Chapter 7: Software Update

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who gets handed a superpower and immediately understands it, close this book now. Dear Reader, every gift Arthur Specter had ever been given so far had come with a countdown, a threat, or both... so forgive him for not trusting this one just because it came with a confetti font.

Chapter 6 — Twelve Years Old, Actually

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a story about a boy who hears a prophecy and nods solemnly, close this book now. Dear Reader, Arthur Specter had read that exact scene in four hundred different novels, and every single time, the kid was an idiot for not asking the obvious follow-up question first.

The campus kept moving around them like nothing world-ending had just been said. Cadets sparring somewhere off to the left, that laughing sound still coming from the tree that shouldn’t have anything in it. Voss hadn’t moved. He was watching Arthur the way you’d watch a pot you weren’t sure was about to boil.

"Okay," Arthur said. "Before we go any further... you do know how this sounds, right?"

Voss blinked. "How what sounds?"

"This." Arthur gestured at him, at the campus, at the whole production. "Orphan-coded kid, secretly special, shows up out of nowhere, mysterious headmaster takes a personal interest, drops a prophecy about him destroying everything. You didn’t come up with this. You stole it. There’s a whole movie about a wizard boy with a lightning scar that did this exact plot forty years ago."

"I didn’t—"

"I can draw one on, if it helps." Arthur tapped his own forehead. "Right here. Jagged. I’ve got a marker in my bag. Really sell the whole bit for you."

Voss stared at him for a long moment, and something in his charming, camera-ready expression cracked. Not into anger. Into something closer to genuine surprise. Somewhere behind him, a cadet went sailing sideways out of a training circle and landed in the grass laughing, and Voss didn’t even glance back at the noise. His whole attention stayed on Arthur.

"I wasn’t trying to do anything," he said. "I was trying to warn you."

"Sure you were." Arthur crossed his arms. "Here’s the part you’re skipping. You’re not just warning me. You’re recruiting me. Feeding me. Probably about to offer me extra credit for existing, my house as well, make me feel golden before you stab me in the back. That’s not a warning, that’s a leash with a bow on it... so that later, when your bigger plan needs a very specific, very dangerous twelve-year-old, I’m already sitting right here, trained and grateful."

Every gift wears a leash out of sight...

the softest hand can still hold the knife.

"You are," Voss said slowly, "an extremely untrusting child."

"I’m an extremely ordinary child. But you’re not that special either. You can’t even come up with an original plan." Arthur didn’t slow down. He’d started walking again without deciding to, gravel crunching under his sneakers, putting just enough motion into it that he didn’t have to hold Voss’s eyes the whole time. "You know what a school does with a student who might end up ’standing over the whole world’? It doesn’t befriend him. It builds a code black. A kill switch. Something quiet, something fast, something that activates the second I look like I’m drifting the wrong way. That’s not paranoia, that’s just good management. I’d do the same thing if I ran this place."

Voss opened his mouth. Closed it. For once, nothing smooth came out to fill the gap. Just a beat of silence long enough that a bird somewhere finished an entire sentence of its own before he answered.

"That’s not what this place is," he said, which Arthur noticed, and filed, was not actually a no.

He decided not to push it. Not yet. Some plot holes were worth letting breathe.

Voss recovered fast. Professionals always did. He reset into something warmer, gentler, the kind of voice built for assemblies. "What we’re building here is community. Belonging. Cadets who’d lay down everything for each other, because—"

"Nope." Arthur held up a hand. "Stop. You’re doing the sleepy voice. The unity-and-friendship speech. I’ve read that Chapter too, and it’s always the boring one right before the plot actually starts."

Voss didn’t answer that either. Arthur didn’t notice he hadn’t. Not yet, not with what happened next.

Something moved past them, out across the training field. A flash of white, low to the ground, then suddenly not low to the ground at all. Wind came off it in one hard gust, carrying the smell of cut grass and something warmer underneath, like static right before lightning.

Arthur stopped walking entirely.

A kid maybe a year older than him stood near the fence with both hands buried in a mane that shouldn’t have existed, attached to a horse that shouldn’t have existed either, except this one had wings currently stretching out to their full, ridiculous, sun-catching span.

"Is that," Arthur said, very carefully, "a pegasus."

"That’s a Bond," Voss started. "A Gift, earned through—"

"Stop trying to put me back to sleep and tell me about the freaking pegasus."

