Chapter 2: Investment System

Pain was the first thing that came back to him. A deep, throbbing ache in his stomach where Liam’s fist had landed, and a duller one spread across his ribs from the fall. Leon lay where he’d collapsed, cheek pressed to the cold floor of his room, and for a long moment he genuinely considered just staying there.

’Let me just die,’ he’d thought, right before everything went dark.

He hadn’t gotten his wish. Instead, floating in the black behind his own eyelids, three lines of pale text had burned themselves into his vision like an afterimage from staring at the sun.

[Max Despair accumulated]

[You have awakened the Investment System]

[Congratulations]

Leon’s eyes cracked open. The words were still there, no, not there, they were here, hovering in the actual air above him, translucent and blue, ignoring every law of physics he understood.

He didn’t move for a while. He just stared.

"...Okay," he said out loud, voice cracked and small in the empty room. "Okay. I got hit really, really hard. That’s it. Liam cracked something in my skull and now I’m seeing things."

The window didn’t disappear. If anything, it seemed to wait for him, patient in a way nothing in his life had been patient with him in years.

He tried closing his eyes. Counted to ten. Opened them again.

Still there.

Slowly, wincing with every movement, he pushed himself up against the wall, dragging his aching body into something resembling a sitting position. The window drifted with him, staying fixed at the same spot in his field of vision no matter how he turned his head, like it was pinned to the inside of his eyes rather than to the room.

"System," he said, feeling like an idiot for talking to nothing. "Investment System. What... what does that even mean?"

Nothing happened for a second. Then, like it had only been waiting to be addressed, more text unfolded beneath the first three lines.

[Investment System - Level 1]

[Investment EXP: 0 / 100]

[Investment Capital: 0 Credits]

[Appraisal: 2 / 2 charges available]

He read it twice. Three times. Each pass didn’t make it make any more sense.

Everyone he knew who’d awakened, every hunter he’d ever seen on a broadcast, every name that got whispered with respect in the halls of his university, had gotten something. Fists that could level buildings. Fire that could melt steel. Liam had gotten flame that put him in the A-rank bracket at twenty-three years old, flame that had sent Leon flying through the air like a ragdoll in front of a crowd that laughed at him for it.

And Leon had gotten a number that said zero credits.

A bitter, wheezing laugh escaped him before he could stop it, and it hurt his ribs enough that he immediately regretted it. "Of course," he muttered. "Of course this is what I get. Everyone else gets to punch through walls. I get a bank statement."

He almost dismissed it right there. Almost decided that whatever this was, trauma, hallucination, some cruel cosmic joke, it wasn’t worth thinking about tonight. But something kept nagging at him, some small, stubborn part of him that refused to let it go, because it hadn’t gone away after ten minutes, or twenty, and hallucinations were supposed to fade, weren’t they?

He reached out, more out of morbid curiosity than any real hope, and let his fingertip brush against the word Appraisal.

Nothing dramatic happened. No flash of light, no grand revelation. Just a single small line of text, unfolding calmly beneath his touch, like a tooltip on a phone app.

[Appraisal - reveals the current worth and hidden potential of a person, asset, or opportunity. Resets daily. Charges scale with System Level.]

Leon stared at that for a long time.

It was real. Or it felt real, at least, as real as anything else that had happened to him in the last few hours, which admittedly wasn’t setting a high bar. But real or not, useful or not, it didn’t change the fact that he was sitting on the floor of a room he could barely afford, ribs aching, stomach empty, with absolutely no idea what any of this was supposed to do for him.

That was when he saw the folded piece of paper sitting just inside his door, where it must have been slipped under sometime while he was out getting his life ruined in a clothing store.

He didn’t want to read it. He already knew what it was going to say. But he dragged himself over anyway and unfolded it with hands that weren’t quite steady.

Leon, I hate having to do this, I really do, you’ve always been a good tenant and I know things have been hard since school got expensive. But I’ve got bills of my own piling up and I can’t keep letting the rent slide. I need what you owe by the end of the week, or I’m going to have to talk to you about finding somewhere else. Please don’t make me do that. - Mr. Adam

Leon read it twice, the way he’d read the System window twice, like maybe if he looked hard enough the words would rearrange themselves into something less final.

Forty-three credits. That was what he had left in the world. Forty-three credits, a body held together mostly out of spite, a girlfriend who’d traded him in for someone with better stats, and a note from a landlord who was practically begging him not to force his own hand.

And a System that offered him nothing but a word, Appraisal, and a promise that somewhere in all this uselessness, there might be value.

He sat there for a long time with the letter in one hand and the ghost-light of the System window hovering in front of him, feeling something shift underneath the despair. It wasn’t hope, not exactly. It was closer to the kind of desperation that made a drowning man grab at anything within reach, whether or not it looked like it could float.

’Fine,’ he thought. ’Fine. Let’s see what you can actually do.’

He pushed himself up off the floor, ignoring the protest from every muscle in his body, and half-limped, half-stumbled toward the old desk shoved into the corner of his room, where a secondhand PC sat gathering dust, a relic from before things had gotten this bad, one of the only things he hadn’t sold yet.

He dropped into the chair, woke the screen with a shaking hand, and for the first time since Scarlet had looked at him like he was something she’d scraped off her shoe, Leon felt something other than shame simmering under his skin.

It wasn’t much. But as he pulled up the login screen for a trading account he hadn’t touched in two years, fingers hovering over the keys, he realized with something like surprise that what he was feeling, underneath the pain and the humiliation and the gnawing fear about Friday, was eagerness.

’Alright, System,’ he thought, and typed in his password. ’Prove me wrong.’