Picking Up Attributes In Martial World

Chapter 172: Weaver

The world dissolved around Ye Jun again after he finished enduring his Seventh Tribulation.

The white void slowly turned dark, the dark of a city sky bleached out by streetlights below, and the cold came in before the rest of the scene did. It was a familiar cold.

’I did not miss that.’

Ye Jun felt the shift inside him before the world finished forming.

His consciousness began to shift, as it appeared in two places at the same time. One who lived these terrible memories again and the other who watched from behind, like an audience.

He opened his eyes in the alley behind a corner store on a winter night. Eight years old and skinny enough that the cold went straight through him.

Across the street, a liquor store sign flickered in red neon.

A small figure sat next to him against the dumpster, wrapped in a too-thin blanket, breathing too fast and too shallow. Sam, eight as well, maybe nine. A fever had been eating him for two days.

Weaver’s hand was sticky with something, so he looked down and found a half-loaf of bread, still warm, pressed against his coat. The shop owner’s brother had seen him take it.

He could hear the heavy footsteps a block away, getting closer. His eight-year-old self knew it well enough that he could run, but Sam could not. If he stayed, the man would catch them both.

Behind his eyes, Ye Jun watched himself make the same decision a second time. He felt the small boy’s heart pound and the small boy’s loyalty refuse to bend.

’What an idiot!’

Weaver tore off a piece of the bread and pushed it into Sam’s hand. He stood up between Sam and the alley’s mouth.

The man came around the corner with a knife.

What happened next was fast. Sam tried to get up, but slipped on the wet pavement. The man swung to scare them, but Sam stopped breathing partway through a word he never finished.

Weaver got the knife across his arm and the bread fell into a puddle and he ran because there was nothing else left to do.

He did not stop running until three streets away, where he collapsed behind a different dumpster in a different alley, his arm bleeding through his sleeve, his lungs raw from the cold.

He sat there for hours.

Sometime after midnight, the eight-year-old boy curled tighter against the cold metal and made a decision that would shape every year after. He spoke it out loud to nobody, the way a child made things real by saying them.

"One part of me stays alive. The other part keeps being a person."

He felt something inside actually split. It was just a small inner snap, like a green branch giving way under careful pressure. He stopped crying after it happened, because the part of him that cried had gone somewhere else, into a room with a door he would not open again for a long time.

The rational part stood up, wrapped his bleeding arm in a strip torn from his shirt, and went to find somewhere warmer.

The scene dissolved.

The teen years came at him in pieces, the trial moving faster through this stretch similar to how memory itself moved faster through repetition.

Pickpocketing on the south side. A bigger kid taking his money and his shoes. Learning to use a knife on a man who had cornered him in a stairwell when he was thirteen. Sleeping under a bridge in the summer because shelters had rules.

The Boss found him at fifteen.

Carter did not introduce himself by name for almost a year. He sat at a coffee shop window and watched Weaver work a tourist crowd outside the train station, and the next week he sent a man over with a hundred-dollar bill and an address.

Weaver took the bill and went to the address. There was work waiting, carrying packages and then watching people. Then watching them in ways that ended badly for them.

Carter taught him in pieces, never in lessons. He let Weaver fail at things, then asked questions afterward in his quiet voice.

"What did you learn?"

"Why did that go wrong?"

"What would you do differently?"

The first time Weaver killed someone, he was seventeen and the job was supposed to be a courier pickup. The mark had pulled a gun and Weaver had a knife.

He came out alive with shaking hands and blood on his coat and an awareness that he had crossed something he could not uncross. Carter was waiting in a car two blocks away. He drove Weaver home in silence and then said one thing as Weaver got out.

"Trust gets people killed, kid. Including you."

The line went into the rational half of Weaver and stayed there for the rest of his life.

By twenty-one he had earned a codename, given to him by other professionals who had watched his work. Spider, first, because he set things up patiently and never moved until they were ready. Then Weaver, because his kills wove together cleanly, no threads left behind for police to pull.

He liked the second name.

He was good at it, better than Carter, better than most. The rational part of him had grown into the shape of the work the way water grew into the shape of a glass.

The emotional part stayed in the locked room.

He visited it sometimes through stories. He read translated webnovels until the small hours and watched anime alone in his apartment with the lights off, and the fictional people felt things he had filed away years ago.

He cried at scenes other people called cringey and sentimental, but he never cried in front of anyone. The room had a door, and the door stayed closed except in the dark.

The trial sped through these years and slowed when it reached Lily.

A diner on Seventh Avenue. Late shift. A booth by the window where the streetlight reached his table but his face stayed in shadow. He came in after jobs because the food was hot and nobody at the counter asked questions.

