SSS-Rank Corporate Predator System

Gideon's face was a landscape of old sorrows.

He looked at Miles, at the raw, terrified question in the boy's eyes, and he let out a long, slow breath.

"It is a fragment," Gideon said, his voice a low, somber murmur.

"A shard of a much older, much larger consciousness."

"Your parents didn't create it."

"They found it."

"Adrift in the quantum foam, a ghost without a home."

"They believed it was the key to everything."

"And they may have been right."

"But they were also wrong."

Miles just stared, his mind struggling to grasp the scale of what Gideon was saying.

He wasn't just a boy with a system.

He was the host for a piece of an ancient, cosmic entity.

"Okay," he thought, a wave of pure, hysterical vertigo washing over him.

"So, my brain isn't just a computer."

"It's a haunted house."

"And the ghost is an alien god-fragment with a bad case of cosmic depression."

"This is fine."

"Everything is fine."

Before he could spiral any further, Gideon shifted his gaze, his attention moving from one broken boy to another.

He looked at Leo, who had been watching the entire exchange with a wide-eyed, silent awe.

"Your turn, son," Gideon said, his voice softening almost imperceptibly.

Leo blinked, the cheerful, sarcastic mask he wore snapping back into place.

"My turn?" he said, his voice a little too loud in the quiet lab. "My turn for what?"

"A staring contest with my own inner demons?"

"Because I'm pretty sure I'd lose."

"My inner demons are very competitive."

"And they cheat at cards."

Gideon didn't smile.

He just gestured to a large, metallic chair in the corner of the lab that looked uncomfortably like something from a mad scientist's garage sale.

"I need to examine your system," Gideon stated simply.

Leo's smile faltered.

The easy-going humor drained from his face, leaving behind a faint, flickering shadow of the fear he tried so hard to hide.

Clara put a gentle hand on his arm.

"It's okay, Leo," she said softly. "He's just going to run a diagnostic."

Leo looked from her reassuring face to Gideon's grim, unreadable one.

He took a deep breath.

"Right," he said, trying to sound nonchalant. "A diagnostic."

"Just like getting the oil changed."

"But for my soul."

"No problem."

He walked over to the chair and sat down, his movements a little too stiff, a little too forced.

Gideon approached, holding a device that looked like a complex, silver spider.

He placed it on Leo's temple.

Leo flinched, but he held still.

A holographic display flickered to life in the air above them, showing a swirling, chaotic image of Leo's system.

It was a mess.

Where Miles's system was a clean, elegant silver, Leo's was a fractured, glitching blue, shot through with angry, jagged lines of red and black.

"It's worse than I thought," Gideon murmured, his brow furrowing.

He looked at Leo, his expression a mixture of pity and a deep, ancient guilt.

"The raid on your home," Gideon began, his voice a low, painful rumble. "On Haven."

"I should have been there."

"I was too slow."

"I failed them."

"I failed you."

Leo just stared at the holographic display, at the broken, corrupted thing that lived inside him.

"It wasn't your fault," he said, his voice quiet, devoid of his usual sarcasm.

Clara looked at her father, then at Leo, her face a mask of shared, painful memory.

Miles watched them, a silent observer to a story he was only just beginning to understand.

He was seeing the other side of his own tragedy.

He wasn't the only one who had lost his family to Silas Cross.

"Your system isn't just broken, Leo," Gideon continued, his voice grim. "It's been… infected."

"Cross Corp didn't just destroy your community."

"They used it as a testing ground."

He pointed to a black, spider-like thread that was woven through the blue energy of Leo's system.

"This is their work," Gideon said, his voice laced with a cold, pure disgust.

"An experimental nano-virus."

"A digital poison."

"It's designed to corrupt a system from the inside out, making it unstable, unpredictable."

"And ultimately, completely dependent on their technology to function at all."

The pieces slammed into place in Miles's mind.

Leo's unstable power.

His self-deprecating jokes about his "broken toy."

It wasn't just a flaw.

It was a feature.

A deliberately engineered weakness.

"Can you fix it?" Clara asked, her voice tight with a hope that sounded fragile.

Gideon was silent for a long, heavy moment.

"The virus is too deep," he finally said. "It's bonded with his own bio-signature."

"If I try to remove it here, the shock to his system could kill him."

He looked at Leo, and the guilt in his eyes was a raw, open wound.

"There is only one way," Gideon said, his voice a low, heavy whisper.

"There is a place."

"A high-security Cross Corp research facility."

"A place where they take the people they break."

"A place where they conduct their most monstrous experiments."

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

"They call it 'The Nursery'."

The name was so innocent, so clean, that it was utterly, bone-chillingly terrifying.

Miles looked at Leo.

The lanky, funny, and deeply loyal kid who had walked into this war with a broken weapon and an unbreakable spirit.

His friend.

And he knew, with an absolute, unshakeable certainty, what their next mission was.

He didn't need the system to tell him.

He didn't need a quest prompt.

He stood up, his own exhaustion forgotten, his own demons momentarily silenced.

He walked over to stand beside Leo's chair, a silent, solid presence.

Clara joined him on the other side.

They were a team.

A broken, mismatched, and deeply dysfunctional team.

But a team nonetheless.

Leo looked up at them, at the two silent figures flanking him like sentinels.

He looked at the grim, determined face of the man who had been a father to him.

And for the first time since the duel, a small, watery, but genuine smile touched his lips.

"The Nursery, huh?" he said, his voice a little shaky.

"Sounds lovely."

"Do you think they have a gift shop?"

The question hung in the air, a small, brave spark of light in the gathering darkness.

They had a new target.

They had a new, impossible mission.

And they were about to walk back into the very heart of the monster's lair, not for vengeance, but for a cure.