SSS-Class Profession: The Path to Mastery-Chapter 242: Persistence Error

I’ve been hurt before. Cut open. Lacerations from claws. Bruises from punches. Broken ribs and bones and even a crash landing on Mars.

But this? This was a different kind of agony.

It wasn’t the injection itself. That came early. Clean. Efficient. A needle thin as hair slid into the crook of my neck, and whatever they pumped in felt less like fluid and more like frostbite—liquid ice, threading through arteries, crawling up my spine like it wanted to colonize my brain. My jaw locked halfway through a breath. My fingers twitched. My lungs forgot how to pull in air for a full three seconds.

And then the machine hummed to life. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

What followed wasn’t pain the way I’d ever known it. It was a violation.

The table I was strapped to felt welded into the floor, cold steel digging into my shoulder blades. Restraints clamped over my forearms, ankles, and neck—mechanical, hissing slightly every time they adjusted their grip. Not to stop movement. To measure it.

Above me hung a rail-mounted apparatus—a spider’s nest of rotating instruments and surgical arms, each tipped with scanners, prods, needles, or blades too small to catch the light. They moved with a kind of clinical precision that made me sick to watch. Smooth, uninterrupted, patient. Like they’d done this a thousand times and never once needed to rush.

And at the center of it all: the extraction rig.

It looked like an old MRI gutted and repurposed by someone who’d grown up dissecting minds instead of imaging them. It wasn’t sleek—it was brutalist. Layers of bolted panels, exposed wiring, humming coolant tubes that snaked down into the floor. A cylindrical collar was locked tight around the top half of my skull, humming with faint violet pulses. I could feel it mapping me—neurons, synapses, job registry cores, whatever they could latch onto.

Each pulse it sent into my head came with a fresh, disorienting surge. Not pain, exactly. Worse.

Disassembly.

My thoughts fractured. Words slipped. I couldn’t remember the number four. I forgot Sienna’s last name. The taste of coffee. The location of my old apartment. They came back a second later—but dulled, smeared at the edges like half-washed ink. Every second in the machine cost me something.

They didn’t speak. No questions. No taunting. Just silence broken by mechanical murmurs and the whir of recalibrating servos.

In the far corner, a monitor flickered with scrolling data—slabs of text and glyphs I only half-recognized. Neural latency graphs. Skill efficiency decay. Job title retention percentages. Each readout blinked, wavered, auto-adjusted, trying to make sense of me.

And then—A message.

Right in the corner of my vision. No voice. No preamble.

SYSTEM NOTICE: SSS-RANK TITLE "JOBMASTER" - REMOVAL IN PROGRESS.

AUTHORIZATION: EXTERNAL OVERRIDE.

CONDITION: FORCED.

My breath hitched. Not from fear. From the familiarity of that interface—my interface—being twisted like this. They were reaching into something they had no business touching.

A moment later—

STATUS: REMOVAL ATTEMPT UNDERWAY.

WARNING: TITLE-ANCHOR INSTABILITY DETECTED.

ERROR: SYSTEM INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.

ATTEMPTING REPAIR...

ATTEMPTING...

ATTEMPTING...

Then, in bold red:

TITLE REMOVAL FAILED.

JOBMASTER STATUS: PERSISTENT.

A short beat of silence. Even the machine seemed confused.

A voice finally spoke, tinny and frustrated through the room’s intercom. "Process stalled at 67%. Retrying..."

Another shock slammed through my nerves. I tasted metal and bit my tongue so hard I felt blood coat my teeth. My hands jerked against the clamps, fingertips curling into air that no longer felt real.

Then, more voices. Muffled behind glass.

"Why didn’t it fail sooner?"

"Could be systemic corruption. Or an anchor loop."

"That would require external rooting. Something not coded from our side."

"That’s not possible—this subject was never augmented."

I wanted to laugh. The irony was almost pretty.

They didn’t understand. Though not even I did.

My assumption is that The Jobmaster title hadn’t been granted like the others. They were experimented on and artificially given meaning it was likely possible to take it away. On the other hand, the system gave me this title on its own, it likely had a greater connection to my existence which prevented it from being removed. In short...

It had chosen me.

The pain dulled, not from relief—but from exhaustion. My system flickered again.

AUTO-RECOVERY ENGAGED.

JOB TITLE LOCKED.

DEACTIVATED SKILLS REPAIRING...

TIMED SYNC STABILIZED.

Still shackled to the chair, I felt it. A flicker. A low hum under my skin.

Like a light coming back on in a long-forgotten room.

One of the observers stepped closer to the glass, tapping something on their console. "Vitals are stabilizing. Neurological patterns returning to baseline."

Another voice. Clipped. Irritated. "That’s impossible. The strain from the override should’ve liquified his neural graph. Why is he recovering?"

"Unknown. There’s some kind of—"

"Forget it. We’ll revisit tomorrow when subject 3829 hasn’t been using his job title for hours. There’s a chance the title weakened and Reynard Vale is resisting with what little skills he has."

They shut the lights in the chamber to half-brightness. One of the clamps retracted from my ankle with a hiss. Another from my neck.

The chair tilted forward, half-dumping me into a crouch on the floor. My hands were still cuffed, and I was too weak to stand fully, but I managed to push myself against the cold metal wall.

The observers left.

No guards. No follow-up. Just the sharp hiss of the door closing.

I wasn’t alone. But I was unmonitored. For now.

I sat there for what might’ve been ten minutes. Might’ve been an hour. My mind couldn’t track time clearly anymore.

Then the flood began.

Skills.

Memories.

Connections.

It started with the low-tier ones—Reflex Calibration, Fire Suppression. Faint pulses returning to my limbs. A breath of clarity to my balance. Then others. The deeper ones.

Command Presence. Interrogation. Endurance Boost.

Psychological Insight. Deduction. Intimidation Through Status.

And deeper still.

Observation. Heavy Lifting. Instinct.

Then—

SYSTEM NOTICE: FULL TITLE FUNCTIONALITY RESTORED.

STATUS: RESYNCHRONIZED.

SKILL INTEGRITY: 98%.

RECOVERY COMPLETION ETA: 1h 12m

I nearly laughed again, but my throat hurt too much.

Instead, I leaned back and closed my eyes.

Everything felt louder now—my heartbeat, my thoughts, even the thrum of electricity in the floor. I wasn’t at full strength. Not yet. But my mind was working again. My tools were returning.

And so was the weight.

Every skill came with some pressure. Ghosts of jobs I’d taken. People I’d outwitted. Names I’d faked. Weapons I’d used. Rules I’d rewritten.

And pain.

God, the pain.

But that was good. That was mine.

I needed a plan. But my limbs ached, and my head was still full of static. So I did the only thing I could.

I rested.

Not well.

Not comfortably.

The floor was hard. My left shoulder throbbed. My back scraped against a seam in the wall. And the red lights never dimmed.

But I let myself drift.

Just enough.

Because if I didn’t regain strength, if I didn’t stay alert—this place would become permanent.

They called it understanding.

But what they really wanted was dissection without a knife.

Tomorrow, they’d come back. Probably with a new plan. New tools. New commands for Subject 3829.

But next time, I wouldn’t be hollow.

I would be ready.

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