Chapter 245: 245 | My Fake Aspect Sounds Lonely [GT BONUS]
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. A smile appeared on his face like sunrise over a landscape that did not get much sun. Small and genuine and entirely unprepared for itself.
"Thank you." He cleared his throat. "Your turn. What does Phantom Touch want?"
Right.
My fake Aspect. The cover story I’d constructed from stolen abilities and a registration system that couldn’t detect the System running beneath everything I did. Phantom Touch was supposed to be a mid-tier Channeler variant, a telekinetic projection system with moderate output and limited range. That was the file. That was what every instructor at this academy believed about me.
But Dravid had asked what the Aspect wanted.
And for one stupid, reckless moment, I considered telling the truth.
Not about the System. Not about the transmigration or the gacha or the fact that every ability I possessed had been purchased with currency generated by making women fall for me. But about the feeling. The interior experience of carrying power that nobody knew about, of holding back in every room I entered, of wearing a skin that fit the body but not the thing living inside it.
The silence between what I could do and what I was allowed to show.
That was real. That part wasn’t a lie.
"It wants more room," I said.
Percy’s pen hovered.
"Phantom Touch feels like having arms that extend past where my body ends," I continued. "The constructs reach further than my hands can, grab things my fingers can’t touch, interact with the world at distances my physical body was never designed to cover. And every time I use it, I feel the limit. Fifteen feet. That’s the range. And the Aspect wants more. It pushes against that boundary like something trapped in a space too small for it, and I can feel it asking me to let it go further."
I paused. Looked at my hands resting on the desk surface.
"It wants to fill the space between me and everything I can’t reach."
Percy wrote for thirty seconds without stopping. When he finished, he read back what he’d written, nodded once to confirm it matched what I’d said, and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t fully decode.
"That sounds lonely," he said.
The Oracle Feed remained silent. No gauge notification. No strategic recommendation. No snarky commentary about optimization or progression vectors.
Just Percy Mendoza, sitting in an Aspect Theory classroom with his notebook and his anxiety and his terrifyingly accurate read on the human being sitting next to him, telling me that the lie I’d just told about my fake Aspect sounded lonely.
He wasn’t wrong.
He just didn’t know that the loneliness was real even if the Aspect wasn’t.
Across the room, other pairs conducted their own conversations with varying degrees of success. Caden and Marco appeared to have deviated from the assignment entirely and were now arguing about whether light could technically be lonely or whether that constituted anthropomorphization of photons. Felicity spoke to her partner with the focused warmth she brought to everything, her hands gesturing as she described what illusions felt like from the inside. Rina had been paired with Nyx, and from the look on Rina’s face, Nyx had said something that landed harder than expected, because Rina’s purple eyes were wide and her tail had wrapped around her own leg in the protective curl I’d come to recognize as her processing something emotionally significant.
Petra sat in the top row with her arms crossed and her partner looking increasingly uncomfortable.
Dravid watched all of it from the demonstration floor, leaning on his cane, his gold eyes moving between pairs with the slow, deliberate attention of someone reading a room the way Percy read maps. Finding the paths. Identifying the bottlenecks. Seeing where the conversations flowed and where they got stuck.
When his gaze reached me again, it paused. Not as long as before. Just long enough to communicate that he had heard what I said to Percy or that he hadn’t needed to hear it because he already knew.
I held the eye contact until he moved on.
The hour passed faster than any hour of my life at Halloran so far. When Dravid called time and dismissed the class without collecting our written responses, the absence of a grade or assessment felt deliberate. The exercise had never been about producing a document for evaluation. It had been about forcing twenty teenagers with dangerous abilities to sit across from another person and say something honest about the thing living inside them.
I stood and gathered my tablet. Percy closed his notebook with the careful reverence of someone protecting something valuable, and Rina stood beside him, her mug in one hand and her tail swaying in the gentle motion that meant she was calm.
"That was different from what I expected," she said quietly.
"Different good or different bad?" I asked.
She considered this with the seriousness she brought to everything, her purple eyes looking inward before looking at me.
"Different necessary."
We walked out of Room 218 together, the three of us falling into a formation that had become natural without anyone deciding it should be. Percy in the middle with his notebook, Rina on his left with her mug, and me on the right with my fake Aspect and my real loneliness and the gold eyes of Cole Dravid still pressing against the back of my skull like a question I wasn’t ready to answer.
My phone buzzed. Sloane.
You never answered my question about the hot teacher.
I typed back.
Different class. Different instructor. Male. Very old. Uses a cane.
...is HE hot?
Sloane.
I’m asking for science.
Through the bond, I felt her laughter before the message arrived. Warm and sharp and entirely herself.
I pocketed the phone and kept walking.
The sun had shifted while we were inside, angling past noon and flooding the covered walkway with the aggressive California gold that made everything on campus look like a recruitment poster for a life I was still pretending to deserve. Students from both cohorts moved along the paths in clusters, their uniforms catching the light and their voices carrying the particular energy of people discovering the shape of their own futures for the first time.
Somewhere across campus, Sloane was demolishing whatever training exercise Hale had given her cohort and thinking about me between detonations. Somewhere in a high-rise office downtown, Diane was managing Victor Sterling’s latest publicity disaster and checking the tracking app she thought I didn’t know about. Somewhere in the 1-B common room, Felicity was planning our next shopping trip and Camille was sharpening her observations about me into questions she intended to deploy at maximum inconvenience.
And here, walking between a boy who organized his world into notebooks and a girl who apologized for her own existence, I headed toward a cafeteria that served better ramen than most restaurants I’d visited in either of my lives, carrying a fake identity and real friendships and the growing certainty that Cole Dravid had just looked straight through the cover I’d spent three months building and seen something underneath that the file could not explain.
The System remained quiet.
I liked it better that way.
