Impact still comes first.
The BMW droped off a rough patch of broken asphalt and lands hard enough that the whole chassis rings—metal complaining, suspension compressing, tires slapping back into grip. Jacob Cooper's spine felt it as a single violent note, like someone struck a tuning fork inside his bones.
He didnt't remember climbing behind the wheel.
He remembered a different kind of ringing: a courtroom's stale silence, the thin clack of a pen against a desk, the weight of inevitability settling over him like dust. He remembered his lawyer's voice sounding far away. He remembered the word convicted hovering in the air like a vulture that hadn't landed yet.
Then—nothing.
Now—this.
His hands were already on the steering wheel, gloved, steady by instinct and trembling inside the small muscles. A black racing helmet caged his head, tight at the cheeks, padding pressing into his jaw. His breath was thunder in his own ears, hot against the chin guard, fogging the lower edge of the visor with each exhale.
Outside the visor, the night is harsh and old-fashioned—industrial Los Angeles, 2001, lit by sodium lamps that turn everything the color of tarnished gold. The city looks less polished than the world he knows. Less LED. Less glass. More grit. Older signage. Dirtier shoulders. A strip of warehouses and loading docks, chain-link fences, the silhouettes of parked semis.
And behind him, the sound that doesn't belong in his chest: sirens—raw, mechanical, not the clean warble of newer fleets but the older, angrier voice of early-2000s patrol cars.
Jacob's eyes flickered to the rearview mirror.
Red-blue strobes slam across the glass, erratic pulses. Two black-and-white cruisers first—big, squared-off bodies that look like they were carved from steel blocks. Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, the kind of cars you saw everywhere back then: heavy, stubborn, built to idle for hours and soak up abuse. Another unit further back, headlights bouncing.
A helicopter spotlight swept the road in a wide, searching arc. Its beam is whiter, colder than the streetlights, crawling over fences and container stacks like a predator sniffing for blood.
Jacob's throat tightened.
He draged his gaze forward again—because the BMW is fast, and speed demands attention the way fire demands oxygen. The road unspooled into a corridor of light and shadow, broken by patched asphalt and uneven seams. His headlights carved a clean wedge through dust and exhaust haze.
And then he saw it—the reflection in the windshield, the ghost of the hood.
Blue and silver livery. Jagged. Iconic.
The BMW M3 GTR.
Not just an M3. That M3. The legendary machine that belongs—impossibly—to Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005). A car he knows down to the pixel, down to the way its hood lines cut the light and its engine screams like it wants to outrun reality itself.
His stomach turned, hard.
"No," he breathed, the word muffled by helmet padding. The engine's note swallowed it anyway—metallic, predatory, a sharp snarl that doesn't belong on these streets in 2001.
Because the BMW isn't merely quicker than the police.
It's from a different era of possibility.
It surged with the eagerness of something built to humiliate anything that tries to hold it back. The throttle response was immediate, violent. Every time his foot pressed down, the car answered like it's angry he ever asked politely. The speedometer needle climbed with a confidence that felt obscene. The Crown Vics behind him don't accelerate so much as they commit, their V8s hauling mass forward with brute persistence—but the BMW has something else: razor power, lighter weight, grip, and a willingness to be reckless that these heavy cruisers can't match.
In the next lane, one cruiser pushed up alongside him anyway, the driver stubborn enough to try for a read.
Jacob turnd his helmet slightly.
The officer was young. Focused. The car beside him is a standard black-and-white with steel wheels, roof bar lights, the kind of setup you'd see in an LAPD lot in 2001. The interior glows with greenish instrument light, low-tech and utilitarian.
The driver glanced over.
Brian O'Connor.
Jacob recognized him with a cold, story-snapping certainty. It isn't "I think that's—"
It's knowing, sick and immediate, like his brain was being forced to accept a new set of rules.
Brian's expression was controlled, jaw tight. Not fear—assessment. The look of a man watching something impossible and deciding how to catch it anyway.
Jacob's own face was hidden—helmet and visor, anonymity sealed tight. Under it, his features were sharp and pale, almost too young for the fatigue carried in his eyes: a twenty-year-old Cillian Murphy look-alike, all angles and intensity. But none of that mattered now. All anyone saw was a black helmet in a ghost-car that shouldn't exist.
A metallic ping sounded—too clean to be from the BMW's older interior.
Then the world overlayed itself.
Not on the windshield. In Jacob's vision.
Crisp text, faint blue accents, hovering as if the air itself has become a screen.
