I lay on my bed like a good boy.
That was the punishment. Sloane Fitzgerald, the girl who could detonate concrete with her palms and had spent nine years learning to weaponize silence before she ever learned to weaponize kinetic energy, had sentenced me to a night alone in my seven hundred and fifty square foot apartment with nothing but my ceiling and my thoughts and the low thrum of the Bond Resonance carrying her emotions from across campus like a radio station I could not turn off.
She was satisfied. Vindicated. A little smug. And underneath all of that, the warm constant hum that never changed regardless of what I did or who I did it with, the frequency that said mine without variation or apology.
I pulled up my phone and scrolled to the playlist Felicity had made me during our mall trip, a collection of lo-fi instrumentals and Japanese city pop that she’d titled "for when you’ve been a terrible person and need to decompress."
The woman had predicted this exact scenario six days before it happened. Either she possessed genuine precognitive ability or she simply understood my personality with surgical accuracy, and I was not sure which option terrified me more.
The first track opened with a saxophone that had no business being that smooth at seven forty-three on a Friday evening.
I let it play.
The apartment held the fading warmth of the afternoon sun through the east-facing window, and the sage reading chair sat in the corner where Diane had placed it three weeks ago with opinions about light angles and lamp cord placement that I had followed to the letter because disagreeing with Diane Fitzgerald about interior design carried the same survival probability as disagreeing with her about anything else.
The walnut desk held Percy’s thirty-six page insurance document, my phone charger, a half-empty water bottle, and the framed photograph of Marcus and Reina Belmont in their Hero costumes.
I looked at that photograph for eleven seconds.
The original Lukas had looked at it forty-seven times from a different bedroom in a different house during a different life. The transmigrant had looked at it four times total, counting tonight.
The memories that came with the photograph belonged to someone who no longer lived behind these amber eyes, and the grief that should have accompanied those memories arrived secondhand and useless, like receiving a bill for a meal someone else had eaten at a restaurant I had never visited.
I exhaled through my nose and pulled up the interface.
〘 Status 〙
Name: Lukas Belmont
(DP) 0 (SP) 23,430
[ Attributes ]
〘 STR: 100 | AGI: 100 | DEX: 100 〙
〘 INT: 100 | END: 100 〙
ACTIVE SKILLS (4/4):
Spectral Reach (Rare)
Blitz (Rare)
Lightning Cloak (Epic)
Usurper (Legendary)
PASSIVE TRAITS (6/6):
False Data (Uncommon)
Musk (Uncommon)
Ecchi Logic (Epic)
Devotion’s Echo (Legendary)
Sadism (Epic)
Demigod (Legendary)
Twenty-three thousand four hundred and thirty Scumbag Points sitting in the bank like a retirement fund I’d been too paranoid to touch since the stat allocation that pushed everything to one hundred.
The Demigod multiplier meant those base eighty scores performed at triple digits across the board, which put me somewhere between "competitive first-year student" and "classified threat to regional infrastructure" depending on how hard I leaned into any given engagement.
The gap between what Halloran believed I was and what I actually was had never been wider, and three separate faculty members had filed observations about the discrepancy within the past two weeks alone.
I scrolled through the active skills, not because I needed a refresher but because looking at them while lying still on a bed I’d been banished to felt like counting ammunition during a ceasefire.
Spectral Reach remained the foundation. Four independent amber constructs, fifteen feet of registered range that could actually extend to at least triple that distance when I stopped performing for cameras, weight capacity documented at twenty pounds but practically capable of tossing training dummies across gymnasium floors and punching through Legendary-classification crystalline barriers.
The constructs responded to thought faster than my muscles responded to nerve impulses, and at one hundred Dexterity they moved with precision that would have made a neurosurgeon weep.
This was my bread and butter, the ability I showed the world under the fiction of Phantom Touch, the lie that Diane had written into federal documents and Percy had fortified with thirty-six pages of insurance regulatory language and Petra had signed her family name beneath four hours ago in a conference room that still smelled like her perfume and my terrible decisions.
Blitz covered distance. Thirty feet in a fraction of a second, pure physical speed compressed into a burst that made the world blur and the air flinch.
At one hundred Agility the movement felt less like running and more like being fired from a slingshot by a deity with excellent aim. I could chain directional changes, stop on a pin, and arrive at destinations before my opponents finished processing that I had moved.
The registered explanation was "Somatic Surge," an unreliable secondary function of Phantom Touch that sometimes activated under stress, a convenient fiction that explained away the impossible speed as an adrenaline response rather than a separate skill pulled from a gacha wheel by a cosmic system that rewarded me for sleeping with my guardian’s daughter.
Lightning Cloak remained my biggest gun and my shortest fuse. Thirty seconds of golden electrical current wrapping every muscle fiber, doubling my already triple-digit stats and adding voltage to every strike.
At full deployment I could hit hard enough to rearrange the local geography and move fast enough that air resistance became a polite suggestion rather than a physical law.
The stamina drain was brutal even with Demigod recovery, and sustaining the cloak past sixty seconds carried the risk of genuine physical backlash that even my enhanced biology could not shrug off instantly.
I had tested it once at Field Zeta, left scorch marks on the grass, and decided that discretion was the better part of not explaining to groundskeepers why their abandoned training field smelled like an electrical fire.
And then there was Usurper, sitting in its active slot like a loaded weapon I had never pulled the trigger on.