Warren didn't know exactly when the world had fallen apart. He just remembered the day everything had changed. It was before the tutorial. Before the glitches. Before the System's rules had started to manifest.
He pushed open the warped steel door to his shelter an old sub-basement beneath what used to be a pharmacy. The lock still worked. Mostly. The rain followed him in, dripping from the edge of his coat as he stepped inside. The stale scent of dust, old blood, and forgotten medicine clung to the concrete walls.
The space was narrow at first, low-ceilinged and thick with age, but it opened into a wider chamber just past the threshold. Here, the light from a cracked solar lantern flickered gently enough to give shape to the clutter without calling attention from above. Warren didn't need brightness. He needed precision.
To anyone else, the room might've looked like chaos. But everything had its place. Steel shelving lined the walls, sorted by category and utility. Medical on the left. Tools to the right. Food and water at the far end, sealed in vacuum bags and foil packs, each labeled in neat, block handwriting. One full shelf was dedicated to encased modules and conversion units, neatly nested into repurposed foam lining. Another housed comm scraps motherboards, transmitters, cable spools, all tagged with date and source.
He stepped around the main table, a salvaged surgical tray that he'd turned into a crafting station. Its surface gleamed from careful polishing, and every tool from screwdrivers to filament saws was hooked to a magnetic strip on the wall above it. A small drawer unit beneath it held categorized blades some scrap, some inert. Each was stored in its own marked container, layered in graphite shielding and wrapped in cloth.
A corner cabinet had been converted into his triage shelf. Burn salves, pain stims, wound foam, a few strips of ancient gauze he'd boiled and sealed himself. He checked them often, not compulsively, but with the discipline of someone who knew how quickly supplies could become tainted.
Over the years, he'd acquired trinkets not out of sentiment, but because they helped him track time and memory. A broken watch frozen at 3:47. A child's music box missing its key. An antique radio that only hummed static but whose casing warmed slightly when powered on. These lined the upper shelves, dust-free. Markers of past raids. Each one cataloged in his notebook, cross-referenced with the event that brought it to him.
He moved to a small cubby under the stairs where he kept his rain-drenched coat hung neatly beside a rust-spotted black umbrella and his spare boots, each labeled for condition. A cloth-covered hook beside the entry held his travel satchel emptied and cleaned before every outing, never allowed to clutter.
Even the sleeping area was precise. A cot built into the far wall beneath an old pharmacy sign, its foam mattress lined with scavenged insulation panels. Two thermal blankets folded into thirds. One pillow, flat and dense, covered in stitched leather. Beneath the bed, six crates held backup gear: clean undershirts, emergency lights, spare filters, socks.
His books what little paper remained unburned were stored in a moisture-sealed drawer beside his cot. Manuals, schematics, old survival guides with outdated theory and obsolete tech. He read them not for instruction, but for adaptation. Margin notes lined every page.
At the center of the shelter stood a low metal burner, his only heat source. It ran on scavenged gel packs. He lit it now with a practiced motion, the soft whoosh and flare of light casting his shadow long across the floor.
He moved to the hidden storage panel beneath the floorboards, unlatched it, and retrieved his most recent haul. A small kit of tools. A twisted core interface, its casing cracked and lined with faint filament burns still clinging to traces residue. Carefully, he set each one into its designated bin. No waste. No clutter.
It wasn't hoarding.
But it was a hoard.
One any survivor would kill for a dragon's den of salvage, perfectly ordered, obsessively maintained. Not indulgent. Not greedy. Just sharp. Efficient. Ruthless in its logic. Everything here had value. Everything had a place. And everything could mean the difference between life and death.
Memory. Utility. Control.
Back when the world had broken, everything had been fractured, chaotic. The world had gone dark, the System had failed, and people turned on each other. Society crumbled under the weight of its own failure, and the streets had become wild. People had turned desperate, trying to cling to whatever scraps of control they could hold onto.
Warren had never craved control for its own sake. But here, in this room, among these shelves and neatly labeled bins, he felt something close to peace. Not safety that didn't exist anymore but a kind of certainty. The world outside was noise and collapse. In here, everything made sense. Every item had a reason. Every wall told a story. This was his language, his structure, his rebellion against the chaos. Not because he was afraid of the world falling apart, but because he refused to fall with it.
