[New Tabs Unlocked]
→ Territory
→ Leadership
→ Secrets
Nico walked into his room, shut the door behind him, and let the quiet settle before he even looked at the bed. He crossed the floor and finally sat down, letting the mattress take his weight. Only then did he turn his attention back to the system.
"Open Territory tab."
Another screen unfurled at his left side, a long page of dense text spreading across his vision, the letters glowing faint and steady in the dim room. He hadn’t touched the Leadership or Secrets tabs yet, but Territory came first tonight.
[Territory & Influence]
→ How you control places and resources.
→ What It Is
• The neighborhoods, clubs, docks, and fronts you dominate. Territory gives you money, safety, and leverage; Influence is your political and criminal reach.
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→ Key Resources
• Territories: named areas you control (each with an income and percentage bonus)
[Owned Territories: 54]
[Gross Territory Income: $573,694]
[Bonus Percentage: 31.3%]
[Personal Income Split: $179,566]
• Influence: a spendable resource for favors, bribes, and protection.
[Gang Influence: 60/100]
[Personal Influence: 20/100]
[Influence Accumulation: 40/100]
• Heat: attention from rivals, police, or supernatural hunters.
[Heat Scale: High]
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→ Basic Uses:
• Collect income and bonuses from each Territory during downtime.
• Spend Influence to smooth over crimes, secure permits, or turn officials blind.
• Use territory control to gain advantages on stealth, intimidation, and escape.
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→ How It Changes
• Gain Territories by winning conflicts, completing arcs, or buying out rivals.
• Increase Influence through successful operations, alliances, and public victories.
• Heat rises when you act boldly, use obvious shadow powers, or leave bodies; high Heat brings raids, investigations, and rival coalitions.
[All 3 Categories can be affected by wives’ investment returns.]
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Nico pulled up the income figure right away and looked it over, running his eyes across the numbers twice before he trusted them. The figure checked out. It was accurate, at least.
That was the territory income that had been piling into his account every week since he took the Don’s seat. Still, something about it felt off this time. A little too low, and he couldn’t shake the feeling.
His income used to climb past 300 grand without much effort. Back then, the company his full percentage depended on still had buyers lined up, willing and steady, no shortage of demand at all.
That had stopped the moment they caught wind of a change in the usual merchant. The buyers pulled back one by one, and the earnings had been sliding ever since, quietly, without him paying it much mind.
’That can be fixed.’
He filed the thought away and kept scrolling through the rest of the tab. One line caught his eye and held it there: an influence accumulation stat that leaned heavily on his own personal influence.
Only then did it hit him. He hadn’t been building influence at all, not in any real way. Not even while Silas was still alive to guide him through it. That gap was probably why the buyers still hesitated to trust him.
Most of his own gang barely knew him beyond a name on a ledger somewhere. That was especially true of the rookies, the new recruits who never once set foot inside the mansion walls.
If he wanted their respect, if he wanted real recognition instead of quiet compliance, he’d have to earn it himself. He made a mental note to tour every territory he owned, one by one, before too long. It wasn’t something he could delegate away.
Before any of that, though, there was the matter of Heat, and it had climbed uncomfortably high without him even noticing.
Nico already had a rough shortlist of threats to brace for. The mystery assassin still hunting the girls, patient and unseen. The occult group circling back for revenge, waiting on their own timeline.
And somewhere out there, his brother, half out of his mind and getting worse.
He leaned back against the headboard and ran a quiet check on what he actually had to work with, and the answer wasn’t reassuring.
His powers were still new, still thin, nothing close to the years Damon had spent sharpening his own abilities into something dangerous.
Robert had walked straight through the shadow domain with every intention of killing his own son over an inheritance claim. The domain had let him through without so much as a flicker. No alert. No warning. Nothing at all.
The domain’s level had grown some since that night, inching upward on its own, but Nico doubted it would be enough to hold his brother back if Damon ever decided to hit the mansion head-on. That thought alone kept him from feeling settled.
That left one option sitting untouched at the bottom of his arsenal: shadowform. He’d been too busy, or maybe just too lazy, to ever bother training it since the day he first got it.
The idea of turning into shadow, slipping past enemies unseen, letting attacks pass straight through him like he wasn’t even there, had honestly sounded dull to him. Not worth the effort, or so he’d told himself.
Circumstances didn’t care what sounded fun, though. If he meant to keep this household standing against what was coming, he needed every scrap of power he could possibly scrape together, boring or not. There was no room left for pride in that calculation.
He lay back on the bed, shut his eyes for a moment, and let his breathing slow before he focused on the idea of vanishing entirely.
A full minute passed. Nothing surged through him. No warmth, no pull, no sign at all that the ability had even stirred beneath the surface.
He was ready to write the attempt off entirely when the bulbs overhead burst without warning, one after another, plunging the room into total darkness in the space of a heartbeat.
His eyes snapped open at the sound. He stared upward for a moment, waiting for his vision to adjust, before slowly lifting his hands in front of his face to check.
There was nothing there to see. Just black mist where his arms should have been, curling and drifting off him like smoke that never thinned, endless and quiet in the dark.
"This feels...weird. Really weird."
[ShadowForm Activated]
[Cost: 3 UP]
[Prolonged Use Might Trigger Corruption]
He got up to test how far the intangibility went, crossing the room toward the mirror on the far wall and reaching a hand out toward the glass, slow and curious.
His arm passed straight through it without resistance, sliding out the other side without so much as a crack forming anywhere on the surface.
"Okay, maybe this is cool."
He said it quietly, with a small, satisfied smile tugging at his mouth, still watching his own hand hover on the other side of the glass.
There was a catch, though, and it had everything to do with how flexible the form actually was. It made him invisible and untouchable, sure, but it also meant he couldn’t land a hit or grip a weapon while shadow.
That was going to be a problem for his offense. And potentially, it would be just as much of a problem for his defense too.
Picture holding two daggers in the middle of a fight, then flipping into shadowform on pure instinct. The blades would slip straight out of his grip the instant the shift happened.
The whole fight would collapse into a drawn-out game of hide and seek from there, and it would stay that way for as long as he could manage to keep the form active.
"No, seriously, how flexible is this thing?"
[Shadowform Flexibility Rules]
→ When you activate Shadowform, your body becomes partially or fully shadow-based. That means the form can be tuned along a spectrum:
• Full Intangibility: Best for movement, evasion, phasing, and stealth.
• Partial Tangibility: Best for holding weapons, blocking attacks, and interacting with objects.
• Selective Control: The user decides which parts are solid and which are shadow.
[Note: every form requires training and could cost more UP points to activate.]
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"Makes sense." Nico nodded. "I just need to figure out how to achieve those three forms tonight."