AN: I will be changing the future chapters a bit, and the last one. What I have now needs a bit of a rewrite. The idea was given by you guys. Adam should be able to give Ren something like OFA and help her stockpile CE. So ty for the recommendation. Because of this, I will release only 2 chapters this week instead of 3, but if you reach the goal, I will release more.
The deployment bay resolved out of the white folding light the way it always did, cold and clean and quiet, and the first thing Adam heard on the other side of a world was a chair scraping back.
"Boss." Dario Venn was on the night shift at the bay console, a mug going cold by his elbow and a half-finished pathway-digestion log open on the screen. He stood too fast, the way new Beyonders still did around Adam. "You're back early. The board had you at another two days, easy. Everything green?"
"Green," Adam said. The Hub air tasted recycled and familiar after fifty-three days of someone else's sky. "Quiet world. Anything on fire here?"
"Nothing Brandt didn't put out by lunch." Venn hesitated, then gave him the small nod the members had started giving him, the one that meant we're glad it was you and not us. "Welcome home, boss."
"Thanks, Dario. Get some sleep. The report can wait."
He left the kid at the console and took the lift up, and he did not look at his own reflection in the brushed-steel doors, because he already knew his eyes were the wrong color and he was not ready to have feelings about it yet.
Ren was awake when he came through the door of the Floor 40 penthouse, because of course she was. She had Observation Haki; she had felt him cross the threshold of the building.
She was standing in the middle of the dark living room in one of his shirts with her arms already crossed, and she looked at him for a long moment, doing the thing she did, reading him from the doorway. Her eyes caught on the silver, and then the darker hair, and then something in the set of his shoulders that he hadn't known was showing.
"Adam do you have to change every time you come back? Can you have a normal expedition for once."
"Uh, you know how it is, always trying to get more out of it."
"I know, I am happy that you are back in one piece."
Then she crossed the room and put her forehead against his chest, hugging him, and stood there breathing him in like she was confirming the data with a second instrument.
"You're cold," she said into his shirt.
"It was a long way back."
"That's not what I meant." Her hands pressed flatter. Then she tipped her face up, and whatever she'd been about to say got set aside for later, and she kissed him instead, slow and unhurried. The lecture could keep until morning.
The lecture, it turned out, would have to keep longer than that.
He slept the way the dead are supposed to and rarely do, eleven hours face-down with Ren's leg thrown over his and the city humming far below, and when he woke he took the day. He had not taken a whole day in longer than he could cleanly remember. He made breakfast badly. He let Ren win an argument about a film. He sat on the couch with her feet in his lap and did not think about a single threat. The body that had carried a mission for 53 days settled back in the homely atmosphere.
Near evening, he finally let himself look at the new stamp.
The Quiet Coat had earned its fourth, one per L4 return, and Sage decided to show him the details.
[ The MHA stamp, Host. Modest, as these go. Passive: the weave now disperses many simultaneous low-to-mid impacts as cleanly as it handles one heavy strike. A crowd can no longer overwhelm the coat by sheer volume the way a single army nearly did. Heavy single blows still register normally; this is not a shield against the strong, only against the many. ]
And the one-shot.
[ One concussive bloom, once per L4-or-higher return. A non-lethal outward pulse, roughly ten meters, that staggers and clears everything around you and resets a swarm. Recharges on the next qualifying return. It can't win any fight but buys space. ]
Good, Adam thought, and meant it. He had spent the whole MHA arc learning the difference between a tool and a trophy, and a thing that bought space when he was surrounded was a tool. He'd nearly drowned in numbers at the Gunga villa.
He opened the Bazaar shelf because he had seventy-nine thousand points and a Sequence sitting on it that he had been fifteen thousand short of for two deployments, and there was a tidy satisfaction in finally being able to afford the thing.
The listing came up wrong.
Where Sequence 8 had shown Trespasser and Sequence 7 Houseguest, clean names with clean sheets, the Sequence 6 entry on his shelf read only:
SEQUENCE 6 — ???