NFS SYSTEM // SYNC COMPLETEBOUND VEHICLE: BMW M3 GTR (E46)STATUS: LOCKED // PRIMARY ASSETHEAT: 3ACTIVE BOUNTY: $25,000CHASE EARNINGS: HIGHER BOUNTY = HIGHER PAYOUTABILITY READY:SPEEDBREAKER
Jacob's breath catched. The visor fogs at the edges.
He blinked hard.
The overlay remains.
His hands tightened on the wheel until the leather creaks under his gloves. A jagged laugh tried to claw its way out of him—because a part of him, the part that survived by daydreaming about speed and escape, wants to believe this is mercy.
But another part—older, bruised, exhausted—felt grief rising like bile.
He was supposed to be in a courtroom. He was supposed to be watching his life shrink into a sentence. He was supposed to become a number in a system that didn't care what he loved.
And now he was inside a different system entirely.
He swallowed, tasting hot air and adrenaline.
"System," he whispered into the helmet, voice muffled and thin. "What… what is this?"
The overlay updates, indifferent.
OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE PURSUITWARNING: CAPTURE = FORFEIT CURRENT CHASE PAYOUTSHOP: UNAVAILABLE DURING CHASESPEEDBREAKER: ACTIVE ON COMMANDNOTE: DURATION SCALES WITH CONTROL
Control.
The word landed like a cruel joke and a dare at the same time.
The road ahead split: the open street, brighter, more lanes, more room for a net to close; and the darker cut toward a container yard—narrow corridors, stacked metal walls, places where a lighter, sharper car could disappear.
Jacob doesn't know this city as a local.
But he knows the logic of a chase. He knows pressure. He knows how it feels when the world turns into a line you either hold or you die.
He turned the wheel.
The BMW dove into the yard like it belongs there.
The sound changed instantly—sirens echo off steel, turning into a brutal, multiplying howl. The headlights flash across container doors painted in faded company logos. The air tastes like rust and old diesel. The road is rougher here, patched concrete and oil stains.
Behind him, the Crown Vics struggle to follow at the same pace—not because they're slow, but because they're heavy. Their suspensions pitch and heave. Their front ends dip hard on braking. They can't flick into narrow corridors the way the BMW can. They aren't built for precision; they're built for endurance.
Yet they keep coming, stubborn as gravity.
Brian's cruiser threads in behind Jacob, cleaner than the others, his line tighter, his pace more confident. Brian isn't trying to match speed. He's trying to predict exit points. He's hunting like a man who understands that you can't beat a faster car by chasing its taillights—you beat it by catching where it has to breathe.
Jacob takes a corridor turn too tight.
The rear stepped out, tires snapping toward a slide.
For a fraction of a second, panic flooded him—pure, animal certainty of impact. He imagined the BMW's legendary hood folding like paper against container steel. He imagined the helmet cracking. He imagined waking up back in fluorescent light, the dream over.
Then the HUD pulses.
SPEEDBREAKER
He triggered it without thinking.
Reality doesn't turn cinematic.
It turns thick.
Sound stretched. Motion slowed. Dust became visible, suspended in the air like stars. The siren's wail became a long, haunted ribbon. The helicopter spotlight crawled across the top edges of containers with predatory patience.
And Jacob—inside the helmet, inside the roar—finally had room to feel.
He felt weight transfer. He felt the exact moment the rear tires want to over-rotate. He felt the steering go light, then bite. His hands moved in small, exact corrections—counter-steer, breathe throttle, settle the rear.
The BMW responded instantly, as if it had been waiting for him to stop panicking and start driving.
In the slowed corridor of time, Brian's cruiser appeared behind him, nose dipping, Brian braking hard, trying not to slam into the container wall. Brian's eyes are locked forward, laser-focused, calculating.
Jacob straightened the car.
Speedbreaker drained away.
The world slamed back into full-speed violence.
The BMW rocketed out of the slide and surges down the corridor, and Jacob makes a sound that surprises him—half laugh, half sob. It isn't triumph. It's shock. It's the strange ache of realizing he can still do this—still survive, still move, still be something other than a defendant waiting to be processed.
The overlay flashes:
SPEEDBREAKER USEDCOOLDOWN: 00:45
Then, almost cheerfully:
BOUNTY INCREASED: $30,000PAYOUT MULTIPLIER: x2.0TIP: PROLONGED CHASES = GREATER REWARD
Jacob's stomach twisted.
So that's the hook.
The more hunted he becomes, the more he earns. The system doesn't reward escape alone—it rewards being chased. It turns danger into income. Turns adrenaline into currency. Turns the worst habit he ever had—running from consequences—into a feedback loop with a payout screen.
Ahead, the yard opened toward a service road. A gap. A chance to break line-of-sight and vanish into the city before the net closes.
