The system chimed in his head, crisp and unemotional. Data poured across his awareness: fighting drills, micro-adjustments, counters and angles. Each packet fitted into muscle memory and rewired reaction time.
Cole Shaw smiled without showing teeth. The readouts said what he already suspected: neither Dade nor Kate qualified as full, comprehensive S-level operatives—yet both possessed elite singular specialties. A single-trait S could be more valuable than an unfocused generalist.
He pinged the system quietly. "System — what is the Eye of True Seeing?"
Ding—The Eye of True Seeing reveals attribute panels, loyalties, hidden modifiers, and active buffs for host and visible targets.
Cole flicked the Eye over himself and watched the panel expand.
[Host: Cole Shaw][Mobility (composite physical): 7 (baseline human = 1)][Reflexes (marksmanship): 6][Vitality (hit resistance): 5][Skill points: 330][System space: 1 cubic metre +][Skills: Gun Master; Intermediate Combat+; Beginner Driving+][Items: Mission: Impossible special-agent kit (module)]
He ran the numbers in his head. Mobility reflected raw strength, speed and stamina; the serum had multiplied his baseline and the Gun Master bonus pushed the composite to seven. Marksmanship sat high thanks to the Gun Master edge. Vitality lagged but was respectable. Skill points came from kills—thirty-three pirates at ten points apiece meant a tidy pool to spend.
"System — how are skill points earned?" he asked.
Ding—skill points awarded for hostile eliminations and completed combat objectives, the system replied.
He tapped into the skill trees. Driving needed a thousand points to raise from beginner to junior; mastery would require orders of magnitude more. Mastery levels ate points like a grinder. He exhaled. He had no appetite to append ten thousand kills to his ledger just to master a wheel.
"Open the Mission: Impossible kit," he said instead.
Ding—Gecko Gloves unlocked.Ding—3-D printed face mask unlocked.Ding—Holographic contact lenses unlocked.Ding—Implantable tracker unlocked.Ding—Explosive chewing gum x10 unlocked.Ding—Projection screen (camouflage/illusion unit) unlocked.Ding—Biometric bypass kit: gait recognition, iris, fingerprint modules unlocked.
The list flowed in like a shopping cart of theatrical black tech. The gecko-style gloves let a climber stick to smooth glass; the printed mask approximated any scanned face to photorealistic accuracy; the contact lenses recorded, analysed, and overlayed facial recognition in a blink; implanted trackers could hide in living tissue; the exploding gum was a small tactical charge; the projection panel hid cameras and misdirected optical systems; biometric kits spoofed signatures used by high-security sites.
These were the movie gadgets he'd been taught to respect—and to exploit. (Mission: Impossible has long used masks, sticky/climbing gloves, camera/contact devices and novelty explosives as on-screen spy tools.)
Cole felt steadier. Armed with the kit he could move through surveillance as though it were scenery. He closed the panel and stood up when Jason wandered in.
"You asleep?" Jason asked.
"Not a chance," Cole replied, handing him a cigar. "So—what's the truthful version? What did they come for?"
Jason lit the cigar and blew smoke up toward the ceiling. "They want the Rabbit's Foot," he said flatly.
The name landed like a dropped weight. Cole sat up straighter. The Rabbit's Foot—an ominous MacGuffin ever since the old IMF days—had always been half-legend, half-rumour. It had been mentioned in older IMF files, never explained, and then whispered about again in later returns to the franchise. Recent authoritative breakdowns treat it as a biological/biotech MacGuffin—dangerous, marketable, and irresistible to anyone who wanted a power edge.
Jason's voice tightened. "My mentor and I were working on something. It's…a viral delivery architecture—small-scale now, but the mechanism is real. The institute's old link to defence research meant someone above noticed. They wanted the tech. They'll pay to buy it; others will pay to weaponise it."
He swallowed hard. "We built a shutdown procedure, but materials are scarce. This thing isn't a doomsday bomb today, but if it scales it becomes a global threat. People will pay obscene sums for it. That's why the mercs came."
Cole let the implications settle. A market for curated biotech meant contractors, private buyers, rogue states. If the Rabbit's Foot—or anything like it—existed in the open market, it would invite an arms bazaar of horrors.
"Is there a way to destroy it?" he asked.
Jason hesitated. "There are containment protocols. My mentor coded a kill-switch, but you need the institute's backups to verify the checksum. Without them you can't guarantee clean termination. And the materials—they're volatile if handled wrong."
Cole folded his hands and let the system overlay his options: extraction, obfuscation, or destruction. Extraction meant getting the asset out of the college to a secure site; obfuscation meant fragmenting the research so the core never sat in one place; destruction meant using blunt force or a carefully applied molecular spoilage that might leave toxic residue—moral calculus he wasn't keen to perform if he could avoid it.
He thought of the Expendables hovering in the background, of Ross's men already mapping vertical insertion points, of the anonymous envelope that had demanded delivery to pier coordinates. If the price for the tech reached ten million and the buyers were organized, the situation would spin violently out of control.
Cole shut his eyes for a beat and then stood. "We don't let that tech walk. We either break the schema into useless fragments or we get it out of their reach. No police, no witnesses, no open trial."
Jason nodded once, jaw set.
Cole's phone pinged faintly—the system delivering another whisper of reward. He ignored it for the moment and went to the window to watch the street below, thoughts tight and cold with plans.