A Man on Fire: A Cyberpunk LitRPG (Slumrat Rising Book 4) by Warby Picus

Author:Warby Picus [Picus, Warby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2025-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 43

DREAMING

Truth spent the morning doing moving cultivation. He had the space now, and just sitting around had never felt right to him. Every few hours he checked the scry—lockdown still in effect. It turned out that people were being allowed out to buy things, but you had a fixed time of day to do it at, based on your tax ID. And if that time happened to be three in the morning, too bad for you. The cops were out and were checking. Had to be playing hell with the economy, but these days, what wasn’t?

Around lunchtime (theoretical lunchtime; there really wasn’t anything to eat in the apartment), the news announced that the lockdown would end at six in the morning the next day. Truth was quietly confident that the old man who lived there would not be back by then. Truth didn’t bother to switch on any lights and kept the running water to a minimum. From the outside, the apartment appeared to be empty.

Three times during the day, Truth felt diviners sweep through the apartment. Each time, the search was steady and patient. These were diviners who fully accepted that this was their job and weren’t going to rush it. Truth was a little vague on the finer details of how divining worked. He was more familiar with how to defeat surveillance than how to do it. It sure seemed like this batch was well trained and well equipped. At a guess, Level Three power. Which, for apartment sweeps that he would have normally expected to be done by Level Ones, was kind of nuts.

They were rare highlights of the day. Each sweep revealed a happy truth—they knew, roughly, what he was up to; they just couldn’t counter it effectively. He could practically hear them walking through the logic—

“He can use Incisive and it seems he has some means to make himself invisible or undetectable, so he probably just hides out wherever he wants. Which means he isn’t using a specific safehouse; he is sleeping wherever he wants. Which means we have to look everywhere.”

“In Harban. Every apartment and home in Harban.”

“Well, what if we locked down the city first?”

“Search every home. In Harban.”

“With diviners. Give them top-notch tools. Hell, have demons or angels powering the search. Not like we have a budget cap for this.”

“Every home. In Harban. In less than forty-eight hours.”

“We will probably have to check a few times, because he clearly knows how to defeat surveillance.”

*Beatings ensue.*

It wasn’t dumb, exactly. Just, what else could they do? He was sure they would have those watcher-things posted up in far, far more places than before. Certainly, every route out of Harban would be coated in them. Aggressive police sweeps. Aggressive checks of sigils. Constant pressure on the basis that he would have to succeed every time but they only had to succeed once. It wasn’t dumb, exactly. Just very inefficient and not very effective.

They must be using him as a hat, he reckoned. This was most likely aimed at known agitators.

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