Behind him, the sirens were still there—older, harsher, carried by big American sedans that can't match his top end but can flood streets, block exits, call ahead. The helicopter eye sweeps, searching for the blue-and-silver ghost.
And Brian was still back there, not giving up, not falling away.
Jacob's fingers flexed on the wheel.
Under the helmet, his face is hidden, but his emotions weren't. Confusion clung to him like sweat. Fear bit at his ribs. Grief pressed in from the memory of the life he left mid-sentence.
And under all of it—beneath the panic, beneath the disbelief—there is a tremor of something Jacob hated himself for feeling.
Hope.
Not the gentle kind. The dangerous kind. The kind that whispers: Maybe you can outrun what you were.
He floored it.
The M3 GTR answerd with a savage surge, and the gap ahead rushed closer—an opening into 2001 Los Angeles, into a world that isn't his, but is real enough to kill him.
Real enough to change him.
And somewhere behind, in a heavy black-and-white sedan built for a different kind of chase, Brian O'Connor leant into the pursuit of a driver in a black helmet—someone no one can identify yet, in a car no one can explain.
..
The container yard spat Jacob out like a swallowed thing forced back into daylight.
One moment he was in steel corridors where sound ricochet and the air taste like rust; the next he was on a service road that ran parallel to the docks, the city opening up again into long stretches of cracked asphalt and orange sodium pools. The helicopter's light found him almost immediately—an impatient, searching beam that snapped onto the blue-and-silver hood like it had been waiting.
Jacob's helmeted head tilted, instinctively shrinking from the white glare. It was useless. The light didn't care about dignity or hiding. It just painted him for the world.
The M3 GTR howled beneath him, a tight, high, predatory note that belonged to something lighter and angrier than the police sedans clawing after him.
In the mirror the Crown Vics lookes like square shadows with teeth—big bodies pitching under acceleration, roof bars strobing, sirens flaying the night.
They're slower, but they have numbers.
And in 2001, numbers matter.
They can flood intersections. They could box him in. They could radio ahead, set up a wall of steel and red-blue light.
Jacob's breath was loud in the helmet. His pulse felt too big for his ribs.
The HUD sat at the edge of his vision like a parasite that's learned to be polite.
HEAT: 3ACTIVE BOUNTY: $30,000CHASE PAYOUT MULTIPLIER: x2.0WARNING: ROADBLOCK PROBABILITY INCREASING
He didn't need the warning to taste it. The cops behind him tightening formation, not all of them chasing his taillights anymore—two hang back, one crept to the side, angling like a shark that's tired of following and wants to bite.
Jacob glanced left.
A Crown Vic edged up, front bumper just behind Jacob's rear quarter panel—exactly where it shouldn't be if the driver were playing safe. The big sedan's engine note was lower, more brutish, and it vibrated through Jacob's bones even from a lane away.
He knew what that angle means.
PIT.
A precision immobilization technique—except these guys weren't going to be precise. Not at this speed. Not with a suspect in a car that looks like a lingering streak.
The officer in the Vic commited. The sedan surged closer, heavy nose drifting toward Jacob's rear wheel.
Jacob's hands tightened on the wheel.
There was sharp spike of panic—the old kind, the courtroom kind, the kind that says you cannot control this.
He felt the M3's rear end twitch as the Vic's bumper kissed the BMW's quarter panel.
A violent shove. A crack of metal.
The BMW should snap sideways.
It didn't.
Instead, the impact felt… wrong. Not harmless—Jacob felt it, the hit shuddering through the cabin like a fist on a door—but the car didn't fold the way it should have. The rear didn't crumple. The chassis didn't buckle. The BMW absorbed the force like it braced for it, like it had been reinforced in ways a street car had no right to be reinforced.
Jacob's visor caught a brief flash of something in the window reflection: the Crown Vic's fender grinding against the BMW's side, paint scraping, the police car's own front end beginning to deform—steel complaining under its own weight.
Another shove. Harder.
Jacob's tires chirpped. The BMW slew half a lane, but it didn't spin. It resisted like a living animal digging its claws into the road.
The HUD pings—almost smug.
PASSIVE TRAIT TRIGGERED:BOUND VEHICLE DURABILITYSTATUS: IMPACT RESISTEDNOTE: DAMAGE REDUCED (SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZATION)
Jacob's stomach lurched.
So it's not just fast.
It's wrong in other ways too.
The Crown Vic's driver tried again—angling for the full rotation.
The shove hit. Jacob felt the rear finally start to break loose, the BMW slipped out of line, tire grip dissolving into a brief, terrifying float.
But instead of fighting it with fear, Jacob let his body do what it was born to do: he drove through it.
