New Novel
Chapter 19: Why Isn’t It Working?

Chapter 19: Why Isn’t It Working?

"Hello, pervert."

He didn’t even flinch at it anymore. "Morning to you too." A beat. "How’s your night?"

"It was fine. But..." A short silence ran through the call. "I really didn’t wanna do this, actually."

Something clattered on her end. A cabinet, maybe, shut a little harder than it needed to be.

Adrian’s eyes furrowed a bit. "Do what?"

"I can’t do breakfast today. Manager called me in early, and I haven’t even left yet."

He let that sit a second. "Day one. And you’re already making excuses."

"Excuse me?"

He sat on the bed. Sunk into it.

"I’m just saying." He said. "Strong start to the contract."

"That’s not what’s happening here." Somehow he could hear the eye-roll through the phone. "I’m not skipping it. I’m still cooking. I’ll just do it for dinner instead and bring you some then."

"That’s not the deal."

"It’s breakfast food. At dinner. Same effort, different hour."

"Not good enough."

A pause on her end, short, like she hadn’t expected pushback on this specific point. "...Not good enough?"

He paused for a moment, weighing whether he actually had a real counter or was just enjoying the standoff.

"I don’t just want the food dropped off. I want to actually have dinner with you tonight." He said it plainly, and only heard how much he meant it after the words were already out. "Together. Not you handing me a container through a door."

Silence for a second, long enough that he almost checked if the call had dropped.

He already had his own reasons for wanting tonight to happen anyway. Dinner, whether she called it a favor or not. And she clearly felt bad enough about the morning slipping that this landed harder than it should have.

He was still showing up for his end of things before he’d even collected on his. All she had to do was actually sit across from him instead of leaving food on a table like a transaction.

"Hmm. You keep pushing towards us having dinner. " A beat. "Am I to take it that you’re pitifully lonely or a hentai."

"Those aren’t really reasonable options." He ran a hand through his hair. "But I’d pick the hentai option."

He caught the sound of a faint chuckle ran through from her end.

"Fine." She said it slow, like she was deciding something in real time. "Dinner. Together."

"Good."

"Don’t call it a date."

"Wasn’t going to."

"You were absolutely going to."

"Two friends getting dinner," he said, deadpan. "Nothing more."

"...Right." Something in her voice shifted, just slightly, like she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or mildly offended by how easily he’d agreed to that framing. "Anyway. I actually have to go, my manager’s probably already waiting at the door for me."

"Go." He said. " Don’t get fired over breakfast negotiations."

"This is entirely your fault if I do."

He smiled. Shaking his head slightly.

"Bye, Adrian."

The line went dead.

He sat there a second, phone still against his ear out of habit, before pulling it away and setting it on the mattress beside him.

Dinner, then. Together. Seems their promise was still on anyway.

Wait. That word, promise, snagged on something else entirely on its way past. It took a moment for it to land.

Mom.

Right. He’d promised to call her back last night, and somewhere between the kiss and a system scanning his face in a dark parking lot, that particular promise had gotten buried under everything else the day decided to throw at him.

He called. It rang out, no answer.

He stared at the screen a second, thumb hovering over redial, weighing possible reasons why she might not have picked.

Maybe she was just busy.

Didn’t call back. She’d see the missed call, call when she got a chance. Probably.

He set the phone down. Filed it under handled, and let it go.

Which left the actual point of today.

He opened the system. Daily tasks sat there, same five boxes, still empty across the board. He scrolled past them to the part that mattered.

Nineteen hours and change on the target timer, ticking down the same way it had been since one in the morning, unbothered by the fact that he’d spent half the night unconscious instead of doing anything productive about it.

That got him moving faster than coffee would have.

He’d already burned enough of the clock doing nothing. Time to actually earn one of these boxes.

His eyes caught on the physical activity line before anything else. Ninety minutes, same as yesterday, except yesterday hadn’t been on purpose.

Well. Kinda.

He thought about the gym down the block from Sin’s Peace, briefly, then dismissed it just as fast.

Paying to test whether a supernatural app had actually upgraded his body felt like the wrong kind of experiment to run with a membership fee attached.

If Enhanced Physique actually worked the way the description claimed, his own living room floor would prove it just as well as a fifty-dollar-a-month treadmill would.

He set a timer. Ninety minutes. Started right there in his bland living room, one box still sitting unopened in the corner like a silent judge.

Push-ups first. Easy enough, at first. The specific kind of easy that lulled a person into overconfidence before it turned on them.

Sit-ups after that. Squats. A plank he held longer than he expected to, right up until his arms informed him, without much ceremony, that the honeymoon phase of this experiment was officially over.

He checked the timer.

Still an absurd amount of time left.

He kept going anyway, mostly out of spite at this point, one exercise bleeding into the next with less and less form behind each rep.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, his arms decided they were done whether he liked the idea or not.

He fell back on sit-ups instead, and his core gave him the same verdict soon after.

C’mon. He breathed. You can’t give up so easily.

About twenty minutes left. He could rest up but he really needed to see a tick at one box at the very least before he could permit himself.

His arms and core were out of the game. So that left a run.

Yeah.

A run would finish this out better than another set of squats in a room that was actively starting to feel smaller.

He grabbed his shoes. Got out. Locked the door.

The run started fine. That was the part that always lied to him.

First few blocks felt almost good. Legs loose, morning air still cool enough to make the exertion feel like a decision rather than a punishment.

Then fine turned into something else, somewhere around the point his lungs started sending formal complaints up the chain of command.

Running slid into a slower kind of running, which slid, with no dignity whatsoever, into a jog that barely qualified as one.

He was annoyed his body hadn’t magically become invincible overnight. Apparently a small stat boost didn’t come with cardio included.

He kept moving anyway. Which soon turned to walking. Walking counted. Walking was still forward motion, and forward motion was the entire assignment.

He ended up at a park a few blocks over. Mostly because it had actual pavement instead of street corners, and pavement meant he could keep walking without dodging traffic every ninety seconds.

Sweat-soaked, breathing like a man twice his age, and still technically on the clock.

He checked the timer without slowing down.

Time remaining: 00:38:42

A smile drew on his face. He was almost there. Somewhere in there, the excitement pumped enough into his legs that he found himself walking faster without meaning to.

The timer reached five seconds. He counted down in utter glee. Three. Two. One. Zero.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

DAILY TASKS

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

☐ Eat one proper meal. Preferably in the company of another person. ⓘ

☐ Maintain personal hygiene. ⓘ

☑️ Accumulate 90 minutes of physical activity. ⓘ

☐ Get at least 7 hours of sleep. ⓘ

□ Have at least one meaningful social interaction. ⓘ

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A satisfactory breath left him. One down. Finally. The screen lit up.

Recent Physical Activity Detected.

Estimated time: 90 Minutes.

He smiled. There it is.

Calculating Physical Development.

Calculation Complete.✅

The urgency was gnawing at him as he waited for the enhancement reward message. However. In its stead-

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❗️ERROR ERROR❗️

Skill, Enhanced Physique, Cannot be used at the moment. ⓘ

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He paused. Reread the line just to be sure the message was real. It was.

"The fuck?"