He moved through the dim room without turning on the overhead he didn't need it. Muscle memory guided him. One step over the broken crate. Left around the fallen shelving. Kneel. Slide the reinforced panel into place behind him. Safe.
It was in places like this that the weight of memory pressed hardest. Not in the fight. Not in the ruin. But in the silence that followed.
Warren peeled off his soaked coat and hung it in its place by the door. The loop fit snugly, designed not to sag. As he moved back toward the center of the shelter, his mind drifted back to the day the cheering stopped, when the world began to fray. When the systems they'd trusted glitched out one by one. No warning. Just noise and silence, back to back.
He knelt in the cold, surrounded by the remnants of a world that had promised safety and delivered slaughter. And for a moment just one he let himself remember what it had been like to watch the lights go out.
But Warren had survived. He always had. He had a knack for survival. Even before the System rolled out, even before the world had a name for what it was becoming, he knew how to live through it.
He didn't grow into the violence. He was born steeped in it. Not in warzones or blood rites, but in alleys and dumpsters, behind cracked windows and under broken neon. The kind of violence that doesn't scream it whispers. Quiet things. Things no one noticed until it was too late.
He had killed before he had language for it. Rats, first. Then strays. Then worse. Not for pleasure. Not even for hunger. For control. To understand. To test what it meant to end something.
No one taught him how to disappear. He simply never learned how to be seen.
His hands were small. His steps were light. His eyes too still, too cold. People avoided that kind of look in a child. It made them feel like prey.
He wasn't a monster. Not at first. Just something the world forgot to shape. Something it left half-formed and mean.
Until her.
Mara.
She found him half-feral and red-handed behind a supply crate in what was left of an old clinic. He thought she'd kill him. She didn't. She gave him water. Sat beside him like he wasn't wrong. Like he wasn't a warning waiting to go off.
She didn't flinch when he didn't speak. Didn't recoil when he stared too long. She just watched him back and said, "You're not a bad thing, Rabbit. You're just sharp. People fear sharp things."
Rabbit. That was what she called him. Her little rabbit. Ironic, really he'd never run from anything in his life. She knew what he was maybe better than he did. A child with predator's eyes, not prey. But she never tried to blunt them. She taught him how to aim them.
Mara was the last bit of good left in the world, and even that wasn't soft. Her good came with cracked knuckles, stitched wounds, and rules carved deep. She didn't offer comfort. She offered clarity. Structure. A code.
The Scav Code, she called it. A list of rules passed down like relics. Not to keep you good. To keep you clean. Alive. Unbroken by the mess of the world.
He memorized every line. Not because she made him, but because he wanted to. Because the words made him feel like something more hunger and teeth.
She taught him to kill clean or not at all. To take what worked and leave what mattered. To never steal from the living. To care for the dead.
And for a time, he believed he could be more. Not soft. Not tame. But something with purpose.
Then she was gone.
He was there when she died.
It wasn't quick. It wasn't clean. A gang had come for them rapists and pedophiles twisted by hunger and rot. Not just thieves. Not just killers. Monsters in human skin. The kind of men who took what couldn't be replaced, who hunted softness, who laughed when their prey couldn't scream. They hadn't come for loot.
They'd come for her.
And worse they'd come for him.
Warren had been the scout. He was supposed to be watching. He was supposed to see it coming. But he hadn't. Not until it was too late.
Mara fought like a storm, like the end of the world in human form. She didn't wait. She didn't ask. She killed all of them. Every last one. Hands, blade, fire. It didn't matter what it took.
But she paid for it. Blood for blood.
Warren had tried to help, but she pushed him back, told him to stay hidden. By the time he reached her side, the light in her was fading.
She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She just smiled at him soft and wide, like he was still the half-starved boy she'd found clutching a broken scalpel and too angry to speak.
"I love you," she said. "Like my own. Like the son I never had. You hear me, Rabbit?"
He did. He never stopped hearing it.
"Be strong. Use what you are. Use what you've been given. It's a gift. Never let them call it a curse."
Then she was gone.
He buried her in the icy rain, six feet deep deeper than he was tall. The earth was frozen. His hands bled. He didn't stop. Didn't speak. Just dug. He laid her beneath a rail bridge, the same one they used to sit under to listen to the rain.
