Pain was a bitch.
And the whore kept a calendar, apparently, because she only ever turned up on the exact day a man had many plans.
Park had plans after the gym. Real ones. After the time he’d had with with Emmeline, after how far the’d already pushed things with her — he’d figured the least he could do was finish the night properly, who knew maybe they could’ve taken another major step into their forbidden relationship wth his sister.
And also he’d wanted to settle some of that strange charge building between him and his beautiful guard and push it a little further; finally find out whether Quinn’s professional calm could survive him with nobody else in the room, without Emmeline standing off to one side smiling like she’d bought front-row seats.
That had been the plans.
Then gym happened:
By the time Park dropped into the back seat of the armoured car outside the Foundry, romance was dead, the forbidden seduction too had packed a bag, and every muscle he owned had filed a joint restraining order against movement.
Jacobs had barely pulled into traffic before his head went back against the leather and stayed there.
He remembered Aurora sliding past the tinted window in streaks of gold and white and electric blue. He remembered thinking he should message Jessie before he got home. He might even have unlocked his phone.
After that, nothing. The exhaustion reached into his skull and switched him off at the wall.
He slept the entire drive, woke when they reached the estate, and discovered that getting out of a car had somehow become a boss fight. His legs were still technically attached. They no longer seemed emotionally committed to the arrangement.
Perfect Crown kept him from looking as wrecked as he was, which was impressive work considering Park felt like somebody had dismantled him with gym equipment and then lost the instructions during reassembly.
He still needed Quinn’s shoulder to get up the stairs. By the time she got him into his room, his pride had gone on ahead, packed its own suitcase and relocated to a different wing of the mansion.
Park fell onto the bed and stayed on it.
Quinn worked on the worst of the stiffness — stretching out what Jim had bullied, running her hands over the knots until the pain stopped shouting quite so loudly. Soft where it needed to be soft, firm where his body had tied itself into complaints, and pleasant enough that his remaining plans tried to rise from the dead for roughly thirty seconds.
Then sleep swallowed those too.
Park slept like a baby who had fought eight grown men, lost with honour, and required twelve uninterrupted hours to process the defeat.
The alarm started screaming at six.
Park’s hand came out from under the blanket and came down on it hard enough to nearly send the machine into its next life.
Silence returned.
’Sweet, holy silence.’
He lay there with his face half-buried in the pillow while his mind hovered somewhere between waking up and declaring war on mornings. The room was dark apart from the thin early light bleeding around the curtains, barely enough to outline the furniture.
Quinn must have set it.
He rolled onto his back, blinked at the ceiling, then looked at the empty side of the bed — where some sleepy, stupid part of him had genuinely expected to find Emmeline, stealing most of the blanket and claiming she’d only come in because his mattress was better.
"We’re not there yet, I guess given we just crossed a major boundary."
He pushed the blanket off, swung his legs over the edge, and stood.
Or tried to:
His knees folded so fast he barely caught the mattress before his face could introduce itself to the floor.
"Fuck."
The bitch had stayed the night.
Yesterday had been exhaustion but this was different.
The tiredness had mostly gone, and in its place every muscle Jim had trained had tightened into one continuous complaint. Thighs. Stomach. Shoulders. Calves.
Even his ass had joined the conversation, which felt unnecessary and faintly disrespectful.
Technically this was Park’s first real workout. The body had muscle memory but the mind was still very much a rookie, and the mind, it turned out, could be dramatic as hell about pain it was only expecting.
Underneath the soreness, something else was going on. His legs didn’t feel weak. They felt packed. Tight. Newly awake. His muscles felt like they’d finally worked out that somebody expected them to start paying rent.
The problem was purely his brain, screaming that movement would hurt before he’d moved.
’Well, fuck that.’ Park knew that trick.
He’d met it in acting, in singing, in auditions and rehearsals and every miserable night when running another scene felt pointless because not one person on the planet cared whether he improved.
He’d pushed through then.
Talent had never been enough by itself and he’d known it — he’d worked until lines stopped sounding memorised, until borrowed emotions sat naturally on his face, until songs moved through his breath instead of making him fight for every note.
He could do the same to his body.
Pain wasn’t an order. It was just the body being loud as hell about yesterday.
Park planted both feet and stood again. His legs shook. He stayed up.
"There we go," he muttered. "Quit being a little bitch. We’re walking."
One step. Then another. The first few were ugly, and after that the pain stopped being an argument he could lose. Still there. Still rude. Still crawling up through him whenever he bent too far — but no longer running the room. And underneath it his body felt stronger than yesterday. His balance corrected faster. His feet planted harder. Even standing upright felt more solid, like Jim had gathered up whatever loose pieces were rattling around inside him and hammered them into place.
He rolled one shoulder carefully, stretched an arm across his chest, and called it up.
"Status."
Blue light opened in front of him.
***
[Host Status.]
[Name — Park Nathaniel Bennett
Age — Nineteen
Overall Standing — Tier: Bronze (Unknown)
Public Recognition — 10%
Industry Standing — Unranked
[Physical Attributes:
Strength — 63 / 100
Agility — 65 / 100
Endurance — 60 / 100
Stamina — 76 / 100
Flexibility — 80 / 100
Fatigue — Low, with mild physical soreness
Mood — Determined.]
***
Park stared at it.
"Mmm."
Strength up from 60 to 63 while Endurance from 58 to 60. Stamina from 72 to 76 — four points off one session.
’One session!’
Normal people trained for weeks before they could prove anything had changed at all.
Park had suffered once and woken up with receipts.
Perfect Crown had absorbed all of it; the running, the sled, the kettlebells, the ropes, the farmer’s carries — even the humiliating plank he’d missed by twenty damn seconds.
Every bit of it had gone into his body and stayed there.
He opened the inventory and looked at the two Gold Insta-Boost cards sitting inside.
He’d been tempted. Very tempted. One card could lift the entire Physical category at once, and after being handed a body like this, the idea of turning it into something genuinely unreasonable had obvious appeal.
But why burn them now?
Three points here. Four points there, from one afternoon of being politely dismantled by a professional. Give gym and even Jim a week or a month and the bastard might accidentally build him into a special effect.
A few months and Park wouldn’t just look good on screen — he’d move well.
Run without looking desperate. Fight without moving like a man who’d learned the choreography that morning. Climb, carry, fall, survive an action sequence, walk shirtless into frame and make every gym membership in the Empire feel personally insufficient.
The cards could wait. Cards were cheats, and cheats were for when honest effort had stopped working — not for skipping a road that was already throwing rewards at his feet.
"No fucking way," he murmured, closing the inventory. "You two are staying right there."
Then his eyes drifted back up the panel and stopped.
[Public Recognition — 10%.]
Yesterday morning it had been zero point nine; not even one full percent.
"What the fuck?"
He leaned in, as though the number might get nervous under scrutiny and admit it was lying. It didn’t move.
His tier hadn’t changed, [Bronze (Unknown)] still sat there with that little parenthetical mocking him, the System reminding him that the overwhelming majority of the Empire had no idea he existed.
But ten percent was not nothing.
Ten percent was a goddamn jump.
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