The Tampered Score

She noticed something else. This was not the first time Aiden had been pushed down. Since the awakening test, every time he approached a high point, the system had introduced a tiny disturbance, as if some mechanism was deliberately making sure he stayed “almost” there. This was not an accident. It was a filter. Someone was filtering whether he could really climb. She stared at the screen and felt, for the first time, an instinctive warning. This ridiculed new hero was going to collide with something the Alliance did not want him to know existed.