He took what was his the yellow raincoat, still as bright as her smile when she looked at him. And the pocketknife, handed down from her father to her, and promised to him in whispers when she thought he wasn't listening.
He was a stray but she had taken him in without a second thought. Far, far too good for this world.
She was his mother.
And he had loved her.
He didn't cry for her.
But the world did.
The world swallowed her up, and Warren was alone again. But not the same. Never the same. He carried her in the way he moved. In the things he refused to do. In the silence he kept like a blade tucked behind his teeth.
He wasn't her little rabbit anymore.
He was something colder. Sharper. But kinder, too, in ways that would've made her proud.
A predator with rules. A weapon with a memory.
And that made him dangerous in a way nothing else could.
Warren carried her memory like a burn always beneath the skin. And as the years limped forward, he watched the world reshape itself around a different kind of fire.
The years after Mara died were brutal. Not just in violence, but in silence. He didn't speak for weeks. Didn't need to. He moved through the ruins like a ghost sharp, watchful, impossible to track.
He never got a chip. Not because he couldn't. Because he wouldn't. Long before the System arrived, implants were being passed around prototype tech, crowd-control tools disguised as salvation. Mara had warned him. If they offer you something that sounds too good, it's because it's not meant for you.
He watched people line up for enhancements, for access to supply chains and ration networks that never arrived. Most ended up tagged, tracked, or worse disappeared.
Warren learned everything the hard way.
He learned not to light fires unless the smoke could rise into fog. He learned the sound difference between a raindrop hitting canvas and one hitting skin. He learned how to make a meal out of things no one else would eat and how to gut a man with a broken spoon when the need came.
He learned to look away when the flesh-eaters peddled their product meat that looked too fresh, they smiles too wide, eyes too hungry. They operated in the shadows of collapsed markets and storm-drained crossings, carving up what they dared call 'clean cuts' from the bodies no one claimed. Some didn't even wait for death. Warren had seen the signs the vacant spots where a child had been hours ago, the bones stripped of everything useful. People had stopped asking questions. Some even bought. Hunger made monsters, but it also made customers. And Warren, sharp as ever, knew better than to intervene. He wasn't their savior. He just had to survive.
He stole maps from old terminals, built his own network of safe spots, tested every shelter for collapse risk and signal bleed. He memorized every route by step count, shadow angle, and scent. He knew how many seconds he had before most trip sensors reset. How to fake a heat signature with a lizard in a hot bag.
Most people looted. Warren curated. His hoard wasn't just tools and food it was leverage. A signal jammer salvaged from a satellite core. A weather-worn coat lined with mesh tuned to disperse echo pings. Not inventions. Just adaptations.
He saw early System tests fail in real time. Watched people try to interface and glitch out mid-sync. Half-conscious, screaming with the voices of others. Some burned from the inside. Some walked away changed eyes vacant, behavior patterned. Not that Warren trusted many to begin with. But those few who had earned it scavvers who'd bled beside him, who shared shelter and silence most of them didn't come back right. The System didn't just rewrite code. It rewrote people.
The System didn't come with sirens or fanfare. It crept in, slow and flickering, on half-powered terminals and half-spoken promises. Most of the old networks were dead. What tech still worked was patched together from scavenged cores and decaying satellites.
Still, word spread by mouth, by scrawl, by weak signal bursts and back-alley whispers. A fix, they called it. The last hope. The only shot at stopping the rot. Integration, automation, salvation all one thing now.
Warren had watched from the cracks. He saw the way people clung to it, desperate for meaning, for rescue, for something beyond scavenging and screams in the night.
He didn't trust it. Not from the start. Not with how neatly it promised to erase pain.
It wasn't clean. It wasn't even fully functional. The integration points were unstable. Most places didn't even get a full pulse just fragmented overlays, partial syncs, ghost-code spiraling through outdated ports.
Then came the seizures. The blanks. People freezing mid-motion, glassy-eyed and stiff. They'd jerk once. Then drop.
Blood followed.
From ears. From eyes. From the spine like it had been yanked too hard by something no one could see.
Memories vanished. People forgot their own names. Children looked at their parents like strangers. Faces stopped meaning anything. Voices blurred. Screams didn't even sound human anymore.
