His informant, a disheveled neural architect named Dr. Aris, had paid for this file with his life. He’d whispered his last words into a broken comms unit: “It’s not a rating, Kael. It’s a mirror. Don’t open it alone.”

He hit .

Because the profile was right. He’d already run far enough.

For three years, he’d been chasing the ghost of the Dlo Rating—an algorithm so complex, so impossibly precise, that it was said to map the entire moral and strategic topography of a human mind. A score of 5000 was theoretical. Divine. The scale only went to 4999.