He rode the slide for a heartbeat—just long enough to keep the car from snapping into a spin—then he tore the wheel and stabbed the throttle at the same time, a brutal, decisive input that flipped the car's weight like a coin.
The BMW pivoted.
Not a lazy fishtail. A knife-turn.
The rear swung wide, the front snapped around, and for a fraction of a second Jacob is starred directly into the strobing mouth of the pursuit—headlights and grille and the startled, wide-eyed face of the officer who just tried to end him.
Jacob committed.
He yanked the handbrake—quick, surgical—while counter-steering into the rotation.
The BMW's tires shrieked, a high, painful sound that rose over the sirens.
A J-turn.
A complete 180 executed in one violent movement, the kind of thing that belonged in training videos and games, not on an imperfect 2001 service road with real lives on the line.
The car snapped to a stop facing the opposite direction—nose pointed back at the police stream—then Jacob slammed it into gear and launches forward into the gap that used to be behind him.
For an instant, he drove straight at them.
The Crown Vic that tried to PIT him veered, too slow and too heavy to correct. Its suspension rolled as the driver overcompensated, and the sedan skid toward the shoulder, tires screaming, momentum carrying it like a falling building.
Jacob flashed past—so close he could see the officer's hands white on the wheel through the windshield.
He rocketed through the collapsing formation and tears away down the road the cops just came from, the M3's engine shrieked like an exorcism.
The radio chatter exploded behind him, voices cracking with disbelief and anger.
"HE TURNED AROUND—HE'S COMING BACK—"
"UNIT DOWN—UNIT—WATCH IT—"
The helicopter light scrambled, swinging wide like a frantic eye trying to refocus. It lost Jacob for a second as he dove under an overpass, the darkness swallowing him, and in that brief darkness Jacob felt something like quiet.
Not peace.
Just… a gap where his thoughts could fit.
His breath rasped in the helmet. Sweat trickled down his temple, trapped by padding. His hands ached from gripping the wheel like it's the only thing keeping him anchored to reality.
He stole a second. That's all. In this world, seconds were currency.
The HUD flickers again.
Bounty Increased: $35,000Chase Payout Multiplier: x2.2CHASE BONUS: EVASION MANEUVER (J-TURN)
The system rewarded him for being hunted and clever about it.
Jacob felt a sick twist of understanding: this wasn't a gift, it's a set of rails. A path that lead deeper into danger, dressed up as freedom.
A sign flashed by—older style, reflective green, the kind he remembers from the time before digital billboards dominated everything. He caught a glimpse of the street name as he tore past an intersection.
He didn't have time to memorize it.
He just drove, letting the city's veins carry him away from the docks, away from the converging sirens, toward noise that wasn't police noise—toward people.
Then he heared it.
Not sirens.
Music.
Low bass thumpped through the night like a second heartbeat. A crowd's murmur.
Engines revved—different from the police pursuit, these aren't working engines, they were performing. The sound was ritual: throttle blips, laughter, the crackle of tension before a race.
Headlights ahead. A wide industrial stretch blocked by bodies and parked cars angled like a makeshift arena. Neon underglow in patches, cheap but proud. The air was alive with cigarette smoke and spilled beer and the electric smell of anticipation.
A street race.
In 2001, before everything got complicated, before the story's opening domino fell.
Jacob didn't know he was about to slice through the center of something important until he was already there.
His headlights slammed across faces.
A hundred heads turned.
Someone shouted.
A couple of cars at the line—import coupes with glossy paint, mufflers throaty and loud—are staged nose-to-nose, their drivers focused on a starter's hands.
And then Jacob's BMW M3 GTR hit the street like a goddamn meteor.
He blasted past the start line mid-count, a blue-and-silver streak with an engine note that didn't just dominate the other cars—it erased them.
The wind of his passage whipped loose shirts and hair. People stumbled back instinctively, eyes wide, arms thrown up.
For a heartbeat, everything froze—not because time actually slowed, but because the entire crowd's brain needed a second to process what just cut through their world.
Then the roar of the BMW's exhaust ripped that silence apart and left it in pieces behind him.
On the edge of the crowd, a man stood with his arms crossed, posture calm but coiled—broad shoulders, shaved head catching the sodium light. His gaze tracks the BMW with a stillness that's more dangerous than movement.
Dominic Toretto.
Near him, a young woman with a watchful face—Mia—stepped forward half a pace, eyes narrowed, trying to figure out what she just saw.
Another woman, harder in her stance, confidence like armor—Letty—tilted her head as if she's heard a new kind of threat and wants to meet it.
For them, this wasn't a game overlay or a system prompt.
