Chapter 35 : THE VETTING
Marcus's roundhouse kick caught the pad with a crack that made the gym walls ring.
"Faster. You're loading the hip too early — the telegraph is three counties wide."
I reset. Threw the kick. The hip rotated through the motion with a fluidity that would have been impossible two weeks ago — the body responding to commands it couldn't have executed before the CP investment that had reshaped my physical baseline from adequate to dangerous.
The investment had happened across three nights of focused allocation, each session conducted in the apartment with the closet door closed and the System's interface burning behind my eyes.
[CP INVESTED: STR 7→8→9→10. COST: 15 CP (5+5+5).]
[CP INVESTED: END 8→9→10. COST: 10 CP (5+5).]
[CP INVESTED: AGI 9→10→11. COST: 20 CP (5+15).]
[CP INVESTED: WIL 9→10→11. COST: 20 CP (5+15).]
[CP INVESTED: PER 11→12. COST: 15 CP.]
Eighty CP. Burned in three days. The largest single investment since the System came online, transforming the host body from a baseline civilian with combat training into something that the System classified as exceptional across multiple physical dimensions. STR 10 meant I could hit with genuine force — not Oliver force, not Diggle force, but the kind of power that cracked ribs and dropped trained fighters. AGI 11 put me in the elite range for coordination and reflexes. WIL 11 was the upgrade I'd needed since the third death — mental fortitude, the psychological architecture that kept a man functional after five deaths and the knowledge of hundreds more to come.
PER 12 was a revelation. The world at PER 12 operated in a different resolution — not just sharper, but deeper, each sensory input carrying layers of information that PER 11 had hinted at. Micro-expressions at thirty feet. Sound separation that could isolate a whispered conversation across a crowded room. Spatial awareness that mapped every exit, every weapon, every threat in any environment within seconds of entering.
Marcus noticed. Of course Marcus noticed — he'd been watching my impossible improvement curve for four months, cataloguing the anomalies with the quiet precision of an ex-military trainer who'd seen a thousand fighters and never seen one learn this fast.
"You're different this week."
"Good different?"
"Dangerous different." He held the pads up. "Again."
The kick landed clean. Marcus stepped back. His assessment eyes — the same eyes that had sized me up on day one, when I'd paid forty dollars for a membership and couldn't last thirty seconds against a teenager — tracked the rotation, the power transfer, the follow-through.
"Whatever you've been doing outside this gym, CW — and I know you've been doing something because nobody improves like this through pad work alone — keep doing it."
"What I've been doing is spending magic points on a body that isn't mine to fight a war you'll never know about."
"Just training harder."
He didn't believe me. He hadn't believed me since the protein bar conversation months ago. But Marcus was a man who respected results over explanations, and the results spoke a language he understood even if the source was impossible.
---
The verification week played out in phone calls and digital confirmations.
Diggle called twice. The first call was coordinates — the construction site entrance I'd provided, checked from a safe distance by Diggle himself. Confirmed. The fencing, the fake transit authority signage, the construction trailer. All there.
The second call was Merlyn Global subsidiaries. Felicity had traced the shell company network I'd mapped — Pinnacle Logistics, Zenith Applied Sciences, Cascade Development Group — through financial databases she had access to that I'd never been able to reach. Every connection I'd drawn held. Every company existed. Every money flow matched.
"Three for three." Diggle's voice on the phone was the carefully neutral tone of a military man acknowledging good intelligence without committing to the source's trustworthiness. "Oliver wants to know what else you have."
"Everything I have is in the package. I've been building that intelligence file for five months. There's nothing I held back."
A pause. The specific silence of Diggle weighing the claim against his assessment of my character — a judgment being rendered in the space between breaths.
"Oliver has questions about timing. How far out is this... event?"
"Based on the construction progress I observed and the procurement timeline in the invoices, approximately six to eight weeks. The device is nearly assembled. The infrastructure is in place. What's missing is final calibration and deployment authorization."
"And the second device?"
The question hit like a jab I hadn't seen coming. In the show, Malcolm had deployed two earthquake machines — redundancy, the engineering of a man who left nothing to chance. I'd provided one location because I'd only found evidence of one. But Oliver — or Felicity — had extrapolated from the seismic data that one device was insufficient for the coverage area Malcolm intended.