Voss actually laughed at that. A real one, short and surprised out of him.

"It’s a Gift called Dragon," he said. "Save up enough Coins, redeem it, and you’re taken to meet the—"

"Wait, taken where?"

"...the Earth Dragon. She keeps every creature in this—"

"There’s a dragon dragon? An actual—"

"If you let me finish a sentence." Voss held up a hand, fighting a smile now. "She keeps every creature in this world on something like a leash, ironically enough. She gives you an egg. The egg hatches into a bonded pet. What it turns into depends entirely on—"

"On the person, yeah, obviously, that’s how every pet-egg system in every story ever works—"

"...on the person," Voss finished anyway, mostly to himself.

Arthur turned on him, and every trace of the last ten minutes, the suspicion, the leash theory, the very reasonable point about kill switches, evaporated off his face like it had never been there.

"This should’ve been the first thing you told me," Arthur said. "On the tour. Before the training yards. Before the houses. Before any of it. I’m twelve. Of course I want to see a dragon and get my own magical pet, what is wrong with you. Does it evolve?"

Voss nodded, visibly unsure what had just happened to the conversation.

Arthur was already bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, all traces of Iron-tier cynicism gone, replaced by something that looked, for the first time since he’d died, exactly like a regular twelve-year-old.

"Code black be damned," he said. "I’m a hundred percent in. Where do I get my freaking quest?"

Suspicion melts for a shinier prize...

even old souls have young, hungry eyes.

TO BE CONTINUED...

"Before the quest administration," Voss said, "you’ll need an assessment."

"I have a System," Arthur said, before he could stop himself, then immediately wished he hadn’t. That was the one sentence on the entire campus he wasn’t allowed to say out loud, and he’d nearly handed it over for free just to avoid twenty minutes of paperwork.

"A what?"

"Nothing. Sense of purpose. Very motivated." Arthur cleared his throat. "Isn’t this redundant, though? You already know I’m... whatever I am. Math problem, remember?"

"Knowing that you’re unusual and knowing exactly how isn’t the same thing." Voss’s smile didn’t move, but something behind it did. "Call it curiosity."

Arthur decided not to call it that at all. He had a much shorter word in mind, and it started with threat.

They walked in silence after that, which suited Arthur fine. It gave him room to spiral properly.

Okay. Think. If this thing scanned for supernatural output and found two separate tracks running in one twelve-year-old body, that was not going to read as "gifted transfer student." That was going to read as code black. Voss was probably just trying to measure how to stop him if he ever went rogue... and honestly, if he ever did go rogue, he’d probably have a decent reason, and he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being stoppable at all.

Small comfort: his Ghost side and his Awaken side had never once talked to each other. Different Levels. Different tiers. Different everything, except the one stat pool nobody outside his own head could see. If the machine only knew how to ask Awaken questions, maybe it just wouldn’t think to ask a ghost one.

Maybe. He was, historically, terrible at "maybe." He was winging this the same way he’d winged possessing a thirty-year-old grief demon with his bare hands, which was to say: badly, loudly, and with a suspicious amount of luck involved.

Honestly, at this point, he half hoped Voss would just start screaming code black, code black the second the machine so much as hiccuped. At least then he’d know where he stood.

Hold your breath and hold your face...

the machine can’t read what leaves no trace.

The Assessment Engine looked less like a magic ritual and more like an MRI machine that had lost an argument with a chandelier. A ring of soft gold light, a technician in a lab coat tapping a tablet, and absolutely no drama whatsoever.

Which somehow made it worse.

"Just stand still," the technician said, not even looking up. "This won’t hurt."

Easy for you to say. You’re not hiding a ghost alt inside.

Arthur stood very still and thought about absolutely nothing, which is famously the hardest thing a human brain can be asked to do on command. His heart was doing something closer to Morse code than a heartbeat. He kept his face arranged into polite boredom anyway. Chin level, shoulders loose, the exact expression of a kid enduring a school physical.

Nobody in the room seemed to notice he was internally screaming.

Huh, he thought, filing that away with something like professional interest. I’m actually a really good liar. Not the sarcastic-comeback kind he already knew he had. The other kind... the kind that could hold a straight face through actual terror. Add it to the list of things he apparently had going for him, right under "reads too much" and "died once, technically."