It's a car that just flew by faster than anything they've ever seen in their world—too fast, too controlled, too wrong.
Dom's eyes followed the fading tail lights like he's measuring the sound, the line, the discipline. Like he wastrying to decide whether that driver is reckless… or terrifyingly skilled.
Mia's lips parted slightly, a quiet, incredulous breath.
Letty's expression sharpened, not impressed so much as alert.
And Jacob—helmeted, anonymous, heart hammering—didn't even realize who he just flashed past. He only felt the crowd as a sudden wall of heat and eyes, a brief sensation of being seen by a hundred strangers at once.
His grip tightened.
Because behind him, far off but coming, the sirens were returning—older, harsher, getting louder as the police reorient. The helicopter's spotlight is swept again, hunting the blue-and-silver phantom that just tore through a street race like it was nothing.
Jacob's world narrowed into the next decision.
Run deeper into the city where people can hide him.
Or keep to the open where speed is his only shield.
The HUD sat at the edge of his vision, patient.
Tempting.
As Jacob shot down the next stretch of road, he didn't see Dom's mouth tighten into the faintest line of respect—or warning. He didn't see Letty memorizing the sound of his engine like a signature. He didn't see Mia's worry bloom, because even she could feel it: whatever that was, it wasn't just some random racer.
But he did feel something he couldn't name—a shift, like he just brushed against fate at two hundred miles an hour.
And for the first time since he woke up behind this wheel, Jacob Cooper realized the scariest part wasn't the cops.
It was that this world had witnesses now.
And they just saw him do the impossible.
...
Jacob didn't get to savor the moment he stole from the yard.
The street race he tore through was already behind him—bass thumping, startled shouts, headlights whipping as people scatter back from the road. For a heartbeat it felt like he'd sliced through a living, breathing pocket of the city… but the sirens are still out there, reorganizing, hungry, and Los Angeles at night has a way of remembering where you've been.
The helicopter spotlight found him again as he cleared a long curve—white light washing over the hood, turning the blue-and-silver paint into something unreal, like a comet dragged low across asphalt. Jacob's black visor reflected that beam back in a dull sheen. The helmet made his own breathing sound like a storm trapped in a box.
Behind him, the wail swelled.
They've reentered the chase.
Crown Vics again—more of them now—big, square silhouettes pooling into the road like spilled ink. They weren't trying to match his speed in the streets anymore. They were trying to herd him, shove him toward chokepoints where weight and numbers matter.
Jacob's fingers flexed on the wheel.
He saw the highway entrance before he fully decided to take it: a ramp rising toward a river of headlights, the glow of overhead signage in that older reflective green, the kind of signs he remembers from childhood trips before everything became sleek and digital.
The ramp was a risk—wide, open, visible—but it was also honest.
Highway meant fewer corners. Fewer surprises. It meant the car could be what it was built to be.
And if the BMW is truly his, if the system really bound it to him…
…then the highway would prove it.
He committed.
The M3 GTR climbed the ramp like it was being pulled by a cable. The engine note tightened and sharpened, and Jacob felt the car settle under him—like a predator stretching out after being forced to fight in a hallway.
He merged into the right lane between two clusters of traffic, threading the gap with terrifying ease.
In his mirror, the first Crown Vic hit the ramp and immediately looks wrong up there—too tall, too heavy, its front end lifting and dipping as it tries to gather speed. More units followed, sirens echoing off the concrete barriers.
Jacob's HUD flickered at the edge of his vision.
HEAT: 4ACTIVE BOUNTY: $45,000CHASE MULTIPLIER: x2.6BONUS: HIGH-SPEED EVASION (+$2,000 / 10s)
His stomach clenched at the numbers—not because they're small, but because he could feel what they're doing to him.
The system was turning his fear into profit.
Turned his pulse into a meter.
Turning the urge that once dragged him toward a courtroom into something that feels—dangerously—like purpose.
He pushed the throttle.
The BMW lunged.
And the difference became obvious in the most brutal way: the police cars didn't just fall behind… they age behind him.
Their headlights shrunk, their sirens turnedthin. The BMW's acceleration was clean violence—each upshift a snap, each surge a declaration.
Jacob blew past a pickup in the middle lane, then a sedan, then another, lane changes crisp and surgical. Traffic was thicker than he expects—2001 L.A. didn't sleep—but the M3 treated the gaps like they were designed for it.
The first cruiser tried to follow his line and immediately loses it—not spinning, not crashing, but simply being forced to brake harder, being forced to accept the truth of its own mass. The Crown Vic was a battering ram; the BMW was a blade.
Above, the helicopter kept pace better than the cars, spotlight sliding along him like a leash.
