I was not human. Not entirely. Not anymore. The System had reclassified my biology during a platinum gacha pull conducted while Sloane slept against my chest, and the reclassification was permanent and irreversible and would compound with every future improvement until the gap between me and baseline humanity became a canyon that no amount of institutional fiction could bridge.
Five hundred years.
Everyone I knew would be dead and I would still be here, still carrying the original Lukas’s photograph and the transmigrant’s guilt and the System’s expectations, still running the math on how many women I needed to seduce to fuel a progression engine that had been designed by something that communicated through bracket notation and maintained opinions about my decision-making without possessing, to my knowledge, any emotions with which to hold those opinions.
The saxophone track ended and something with a piano took its place, slower and sadder, the kind of melody that Felicity would have described as "emotionally correct for the context" while stealing a fry from my plate.
I closed the status screen and opened the inventory.
Joyful Cloud sat in its slot, the three-section staff with ivory segments and golden chains that had put a basketball-sized crater in Diane’s gym wall at one in the morning three weeks ago. The weapon scaled with my Strength and at one hundred base it could rearrange load-bearing architecture with a committed swing. I had not deployed it since arriving at Halloran because explaining why a mid-tier Channeler possessed a weapon that operated at structural demolition output required a level of creative fiction that even Diane’s registration language could not support.
The Faceless Veil occupied its own slot, the bone-white mask that provided complete anonymity through visual concealment, voice modulation, and cognitive static. I had not worn it since the night I acquired it. The mask waited for a version of me that operated outside institutional oversight, and that version had not been necessary yet.
The High Priestess sat beside the Veil, a tarot card that granted five minutes of massively accelerated perception and precognitive flashes of immediate future events with a one hundred twenty hour cooldown. Emergency use only. The kind of ability you held in reserve until the difference between life and death was a margin too thin for normal cognition to navigate.
And at the bottom of the inventory, in the space reserved for things I would never equip but could not bring myself to discard, sat Dampen and Convenient Amnesia.
Dampen made surfaces slightly moist on contact. Convenient Amnesia gave a fifteen percent chance that heroines in compromising situations would forget the encounter within twenty-four hours. The System’s gacha had provided me with the power to make doorknobs feel recently used and the power to make women forget I existed, and both of these abilities occupied inventory slots that could theoretically hold something useful, and I kept them anyway because throwing away garbage felt like admitting I had paid too much for it.
Twenty-three thousand four hundred thirty Scumbag Points.
The number sat in my vision like a dare. I could buy another full round of stat increases, pushing toward the next tier where costs doubled and the gap between me and baseline humanity widened further. I could pull gacha tickets and pray for something that complemented the toolkit rather than contradicted it. I could save everything for an emergency that felt increasingly inevitable as faculty files accumulated and agency scouts pulled my registration and the Crucible approached in thirteen days with Odette Reyes standing on the floor with a clipboard and the authority to determine whether my entire fiction held under live combat conditions.
I did none of these things.
I lay on my bed. I listened to the piano. I felt Sloane’s presence humming across the bond, warm and steady and certain in a way that I envied because certainty had not been available to me since I opened my eyes in a dead boy’s bedroom and found a System waiting where a childhood should have been.
My phone buzzed.
Felicity. 7:51 PM.
heard you got grounded bestie. brought you something to make the night less tragic 💕
A photograph followed.
Felicity in a pink towel, standing in what was clearly the third floor communal bathroom with the tile and the bad overhead lighting that should have made everyone look like a hospital patient. Should have. Did not. She was angled slightly away from the mirror, chin tilted down, wet hair plastered to her neck and the slope of her shoulders in thick golden ropes that dripped onto her collarbones.
Her grip on the towel sat just above her chest, fingers curled into the fabric with the casual looseness of someone who was not worried about the towel staying up and wanted you to know she was not worried about it.
The fold of terrycloth covered what it technically needed to cover and absolutely nothing else.
Her expression was the specific Felicity expression. Wide eyes, the ghost of a smile that communicated she knew exactly what this photograph was doing and considered that information yours to manage.
The towel slipped lower on the left side than the right. Not by much. By exactly enough.
I locked the phone and put it face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling and breathed once through my nose and accepted that Ecchi Logic had generated another probability event and that I would be seeing that photograph in high definition every time I closed my eyes for the next seventy-two hours minimum.
The piano continued. Sloane continued, warm and distant and mine. The ceiling offered no solutions and no judgments and no bracket-notation commentary about my life choices.
My phone buzzed again.
Maribelle. 7:53 PM.
babes the bathhouse is INSANE tonight. rina’s in the warm pool and percy is sitting on the edge pretending to read his notebook except he hasn’t turned a page in eleven minutes. thought you should know.
A second message arrived four seconds later.
also camille is in the hot pool and she looks like she’s trying to boil herself alive. just fyi.
A third.
where are you?????
I picked up the phone and typed four words.
Being a good boy.