The light finished its slow ring around him and dimmed.

"Tier: Iron," the technician read off, unbothered. "Talent... Proxy Me. That’s it. Nice and clean."

Nothing about a ghost. Nothing about Possession, or Float, or a phone that used to be a person’s whole grief. Just one Talent, exactly as advertised, and not a flicker more.

Arthur let himself exhale, quietly, like it was nothing. Well, that was anticlimactic, he thought. Guess their technology just isn’t that thorough. My System works way better.

Then the machine chimed again. A different tone, higher, almost curious, and a thin filament of gold light arced off it and into Arthur’s chest, like it had found something worth reaching for.

[SYSTEM: EXTERNAL DEVICE DETECTED. SYNCING...]

Oh, come on—

[UPDATE IN PROGRESS.]

The technician frowned at their tablet, tapped it twice, and apparently decided it wasn’t worth a follow-up question. Voss, notably, didn’t look away from Arthur once. He was still trying to work out what that Talent actually did.

[UPDATE COMPLETE.]

[CONGRATULATIONS — NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: APPRAISAL.]

Guess phones get software updates, Arthur thought. Even dead ones.

He looked at the technician, mostly on reflex, and a window bloomed at the edge of his vision. Not imagined, not projected, just there, the way text is there once you know how to read.

NAME: Bob Chigo

TIER: BRONZE

TALENT: MECHANIC

STR 29 · AGI 25 · DEX 30 · INT 29 · VIG 29 · WIL 20

HP: 448/448 · MP: 340/340

Readable. Normal. Fine. His WIL’s kind of weak for a Bronze, though, Arthur thought. Everything else in the high twenties, low thirties, and then WIL just... face-plants at 20. Like he started at zero and never touched it on purpose. Weird. Filed, not answered.

Then, without meaning to, he glanced at Voss.

NAME: ???

TIER: ???

TALENT: ???

STR ??? · AGI ??? · DEX ??? · INT ??? · VIG ??? · WIL ???

HP: ???/??? · MP: ???/???

Question marks. All the way down. Not blank. Refused, like the number existed and simply declined to be read by someone this far beneath it. A classic overpowered-character stat window, unfortunately Arthur was the one on the wrong side of it. For now.

You need to be stronger to appraise someone extremely stronger, the window added, unhelpfully, when he tried to turn the ability on himself and got the exact same wall of nothing back.

Fine. Great. I wonder if my own window’s at least a little more generous.

NAME: Arthur Specter

TIER: IRON

TALENT: PROXY ME

Passive: runs a Passive AI that pilots the body while the Primary Mind is elsewhere.

Active: create a clone, automated by the Passive, that carries out your actions in your place.

STR 6 · AGI 6 · DEX 6 · INT 12 · VIG 8 · WIL 20

HP: 196/196 · MP: 170/170

The description sat there in plain text for the first time, spelled out instead of half-guessed from context, and Arthur read it twice.

Runs a Passive AI that pilots the body while the Primary Mind is elsewhere.

He already knew that part. That was just the thing keeping him breathing on a hospital bed while his soul went and grabbed a vengeful spirit by the throat.

That part he hadn’t actually sat with yet. Not maintain vitals. Not idle.Pilot the body. If that meant what it sounded like it meant, his body didn’t have to just lie there twitching every time he left it. It could keep going. Sit through class. Nod at the right moments. Raise a hand. While the actual him was off somewhere else entirely, doing something a twelve-year-old body had no business doing.

Nobody would even have to notice he was gone.

He had exactly zero idea if the autopilot was actually that convincing, or whether it would last five minutes before doing something deeply, obviously wrong in front of a teacher. He’d never tested it past "keep the lungs going." But it was, without question, the single most useful thing anyone had told him all week, and he filed it right at the top, for once, instead of the bottom.

Create a clone, automated by the Passive, that carries out your actions in your place. Side of his ability he needs to test out as soon as it’s safe.

Voss finished writing something in a small notebook and looked up.

"Well," he said. "Your ability’s a unique one. Fairly common among Awaken, actually. We usually work out the passive and active function from the name alone."

Arthur didn’t answer that. He was too busy doing math on how many classes he could theoretically skip without anyone knowing.

Some names return a wall of doubt...

that kind of power needs no shout.

TO BE CONTINUED...