Then a second helicopter appeared in the distance—different angle, different movement, smoother and more predatory in its tracking.
Not police.
A news chopper.
Jacob didn't realize it at first. He just saw another set of running lights and assumed the sky was filled with eyes.
But then he heared it—not over the police radio chatter, but through a strange bleed of sound as his car's cabin picked up a nearby frequency, a faint voice that wasn't trained command, isn't clipped procedure.
"…we're live—yes, we're live right now—this is unprecedented—"
The voice was excited and scared in equal measure, like the person speaking couldn't decide whether they were witnessing history or a tragedy.
A second voice—older, anchoring—slides in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are interrupting our scheduled programming with breaking news out of Los Angeles—an ongoing high-speed pursuit on the freeway. You are looking at live helicopter footage—again, live—of a suspect vehicle—"
Jacob's eyes flicked up instinctively, catching his own car's reflection in the windshield, the hood's blue-silver ghost staring back.
"—moving at speeds that appear to be well over one hundred and twenty miles per hour—"
In 2001, live TV still had a rawness to it. Less polish. More static around the edges. But the country loved a chase. It was something primal: the idea of a man trying to outrun the net, the idea of watching fate unfold from the safety of a couch.
Jacob felt that realization sink in with sudden cold weight.
He wasn't just being hunted anymore.
He was being seen.
Across the city. Across the state. Across the country—because cable networks will pick up the feed, replay it, loop it, let people call in and speculate. They'd zoom in on the paint job. On the way the car moves. On the black helmet that hides a face.
He imagined his old world for a second—some version of him in a different timeline—watching this chase in a bar, half drunk, pointing at the screen and saying, That guy's crazy.
Jacob's breath turned ragged in the helmet.
The HUD pinged again, as if pleased by the escalation.
EVENT: NATIONAL BROADCASTSPONSOR INTEREST DETECTEDCASH BONUS: +$5,000 / minute (LIVE PURSUIT)NOTE: Stay visible to maximize earnings.
Stay visible.
A chill thread through his spine.
The system was not merely rewarding survival—it was rewarding spectacle. It's turning him into content, turning his escape into a performance that pays better the more people watch.
And part of him—the part that hates the quiet, that fears stopping—felt a sick, magnetic pull toward it.
He shifted lanes again, clean, barely a twitch of the wheel.
A car honked—an angry, startled blast—as Jacob slid past inches from its front bumper.
The BMW didn't wobble. It didsn't argue. It simply went, stable at speed in a way the police cars can't even dream of.
Behind him, the lead Crown Vic finally hit its limit. You could see it in the way it stops gaining. In the way it started to hold position like a man trying to sprint against a treadmill that keeps speeding up.
The siren became a distant complaint.
The helicopter light remained—because the sky didn't need to corner; it only needed to track.
Jacob glanced at the mirror again, and for a moment, in the far flicker of emergency lights, he thought he saw the same steadiness from before—one cruiser holding a smarter line, not pushing to match speed, just refusing to vanish.
Brian.
Still there.
Still hunting.
Jacob's jaw tightened under the helmet padding, and his throat ached with emotion he didn't have time to name. Confusion. Fear. The tremor of exhilaration that felt like betrayal of every promise he ever made to "do better."
The news voice kept talking somewhere above and behind, describing him like a storm.
"…the suspect vehicle appears to be a BMW with a distinctive blue-and-silver paint scheme—"
"…we have never seen a unit fall back like that—"
"…police are advising motorists to clear the area—"
Jacob's HUD ticked upward like a hungry clock.
ACTIVE BOUNTY: $60,000CHASE MULTIPLIER: x3.1LIVE BONUS BANKED: $10,000TOTAL CHASE EARNINGS (CURRENT): $78,400
Numbers that would've meant salvation in his old life.
Numbers that now feel like chains made of gold.
Traffic thickened ahead, red tail lights compressing into a slow-moving cluster. The freeway curved and narrowed under an overpass, concrete pillars rising like teeth.
Jacob's hands tighten. His instincts screamed: this is where speed stops being a shield and becomes a blade that can cut you.
And somewhere behind him, the cops were counting on that.
Because even if they couldn't outrun him—
They could wait for the road to do it for them.
Jacob Cooper inhaled, helmet filling with the sound of his own fear.
Then he made a choice not with words, but with pressure—foot, throttle, commitment.
The BMW surged toward the bottleneck.
The helicopter spotlight holding him.
The news chopper kept filming.
Across the country, millions of eyes were about to learn the shape of a myth: a black-helmeted driver in a car that looked like a blur, moving faster than anything on the road had any right to move.
And Jacob, in the hottest part of the chase, realized something terrible and true:
The system wasn't just paying him to run.
