Chapter 7: The Desperate Call

Chapter 7: The Desperate Call

The city lights were a cruel mockery. An hour ago, Leo had stood on the rooftop of Celeste, looking down at this glittering expanse as a future kingdom. Now, on the street level, scurrying through canyons of steel and glass, he felt like a rat in a maze, and the lights were just the cold, unblinking eyes of the traps.

Julian’s voice was a venomous echo in his head. Find me my new wolves. The quest notification for [The Great Hunt] pulsed insistently at the edge of his vision, a constant, glowing reminder of the monstrous task he’d been given. The profiles of Marcus Thorne and Amelia Carden were already half-formed in his mind, their routines and vulnerabilities cataloged by a part of him that was now horrifyingly efficient at this kind of predatory analysis. The System was a brilliant tool. And he was its slave.

His newfound confidence, that hard-won shell of the "Apex Predator," had been shattered by a single conversation. It was a cheap fake, a thin veneer of ideology over a core of raw terror. The power he’d gained felt like a gilded leash, and Julian held the end of it. To disobey was unthinkable. Julian’s rage, which he’d glimpsed in the penthouse, was a physical force. Leo knew with primal certainty that if he showed any sign of defiance, he would be crushed without a second thought.

He couldn't use his phone. Julian Vance, the tech mogul, would undoubtedly have a backdoor into every device he provided. Leo’s sleek new phone was a tracking device, a listening post. His whole life at The Apex Collective had been a carefully monitored experiment.

He walked for what felt like hours, his expensive new shoes—a gift from Julian—pinching his feet. He was moving instinctively, away from the sterile opulence of the financial district and back toward the familiar grime of the city’s forgotten corners. He was returning to the shadows, but this time they felt like a refuge, not a prison.

He finally found one near a boarded-up laundromat, its windows painted over with peeling graffiti. A phone booth. It was a dinosaur, a relic from a time before everyone carried a leash in their pocket. The glass was spiderwebbed with cracks and fogged with grime. The receiver dangled from a frayed metal cord, and the whole enclosure smelled faintly of urine and desperation. It was perfect. It was a gutter. It was where he belonged.

Leo stepped inside, the door groaning shut behind him. He fed coins into the slot, his hands trembling. His thumb hovered over the worn-out keypad. He knew the number by heart, a sequence burned into his memory from a time when he still had a life, a time when he still had friends.

His pride screamed at him. It was a raw, physical thing, coiling in his gut. He thought of Alex’s face in the café, the hurt in their eyes as he’d systematically dismantled their friendship with cruel, calculated words. I killed him, he’d said. How could he possibly take that back? How could he crawl back to the person he had so brutally discarded and ask for anything? It was pathetic. It was a beta move.

The thought, a direct quote from Julian’s philosophy, made him want to vomit.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He saw Amelia Carden leaving the bar, unaware that her life was about to be ripped apart. He saw her waking up in an alley, just like he had, her body a prison of new agony, her mind reeling in terror. And he saw Julian, smiling that serene, predatory smile, appearing like a savior to offer her the same poisoned cure he’d given Leo.

The nausea won. Pride was a luxury he couldn't afford. Not when other lives were on the line.

His finger jabbed the numbers. The phone on the other end rang, each pulse an eternity. Once. Twice. He was about to hang up, to give in to the despair, when the ringing stopped.

A click, then silence. Finally, a voice, cautious and laced with ice. "Hello?"

It was them. Leo’s throat closed up.

"Who is this?" Alex asked again, their tone flat and wary.

He had to force the words out, his voice a raw, broken thing he barely recognized. "Alex… it’s me. It's Leo."

The silence on the other end of the line was absolute, a dead weight of anger and betrayal. He could feel them about to hang up.

"Don't!" he gasped, pressing the receiver hard against his ear. "Please, Alex, don't hang up. I… I was wrong. Oh god, I was so wrong about everything. You were right. You were right, I’m becoming a monster."

"You have a lot of nerve," Alex’s voice was barely a whisper, but it was sharp as a shard of glass. "A monster? That's what you wanted, isn't it? What do you want, Leo? To tell me how much stronger you are now?"

"No!" he choked out, leaning his forehead against the cold, greasy glass of the booth. "No, it’s not what I wanted. It’s a lie. It’s all a lie. I’m in trouble. No, that’s not right. People are in trouble, and it’s my fault."

The sheer panic in his voice must have cut through their anger, because they didn't hang up. They just waited.

Taking a shuddering breath, Leo began to confess, the words tumbling out in a frantic, hushed torrent, as if saying them too loudly would summon Julian from the shadows. "There's a man. His name is Julian Vance. He found me… after one of the changes. He showed me how to control it. Or, I thought he did."

He explained the System, the holographic interface only he could see, the stats, the quests. He could hear Alex’s faint, incredulous breath on the other end. "It’s like… a video game for my curse. It gamified my life. It gave me quests. And the first one… Alex, the first quest was to hurt you. To push you away. He said attachments were a weakness. A bug. And I was so desperate, I believed him."

He didn’t stop. He told them about the gym, about the ideology he’d been writing, about the sterile office and the soulless philosophy of the 'Apex Predator.' He told them about the failed recruitment drive on the VeilNet, about the ancient werewolves who had rejected Julian as a heretic.

And then he got to the end. His voice dropped even lower, the words catching in his throat. "They all said no. So now he has a new plan. He calls it 'The Great Hunt.' He’s not going to recruit werewolves anymore. He’s going to make them. He took me to a bar tonight, Alex. He pointed out people—ambitious, ruthless people—and he told me to watch them. To find their weaknesses."

He finally ran out of air, the confession leaving him utterly hollowed out. He was just a man in a filthy phone booth, shaking in the dark.

"He wants me to help him hunt them," Leo whispered, the final admission tasting like poison. "He's going to have them attacked, bitten, forcibly turned. He’s going to break them so he can rebuild them as his own private army. And he wants me to be his scout."

The silence on the line stretched, thick and heavy. Leo could picture Alex on the other end, sitting in their cluttered, cozy apartment, trying to process the torrent of impossible information. He had laid his entire insane, monstrous reality at their feet. He had confessed to becoming a monster and then revealed a much greater one. He waited for the click of the hang-up, for the final, deserved rejection.

Instead, after a lifetime, Alex’s voice came back, devoid of its earlier anger, replaced by a quiet, focused intensity that chilled him to the bone. "A system? In your vision? You're telling me this man… Vance… is turning people into werewolves against their will?"

"Yes," Leo breathed, a wave of desperate hope washing over him.

"And he wants you to choose the victims."

"Yes."

Another long, terrifying pause. Leo held his breath, his knuckles white on the receiver. He had thrown his one and only Hail Mary. The fate of his soul, and the lives of countless others, rested on the compassion of the friend he had tried so hard to destroy.

Finally, Alex spoke again. Their voice was steady, solid, and held a frightening new weight. It was the voice of someone who had just accepted an impossible truth and had already started calculating the consequences.

"Where are you, Leo?"