Chapter 985: Becoming

And it was all working for her ultimate plan.

It was like showing people of Earth

an alien

they all suspected existed, in this case though, it was

a

god

and a few humans had seen him before she made sure everyone else should too.

And then the firsthand accounts started surfacing.

People who’d actually

seen Eros

before. In person. In Miami. Walking the streets with Amanda and his entourage, turning heads on sidewalks, making traffic slow down not because of congestion but because drivers forgot they were driving.

In

restaurants.

In

hotel

lobbies.

Anywhere he’d existed in public, someone had been watching, and now those someones had a reason to speak.

They commented. They posted. They made videos.

The firsthand accounts all shared one detail ARIA hadn’t planted: the physical reaction. Every single person who’d encountered Eros in the flesh described the same thing — a heat in the chest, a feeling of being in a presence of something else, a moment where the air changed.

They used different words for it.

Some called it being in existence of something beyond human, godly charisma. Some called it energy.

One woman in a Miami shop where he’d once bought strawberry milk, her review described it as

"walking into a room and forgetting every being I’d ever met."

A hotel concierge in South Beach where Eros had once been with Ava after killing Dmitri, wrote three paragraphs about how he’d held a door open for Eros and spent the rest of his shift unable to concentrate.

These weren’t the ads. These were the witnesses. And their testimony was converting skeptics faster than anything.

One particular

video

gained traction faster than anything Eros would’ve seeded—and this one was organic.

A someone had recorded it on her phone, shaky and candid, clearly never expecting it to become anything. It showed a supermarket. A woman at the checkout counter, face crumbling as she realized she’d come with less money than she needed.

The line behind her growing. People shifting weight from foot to foot.

A few mutterings. One man—

loud,

deliberate, the kind of person who mistook cruelty and disrespect for comedy

—making a comment about holding up the line.

And then Eros stepped in.

Casual. Unhurried. Like it wasn’t even a decision. He just appeared beside the woman, handed his card to the cashier, and paid. Didn’t make a speech. Didn’t wait for thanks. Didn’t perform it. Just did it and moved on after wishing her a good day.

What the woman didn’t know Peter had been with Linda worse and this had happened to her when she forgot her wallet home and people in the line had really humiliated right when her son was standing next to her.

Seeing her like that had brought back some memories that he’d paused getting his milk and helped her out.

Standing beside him patiently, partially visible at the edge of the frame, was a woman whose face ARIA had

blurred

into obscurity before the video ever hit the public.

Soo-Jin.

She’d been very clear about it. Crystal clear, in that terrifying, soft-spoken way of hers that somehow carried more weight than shouting.

"That’s how you blow your shadow cover,"

she’d told ARIA.

"I want no exposure. None. Zero. Not a pixel of my face on anyone’s screen."

ARIA had respected it. Not just because Soo-Jin asked. Because Soo-Jin was the kind of woman whose requests weren’t really requests.

More videos resurfaced after that. Other moments. Other encounters. Eros—being kind in ways that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the man he’d been before the abilities, before the System, before any of it.

Holding doors.

ARIA boosted every single one.

Because this was the other half of the equation. The face got them in the door. The body held their attention. But the kindness? The humanity? The down-to-earth, mannered,

real

quality that people couldn’t fake and couldn’t buy?

That was what made them stay.

That was what turned

fascination into devotion

.

And

devotion

was what ARIA was building.

And much to Peter’s annoyance—

or whatever mild version of annoyance a man living his life could summon

—the interview requests started flooding in.

Television networks. Morning shows. Late-night desks. Cable news culture segments. Podcasts ranging from the legitimate to the laughable. YouTube channels with subscriber counts in the tens of millions. Print magazines. Digital features. Everyone wanted Eros.

Everyone wanted fifteen minutes.

Everyone wanted to be the first to sit across from him and ask the questions the internet was already screaming.

ARIA logged 2,847 formal interview requests in four days. She categorized them by reach, demographic alignment, editorial tone, and strategic value. Built a ranked matrix. Presented Peter with the top forty.

He’d looked at the list for exactly six seconds.

"No."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

He turned them all down.

Every single one.

Not out of arrogance—though the arrogance was certainly available if he needed it.

Scarcity was the most powerful currency in the

attention

economy, and ARIA had taught him that, or maybe he’d always known it and she’d simply given him the language.

The more he said no, the more they wanted him. The more they wanted him, the higher the value of the eventual yes.

And the eventual yes went to one outlet only:

Rivera Next Media.

His only partnered media entity. The glass and steel tower in downtown LA with the Rivera family crest visible from two blocks away —

The

Empress Catalina’s

empire. The media hydra he’d chosen to adopt rather than build from scratch. The only platform he trusted to handle the narrative correctly—which meant handling it the way ARIA had already written it.

And even then, it wasn’t going to be live. Recorded. Edited. Controlled. Every frame approved before it reached a single screen.

Peter wasn’t in mood to do

live.

ARIA had already drafted the interview framework. Forty-seven questions. Fourteen approved. The rest existed as decoys — questions the interviewer would think they’d chosen freely, each one steering the conversation toward exactly the narrative ARIA wanted aired.

The interviewer wouldn’t know. Would think they were conducting journalism. Would feel proud of the hard-hitting follow-ups they’d landed.

Every one of those follow-ups had been

pre-written

by an ASI who understood human psychology better than the species understood itself.

On the other hand, while ARIA waged her invisible war on the world’s

attention span

and Peter spent his afternoons pretending he was a normal man on normal dates with his

not-at-all-normal

women,

two jets

were being

prepped for Paris.

The first sat on the tarmac at

Lincoln Heights Airport.

Sleek. Private. The kind of aircraft that didn’t appear on public flight logs because the people who owned it preferred their movements to remain theoretical.

The second was at the

Ghost Mansion

. Waiting for him. And for the entire entourage he was bringing with him.

This one was different.

And Paris—beautiful, arrogant, ancient Paris, the city that believed it had seen everything—had absolutely no idea what was coming.