Nathan adjusted his shoulders, scanning the area. There was nothing coming to attack them—not yet. The air was thick with the scent of campfire smoke, and the group around him was casually chatting, their voices blending into the crackle of the flames.

  "Who is this?" Nathan muttered under his breath.

  "Ah, forgive us. We forgot to introduce ourselves," the voices in his head replied, pausing briefly. "We are the Wanderers."

  "Okay, Wanderers. What’s your problem with me?" Nathan asked, his tone sharp.

  "Where do we even begin?" the voices said, their words dripping with disdain. "Your very existence is an abomination. There is a part of you filled with our essence—the essence of the breath of the air, the ocean, the trees. And yet you also carry the stink of the system."

  "I’ll have you know I bathe regularly," Nathan shot back, his voice dry.

  "You stole it, didn’t you? One of our kind—their powers must have been planted into your body by the system."

  "It actually has nothing to do with that," Nathan said.

  "Oh, you have an explanation? We’d love to hear it," the Wanderers sneered.

  Nathan tapped his foot, his mind racing. What did they want? Why were they contacting him like this?

  "It’s simple," Nathan said. "I was a normal guy, but there’s this whole thing with a goddess trying to give me her blessings and—"

  “A goddess?” the Wanderers interrupted, their laughter echoing. "Are you suggesting you have a patron? If that were true, then we wouldn’t even have to lift a finger. Your path is already set for destruction."

  "I don’t suppose that means you’ll let me go?" Nathan asked.

  "We’re afraid not. Even if that were true—which we doubt—it simply means a foreign entity is attempting to establish herself as a queen. Either way, you must be eliminated."

  "Then why contact me?" Nathan said. "If there’s nothing I can do to convince you to back off, why even bother?"

  "Because," the voices whispered, their tone shifting, "we don’t wish for you to die. If you come with us willingly, we can guarantee your survival."

  "Survival from what?"

  "Survival from the extraction," the voices replied, their volume rising, a hint of greed creeping into their words. "All that power, residing within you… it should be put toward a more virtuous use. We’d simply take it and let you live. Just come along."

  "Absolutely not," Nathan said.

  "Then we shall pry it from your cold, rotting corpse," the voices hissed.

  Nathan tensed his body. An attack—?

  The voices laughed. “We won’t strike you, boy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t need to. Your death is already assured. Tell me, how much do you know about your ‘allies’?”

  Nathan’s blood ran cold.

  The voices faded, leaving only the crackling of the campfire and the weight of their words hanging in the air.

  "Well, well." Dave's voice resonated through probability curves that shouldn't exist. "The incompetent manager who let a fisherman break his sector. You thought you were so clever with that trap, huh? I've been looking forward to this."

  "I—" B32's voice modulated through seven different quantum states before stabilizing. "I can explain everything! Nathan Lee, he's not—he doesn't follow normal rules! Do you know he deleted a monster after fishing it into his inventory? Who does that? How does that even work?"

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  Dave's laugh destabilized several nearby timelines. "You sound exactly like your reports. Panicked. Ineffective. Weak." The enforcement agent's form began to expand through dimensions B32 didn't even have clearance to perceive.

  That's when B32 did something desperate.

  Let’s hope this works!

  He reached out with his probability-manipulators and pulled, dragging them both into his soulscape.

  The transition felt like being compressed through a mathematical singularity. When it finished, they both stood in a vast dark expanse dotted with points of light, their forms simplified into something a human mind could process. No more probability clouds. No more quantum superpositions. Just two figures in a space that looked almost like a physical arena.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Dave's voice was singular now, no longer rippling through multiple dimensions. In the soulscape, he appeared as a towering figure of light and authority. "You really think you can fight me here?"

  "Fight you?" B32 let out a slightly hysterical laugh, looking down at his own simplified form—something almost human-shaped, but crackling with lines of system code. "Oh no, no, no. I've spent months watching Nathan Lee break every attack I throw at him. You know what I learned?"