It was paying him to become unforgettable.
..
Tail lights compressed ahead—an artery clogging.
The freeway bent under an overpass, lanes tightening, concrete pillars rising like blunt teeth. Jacob saw it the way you see a trap closing: not as a single obstacle, but as a chain of consequences. Traffic thickened, brake lights bloom red, and the air seemed to get heavier with every car he was about to thread.
Behind him, the sirens were close again—because chokepoints are where heavy cars earn their keep. Crown Vics couldn't win a sprint, but they can win a squeeze.
Above, the helicopter spotlight still pinned him—an accusing white circle sliding across his hood, refusing to let the night swallow him.
And somewhere just off to the side of the sky, the news chopper hung back at a safer angle, its camera locked, its voice spilling into living rooms across the country.
Jacob's breath was loud inside the helmet. Too loud. Like the helmet is trying to turn him into nothing but a heartbeat and fog.
He flicked his eyes to the HUD.
HEAT: 4ACTIVE BOUNTY: $60,000CHASE MULTIPLIER: x3.1LIVE BONUS: +$5,000 / minuteTOTAL (CURRENT): $78,400
The numbers made his stomach twist with a kind of shame. In his old world, that money would've been salvation. Lawyer fees. Bail.
A clean start. A chance to breathe without the taste of panic.
Here, it's a leash made of gold.
He forced his focus forward.
He didn't slam the brakes—braking is surrender at this speed—but he bled off just enough velocity to become a needle instead of a hammer. The BMW's nose dipped, then settled. Jacob's hands moved in small, exact increments—left, right, left—finding the seams between cars like he's reading a language the road is speaking directly into his palms.
A minivan drifts, startled by the sirens.
Jacob slipped past it so close he saw the driver's face flash pale in his peripheral vision.
The BMW's engine stayed sharp, angry, contained.
Behind him, the first Crown Vic reached the same bottleneck and lost its courage. Its front end dove hard under braking, tires squealing, the big body rolling. It couldn't do what Jacob was doing without turning every civilian car into shrapnel.
The pack bunched.
Police radios erupted, overlapping voices with older microphones and harsher static.
"Traffic—traffic—he's threading traffic—"
"Air unit, where is he—?"
"He's still on the freeway—northbound—he's—he's cutting through—"
Jacob's throat tightend. His hands ached. His world narrowed to gaps and timing and the brutal certainty that one mistake will end in metal and fire and a headline.
The helicopter light above jittered as it adjusted to the crowd of moving vehicles below. Jacob could feel that light like pressure on his skin, even through metal and glass.
And then—
Another ping.
Not from the police. Not from the radio.
From inside him.
The HUD pulsed so brightly it felt like a camera flash behind his eyes.
VEHICLE EXP GAINED: +250LEVEL UP AVAILABLEBOUND VEHICLE: BMW M3 GTRLEVEL: 1 → 2
Jacob's breath catched so hard the visor fogs.
"Now?" he whispered, voice muffled in the helmet, like he was talking to a god that only spoke in menus.
The system didn't answer with comfort. It answered with execution.
Text scrolled with calm inevitability.
LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED: STAGE-1 SYNCHRONIZATIONAUTO-INSTALLED: ECU CALIBRATION (2026-LEGAL EMULATION)
AUTO-INSTALLED: DRIVETRAIN REINFORCEMENT
AUTO-INSTALLED: AERO STABILITY (+HIGH-SPEED CONTROL)
PASSIVE: DURABILITY INCREASE (MINOR)NOTE: SHOP ACCESS REMAINS LOCKED DURING CHASE
He felt it before he understood it.
The car tightened.
Not louder—sharper. The throttle response became almost rude. The BMW's pull stopped being enthusiastic and became feral, like something just unclipped a restraint inside the engine bay. The chassis felt… braced. Like the car had decided it's done negotiating with physics.
Jacob's stomach dropped with the realization:
The system was upgrading him in real time.
And it was doing it while he's surrounded by civilians.
A sick heat crawled up his neck under the helmet padding. The temptation was immediate and poisonous: use it. prove it. disappear.
The BMW surged at his slight increase in throttle, as if it had been waiting for permission to stop pretending.
He cleared the bottleneck.
Open lanes appeared ahead—brief, blessed stretches of freeway where the city lights smear into streaks and the horizon becomes a single dark promise.
Jacob exhaled, and the car answered by devouring distance.
The speedometer climbed through numbers that feel irresponsible. One-twenty. One-thirty. One-forty. Beyond what most people ever choose to experience with a steering wheel in their hands.
The older police sedans faded behind him, sirens thinning into distant complaint.