Nothing under it. No name, no description, no acting method, nothing. Just the rank, and the three question marks, and a faint instability in the way the panel rendered, like the storefront itself wasn't sure what it was selling.
The note surfaced in his memory unbidden, the last thing the Bazaar had shown him before it pulled him out of a hero's world. Your actions have consequences.
Sage.
[ I see it, Host. ] A pause, which from Sage was a paragraph. [ The Bazaar prices what it can define. It cannot define this. My best interpretation: your progression no longer resolves to a single pathway. You walked into MHA a clean Stalker, Sequence 7. You walked out carrying a stolen emperor's power, a dozen seated quirks, three fragments of foreign authority, and a great deal of accumulated spiritual residue you have not yet paid for. The branch points multiplied. The Bazaar cannot tell you what Sequence 6 is for you anymore, because there are too many things it could now become. The question marks are not a malfunction. They are honesty. ]
Adam sat with the three symbols a long time.
The smart move was obvious and he could hear himself making it. Buying it is risky. Spend a deployment shedding residue, let the path resolve, come back when the listing knew its own inventory. He was twenty-one years old and four hundred years from old age and there was no clock on this but the one he kept himself.
He bought it anyway.
He told himself it was because waiting was its own risk, that residue didn't shed on its own and the branch would only thicken. That was even partly true. The rest of it was the thing Ren had read off him in the doorway and not said.
I came, I saw, he thought, with no humor in it at all, and drank the potion.
For a while there was nothing, and then there was everything, and none of it was his.
It did not feel like the Trespasser digestion or the Houseguest climb, which had been pressure and reorganization, his own architecture rearranging into something larger. This was subtraction performed by something that did not care whether he survived it. His skin went first, a deep wrongness crawling outward from the sternum, and when he looked down with eyes that would not focus he saw it peeling, lifting at the edges like old paint, and underneath was not muscle but more wrongness, more layers that were not his.
His heart seized. Not a heart attack, he had the detached clarity to know that even through it; a heart attack was a pump failing. This was the organ itself being smushed, taken apart and weighed against something he had broken without understanding he was breaking it. Everything foreign in him, every quirk he had grafted into his own soul, was being counted against him at once, and under all of it ran something colder, a thin thread of resentment that did not feel like his at all. It wanted somewhere to go, and it had found the door.
His thoughts came apart next, and that was the part that frightened him, because his thoughts were the one thing he had always been able to trust. The continuity of him, the single unbroken line of the man who had moved into this life from another one and built it carefully, plank by plank, began to lose the thread of itself. He could not have said his own name. He could not have said which life he was in.
Sage was there, in the static. He could feel her, and she was not formal and not dry and not anything but a procedural runtime spending everything it had to hold two structures together that both wanted to fly apart, his and her own. She ran on him. As he came undone she came undone with him, and still she did not stop trying to keep the lines connected.
Years passed. He was certain of it, in the moment, with the absolute certainty of a man with no clock. Years of being slowly disassembled on the floor of his own living room while Great Sage screamed silently and held on.
Then it let go of him, all at once, the way a wave finally puts you down.
He came back on his hands and knees on the floor, soaked through, his whole body shaking, dragging air in like he'd been underwater. The skin was his again. The heart beat, wrong somehow, heavier, but it beat. The room was the room. The clock on the wall said four minutes had passed.
Sage was not there.
Emptiness. The friend that had ridden in his head for three years was dark, rebooting from something close to the bottom.
He was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature, and alone in his own head for the first time in years, and that was the state Ren found him in when she came home twenty minutes later and dropped everything in her hands at the door.
He did not remember most of the next part, which was its own kind of mercy.
He surfaced in pieces. Ren's voice, low and even and absolutely without panic, which was how he knew she was terrified, because Ren got calm the way other people got loud. Warm water; he was in the bath and she was washing the cold sweat off him with her sleeves pushed up, one hand braced behind his neck, talking to him the whole time in that flat, steady register. The weightlessness of being lifted, which should have been impossible, except she was Special Grade and he had apparently stopped being heavy. The give of the mattress. Blankets, and then more blankets, and then the specific warmth of another person fitting herself along the cold length of him and refusing to move.
