Deep night, and the New York that should have gone quiet with the rest of the world burned on, lit from river to river.
Gali had long since gone to sleep.
Trist stood up on the rooftop terrace instead, watching a smear of firelight in the far distance and guessing, without much investment, that it was probably another gang shootout burning itself down.
He had not, for the record, gone off to college to be a good and diligent student.
A little money had gone out, his enrollment would coast along untouched until a diploma fell out the far end, and the whole afternoon had gone into the new comics instead.
Now he was waiting.
Waiting to see how much fan value the first day of One-Punch Man’s great wave would actually deposit, because on the other side of that number sat the thing he’d been thinking about all week: the draw.
*Fwip…* A sound reached him from somewhere off to the side, faint, rhythmic, and he turned toward it in time to catch a human figure sweep past between the buildings, and the detail that snagged his whole attention was the *motion* of it.
The figure wasn’t falling and wasn’t flying.
It was swinging, out and under and up, exactly like a child on a playground swing scaled up to the size of a city.
In the entire Marvel universe he knew, exactly one person moved like that.
Spider-Man.
Peter Parker.
And the timeline assembled itself on its own: just yesterday, Peter had invited him along to the research institute tour, and he’d declined.
So that trip had been it, then.
The turning point of Peter Parker’s whole life had come and gone inside a single school day.
*And now he’s swung all the way from Queens into Manhattan.
Truly the friendly neighborhood at work.* Trist delivered the joke to an audience of nobody and turned his attention back to the interface, where the fan value’s climb had finally flattened into a slow, steady crawl.
The wave was settling.
The wait stretched long.
And then, in the quiet dark, under the wash of the moon, the system’s mechanical voice finally sounded.
*[FAN VALUE TALLY COMPLETE.
ON DAY ONE, THE HOST HAS GAINED A TOTAL OF 280,840 FAN VALUE POINTS.]* Two hundred eighty thousand.
In one day.
The grin took over Trist’s face before he had any say in it.
By his own estimate, One-Punch Man’s readership growth would crest tomorrow and hold for a week, and clearing a million points inside that window wasn’t even a question.
*[HOST MEETS THE MINIMUM DRAW THRESHOLD.
BEGIN?]* The floor for a single draw was one hundred thousand, which meant two hundred eighty thousand bought exactly two spins, and the prize pool covered anything and everything that had appeared in One-Punch Man’s four published chapters.
Calm was not available to him.
Two draws only, fine, but *anything* out of that comic was worth its weight in gold to a man in his position.
“Draw.
Right now.” *[PLEASE SELECT THE AMOUNT PER DRAW.
HIGHER CONSUMPTION RAISES THE PROBABILITY OF RARE ITEMS.]* If he’d had a million points, he’d have burned a million on one glorious spin without blinking.
But he had two hundred eighty thousand, and how much better could two hundred thousand really run than one hundred thousand?
Better to split it into two chances and find out, once and for all, what color his luck actually ran.
*Time to learn whether I’m one of fortune’s chosen.* He went to the washroom and splashed his face, nerves entirely disproportionate to the dignity of the moment, rubbed his hands together like a gambler at a table, and punched in two draws at one hundred forty thousand each.
*[CONGRATULATIONS, HOST.
OBTAINED: ULTIMATE CHOLESTEROL, “BICEPS KING.”]* “Huh?” A single vial materialized out of the air and floated down into his palm, the solution inside it flickering with veins of gold.
He knew this bottle intimately, because he had drawn it with his own hand.
Straight out of chapter three: the formula Fukegao developed and fed to his younger brother Marugori, and one swallow later, the man stood thousands of meters tall, flattening a town with a single fist.
By the Association’s future scale, a Demon-level disaster at minimum, since Demon meant a crisis capable of paralyzing or destroying a town, and the giant had managed that with roughly the effort of stretching.
Trist gave the vial a gentle shake and watched the gold light swirl.
A terrifying thing, this little tube.
This much liquid, and an ordinary human became *that*.
And he had absolutely no intention of drinking it, because he had no interest in becoming a monster, and in the Marvel universe a Demon-level brute wasn’t even good currency; there were better roads open to him.
He set the vial down on the desk.
*[CONGRATULATIONS, HOST.