And then
The Broken.
They weren't dead. But they weren't people, either. Hollowed out. Scrambling on all fours. Twitching like puppets with cut strings. Most were violent feral things with bloodied nails and gnashing teeth, but some were worse. Some had begun to change.
Metal fused with bone. Not by design by failure. By overload. By a system that couldn't distinguish man from machine. Twisted metal horns jutted from brows where the skull had ruptured. Spines sprouted filament-thin wires like infected roots. Faces warped around embedded plates, teeth grinding against synthetic mesh. Their screams carried a static edge, their limbs jerking with too much torque.
They were something new.
All of them were empty.
Warren didn't flinch. He didn't scream. He didn't run.
He watched.
Because he knew
The System hadn't failed.
It had done exactly what it was made to do.
It just wasn't made for them.
But Warren wasn't like them. Not at first. Not yet.
He had never been chipped not until recently. He had watched people around him, dying, glitching out of existence, becoming Broken. But he had held on. Somehow, his body didn't break. His mind didn't crack under the strain.
It wasn't fear that kept him away from the System. It was experience.
Before everything twisted into static and blood, Warren had tried once to join something bigger. A scavver clan, one of the "reputable" ones. It was run by a man named Lucas, tall, clean-cut, with just enough charisma to look like a savior and just enough menace to keep his people in line. Lucas talked like a leader. Promised order. Promised purpose.
Lucas had a brother. Reggie.
Reggie was always in the background quiet, grinning, with eyes that lingered too long and questions that felt like traps. Warren didn't know at first. No one told him. No one told any of the new blood.
But Warren watched. And he saw the pattern.
Recruits went missing. Girls, mostly. Boys, sometimes. The clan said they'd left. Said the training was too much for them. Said the weak didn't belong.
But Warren saw Reggie following them. Saw the hunger in his face. The way he whispered to Lucas in the dark, and Lucas would just nod.
Lucas fed his brother victims and played the hero in daylight. He didn't want a better world. He wanted a harem and a throne.
Warren hadn't spoken out. Not then. Not right away. He waited.
When Reggie turned his attention toward him, Warren was ready.
It happened in the supply yard. Late. Reggie had tried to corner him smiling, speaking soft, like he thought Warren was just another stray to corner and claim. He thought he had the upper hand.
"You always this quiet, Warren?" Reggie asked, voice low, amused. He leaned one shoulder against a crate like they were old friends, like he hadn't been circling Warren for days.
Warren didn't look at him at first. Just waited. Let the silence stretch.
"You're sharp," Reggie continued, tone tightening. "Too sharp for a grunt. You want more, don't you? Real work. Something that matters."
Warren turned slightly. "I want quiet."
Reggie laughed, a little too loud. "We all want something. Don't lie. Not to me. You want more than this. I can see it in you. You're not soft like the others. Lucas sees it too."
Warren met his gaze finally. "Lucas sees what he wants."
That set something off. Reggie's smile twitched. "You think you're better than us? Than me? I've done more for this clan than any of you. Bled for it. Killed for it. Fed it."
"Yeah," Warren said quietly. "I've seen what you feed it."
Reggie's posture shifted. That slick mask slipped a little. The heat in his eyes turned sharp. "You don't know what you're talking about."
Warren stepped sideways, subtle, closer to the shadows. "Maybe. Or maybe I've just been watching longer than you think."
Reggie's hand twitched near his belt. Knife or fist it didn't matter. Warren was already tightening his stance, calculating space, leverage, where to move next.
"You think you're clever," Reggie snapped. "You think that makes you safe?"
"No," Warren said, tone flat. "It makes me ready."
Reggie lunged.
And Warren was already moving.
The fight was brutal. Close. A trap turned inside out.
Reggie lunged first, thinking fear would stall Warren. It didn't. Warren ducked the swing, slipped to the side, and drove his elbow hard into Reggie's ribs. He felt something give, heard the wheeze snap from Reggie's lungs.
But Reggie was bigger. Sloppier, but mean. He grabbed Warren by the coat and slammed him into the supply crate, splinters biting into Warren's back. A fist followed then another. Blunt, messy. Reggie fought like a drunk animal with blood in his mouth.
