He woke in a hospital bed with a tube in his arm and a machine beeping somewhere to his left, and the first thing he registered, before pain, before fear, before even the ceiling above him, was Priya's hand wrapped around his, gripping so hard it hurt.
"Don't you dare," she said, before his eyes had even fully focused. "Don't you dare go under again. You've been out for six hours. I've counted every one of them."
"Priya."
"You got shot, Owen." Her voice cracked on the word, and she pressed her free hand over her mouth for a moment, composing herself with visible effort. "You got shot in a lobby you had absolutely no business being in, trying to talk down a man with a gun, because that's apparently just who you are now. The surgeon said another two centimeters and it would have hit something that doesn't come back from surgery."
"I'm okay."
"You are not okay. You are extremely not okay. You are the least okay person I have ever met, and I work in insurance fraud." She let out a long, unsteady breath. "But you're alive. So. There's that."
He tried to shift and a bright bloom of pain stopped him cold, a deep, furious ache low in his side. He looked down at himself: bandages, a drain, the pale hospital gown. He was alive. He hadn't been entirely sure, in the dark moment before the world had gone out, that he would be.
"What happened to Raymond?"
"In custody. Psychiatric hold, not jail, for now — the DA's looking at the circumstances. Fitch is telling everyone who'll listen that you saved the building single-handedly. Which, for the record, is not what I saw. What I saw was you walking toward a man with a gun with your hands in the air, saying things a hostage negotiator would've said, and getting shot for your trouble." She squeezed his hand. "You could have died."
"I know."
"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, you don't seem to know things like that the way normal people do." Her voice was raw. "You have three powers, Owen. Three. A sense that gives you nosebleeds. A repair trick that hurts you every time you use it. A silence that comes with a bill. And you keep walking toward guns and fires and men with knives like you've got something better than that. You don't."
He was quiet for a long moment. The machine beeped. Outside the window, evening was coming down gray and gold over the East River.
"I know," he said finally. "I found that out today. In the worst possible way."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
He looked at his hands, at the IV line taped to the back of one, at the faint pale seam across the palm of the other, a mark from a mended mug weeks ago that had never quite faded.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I can't request a power. I can't choose one. All I can do is earn Merit and hope."
"Then earn it doing something smarter than walking into gunfire."
"There's no smart way to walk into gunfire, Priya. That's what makes it gunfire."
She didn't have an answer for that. She sat with his hand in both of hers, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, and it was, strangely, the most comfortable silence he'd felt in weeks.
The Ledger came to him that night, once Priya had gone home to sleep under protest, and the ward had settled into its low hum of monitors and distant footsteps.
LEDGER NOTE.
He didn't open his eyes. "I know what you're going to say."
THE LEDGER HAS NOT SAID ANYTHING YET.
"You're going to tell me the deed was verified. You're going to give me a number."
THE LEDGER HAS COMPLETED VERIFICATION.
He braced himself.
BENEFICIAL ACT: DE-ESCALATION, ARMED INDIVIDUAL IN CRISIS.
HARM PREVENTED: VERY HIGH (PROBABLE MULTIPLE CASUALTIES AVERTED).
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
COST TO CLAIMANT: GRAVE PHYSICAL INJURY, NEAR-FATAL.
MOTIVE: CLEAN.
MERIT AWARDED: +94.
He stared at the number for a long time.
Ninety-four, he thought. For nearly dying.
"Ledger."
YES.
"When I was on the floor. Bleeding. I asked you to do something, and you told me you had nothing that fit." His voice was low, rough. "Is that going to keep happening? Am I going to keep running into situations where every tool I've got is the wrong shape?"
There was a long pause. When the gold line answered, it moved with what he could only describe, absurdly, as care.
THE LEDGER CANNOT PREDICT FUTURE DRAWS.
THE LEDGER CAN OBSERVE THAT THE CLAIMANT HAS ACCUMULATED SUFFICIENT MERIT FOR A CONVERSION.
He blinked. He hadn't checked the balance. He did now.
MERIT: 121 / 100.
He lay in the dark hospital room, tubes in his arm, a hole in his side that had nearly ended him, and felt the small, warm weight of a fourth ticket settle into his awareness.
I could wait, he thought. I could be smart about it. Rest first. Heal. Draw when I'm not lying in a hospital bed making decisions on painkillers.
He thought of Raymond Osei's shaking hands. He thought of the blood soaking through his shirt, more than he'd known a body could hold. He thought, with sudden and total clarity, of Delgado in his container, six weeks and counting, waiting for a rescue that three mismatched powers could not, on their own, deliver.
"Convert it," he said.