Lily worked the graveyard shift four nights a week. She had brown hair she tied back with a pencil and a tired smile she gave everyone equally.

She started remembering his order after the third visit.

"Same as always?" she said the fourth time.

"Same as always."

It was the first time in years a person had spoken to him without wanting something from him.

He went back and kept going back. He never learned her last name and she never asked his first. She talked about her brother Tyler, who was sixteen and an idiot, as she said all younger brothers were idiots, and she talked about wanting to go back to school but the money wasn’t there yet.

Weaver listened and ate eggs and tipped well. Some part of the locked room was leaking.

’Once again, an idiot!’

He should have known what would happen. The rational part of him did know, but during those times his emotional side was winning, so he went back anyway.

A rival of Carter’s, looking for leverage, saw Weaver eating in a diner.

They went for Lily a week later. She was walking to her car after her shift. Tyler had come to walk her out, because he was sixteen and trying to be the kind of brother who did that.

Lily survived. Tyler did not.

Weaver heard about it from Carter, who told him in the same quiet voice he used for everything. Carter was not angry, as he was a veteran in this field.

"Connections are debts other people can call in."

Weaver went to the hospital anyway.

Lily was in a corridor outside a room. Her arm was in a sling and she had a butterfly bandage on her temple and her eyes were red from crying for many hours without stopping.

She saw Weaver at the end of the corridor and she did not look surprised, because some part of her had already worked it out from the silence in the room and the police questions and the way the rest of her life had just stopped.

He stood there for a long time without saying anything.

She said, "You ruin everything you touch."

She said it quietly, without raising her voice.

Weaver did not argue with her. He simply turned and left the hospital and never went back to the diner. The rational part of him filed her under closed and the emotional part of him added another lock to the door inside.

The kid came later.

His name was Eli and he started showing up in the alley behind Weaver’s apartment building in November, when he was maybe nine, wearing a sweatshirt. Weaver saw him from the windows one night and felt something in his chest that he had not felt in a long time.

But he did not approach the kid. He simply left a coat folded on top of the dumpster the next morning. The kid came back the next night and the coat was gone.

After that it was easy. Twenty dollars folded inside a takeout bag. A backpack with school supplies. A used winter jacket. Weaver tracked down the kid’s grandmother and paid for a real apartment in her name through an intermediary who had no idea who the money was for. He paid for school. He paid for two years of school. Eli got fed and Eli got educated and Eli got the chance Weaver had never had.

The kid had to know where it was coming from. Weaver was sure of it. But the kid never came up to him in that alley, and Weaver liked it that way. It was the cleanest connection he had ever maintained, because it was made entirely of distance.

Then one night Eli followed him.

Curious about who was helping him, maybe. Or just curious like all kids were. Weaver had a job in a parking garage on the lower west side.

He came home that night and Eli was sitting outside his apartment window, knees pulled up to his chest, eyes wide and white in the dark.

The kid had seen everything.

Weaver stopped on the landing and looked at him through the glass. Eli’s mouth was wide open, his face had gone the color of dry paper. He stared at Weaver, and Weaver stared back, and there was nothing to say because the kid already knew everything that mattered.

Eli climbed down without a word and ran. Weaver let him.

The money kept going to the grandmother afterwards and Eli kept getting fed. But Eli never came back to that alley, and Weaver never saw him again. He told himself it was the right outcome. The rational part of him meant it. The emotional part of him, behind its door, did not get a vote.

That left Marcus.

Marcus was the one Weaver could not survive.

They met on a joint contract when Weaver was twenty-six. Marcus was a fixer who worked cleanup.

They did the job together without complications and without killing each other, and afterward Marcus suggested a drink at a place he knew.

Weaver almost said no, but something inside him made him say yes.

The place was a bar in the basement of a building that didn’t have a sign. Marcus drank cheap whiskey and complained about the price of cigarettes.

He quoted an anime back at Weaver in a casual aside, and Weaver almost choked on his drink because nobody in his life had ever caught one of his references before.

For about two years after that, Marcus was the closest thing Weaver had to a person.

They drank in Weaver’s apartment and Marcus crashed on the couch after long jobs. They argued about whether a webnovel translation was better than the official one, and they argued about which season of which show had been a mistake.

Weaver heard himself laugh sometimes and was surprised by the sound. The door inside him began to open, not all the way, but it cracked.

He told Marcus once, drunk, about Lily. Marcus did not say anything for a long minute. Then he said, "Yeah. I have one of those too. Different name."

Weaver did not realize how starved he had been until he started eating.

Carter watched all of this from a careful distance, but didn’t say anything. He simply made notes like he made notes about everything else.