Warren let the first two hit. Felt the pain, catalogued it, used it. Then he moved.
He headbutted Reggie with precision. Nose cracked. Reggie screamed. Warren slipped out of his coat like shedding a second skin, then drove his knee into the inside of Reggie's thigh, just above the knee—nerve strike. The bigger man buckled.
Warren didn't stop.
He wrapped an arm around Reggie's neck and dragged him down to the mud, rolled them both into the shadows where no eyes could see. Reggie bit his forearm. Warren slammed his head into the ground until the biting stopped.
They grappled, twisting. Reggie clawed at Warren's face, got a thumbnail near his eye. Warren bit the hand, spit blood.
Then the shift. The moment Reggie realized this wasn't a fight he could win. That he wasn't hunting anymore. He was prey.
He begged. Started to talk. Words like "stop" and "please" and "don't hurt me."
Warren heard them. Catalogued those too.
Then he broke Reggie's arm at the elbow. The scream that followed was raw real. Nothing calculated about it.
Warren slammed Reggie's head once, twice, then again. Fist. Brick. Elbow. Something cracked. Reggie's legs kicked and kept kicking until they didn't.
He kept hitting long after the fight was over. Until Reggie stopped looking like a man and more like the echo of one.
By the end, Reggie wasn't a person anymore. Just a ruin in the dirt. Bent in places that didn't bend.
He'd begged.
Begged for mercy the same way his victims had. Warren had laughed so deeply with such genuine mirth. Not cruelly. Not out of rage. But deep clean. A laugh so sharp the sun seemed to come out just to witness the moment.
The clan never suspected. They thought a brute had gotten to Reggie in the dark.
Warren didn't correct them.
The chip in Reggie's neck was intact. Miraculously so. It shouldn't have survived not after what he did. But it gleamed like it had been waiting. Warren took it. No hesitation. No second thoughts.
He didn't trust the System. Still didn't. But something about that chip the fact that it endured made him choose.
A single, perfect piece pulled from a monster.
That was the moment Warren stepped toward the edge.
Not out of desperation.
Out of intention.
The chip he had taken was his only shot at gaining some control over what was happening. The world was falling apart, and if he wanted to navigate it, he'd need a way to survive. He didn't know if the chip would work, but he had to try. It had been a risk, but it was his only choice.
It was a strange thing, holding that piece of Reggie clean, undamaged, gleaming like it had been waiting for Warren to find it. He turned it over in his fingers a dozen times before deciding. Chips didn't survive beatings like that. They cracked. Burned out. Fried from the stress. But this one? This one looked new. Like it hadn't even been used.
He didn't install it right away. He sat with it for two nights. Let it stare back at him from the safety of his storage kit, buried between sealed pouches and insulated nodes. He watched it like it might start to speak.
By the third night, the decision was made. He couldn't explain it. It was desperation. It was madness. It was clarity.
He prepared the site his shelter. Quiet. Hidden. The place that had kept him breathing long after the world wanted him dead. It was where he would make his stand. Where he would become something else.
He had no training. No diagrams. No step-by-step instructions. Only a guess and the raw, sharpened edge of resolve. He'd seen enough scavvers torn apart to know where the chips went. Base of the spine. Anchored like a parasite.
The tools were simple. He sterilized them with flame, lined the workbench with a scavenged thermal blanket. Everything was quiet. Too quiet.
He sat shirtless, spine bent to the mirror, hands shaking not from fear but from how badly he wanted this to work. Not just to survive, but to be more. To be what Mara had seen in him.
He bit down on a strip of leather. Then he cut.
The blade slid in, rough and ugly. There was no grace to it. Just pain raw, screaming pain that tunneled through his skull like fire. He dug until he found bone. Dug until he could feel the soft give of tissue around the entry port he hoped was still compatible.
The pain blinded him. He passed out once. Maybe twice. Time slipped sideways.
He thought he had killed himself.
The chip clicked into place wet, final and then... nothing.
No lights. No pulse. No sound.
His breath caught in his throat, shallow and sharp. Panic edged its way in real fear, not the cold kind that sharpened his instincts, but something breathless and bottomless. Not fear for himself. Fear the chip was dead. That it had been a trick of light. That he'd mutilated himself for nothing.