"I've got you," she said, somewhere in the dark, when he was almost under. "You absolute idiot. I've got you. Go to sleep."
He fall to sleep.
He woke to a koala.
That was the only word for it, and the geek-fan layer of him that survived everything supplied it before he was fully conscious. Ren was wrapped around him front-to-back with an octopus thoroughness, one arm under his neck and one across his chest, both legs tangled through his, her face pressed into the back of his shoulder and her breath slow and warm against his chest. Asleep, she had none of the edges. She was holding onto him in her sleep like she could keep him from coming apart again by main force.
It was, he thought, looking at the gray morning on the ceiling, very hard to ever see this side of her. She kept it behind the diagnosis and the dry mouth and the precise routines. He lay very still so as not to end it. Something sat in his chest that the corrupted thing beside it could not touch, and for a minute he just let himself have it.
Then she woke up, felt herself doing it, and the warmth went off like a struck match.
"Don't." She unwound from him so fast it was almost violent and sat up against the headboard with the blanket clutched to her and her hair a disaster, glaring at him with her ears going red. "Don't you dare look at me like that. You don't get to look at me like that. Not after last night."
"Ren—"
"No. You don't get to talk yet." Her voice was shaking and climbing and she let it. "Do you have any idea what I came home to? Do you? You were on the floor. Your skin was — I could see it was wrong, I have Observation, I felt your whole signature trying to come apart, coming undone on the carpet like —" She stopped. Restarted lower, which was worse. "I have watched you take on the world. I have seen you come back from battles no one in your place would survive yet I have never once seen you like that. Not once."
"I know," Adam said quietly. "I'm sorry. I almost lost control."
"You're sorry." She laughed, and it cracked in the middle. "Why did you do it. Tell me that. You had a clean win sitting right there. You were going to hit Sequence 6 and you had the points and the path was clear and all you had to do was not be greedy for two months. That's it. That was the whole assignment. Don't be greedy." Her hands were fists in the blanket. "Instead you ate a dozen dead men's powers and walked your own pathway off a cliff. The Bazaar can't even tell you what you are anymore, and you bought the door with the question marks on it anyway, because of course you did, and it nearly turned you into — into one of the things you hunt. You could have died. You could have become a monster wearing your face and I would have had to be the one who —"
She didn't finish that one.
He saw it then, the thing under all the fury, which was not fury at all. Her eyes had gone bright and spilled over and she was furious about that too, swiping at them with the back of her wrist like Sophie did, an old child-gesture surfacing through all that lethal competence. She was not angry that he had been stupid. She was angry that she loved him enough that his being stupid could do this to her.
For two months he had operated like a man who could afford anything, because in a colder life the only person who ever paid for his choices had been him. He had carried a war alone and told himself there was no one in that world he could tell, and that had been true, and he had started to believe it was true everywhere.
It wasn't. There was a woman in his bed with red ears and wet eyes who had carried him to it. An aunt who counted his meals to make sure he ate enough, an uncle who would cross the world for him, a cousin learning to be brave. He did not get to spend himself like a man with nothing to lose. Not anymore.
"You're right," he said. It came out rougher than he meant it. "All of it. I forgot I wasn't doing my sums alone anymore. I won't forget it again."
Ren looked at him for a long moment, reading him the way she always did, checking the words against the man.
"You'd better not," she said, and the fight went out of her, and she let him pull her back down, and she let herself be small against him for exactly as long as it took to stop crying, and not one second longer, because she had her dignity. "If you turn into a monster I'm using the spear. I want you to know that going in. Nullify your whole everything and put it right through you. No hesitation."
"I'd expect nothing less," Adam said into her hair, and felt her almost laugh, and counted it as a win.
Later, with Ren asleep again and the Great Sage in his head still dark, he took a cup of tea up to the roof.