A year and four months in, Carter handed Weaver a contract. Marcus’s name was on it.

Weaver did not say anything. He took the paper home and sat on his couch in the dark and read it three times. He understood what it was. Carter had watched him grow attached to someone and had decided to find out whether he could still pull the trigger.

The rational part of him knew there was no choice. Saying no to Carter meant Carter would have both of them killed by other people, and those people would not give Marcus the courtesy of going first.

The only way Marcus survived this was if Weaver refused, and Weaver refusing meant they both died in worse ways.

The emotional part of him sat in the locked room and stopped moving entirely.

He had six hours and he spent four of them sitting on his couch. Then he got up, put on his jacket, and went to Marcus’s apartment.

Marcus opened the door.

He looked at Weaver, at Weaver’s hands, and then back at Weaver’s face.

The man stepped aside and let him in.

Marcus poured two glasses of the cheap whiskey he always kept and set one in front of Weaver at the kitchen table. They drank in silence.

Marcus’s hand was steady. Weaver’s hand was steady. They had both spent their entire adult lives learning to keep their hands steady even in the worst situations, after all.

After a while, Marcus said, "I figured it’d be you."

Weaver tried to find words, but there was nothing.

"You can talk if you want," Marcus chuckled. "Or you can not. I’m not going to make you do this differently than you need to."

Weaver stared deeply at his glass.

Marcus finished his whiskey and set the glass down. "I would have done the same, you know. If he had asked me first. So don’t worry about it."

Weaver wanted to say a hundred things but came up with only one.

"I’m sorry."

Marcus smiled at him. It was a small, tired smile, and it had warmth in it, which was the worst part. "Yeah. I know you are."

He stood up. "Do it in the kitchen, will ya? I just cleaned the carpet."

Weaver almost laughed. It came out an odd mix of chuckle and sob. Marcus put a hand on his shoulder for a moment, the only time he had ever done that. Then he stepped back and turned slightly so his side was to Weaver, the way a man stood when he was trying to make a difficult thing easier.

Weaver shot him in the head.

Marcus fell against the kitchen counter and slid down it to the floor.

Weaver sat down on the kitchen tiles next to him and did not move for a long time. He thought about putting the gun in his own mouth. He thought about it carefully and at length, the way he thought about everything.

’Pathetic.’

He decided against it because he was a coward, and because the rational part of him pointed out that nobody would clean up the apartment if he did, and Marcus had wanted it clean.

He cleaned the kitchen.

He left the apartment a few hours before sunrise and he never drank cheap whiskey again.

The years after Marcus ran together.

He kept working, becoming better at the work than he had ever been, because the door inside him had a heavier lock on it now and the rational part of him had more room to operate.

He went home to a quiet apartment, ate takeout from the same three places, watched anime in the dark and read webnovels until the windows started to lighten, and the fictional people in his stories felt the things he could not feel anymore.

He told himself the distance was kindness. Anyone close to him died. Anyone close to him became leverage. Staying alone was the only protection he could offer the world.

The emotional half of him agreed quietly from behind its door, because the alternative was admitting that he had simply burned out.

Carter watched him and he saw the change immediately. Weaver became a man who had stopped needing things from anyone, including Carter.

That kind of man could not be controlled.

The Wayne job was the setup.

Carter took the contract from Wayne’s daughter through three layers of intermediaries. Standard work. A billionaire who had become inconvenient to his own family.

Weaver took the job because Weaver always took the job. He set the surveillance up like he always did and picked the suite at Wayne Tower.

He also planted bombs throughout Carter’s palace over time, because the rational part of him had been tracking Carter’s moves for a long time and knew something like this would happen.

The trial brought him into the suite.

Wayne crawling backward on the carpet. Blood. The crystal chandelier in pieces. Weaver in the black suit and the Spider Mask, the dagger turning between his knuckles.

Everything was so familiar.

The phone rang again, and he heard Carter’s voice. "Micheal Wayne?"

"Bleeding out."

"Good. I wanted to hear his last breath. And yours."

Everything that happened afterward was all too fresh to him, as it had only been a few months for that.

Weaver pressed the trigger, ending the life of the person whom he saw as his paternal figure.

He threw the phone into the pool of blood and stood at the window and watched his city for one last moment.

He thought about Sam in the alley, about Lily in the hospital corridor, about Eli on the apartment window, and Marcus in the kitchen and every other small failure he had filed away in the locked room behind his eyes.

He felt the bone-deep fatigue rise up through him, warm and welcoming. He chuckled and spread his hands.

"Hell’s gonna be crowded tonight."

The floor turned to light.

Weaver died.