"No... no, come on," he rasped, pressing a hand to the base of his neck. "You were clean. You were intact. You were supposed to work."
He stared at the wall, vision swimming, and whispered to no one, "Mara... I messed it up."
Then came the heat. A low, curling burn that spread from the implant outward.
Then it activated.
His wound sealed. Not with stitches, but with a living burn. Nanites. Cold and efficient.
Then came the real pain.
It wasn't healing. It was remaking. Every nerve, every cell, every inch of him rewritten by a force that didn't care if he lived only that he fit.
He screamed until his throat bled. Thrashed. He vomited until there was nothing left. Again. And again. Pain raw and absolute. A purge so deep it felt like his stomach was turning inside out, dragging the worst of his memories with it.
He couldn't move. Not even to cry out. His limbs didn't answer, his lungs barely pulled breath. The pain had burned so deep into his spine and skull that it severed will from muscle. He wasn't paralyzed he was imprisoned inside his own body. Every nerve screamed. Every inch of him recoiled from itself. He could only twitch, barely. Curling tighter when he could. The only mercy was that time stopped meaning anything.
But he endured.
And when it ended when the system stabilized, and his breathing evened out he smiled.
Not with joy.
With victory.
Then the silence shattered.
A single notification blinked into his vision:
[UNRECOGNIZED SIGNAL DETECTED] [ERROR] [ABERRANT DETECTED]
As he faded into dreamless sleep
Warren woke slowly, the way a blade slides free of flesh aching, deliberate, and inevitable. His body still throbbed with aftershocks from the implant. Every nerve felt raw, burned clean. But he was alive. And more than that, he was different.
He didn't rise immediately. Just sat in the silence of his shelter, the flicker of his jury-rigged lantern casting long shadows over shelves of carefully organized salvage. His hoard. His memory. His fortress.
He thought of Mara. Of her voice in his head, not soothing, but solid. He thought of her final words, her bleeding body in his arms, and the promise he'd made without saying a word.
He had done what no sane scavver would. He'd cut into his own spine and installed a chip pulled from a corpse. Not to become one but to control what hunted him. To own the system that had stolen so many others.
The pain had nearly killed him. But the silence that followed that was worse. The moment he thought the chip had failed. That he'd failed. That his resolve had broken something beyond repair.
But the chip had activated. It had worked. And in its working, revealed a terrible truth:
The System could send.
He could receive.
But it couldn't see him.
Warren was something new.
Not broken.
Aberrant.
He moved slowly now, stretching limbs that had seized in the wake of the transformation. The floor was still stained with sweat, bile, blood. But he was clear-headed. Cold. Calculating.
What came next wouldn't be scavenging. It would be infiltration.
He would walk where the System lived and drag its secrets into the dirt.
But before he could act before he could even rise something flickered across his vision.
A notification.
No sound. No welcome.
[UNRECOGNIZED SIGNAL DETECTED] [ERROR] [ ABERRANT DETECTED]
Warren didn't flinch. He smiled.
The System had reached for him.
And missed.
Warren blinked the remnants of sleep from his eyes. His body still ached dull echoes of what he'd done to himself. His spine throbbed like a reminder. The chip was still in place. Still working. But more than that it was silent.
The message hovered before him like a relic, flickering against the dim light of his shelter. He stared at it, not in fear, but in understanding. It hadn't been a dream. The pain, the implantation, the aftermath it was all real.
He exhaled slowly and leaned against the shelf beside him. The filtered air of his hideout felt thinner now. He thought back not just to the chip, but to everything. To the way Mara had first found him. To the way she had died for him. To the time he had almost let Reggie take everything from him, and how he'd responded without mercy.
To the moment he pushed the chip into his own neck and welcomed the fire.
All of it had led to this.
The System couldn't see him.
That was the first truth.
He had been hunted. Tagged. Cornered. But never claimed. And now? Now the System was trying to see him again reaching out with broken hands through corrupted code.
And failing.
Whatever he was now, it wasn't on the grid.
Aberrant. The word wasn't an insult anymore. It was clarity. It was identity.
If the System couldn't recognize him, it couldn't predict him. And if it couldn't predict him, it couldn't stop him.
He stood, posture careful, legs still stiff from the day before. It didn't matter.
He was done remembering.
It was time to begin.