Chapter 8 Eight

Chapter Eight

The four classes sat on the screen like a question he had not expected to be asked so soon.

[CLASS SELECTION — Choose one. This decision is permanent at current level.]

[Shadow Broker: Specializes in intelligence, manipulation, and financial warfare. Passive ability — market insight. Active ability — information extraction.]

[Iron Sovereign: Specializes in physical dominance and combat superiority. Passive ability — damage resistance. Active ability — power surge.]

[Phantom: Specializes in stealth, speed, and infiltration. Passive ability — reduced detection. Active ability — shadow step.]

[Architect: Specializes in building systems, networks, and long-term strategy. Passive ability — accelerated planning. Active ability — resource multiplication.]

Ethan read them all twice and made his decision without much drama.

Shadow Broker.

Not because the others were weak. Iron Sovereign would have made him harder to hurt, and he had already been shot once so the appeal was obvious. But he was not trying to win fights. He was trying to dismantle something. Gerald Luther's empire had not been built with fists. It had been built with information and money and the careful management of who knew what. The only way to pull it apart was to beat it at its own game.

He selected it.

[Class unlocked: Shadow Broker.]

[Passive ability active: Market Insight — you will receive flags on significant financial movements relevant to your network and targets.]

[Active ability available: Information Extraction — cost varies by target. Use via system menu.]

[New system tab unlocked: Intelligence.]

He opened the Intelligence tab. It was clean and sparse, like everything else the system showed him. A search field at the top. Below it, three entries already waiting, each tagged with a small amber indicator that meant unread.

The first was Gerald Luther. A summary of what the system had already shown him, but more detailed now — names of the accountants who had signed off on the falsified returns, dates, routing numbers. The kind of specifics that Marcus Webb could actually use.

The second entry was Lawrence. Ethan opened it. Lawrence's financials were simpler than his father's because Lawrence had never needed to build anything. He received a monthly transfer from a Luther Holdings subsidiary — generous, untaxed, routed through a personal holding company registered in his mother's maiden name. He spent freely. Clubs, hotels, cars, women. He had two private security firm memberships, which explained the men in suits. He also had a pending legal matter, a civil suit filed eight months ago by a former employee, quietly settled, details sealed.

Ethan noted that and moved on.

The third entry stopped him. It was not Luther. It was a name he didn't recognise — Daniel Cho, forty-three, described as a mid-level compliance officer at Renwick Capital. The system had flagged him under a header that read: [Connected party — potential asset.]

He stared at that for a moment. Asset. The system was not just feeding him information. It was identifying people who could be useful. That was a different thing entirely, and it sat with him in a way he hadn't expected.

He closed the tab and called Shelly.

She picked up fast. "I booked the FiDi viewing for tomorrow at nine. Fourteen floor, eighteen hundred square feet. The building manager said we can negotiate fit-out costs on a two-year lease."

"Good. Lock it in."

A short pause. "Ethan, can I ask you something honest?"

"Go ahead."

"Where is this actually going? I'm not doubting you. I just want to understand what I'm helping build."

He thought about how much of the real answer he could give her. "I'm building something that makes us untouchable," he said. "Financially, legally, all of it. The kind of position where nobody walks up and takes what we have just because they have more money or better connections." He paused. "Lawrence Luther and his father are going to lose everything. That's the direction. The business is how we get there the right way."

She was quiet for a moment. "Okay," she said finally. "I just needed to hear you say it out loud."

After he hung up he ordered furniture — a bed, a desk, a proper chair, a couch. He also ordered a new laptop and a phone to replace the cracked iPhone 6 that had somehow survived all of this. While he waited he went back to the Intelligence tab and looked at Daniel Cho's entry more carefully.

Cho had worked at Renwick Capital for nine years. Renwick was a mid-sized investment bank, respectable, the kind of firm that did business with larger institutions including, the system noted in a small flagged line at the bottom, Luther Holdings. Cho's role put him directly adjacent to compliance reporting — which meant he saw things. He reviewed things. He signed off on things or flagged them for review, and the system had identified him as someone sitting on information he had never acted on.

The reason was also there. Cho had a daughter, fourteen, private school, medical expenses from a condition diagnosed two years ago that his insurance only partially covered. He was stretched. Not desperate, but stretched in the way that made a person very aware of what they stood to lose if they made the wrong move at work.

Ethan closed the tab and leaned back against the wall. The system had handed him a person's entire private situation without being asked. He was aware that this was a line, and that crossing it carelessly would make him no different from the people he was going after. He was also aware that Cho was sitting on information that could accelerate everything Webb was building by months.

He did not make a decision about Cho that night. He let it sit.

The furniture arrived in two separate deliveries. By evening the apartment looked like somewhere a person actually lived. He set up the laptop at the desk, transferred the key account details from his old phone to the new one, and pulled up everything Webb had sent him since their meeting — preliminary notes, a list of documents he needed sourced, three questions about the offshore routing that Ethan now had direct answers to through the Intelligence tab.

He typed up the answers carefully, keeping the language vague about sourcing, and sent them back.

Webb replied in under an hour. One line: "This changes the timeline. Talk tomorrow."

Ethan set the laptop aside and looked out the window at the city. Fifteen floors up, the noise was reduced to something almost manageable. Lights across the skyline, buildings full of people running their own calculations, making their own moves.

Somewhere out there Lawrence was having dinner at a restaurant he hadn't booked himself, with people who laughed at everything he said, completely certain the world was arranged in his favour.

Ethan looked at the system screen hovering quietly at the edge of his vision and checked the mission log.

[Mission 3 incoming — estimated 48 hours.]

[Current EXP: 90 — next level at 200.]

[Shadow Broker Intelligence refresh: 06:00 daily.]

He had two days before the next dungeon. Two days to meet with Webb, sign the office lease, and decide what he was going to do about Daniel Cho. He turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark for a while, not because he was lost, but because he had learned a long time ago that the best decisions were the ones you didn't rush.

Then he went to bed, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he slept without dreaming about anything at all.