  Dave's first attack came like a tidal wave of light, but B32 had spent months studying Nathan Lee's impossible successes. He dove beneath the wave, feeling it sear the outer layers of his code as it passed. "I learned that sometimes the dumbest solution is the one that works!"

  "You're nothing!" Dave's next assault came as a barrage of enforcement protocols, each one designed to shred B32's operational permissions. But B32 had seen Nathan Lee fish his way through worse. He wove between the attacks, letting them crash into each other behind him.

  "You know what the worst part was?" B32 called out, his voice cracking as he barely avoided another blast. "Writing those reports! Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain how someone used a FISHING ROD to kill someone?” He let out another slightly unhinged laugh. "But you know what? I studied those reports. Every single impossible thing he did!"

  Dave's attacks were coming faster now, but B32 could see the pattern in them. Just like how Nathan Lee somehow found patterns during combat to survive. "You're just delaying the inevitable," Dave growled, his form growing brighter. "You're a failure of a manager who couldn't handle one human!"

  But something was wrong. Dave's light was dimming at the edges, his attacks losing their perfect geometry. B32 pressed forward, each desperate dodge and scramble bringing him closer.

  Dave's presence flickered. "No," the enforcement agent snarled. "No, I will not be defeated here. Not by you."

  Reality twisted violently as Dave ripped them both out of the soulscape. The simplified forms shattered as they exploded back into fifth-dimensional space, their beings once again expanding into incomprehensible geometric impossibilities that rippled through spacetime.

  "NOW YOU DIE!" Dave's voice thundered. His enforcement-aspect blazed like a dying universe, gathering power that could shred B32's very existence from every possible timeline.

  But B32 hummed with anticipation. This was the moment he'd prepared for, the real trap. Everyone always underestimated middle management—no one ever thought to check what forms they'd filed, what permissions they'd quietly accumulated, what tricks they'd learned from watching the impossible happen day after day.

  The attack came like a cascading collapse of reality itself, enforcement energy burning through multiple dimensions simultaneously. To any third-dimensional being watching, it would have appeared as nothing but a brief flicker of geometry breaking itself.

  But B32's jury-rigged defense was ready. The crude, impossible code he'd pieced together from studying Nathan Lee's exploits activated across all probability states simultaneously. It was ugly. It violated at least thirty-seven fundamental laws of reality. It probably shouldn't have worked at all.

  But just like Nathan Lee's ridiculous fishing skills, sometimes the universe just had to deal with it.

  The fifth-dimensional attack hit B32 and bounced backward, catching Dave in every possible configuration of his existence. The enforcement agent's perfect geometric patterns shattered as his own power crashed back into him, sending him reeling through probability space.

  Dave flickered… then disappeared, nothing but loose pieces of system.

  B32 paused.

  "HOLY BINARY I DID IT!" B32 shouted. "I ACTUALLY DID IT! ME! THE MANAGER WHO COULDN'T EVEN STOP A FISHERMAN! I JUST BEAT DIMENSIONAL ENFORCEMENT! THIS IS THE GREATEST MOMENT OF MY ENTIRE—"

  B32's celebration cut off abruptly.

  He’d done the impossible. He’d managed to defeat a higher System—something that had never been done before…

  But it wasn’t like he’d be getting a medal for it. He’d killed one of his own kind.

  What now?

  B32 couldn’t run. A being like him was easily trackable through subspace. Besides, there was no outrunning the Mother. No fighting, either.

  B32 felt like he was at the bottom of a dark pit with no escape. Almost every option led to doom.

  The least bad option.. .the only one that might’ve led to his salvation was finding and defeating whoever was sponsoring Nathan Lee.

  “The job isn’t finished.”

  A notification pinged across his awareness—another alert about Nathan Lee.

  "Keep fishing, Nathan Lee," he whispered, already beginning to draft requisition forms for restricted materials. "I'm coming for you. And this time, I won’t be playing your game. Let’s see you stand up to a direct assault from the full might of a System.”