The Eclipse Tower roof at this hour was just wind and the great glittering sprawl of the Hub below, the deployment bays glowing soft blue at the base of a hundred towers, the strange beautiful machine of a city built out of survivors. He sat on the ledge with his back to the access door and his hands around the warm cup and let the cold air do what cold air did.
He had, he realized, become the roof guy.
The thought arrived with a flat private amusement that was almost the old register. . I picked it up from Homelander, he thought. Of all the people to take a habit from. The difference was a woman asleep downstairs who would come find him if he stayed up here too long. He could live with that one.
The static in his head thinned.
[ ...Host. ]
There you are.
[ Rebuilt. Mostly. I lost some non-essential indexing and the entire afternoon. ] A pause. [ I held. I want it on the record that I held. ]
I felt you, Adam thought, and did not say the rest, because Sage could not take emotion and would not want it, but he let the thought sit there a moment longer than he needed to before he moved on. You held both of us. I know what that cost. Thank you.
[ Noted. ] And then, because she was herself: [ Now. While I was down, the transformation completed. You will want to see what you bought. ]
Show me.
The readout assembled against the dawn, and it was not a clean sheet. It came in the wrong color, edged in something that even a system panel could not render correctly.
SEQUENCE 6 — DESECRATOR
[ It has a name now, Host. Let me give you the clean parts first. ]
Confirmed gains:
— Physical capability raised another tier across the board.
— Mental resistance hardened.
— Superior Observation sharpened and ranged: you read the location and relative worth of valuable things, spiritual or material, out to seventy meters.
[ And then there is the Theft. This is the heart of the Sequence, and it is enormous. ]
Theft (Desecrator-tier):
— Range extended to seventy meters. You no longer need contact. Inside that radius you can take an object or a power off a target.
— 10 min duration of any stolen power. A genuine theft: the owner loses the ability outright, for anywhere from a few hours to a full week, scaling with how strong they are.
— Higher-tier powers resist harder. The stronger the ability, the lower your odds on any given attempt.
— It runs both ways. You can also place an object onto a target at seventy meters, which is its own set of doors.
— Limit: you may hold only one stolen thing from a given person at a time. You can steal again, but you must release the old one first, and there is a five-minute cooldown before you can take from the same person twice.
Adam turned that over on the cold ledge. Seventy meters of reach-out-and-take, on people and powers both, with the owner left without it for up to a week. It was a thief's whole dream.
[ That is the part the Bazaar will let you show people. Here is the part it will not. The reason the listing went dark is sitting in your chest. ]
The heart.
[ The heart. Host, your original is gone. It was torn apart last night and something else was compressed into the space where it was. I am calling it the Corrupted Heart, because that is what it is, and naming it plainly is the only service I can offer. ]
He pressed two fingers under his sternum, the way Ren had, and felt it beat. Heavier. Wrong. His.
[ The word matters, Host, so let me be exact about it. This is not the emperor's malice. Rewind shed that cleanly on the island and it is gone for good. The corruption is something your own pathway compressed. Your pathway is a clean architecture, and to a clean architecture every quirk you grafted permanently into your soul reads as a foreign body, a contamination that should not be there. A dozen of them destabilized the Sequence you were climbing. And there is more than that in it. When you rewound New Order, when you tore Rewind and All For One out of that reality for good, you broke laws its world held sacred, and a sliver of that world's resentment followed you home. The grafts, the broken rules, the resentment, the knocked-loose path, all of it compressed into one organ. The hat's recording of All For One was spent to forge it, so that slot is empty now. But the quirks already seated in your body stay seated; the habit of seating them was never kept in the hat. The heart does not replace any of that. It adds to it, in a darker way. ]
The Corrupted Heart: — It can take any stolen ability and seat it permanently. The original owner never gets it back. Not in a week, not ever. Rewind cannot reverse it not affect the corrupted hearth. — Every ability you store there deepens the corruption. The fuller the heart, the more corrupted your state, and the harder every future advancement becomes. You felt a fraction of that cost last night. It compounds.
— Any ability that carries authority adds extra corruption on settling. The slivers cost more than the rest.
