The days began to blur into one another.
Damon slipped into a routine so exact it barely felt human anymore. He woke at [5:00], reached the gym by six, and moved through weights, cardio, and bodyweight circuits with a kind of relentless focus that left room for little else.
Every session pushed a little further than the last, the numbers on the bar creeping upward from forty kilograms to fifty, then sixty.
His body responded faster than it had any right to, the potions rewriting his muscle fibers while he slept.
Then ca the shower, breakfast, and classes he had long since morized.
At midday, he trained again, shorter sessions this ti, but harder. Another vial disappeared between lectures. Then ca the evening workout after dinner, followed by one more potion before bed.
Through it all, the golden screen pulsed steadily beside his life, marking each al, each rep, each hour of rest.
[TASK PROGRESS: 5.1%] beca [8.7%] beca [14.3%].
The numbers started to lose their aning after a while. What mattered was the direction.
Up.
Always up.
Lena brought the first batch of twenty vials on a Tuesday, catching him outside the dining hall with a paper bag in hand and a warning not to drink them all at once.
He had laughed.
She hadn’t.
The second batch ca a week later. Then the third.
By the middle of the second week, Damon had stopped counting individual reps. Instead, he watched the percentages. Three-tenths here. Two-tenths there.
Small gains layered on top of one another, passive growth accumulating overnight while he slept, his body steadily rebuilding itself into sothing different from what it had been before.
Matthew Voss cornered him once during that stretch, appearing at his elbow in the corridor with two lackeys at his back.
"Still playing gym rat, Persival? I heard you’ve been living in the weight room. Almost looks like you’ve put on a little muscle. Too bad it won’t—"
"Move."
The word ca out flat, stripped of anger and stripped of fear.
At that mont, Damon simply didn’t have space in him to care. His mind was fixed on one thing only: progress. The only interruptions he was willing to tolerate were Lena and als.
Matthew was neither.
Matthew blinked. His lackeys exchanged uncertain glances. The silence dragged on just long enough to turn uncomfortable, and then Damon walked past them, leaving the three of them standing there in the corridor.
The bullying didn’t end after that, but it changed shape. It beca less direct, reduced to muttered comnts from across the room and sideways looks in the dining hall.
Matthew was still a problem, but he had beco a problem Damon no longer had ti for.
The gym beca the place that felt most like his second ho. The students who had once sneered at him now kept their distance, and Harris, the one who had called him a systemless freak, had taken to using the treadmill farthest from whichever station Damon occupied.
Not out of fear.
Out of sothing closer to uncertainty.
The person moving through that space was no longer the sa one who had shuffled through it a month ago.
And people were beginning to notice.
By the end of the third week, Damon caught his reflection in the locker room mirror and stopped.
The face was the sa. The tired eyes were still there. His hair still needed cutting. But underneath that, his body had changed. His shoulders had broadened.
His arms now filled the sleeves of his compression shirt. The outline of abs showed faintly beneath the fabric, not defined yet, but visible enough to matter.
He flexed his bicep.
The muscle tightened, solid and, to Damon’s absolute delight, real.
[TASK PROGRESS: 31.2%]
"Not bad," he muttered.
Then he went back to work.
***
Lena noticed, of course.
"You’re eating like a horse," she said one evening, watching him demolish a third helping of roasted chicken in the dining hall. "And you’ve gone up a shirt size."
"Wardrobe malfunction?"
"You wish. You’re filling out. It’s subtle, but I have eyes." She stabbed a piece of broccoli with her fork. "The others are starting to notice too. Harris asked if you were using enhancent potions."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you’re finally being healthy. Which is technically true."
Damon almost smiled. "Technically."
"I’m very good at technically." She chewed, swallowed, then fixed him with that sharp, searching look of hers. "You’re not going to tell what’s actually happening, are you?"
"Not yet."
"Fine. But when you do, I expect details, and I an copious details."
"I’ll see what I can do."
***
Week four arrived with rain. Cold, driving sheets of it that turned the training grounds into mud and sent most students hurrying indoors. Damon ran through it anyway.
Six kiloters beneath the downpour, shoes striking flooded cobblestones, lungs burning with that familiar ache he had long since learned to welco.
That morning, he had decided to change his warm-up and skip the treadmill entirely.
By the ti he reached the gym, soaked to the bone, the system pulsed with the notification he had been waiting for.
[TASK PROGRESS: 50.0%]
Halfway.
He stood alone in the empty locker room, water dripping from his hair onto the tile floor, and stared at the number.
Fifty percent.
A month ago, he had been at zero.
A month ago, he had been a corpse on a hospital bed, his heart stopped twice, his future reduced to logistics forms and the quiet shape of failure.
Now he stood halfway to sothing no one else in the world possessed.
"What happens at one hundred?" he asked the empty room.
The system, as always, gave him nothing.
But the golden screen pulsed once, warm and steady, and for a mont Damon could have sworn it felt almost anticipatory.
"Hopefully sothing good."
***
The final push began a few days later.
He increased his weights again. Sixty-five kilograms on the bench press, then seventy. His body scread, his muscles tearing and rebuilding faster than nature had ever intended.
The potions moved through his system four tis a day now, Lena’s batches supplented by the occasional store-bought D-Rank draught whenever he wanted to push harder.
His savings dwindled. Nineteen hundred credits beca fourteen hundred, then nine hundred. He didn’t care. Money was a resource, and resources existed to be used.
And if the system finally awakened, he could earn it back soon enough.
[55.3%]
[61.8%]
[70.1%]
The final week was brutal.
He trained three tis a day, then four. Lena started leaving potions outside his door without comnt, paper bags appearing like clockwork every other morning.
She had stopped asking questions. She only watched now, her sharp gaze following his progress with sothing that seed to hover sowhere between concern and pride.
Once, in the dining hall, he caught Matthew staring at him from across the room. Their eyes t, and for the first ti, Matthew looked away first.
[85.4%]
[92.7%]
[98.1%]
On the thirty-fourth day since he had first stepped into the gym, Damon woke at [4:52] before his alarm could sound. The sky outside his window was still dark, the campus silent except for the distant hum of generators.
For the first ti in weeks, he had a hard ti sleeping. But compared to bad studying habits from the past, this ti it was excitent keeping him awake.
He checked the system.
[TASK PROGRESS: 99.4%]
Today was finally the day.
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