In a small digital store, Mark stood before a wall-mounted TV, arms folded, hood still up, watching the morning coverage with a quiet, restrained smile.
Vought had already spun it.
Same as any multinational with shareholders to answer to and a brand to protect. It didn’t matter what the actual situation was—every crisis that landed on their desk eventually got turned into an opportunity before the day was out.
An unknown supe causing destruction and publicly threatening The Seven wasn’t a problem to them. It was a gap in the market they could fill if they moved fast enough.
He watched the anchor gesture toward the park footage, voice appropriately grave, Vought’s statement scrolling across the bottom of the screen in clean corporate language.
Mark had written corporations like this before. The goal was always profit, the methodology was always image, and the instinct was always the same—when an opportunity presents itself, take it and make it look like responsibility.
He’d handed them exactly that last night.
[Popularity Poll: 30,871]
"As expected, these guys are really good," Mark muttered, eyes still on the screen. "They raised my popularity this much in a single day."
But the number didn’t sit right with him. Millions of people had to have seen the coverage by now—every major outlet was running it, the footage had been shared across every platform.
So why was the number still in the thousands?
[That is because the people need to have at least a medium impression of you. Most of them currently have no impression.]
Mark frowned slightly.
[They do not know your face. They do not know your name. They saw destruction and heard a second-hand threat. You cannot form a feeling toward someone you cannot picture.]
Mark looked back at the TV, turning that over in his head.
The footage was of an empty park at night. Red flashes. Broken trees. No face, no voice, nothing to attach to. As far as the public was concerned, the story was about the damage, not about him. He was still just a concept.
"So I need to actually show myself," he said.
[Correct.]
Mark exhaled slowly through his nose.
"That’s the part where it gets complicated."
[Yes, although you have powerful optic blasts your body is weak as hell. One punch from Homelander and you will turn into human paste.]
"Yeah, I know," Mark said flatly. "No need to mention it. Care to guess whose fault that is?"
[I may be partially responsible, but nothing is entirely on me. Blame yourself for leaving a novel unfinished.]
"No need to rub salt in my wounds."
[I am not rubbing anything. I am stating facts.]
"Same thing," Mark muttered, turning away from the TV.
"So what are the levels of the templates again?" Mark asked as he stepped out of the store and got hit immediately by the full weight of the summer heat.
He genuinely wanted to stay inside but the sales guy had been giving him a nasty look for the past ten minutes, so that option was gone.
[Common, Uncommon, Rare, Unique, Legendary, Mythical.]
"Just tell me the price of Uncommon," Mark said, squinting against the sun. He already knew the other four would be numbers that made him want to sit down, so there was no point asking.
[50,000 points.]
Mark stopped walking for a second.
"Yeah, as expected," he said. "You’re just an expensive system with no discount policy."
He started moving again, hands in his pockets. "Can’t I get any kind of deal? Loyalty discount? First time buyer? Anything?"
[No.]
"Worth asking."
Mark looked at his popularity count.
30,000 points.
"Alright," he said. "Let’s spend some of this."
[Do you wish to use 10,000 points for a common template pull?]
"Yes."
The panel shifted and three templates appeared in front of him.
[Caterpie — Pokémon.]
[Bailey Hoskins — the worst superhero ever documented.]
Mark stared at the second one for a moment, already feeling something in him deflate.
Then the third appeared.
[Kazuma Satou — prior to the start of his adventure.]
Mark looked at it.
Then looked at it again.
"Kazuma Satou," he said slowly.
"You are giving me a template of a man whose defining characteristic before his adventure was that he was a shut-in who died crossing the road." He pointed at himself.
"I have muscle. Actual muscle. On my body. I am physically superior to this template in its base state."
[The pull is random.]
He had no one to blame but himself. He’d expected common tier to give him something workable. That was on him.
His eyes moved back to the three options.
Caterpie was immediately out.
"So if I chose Caterpie, would I become Spider-Man or would I just spit silk from somewhere? Which part exactly?"
[Cannot be certain. It is a Pokemon template. Merging with a human may cause adverse reactions in unpredictable areas.]
Definitely not hands, the panel had said. Mark decided he didn’t want to know which part it would be instead and moved on.
Bailey Hoskins. He remembered that one too. A man whose entire power set was exploding once and dying from it. Single use. Fatal to the user. Completely useless in any situation that required him to still be alive afterward.
That left Kazuma.
Mark stared at the template for a moment.
No powers. No strength. Nothing supernatural at base. But that wasn’t the complete picture.
Kazuma Satou was one of the luckiest people across any universe—the kind of luck that had no business existing, that bent situations in directions probability had no explanation for, that kept producing outcomes that shouldn’t have been possible.
In this world, surrounded by supes who could throw him through a building without trying, luck wasn’t a bad thing to have.
"Fine," Mark said. "Kazuma."
After selecting it he pulled the Common template again.
[Do you wish to use 10,000 points for a common template pull?]
"Yes."
Three templates appeared.
[Claire Bennet — regenerative healing, requires physical death to activate full recovery.]
[Deadpool — accelerated healing factor, accompanied by cellular instability and chronic pain.]
[Sabretooth — enhanced healing, strength, and feral instincts.]
Mark looked at the first two for a moment.
Claire Bennet’s healing only kicked in properly after she was already dead. Useful in theory. Deeply unpleasant in practice.
The idea of having to actually die first before his body bothered fixing itself was not something he wanted to test in a world where A-Train could turn him into a red smear before he registered what had happened.
Deadpool’s healing was stronger but came packaged with constant cellular instability and pain that never fully went away. The man functioned through it because he’d had no choice. Mark had a choice.
That left Sabretooth.
Healing. Strength.
But compared to the other two, it was the only one that gave him something without an immediate catastrophic downside attached to it.
"Sabretooth"
*****
A/N: Advanced Chapters are available on Patreon.
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