But the helicopters remained.
The spotlight continued to track.
For a few seconds, it seemed like the sky is the one place that can keep up.
Then the Level 2 tuning fully took hold.
The BMW's top-end pull—already brutal—became obscene. The engine note stretched higher, cleaner, the car settled into a long, sustained acceleration that felt less like driving and more like being launched.
Jacob's vision tunneled. The freeway signs flicked past so quickly they blurred into green flashes. Wind noise rising into a constant roar that pressed against his helmet like hands trying to push him back.
He didn't feel like he was going fast.
He felt like the world is slowing down out of fear.
The helicopter spotlight began to lag.
At first it was subtle—its circle of light drifting backward on the hood, sliding from center to the rear edge as the chopper struggled to maintain position without dipping too low, without risking its own safety over traffic.
Then it became obvious.
The beam slipped off him entirely for a heartbeat, scrabbled back, caught him again, then slid away as if pulled by invisible tide.
On the police frequency, the air unit's voice cracked with something that wasn't procedure.
"Air-One to ground, he's—he's pulling away. I'm at max safe speed—he's—Jesus—he's gaining!"
Another voice, sharper, panicked with authority:
"How the hell is he gaining on AIR?"
The news chopper's audio bled through again, excited and suddenly uncertain.
"—we're… we're having difficulty maintaining visual—our pilot says the suspect vehicle is accelerating beyond—beyond what we can safely match—"
You could hear the disbelief on live television.
The anchor tried to keep composure, but their voice rose anyway.
"Are you telling us the vehicle is—what—outrunning the helicopters?"
The pilot's voice came through—strained, professional, with the undertone of someone doing mental math against mortality.
"Negative, we— we cannot stay on him at this speed and this altitude. He's opening a gap. If he keeps this up, we lose him."
A ripple ran through the entire chase like a nervous system reacting to pain.
On the ground, officers watched the sky as if the spotlight were a tether and the tether is fraying. Drivers on the freeway craned their necks, seeing the light swing wide, hearing the rotors fall behind, sensing—without understanding—that something was happening that isn't supposed to happen.
In Brian O'Connor's cruiser, the moment hit like a punch.
He's too far back now—because even his cleanest line couldn't cheat physics forever—but he heared it in the radio chatter, and his jaw tightened so hard the muscles jump.
He stared at the shrinking smear of blue-silver far ahead, and something in his expression changes from pursuit to problem-solving.
You couldn't chase that car like a normal suspect.
You can't outdrive it.
So you outthink it.
And Brian's eyes, steady and bright, lock onto the freeway exits, the signage, the way the suspect chose lanes. He started predicting instead of chasing, his mind shifting gears the way Jacob's car just did.
Up above, the news feed catches a final clean shot—Jacob's BMW streaking through the lanes like a blade, the police spotlight losing purchase, sliding off and away.
In living rooms across America, people sat forward.
They've seen slow-speed chases. They've seen idiots in white Broncos. They've seen desperation.
They had not seen this.
They had not seen a car break away from the sky.
The HUD pings again, and Jacob hated how his body responded to it.
A surge of cold satisfaction. A spike of addict's relief.
MILESTONE: OUTPACE AIR SUPPORTCASH BONUS: +$20,000MULTIPLIER INCREASE: x3.4ACTIVE BOUNTY: $75,000NOTE: Visibility increases reward rate.
Jacob swallowed hard.
His hands were steady, but his chest felt like it's splitting.
Because there it was again—that terrifying, intoxicating truth:
The system was turning him into a legend on purpose.
And if he kept feeding it, it would keep making him stronger, faster, harder to catch—until the only things that can stop him are a wall… or himself.
The helicopter spotlight finally dropped away completely, swinging in a wide arc that failed to reacquire him.
For the first time since he woke up behind this wheel, the white beam isn't on him.
The night feels darker without it.
But the freedom wasn't clean. It's heavy. It's haunted.
Jacob's black visor reflected nothing but road and speed and the smear of city lights ahead.
And somewhere behind, the sirens keep wailing anyway—because the cops may have lost him in the air, but they didn't lose him in their minds.
On screens across the country, the anchor was still talking, voice strained with disbelief.
"We have lost visual—repeat, we have lost visual of the suspect vehicle—this is—this is unlike anything we've ever seen—"
Jacob didn't hear the rest.
He's already aiming for the next exit, the next shadow, the next place he could become a rumor again—because now the whole country knows there's a black-helmeted driver in Los Angeles who can outrun the sky.
And the worst part is the quiet, traitorous thought blooming under Jacob's fear as the BMW continued to pull:
If they can't catch me… what does that make me?