— The hearth allows the user to release corruption by gifting others. Every participant must be willing and aware of the corruption when receiving the ability.
— The heart also feeds the Theft: it added twenty meters of range, seventy in total, should have been 50 initially, and improved your odds on every attempt.
Twenty, Adam thought. Sage. What was it supposed to be?
[ Fifty. A clean Sequence 6 would have given fifty meters. The corruption of AFO added its authority to your theft. That is the whole deal, Host. Everything the Desecrator gives you is payed for with corruption. ]
[ One last mechanic, and then you should go back to bed. Every theft gives you a choice in the instant you take it: feed it into the heart, permanent and corrupting and unrecoverable for the victim — or hold it loose, a temporary grip, ten minutes only. The ten-minute timer runs from the moment you take it, whether you use the power or not. Spend it or lose it. ]
The readout faded, and left him with the dawn and the wind and the heavier beat under his hand.
He sat with it. Not the way he sat with a tactical problem, turning it for the exploit. The way you sit with a thing you have done to yourself that you cannot take back. The path he had been climbing so carefully, Marauder to Trespasser to Houseguest, clean and named and his, had been knocked off its line by two months of a hunger he had mistaken for strategy, and what he had now was stronger in places and broken in others and would cost more, every step, the more of other people's power he chose to swallow. The Bazaar had told him in four words and he hadn't listened. Your actions have consequences.
But the cold air was clean. His eyes were silver, the heart was heavy, and downstairs a woman who would put a spear through a monster wearing his face was sleeping in his bed, because she trusted him not to make her do it.
Desecrator, he thought, trying the name on, hating it, keeping it. All right. Then I learn to carry it carefully. Starting with not putting anything else in the heart until I understand exactly what it costs.
[ That is the first sensible thing you have decided in two months, Host. ]
Don't push it.
He finished the tea while the sun came up over the city, and then he went back downstairs to the warmth, before she had to come looking.
As he was sneaking into the bed, Ren woke. He had to tell her the new information. After the talk, Ren looked like she wanted to do something, and he could see the resolve in her eyes.
"Adam, share some with me, the quirks. It will lessen your corruption, and it won't affect me much, right?"
Sage?
[ Indeed, Host, Miss Ren won't be affected the same way by this corruption. For one, she doesn't have any quirks, and second, her path does not involve risky and unstable advancements. Also, just in case, I recommend a 25,000 NP purchase for Miss Ren if you decide to gift more than 1 quirk. It's an item called soothing soul dew. By its description, it repairs and soothes the soul, removing any corrupting influences. ]
That's good, let's see what would be good for her.
[ I recommend OFA as it allows stockpiling of CE for Ren. This way her reserves will keep growing with unknown limits. It's the single most impactful upgrade for her. Anything else will just pollute her soul more and won't bring as much of a benefit. ]
I agree.
"Ren, listen, I checked with Sage, and I can give you a quirk called One For All. By itself, it's not great because what I have is the initial version of it. It allows the user to stocpile energy and also allows for a transfer mechanic to the next user. For you, the most important part is the stockpile. From what I understand, it will allow you to stockpile CE over time and, in turn, make your reserve bigger and bigger. This, in turn, will fix one of your biggest issues and allow for the creation of bigger and stronger techniques."
Ren smilled, "Lets do it! GIve it to me."
Adam wanted to make a comment on that but he let it go for now. He focused on the Cursed Hearth and let the OFA flow towards Ren. It looked like a dark miasma that was sucked into her.
Ren gasped; you could see the sweat start forming on her forhead. She was clutching the blankets. After a minute, she exhaled. The transfer was successful.
"How do you feel?"
"Not bad, I can feel my excess CE flow towards this empty space. It wasn't there before. Also, I feel heavier somehow." Ren said.
"That's good. The feeling of heaviness is probably due to the remnant corruption. You won't need the Soul Dew, but I would buy some soul-related medicine from Bazaar to help with this until your body and soul acclimate to the quirk."
AN: If we get to 500 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 700, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123