All Chapters of Reborn Before Doomsday: My System Has Infinite Storage : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

"What do you mean it's not finished?" I asked, following Dorian back toward the kitchen where Kael was already waiting, a laptop open in front of him and his jaw set tighter than I'd seen it in weeks."They're not satisfied with paperwork," Dorian said, dropping into the chair beside Kael. "Lucien's investigators want to speak with Marcus Webb in person. They've already started calling around his supposed employer looking for a phone number."Kael swore under his breath, low and sharp. "There is no Marcus Webb.""I'm aware," Dorian said, already pulling the laptop toward himself. "Which means we need him to exist just long enough to convince them he's already gone."We spent the rest of the evening at that table, three heads bent over the screen while Dorian built the last piece of the fiction with the same careful patience he'd used on every piece before it. By midnight, Marcus Webb had a voicemail box that clicked over to a generic recording after two rings, a forwarding address tha

Dylan found me two days later outside a small coffee shop I’d started using for anything I didn’t want tied back to the compound, sliding into the chair across from me before I’d even finished giving the barista my order.“We need to talk,” he said, his voice low and clipped, none of the smugness left in it from our earlier encounters in his car or outside that lounge.“You could have called.”“I don’t trust phones anymore.” He glanced around the shop, checking the other tables the way a man checks for exits when he’s genuinely afraid, and I felt the first real flicker of concern that something had actually rattled him this badly.“What happened?”“Alistair’s been asking me questions,” he said, dropping his voice further. “About the man you were with the night I found you outside that lounge. He wants a name, and he keeps asking me in ways that make it clear he already suspects I’m keeping something back.”I kept my face perfectly still, though my pulse had picked up considerably unde

I woke the next morning with one thought sitting on my chest before I'd even opened my eyes properly. Sixty-three days was no longer enough to prepare casually. Until now I had been collecting resources the way a person collects things they assume they'll get around to sorting eventually, building relationships when they were convenient, strengthening security when a threat forced my hand, and dealing with problems only after they'd already become problems. That ended today.I sat up, called the system, and opened a blank list before I'd even gotten out of bed. I divided it the way I should have divided it weeks ago. Food. Water. Medicine. Weapons. Transportation. Power. Communication. Shelter. Clothing. Seeds. Tools. Personnel. Twelve categories, and by the time I'd filled in what we actually had under each one, I realized just how many gaps I'd been quietly ignoring in favor of whatever fire needed putting out that particular week.I called Kael first, then Dorian, before I'd even f

Dorian had the answer by the following afternoon, though it wasn't the kind of answer that made anyone in that kitchen feel better about our situation."A private security company," he said, sliding a printed page across the table toward Kael and me. "Registered, licensed, entirely legitimate on paper. No obvious ties to Lucien. No connection I can find to Alistair, or to anyone in the Kings family. Nothing.""That's not reassuring," Kael said, reading over the page a second time as though the words might rearrange themselves into something more familiar on a closer look."It's the opposite of reassuring," I said. "If it were Lucien's people, at least I'd understand the shape of the threat. Whoever this is, they're not connected to anything I already know how to fight."Kael set the page down carefully, as if handling it any other way might somehow make the problem worse. "I've run against private security firms before, working Lucien's side of things. Most of them exist to protect co

With less than three weeks left before the Kings gala, the compound stopped feeling like a household and started feeling like something closer to a command center, everyone moving with a purpose that hadn't been there even a month earlier.We split the work properly this time, no more overlapping responsibilities that left gaps nobody noticed until it was too late. Kael took security and weapons, expanding recruitment further and running drills with the new hires late into the evening. Dorian took technology, communications, identities, and supply logistics, juggling all four with the same restless energy he brought to everything, though I noticed the exhaustion building steadily behind his eyes as the days wore on. Elara took medical preparations and emergency planning, working alongside the contacts she'd built through Owen Ferris and her own careful research, and I watched her grow more confident by the day, further from the woman who used to flinch at raised voices than I think ev