John’s lungs burned, but the fire in his chest was nothing compared to the worry driving his muscles.

He followed the path that he had traversed once before with Nikolas and the rest of the class, back when they were celebrating their team victory during their first year. It was a distant memory, but right now, it felt so vivid that he could recall even the tiniest detail out of it.

The academy sat on a sprawling plateau just a few miles away from a massive, bustling metropolis. Under normal circumstances, a student would call for a high-speed flying taxi or wait for a mag-lev shuttle.

John didn’t have the patience for waiting. He ran. Every stride was fueled by a desperate need to reach the city, his thoughts spiralling around the image of Ricky walking into an ambush. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

’I need to know where you are, buddy,’ John thought, his eyes scanning the horizon where the glow of the city began to eat into the twilight sky. He used the travel time to dissect every word Mark said.

John knew that, logically, he should be questioning everything Mark said. The rogue program was a master of psychological warfare.

And yet, he was positive that Cissel’s presence in that basement had been a variable that surprised both Mark and himself. He didn’t know she was tracking him, trying to see what big things he planned to do.

He didn’t know that she had fallen under the same illusion and mind control effects he had; her senses got clouded until she walked right into the heart of his Lightning Dance, a move she knew was deadly to both friends and enemies.

The lack of information was a gaping wound in his strategy. He realised now that his only real experience with confusion and mental manipulation had been through his own Sandbox and Remote Access Trojan abilities. He was the one casting them, not receiving the damage.

’I really fell under that bastard’s control,’ John thought, his fists clenching so hard his knuckles popped. ’He spoke about finding my weakness. Is it illusion? Thinking about it, I don’t have a single active ability to counter sensory illusions or mind control...’

He thought back to his Hacker Mind passive. When he had first ventured into the black fog, the ability had successfully negated the toxic, hallucinogenic components of the mist.

’It seems hallucination is a bit different from illusions. Even with the Hacker Mind’s help back then, there was still a time limit. That meant even with the ability maxed out, it can’t filter everything on its own.’

John’s mind jumped from one point to the next until the outskirts of the city swallowed him. He was so absorbed in his internal thoughts that he didn’t even notice the silent shadow that had been tracking his movements since he left the academy gates.

The city was a sprawling leviathan of steel and light, reminding him of the megacities back on Earth, yet this one was vastly more advanced. Flying cars zipped between towering skyscrapers in organised streams.

The presence of flying cars and vehicles served the need for aerial streets, arranged directly onto the sides of buildings, hundreds of floors above the actual ground.

Ironically, the hyper-modernity of the city worked in John’s favour. Because almost everyone used the aerial streets, the old-fashioned ground-level streets were largely recycled. Lots of streets were gone, and only a few were still standing, used by a few.

’If I recall it right,’ John mused, remembering their first time visiting the city, ’Ricky hated boarding those cramped flying taxis. He has a bit of a thing about being trapped in a small box high in the air. Nikolas ended up having to rent a fleet of old-fashioned ground cars to take us to the club.’

John headed toward the direction they had taken way before, using his memories, where a few ancient asphalt streets still survived in the shadow of the massive building blocks. When a city no longer needs streets, the space is usually consumed by more construction.

The result was a suffocating, tin-canned chaos where sunlight rarely touched the ground, an ugly face of progress that John had found depressing. Now, however, it narrowed his search area significantly. Ricky wouldn’t be in the sky; he’d be on the ground.

’I need a map.’

His memory of the city was limited to the single time he visited it. Nikolas had only taken them through two specific districts. He approached a flickering holographic information kiosk on a street corner, intending to scroll through the local directory manually.

He never expected that the moment his hand touched the holograph, his system would trigger a response that turned his blind search into a targeted strike.

-

[Ding! Do you want to integrate this regional map with your Map while activating the Ping Router ability?]

[Ding! It will cost: 500 Mental Points.]

-

John didn’t hesitate for a microsecond. He agreed on paying the cost, and his vision flickered as the map got updated.

Suddenly, a bright green dot began flickering across his map, showing exactly where Ricky was located. But that wasn’t all. He noticed a second green dot, moving at a slow speed, a few hundred meters behind him. It was the person who had been stalking him from the academy.

’Hehehe, it seems I have an unexpected backup plan,’ John thought, zooming in on the dot of his stalker. A wide grin spread across his face as he recognised the unexpected ally who had followed him into the fray.

With his rear-guard accounted for, he shifted his full attention to the flickering dot that represented Ricky. He was in a tough situation, exactly as John had feared.

"Hang in there, buddy," John whispered, his body leaning forward as he broke into a full-speed dash. "Help is coming, and I’m bringing a storm with me."

He didn’t care about the few pedestrians he startled. He was a streak of fast motion, a series of afterimages passing through the few ground-level streets of the city. He kept dashing forward while properly analysing Ricky’s situation more thoroughly.