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Chapter 18: A Surprising Good Pull

Chapter 18: A Surprising Good Pull

He stared at the countdown a second longer, red numbers ticking away without any apparent concern for the hour.

He blinked the intensity out of his stare.

Not doing this at two in the morning.

Whatever the system wanted from him could wait for daylight, when he had a functioning brain and slightly less contempt for his own life choices. He closed the mission panel.

That was when he noticed the reward still sitting unopened at the bottom of the screen.

2× C-Rank Gacha Pull Available

Right. He’d forgotten about that somewhere between the money and the consent requirement giving him a minor existential crisis.

Curiosity won anyway. It usually did.

He opened it.

The interface loaded. A wheel, gold-rimmed, entries glowing a bit too bright to read individually. He pressed the button before he could second-guess whether two in the morning was really the time for this.

The wheel spun. Rewards flickered by in a blur of icons he didn’t have time to catalogue. It slowed. Slowed further. Landed.

C-Rank Skill Acquired!

Nutritional Multiplier: C-Rank

The Host receives 200% more nutritional value from consumed food.

He read it once. Then again.

...So I got an eating skill.

Not entirely useless, if he was being fair about it. Food already had a starring role in this system’s vocabulary, apparently. Just not exactly the kind of reward that made a guy sit up in bed.

Not what I was hoping for.

He let the phone drop onto the mattress beside him and stared at the ceiling instead.

Not exactly useless, if he squinted. Probably useful eventually. But compared with what he could have walked away with...

Barely cleared the bar.

He decided it wasn’t worth another second of his dwindling energy and let the thought go.

He lay there for a while, staring at nothing in particular, the ceiling doing absolutely nothing to earn that much attention.

Then his eyes drifted back toward the phone sitting a few inches from his hand.

He reached for it. Not because he expected the second pull to be any better. Mostly because leaving a free pull sitting there unclaimed felt like a specific kind of stupid he wasn’t willing to commit to tonight.

Might as well see how bad the next one is.

He opened it again. Pressed pull.

The wheel spun a second time, considerably less compelling now that he’d already seen what "disappointing" looked like on this screen. He watched it slow with roughly the enthusiasm of someone waiting for a microwave to finish.

It stopped.

C-Rank Skill Acquired

Enhanced Physique: C-Rank

Description:The Host’s body gains significantly greater physical development from exercise. Physical training will produce enhanced gains in strength, muscle development, and overall physique.

He sat up.

Read it again, slower this time, actually paying attention now.

Oh.

This one earned an entire posture change. He glanced back at the first skill, then at this one, doing quick math on how the two might actually stack.

Okay. That’s actually good.

A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one all night that hadn’t come with an asterisk attached.

Maybe the system hadn’t completely screwed him over after all. Just made him sit through the disappointing one first, apparently for dramatic effect.

The screen shifted immediately.

Skill Integration Initiated.

Analyzing Recent Physical Activity.

His eyebrows lifted. A progress bar crawled across the screen.

Recent Physical Activity Detected.

Estimated time: 90 Minutes.

He paused. He immediately remembered the boxes. The stairs. The mattress that had nearly won the fight against him twice.

You’re counting that?

The system didn’t dignify it with a response, just kept going.

Calculating Physical Development.

Calculation Complete.✅

Growth Enhancement Applied.

He waited.

Nothing happened. He looked at his hands. Still nothing. Flexed his fingers, just to be thorough about it. Nothing there either.

Mm...Is that it?

He got up, pulled his shirt off on the way to the bathroom, mostly out of morbid curiosity than any real expectation of finding something different staring back at him.

He stood in front of the mirror and turned sideways.

Arms. Shoulders. Chest. He looked for a long moment, the specific kind of looking that only made sense if you already suspected there was something to find.

There was a difference. Small enough that he’d have walked right past it on any other early morning.

A little more definition along the shoulder, a line that hadn’t quite been there yesterday. Not a transformation. Not some overnight action-hero upgrade. Just enough to confirm the system hadn’t been bluffing.

He turned slightly again.

...Huh.

Touched his shoulder. Then his stomach. Nothing felt different under his own hand, which made the mirror’s version of events feel almost more convincing. His jawline looked a little sharper too, now that he was checking.

Holy shit. It actually works.

A slow grin spread across his face, the first uncomplicated one all night.

Fuck yeah.

He looked at his own reflection a moment longer, cataloguing the two rewards now sitting in his corner.

Nutritional Multiplier. Enhanced Physique.

One made the food he ate worth more. The other made every hour of training worth more. Eat more. Train more. Get more out of both.

He nodded slowly, mostly to himself, mostly satisfied.

Okay. Not bad.

He returned to his bed.

Then his mind drifted back to the number sitting in his bank app, and the grin came back easier this time.

And I’m still up two thousand dollars.

That settled it, as far as he was concerned. There was nothing left to complain about.

He swiped the app away. The interface folded itself back into nothing, and he was just a guy sitting on a bed again, shirt still off, room quiet in the way rooms only got at whatever ungodly hour it currently was.

He opened his banking app out of habit more than doubt.

$2,092.34, sitting there same as before. He refreshed it anyway.

Still there.

He leaned back against the headboard and let the whole day run past him one more time before sleep could claim it.

Moving in. The dumpster. The kiss. Dinner. A fake relationship with a girl whose name he’d learned less than twelve hours ago.

A system. Two thousand dollars. A clock that hadn’t stopped counting since.

He let out a slow breath.

What a ridiculous day.

===

Morning light found its way through the curtains before he did.

For a few seconds he just existed, blank, unbothered, the specific peace of not yet remembering anything.

Then it all arrived at once, in order. The system, the money, Rose, the target, the clock still counting down somewhere on his phone.

Right. The mission.

He grabbed his phone. It lit up.

6:04 a.m.

He’d slept for about four hours. That was probably enough.

He got up. His body felt noticeably less wrecked than it should’ve after yesterday. No stiffness in his shoulders, no lingering burn from the stairs.

He rolled one shoulder experimentally, testing for the soreness that should’ve been there and wasn’t.

That recovery skill isn’t bad either.

He headed for the bathroom, already half-convinced this day owed him at least one thing going smoothly.

He brushed his teeth without paying much attention to his own reflection. He’d already done the full inspection last night, and there wasn’t much point running the same lap twice. Same face, same faint sharpness along the jaw from yesterday, nothing new to catalogue.

He spat, rinsed, and was reaching for a shirt in the bedroom when his phone started buzzing from somewhere on the bed.

He walked over. Picked it up.

☎️Calling=> Unknown Number.

He stared at the screen a second. Normally this was an automatic decline. Calls from a blocked number rarely turned out to be worth the thirty seconds.

He picked up. Not sure why. "Hello?"

A brief silence on the other end.

Then a voice he recognized instantly, no name required, no number saved.

"Hello, pervert."

He went still.

Rose.

Something in his expression shifted before he’d consciously decided to let it.