission. "Why did you kill Major?"
He kept his eyes on the wall. "The outside forces you to do things you wouldn’t choose," he answered. Nothing more.
"Was it Sinn’s order?"
"It was the outside," he said again, voice flat.
I didn’t press. Some things were meant to stay buried where they were. I had enough of my own.
"I’ve worked with many people," Code continued, still staring at the blank wall. "Never anyone like you." He paused. "It was a pleasure, Abram. Whenever you need me, I’m available."
He lay down and turned toward the wall, ending the conversation as cleanly as he ended everything else.
I lay back and looked at the ceiling again. The panels were perfectly smooth, no cracks, no dust. Tomorrow was coming. The walls were around me once more. Azure was somewhere in School Central. Sophia Vale sat in her oval office. Monica Veyron and Riya Belmonte moved through their centuries inside these walls, unaware that Ethan Nadez had built something specifically for them. Three remaining.
You don’t know anything yet, Abram, Eleanor’s voice found me one last time as my eyes closed.
[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]
[Extraction complete. Source 1 of 4 unlocked.]
[Three sources remaining: Sophia Vale. Monica Veyron. Riya Belmonte.]
[Every female member of the primordial families must be marked.]
The notification burned behind my closed eyelids, cold and certain. I breathed out slowly, the weight of everything settling into my bones.
I was ready to move again inside the walls. Not to level up. Not to survive. To hunt.
Every woman carrying a Vale name, a Belmonte name, or a Veyron name was now my target. The system had never been about random girls or simple power. It had always been leading here. To the ones who still held the old blood.
"Mark them all," Eleanor’s voice echoed live in my mind, low and clear, as if she were standing right beside the bed. "Pour into them. Spare none."