THE CLAIMANT IS INJURED. THE CLAIMANT'S JUDGMENT—
"I know the speech. I've heard the speech." He closed his eyes. "I'm not doing this out of panic this time. I did panic once, and it put me in a different hospital bed. This is different. I need something that can meet a threat as a threat. Not around it. Not away from it. Through it."
Another pause.
THE LEDGER OBSERVES THAT THIS IS A REASONED REQUEST.
CONVERSION AUTHORIZED.
MERIT: 21 / 100.
DRAW TICKETS: 1.
He drew a slow breath, careful of the stitches. "Draw."
The ceiling of the hospital room seemed to recede, and in its place the great gold ledger unspooled, vast and patient, titles blurring past in every script he knew and a hundred he didn't. He watched them spin with a strange, exhausted calm. He had stopped hoping for anything specific weeks ago. He hoped, now, only that it would be something he could hold in his two shaking hands and use.
The columns slowed. A single line lit, and held, longer than any before it, as if even the Ledger understood the weight of the moment.
ENDOWMENT SELECTED.
ORIGIN: MARVEL TRADITION (STREET-LEVEL ENHANCED PHYSIOLOGY).
DESIGNATION: IRONBOUND VIGOR.
STAGE: ONE (BASE FORM).
Dev read it twice, and felt something in his chest, some long-held breath, finally begin to let go.
"That's not a manga," he whispered. "That's not a manhwa. That's here. That's home ground."
AFFIRMATIVE.
"Show me."
The page turned.
ENDOWMENT FILE: IRONBOUND VIGOR (STAGE ONE).
DESCRIPTION: A LATENT PHYSICAL ENHANCEMENT, TRIGGERED BY SUSTAINED OR SEVERE BODILY HARM. GRANTS ELEVATED STRENGTH, DURABILITY, AND ACCELERATED HEALING FOR THE DURATION OF THE TRIGGERING CRISIS AND A PERIOD THEREAFTER.
BASE MULTIPLIER: APPROXIMATELY 4X BASELINE HUMAN STRENGTH AND DURABILITY WHEN ACTIVE.
TRIGGER CONDITION: THE CLAIMANT MUST SUSTAIN SIGNIFICANT INJURY, OR WITNESS IMMINENT SEVERE HARM TO ANOTHER, FOR THE ENDOWMENT TO ACTIVATE.
RIDER (3.7):
(A) THE ENDOWMENT DOES NOT ACTIVATE ON COMMAND. IT ACTIVATES ONLY UNDER THE STATED TRIGGER CONDITION.
(B) THE ENDOWMENT'S ELEVATED STATE CARRIES A PROPORTIONAL SURGE IN AGGRESSION AND PAIN TOLERANCE. THE CLAIMANT'S JUDGMENT MAY BE IMPAIRED WHILE ACTIVE.
(C) UPON DEACTIVATION, THE CLAIMANT EXPERIENCES A CRASH PROPORTIONAL TO THE DURATION AND INTENSITY OF USE, INCLUDING EXTREME FATIGUE AND TEMPORARY VULNERABILITY.
He read it slowly, three times, turning each clause over like a stone.
It's not a switch, he thought. It's a fuse. I can't reach for it. It has to be lit.
"So I can't use it to prevent the injury that triggers it," he said aloud. "I have to already be hurt, or already watching someone else get hurt, before it does anything."
AFFIRMATIVE.
"That's a cruel joke."
THE LEDGER DOES NOT CHARACTERIZE ENDOWMENTS.
"You keep saying that. I keep not believing you." He lay back against the pillow, half laughing, half something closer to despair. "I asked for a sword and you gave me a splint that only appears after the break."
THE LEDGER NOTES THAT A SPLINT IS STILL A TOOL.
He was quiet for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, feeling the dull, stitched ache in his side where a bullet had nearly ended his second life.
Then, slowly, something in him began, unwillingly, to smile.
If I'd had this an hour before I got shot, he thought, it would have done nothing. But the moment the bullet hit — the moment my body understood it was in real danger — it would have come online. Not to stop the shot. But to survive what came after.
It's not a weapon, he thought. It's a second chance, built into the first.
"Ledger."
YES.
"Riding the aggression. The judgment thing. How bad does it get?"
THE LEDGER DOES NOT QUANTIFY SUBJECTIVE STATES.
"Give me something."
There was a pause, and when the answer came, it was, for the first time Dev could recall, phrased almost gently.
THE LEDGER RECOMMENDS THE CLAIMANT HAVE SOMEONE HE TRUSTS NEARBY THE FIRST TIME IT ACTIVATES.
He absorbed that. It was, in its careful, clerical way, the closest thing to a warning the Ledger had ever given him.
"Understood," he said quietly.
He lay back, exhausted, stitched, and for the first time since a room with a green blotter had asked him to sign his name, he felt something other than fear when he thought about the next fight.
He felt, faintly, dangerously, ready.