Chapter 137 - Gaining the Powers of Women He Awakened

The system text dissolved the way it always did.

Like breath on glass. There one moment, gone the next, leaving only the knowledge behind — permanent, integrated, filed into the architecture of what he was the way a new room gets added to a house you already live in.

He didn’t look at the notifications long.

He’d learned in his previous life that the system was bookkeeping. Useful bookkeeping, the kind that told you where you stood, but the numbers didn’t matter as much as what you did with them.

He already knew what he’d acquired.

He’d felt each bloodline the moment the women broke — felt the Phoenix bloodline unfurl inside his chest like something that had been folded up and was finally allowed to extend, felt the warmth of it become a ’knowing’ of fire, felt the other acquisitions from the other women he’d walked through stack beneath it.

He ran a quiet internal tally.

The pheromone architecture.

The telekinesis already present from birth, as if refined across a previous life’s worth of use.

The toxin immunity picked up from Hana’s specific biology.

The enhanced physical architecture — speed, strength, the body that didn’t cooperate with injury the way normal bodies did.

The territorial marking system.

The memory threading that let him walk through someone’s head like a house when they were far enough under.

And now: fire.

Pyrokinesis. Active control. The absolute authority over existing flame rather than just generating it.

Thermal immunity that meant the planet’s temperature could do nothing to him that he hadn’t already accounted for.

He put two or three heroes combined in the back of his mind as an underestimate and moved on.

The rain was still coming down.

He tucked himself back in. The motion was entirely practical, the way you put a tool away when you’re done with it for the moment.

He looked at Veronica in the mud. At Elena. At Victor’s kneeling, still, eyes-open body with the blood drying from his nose.

Then he looked up.

Marga stood at the cemetery gate.

She’d been there — he’d been aware of her for the last twenty minutes, positioned at the edge of the scene with the particular stillness of a woman watching something she’s processing in real time and hasn’t finished processing yet.

Her clothes were intact.

She’d stayed back. She had the expression she used when she was doing rapid internal calculation and hadn’t arrived at an answer she was comfortable with.

She opened her mouth.

"’You shouldn’t have been so—’"

She stopped.

She stopped because his eyes found hers across the distance and the sentence simply — stalled, the way an engine stalls when the key is cut. She looked at him. He was walking toward her now, bare feet on the wet cemetery grass, unhurried, pulling his shirt back over his shoulders.

She looked back at Victor’s body.

At the women in the mud.

At him.

Closed her mouth. Recalibrated.

"’That man,’" Raven said, stopping in front of her, "’if he’d met a different outcome today — if you want to call it surviving — would have been transmigrated.’"

Marga blinked.

"’Transmitted?’"

"’Transmigrated. Pulled from this world to another. The system would have found him eventually — they always find the ones with latent architecture. And in that other world, with the right catalyst, he’d have developed power that would have compounded.’" He looked back briefly at Victor. "’Gotten women. Killed men who had things he wanted. Built something ugly and called it conquest. By the time he was done with that world, he’d have come back to this one with enough accumulated ability to be a genuine problem.’"

Marga stared at Victor’s body.

At the still, kneeling shape of him in the mud.

"’That’s—’" She shook her head. Slowly. "’That’s not — you can’t know that—’"

"’I’ve seen it before.’"

The sentence was delivered without elaboration, with the flat certainty of a man describing something he witnessed rather than hypothesized. He didn’t offer more. She looked at his face looking for the lie and didn’t find one, which was its own kind of unsettling.

"’That’s impossible,’" she said. But her voice had already dropped the conviction out of it by the end. It landed as a question.

"’Forget about it,’" he said. "’Follow me. I need you to find details on someone specific.’"

Marga straightened. The professional shift of it — automatic, trained, the body moving into its working posture before the mind had fully caught up. She looked at his face. Then, briefly, at his body. At the fact that he was still damp from the rain, still wearing what he’d arrived in, thoroughly unbothered by any of the last several hours.

She’d expected — something else. Some continuation of the evening’s pattern. His eyes dropping to her body, his hands moving toward her clothing, the escalating inevitability she’d been both dreading and doing the math on since the pool. She’d braced for it twice already and twice he’d simply looked at her like she was staff and given her instructions.

She wasn’t sure what to do with that.

She nodded.

"’Good.’"

He turned back to the cemetery.

Both women were still down. Veronica hadn’t moved — her chest rising and falling with the steady breathing of someone genuinely unconscious, not performing, her body having decided that complete shutdown was the appropriate response to the evening’s proceedings. The bite marks on her breast and shoulder were red against her pale skin. Her red hair spread across the mud like something decorative.

Elena was slightly more conscious — or trending that direction, her eyes moving under their lids, her fingers curling once in the mud.

He crouched briefly beside them both.

Then stood.

He lifted Veronica first.

One hand — his left — finding the underside of her thighs, the other at her back, and he pulled her off the ground with the ease of lifting something that weighed exactly what he’d planned for. Her body settled over his left shoulder, her hip against his collarbone, her legs hanging in front of him, her breasts pressing against his shoulder blade. The thick, soft weight of her — substantial, real, the body of a woman who had stopped apologizing for occupying space — draped over him without friction.

He moved to Elena.

Right shoulder. Same motion. She made a small sound as she left the ground — a half-conscious protest that dissolved before it became a word — and her body arranged itself over his right shoulder with the boneless compliance of someone between sleep and waking. Her thighs hung against his chest. The destroyed remnants of her dress hung from her in strips.

He stood.

Both women. One on each shoulder. His arms hooked around the backs of their thighs, his hands resting on their asses with the casual, proprietary grip of a man carrying objects he owns. Their bodies — Veronica’s thick and substantial on his left, Elena’s smaller and lighter on his right — draped against his back in a way that would have been challenging for most men and was not challenging for him.

He looked ahead.

Marga was staring.

At the image he presented. At the specific tableau of it — him, upright, unbothered, two naked women on his shoulders like he’d done inventory and was carrying the results to the next location.

She made a sound that wasn’t entirely professional.

He started walking.