"I don't have a location for the second device. The evidence only confirms one site."
"Felicity thinks there's a second. The seismic modeling doesn't work with a single point of origin."
"Then there's a second site I haven't found. I'll look."
The call ended. I sat in the apartment with the phone and the knowledge that Felicity Smoak's analytical mind had identified a gap in my intelligence within a week that I'd missed in five months. The second device. Somewhere in the Glades, another underground chamber, another machine, another piece of the puzzle that I'd assumed the show's plot would eventually reveal but that the show's plot — in this reality, with its butterfly effects and divergent timelines — might have repositioned to a location I couldn't predict.
"Details rot."
The sticky note on the bathroom mirror caught the morning light. Details rot. People hold. The second device's location was a detail — specific, dependent on logistics that might have shifted through butterfly effects. But Malcolm Merlyn's psychology was a person — his need for redundancy, his engineering perfectionism, his paranoia about single points of failure. If I couldn't find the second device through evidence, I could find it through understanding the man who built it.
---
Felicity's background investigation continued in parallel, invisible to me except through the monitoring echoes I could no longer track — the QC server script was deleted, the digital surveillance channels burned. I operated blind to her progress, which was its own form of anxiety.
The background she was searching was thin by design and thinner by circumstance. Charles Weston's host body had been a ghost before I'd arrived — minimal employment history, no social media, no family connections that any database could surface. The man who'd inhabited this body before me had either been remarkably private or remarkably unremarkable, and the distinction didn't matter because the result was the same: a file so empty it looked scrubbed rather than simply absent.
To Felicity, empty files meant either a cover identity or a deliberate erasure. Both interpretations pointed at someone with operational security training, which was exactly what I demonstrated every time I appeared, and exactly what a Glades warehouse clerk shouldn't possess.
The Arrowcave meeting hadn't resolved the mystery. It had sharpened it. Oliver had classified me as an asset, but assets with unexplained backgrounds and impossible intelligence capabilities didn't stay unexamined. Felicity would keep looking. The question wasn't whether she'd find something — it was what she'd find when the trail simply... ended. When the investigation reached the wall where Charles Weston's real history began and found nothing on the other side, because the other side was a different reality entirely.
I trained. Every morning with Marcus, pushing the upgraded body through combinations that felt different with STR 10 — the strikes landing with authority, the movement carrying power that had been theoretical weeks ago. CQC Trained was approaching the Expert threshold, each session logging hours that the System tracked with the impassive precision of a mechanism that measured capability in decimal increments.
[CQC: TRAINING HOURS — EXPERT THRESHOLD AT 78%. CONTINUE CURRENT REGIMEN.]
Seven weeks to the Undertaking. Six, maybe, if the timeline compressed. The body needed to be ready. The stats were there. The skills were building. The question was whether seventy-eight percent would reach one hundred before the earthquake machine reached final calibration.
Marcus put me against Santos again — the same fighter who'd dropped me in thirty seconds on my first day, the teenager who'd grinned at my incompetence and offered his hand up with the magnanimity of someone who'd won before the bell. Santos was older now — six months of growth, six months of training, his technique refined and his confidence earned.
Three rounds. Full contact. I won the first on points, lost the second to a body kick combination that exploited a gap Marcus had been correcting for weeks, and fought the third to a draw that left both of us leaning on the cage with heaving lungs and the mutual respect of people who'd hit each other hard enough to mean it.
[CQC: TRAINING HOURS — EXPERT THRESHOLD AT 82%.]
The percentage ticked upward with each session. The System didn't care about the Undertaking's timeline. It measured effort and capability with the same cold arithmetic regardless of the stakes, and the stakes were measured in hundreds of lives and an earthquake machine that was being assembled, right now, in a chamber beneath a neighborhood where people lived and worked and had no idea they were standing on a bomb.
Sixty-five CP in reserve. Not enough for another major stat investment, but enough for an emergency — a skill acquisition, a critical stat point in combat, the kind of last-resort spending that came when plans failed and adaptation was the only currency that mattered.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]