OBTAINED: VACCINE MAN’S SKILL, LIGHT BALL FRAGMENT x1.]* “A what?
A skill *fragment*?” Trist stared at the panel.
Drawing a skill, he could understand.
Why did it come out in pieces?
“What’s it even for?” *[FRAGMENTS ARE ONE OF THE LOWER PRIZE TIERS, DIVIDED INTO CHARACTER FRAGMENTS, SKILL FRAGMENTS, AND ITEM FRAGMENTS.]* *[EACH TYPE FUNCTIONS DIFFERENTLY.
SKILL FRAGMENTS MAY BE EQUIPPED.
ONE FRAGMENT REPRESENTS LEVEL 1; ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS STACK TO RAISE THE LEVEL, TO A MAXIMUM OF LEVEL 10.]* *Oh.
Oh, that’s a beautiful system.* The excitement hit him all at once and had nowhere to go.
He’d walked into this draw braced for disappointment, because a pool built from four thin chapters shouldn’t have held anything, and he’d fully prepared himself to pull Saitama’s useless white cape or, worse, the jumpsuit.
Instead, two draws, two jackpots: a rare item he’d simply choose not to drink, and a *skill*.
And not just any skill.
The complete version of the Light Ball barrage could level a city; Vaccine Man had been a Dragon-level existence.
Trist touched his own handsome face and marinated openly in self-satisfaction.
“I really am one of fortune’s chosen.” The system, apparently nauseated by the shamelessness, cut in colder than usual.
*[EQUIP THE SKILL FRAGMENT?]* The Light Ball fragment currently sat in the warehouse.
“Equip.” Below the draw interface, a new panel unfolded, a skill module floating up out of nothing, laid out exactly like a game’s.
The fragment burst up out of the warehouse screen as a streak of white light and shot straight into Trist’s head before he could so much as flinch, and in the same moment an icon bloomed on the module, a sphere of white-blue light with a small notation in its upper corner: Lv1.
“This is…” Heat flooded through his skull, one long rush of it, and when the rush cleared, the power was simply *his*, sitting in his hands like something he’d owned all his life.
He raised both palms, slowly.
*Vzzzt!* Blue-white energy streamed up out of his body and gathered fast, condensing into a sphere the size of a fist above his palm, and the power packed inside it ground audibly against the air.
Even at Level 1, the thing hovering over his hand could have blown this whole room out of the building.
Trist stared at the light in his palm and let out a long breath of pure appreciation.
“Trist?
What’s that in your hand?” The sweet little voice arrived out of nowhere.
Gali stood in the bedroom doorway, eyes locked dead onto the glowing sphere.
“Uh.
Nothing.” He dispersed the ball with a wave and produced an extremely awkward laugh, because as far as he knew, Gali was an ordinary child, and an ordinary child might reasonably be terrified of a guardian who had started generating city-block-grade ordnance overnight.
“Ooh.
What’s *that*?
It looks tasty.” Gali, as it turned out, had no interest whatsoever in where the light ball had come from; from where she stood, that little thing would scatter if you breathed on it.
Her eyes had gone right past it, purple light flickering across them, and locked onto the vial of Biceps King sitting on the desk, and she was already moving, fast, like a bloodhound that had caught the scent of a feast.
Her hand closed on the vial at a speed Trist’s eyes genuinely did not track.
The stopper came out.
A line of drool escaped the corner of her mouth.
And she poured it straight in.
“STOP, that’s not for dri…
nking…” Trist watched the last of the gold light disappear down her throat, and the world dropped out from under him like a thunderbolt through the chest.
His head filled to the brim with exactly one image, Gali at three thousand meters, and his legs quietly resigned, and he hit the floor with a thump, face aimed at the boards, eyes rimming red.
*My kid.
The one small kid I only just managed to take in.* He wanted to howl at the ceiling.
He’d finally, *finally* picked up one small kid off the street, and in the space of four seconds she’d become a future mountain of muscle, and the despair of it went all the way down, bottomless.
“Eh?
Trist, what are you doing down there?” *…What?* He raised his head.
Gali stood over him wearing an expression of pure adorable puzzlement, and nothing about her had changed.
Not one inch, not one muscle.
Nothing had happened at all.
*System.
SYSTEM.
That drug was fake!*