Chapter 433| An Epic-Tier Backrub

Chapter 433: 433| An Epic-Tier Backrub

The clock on his phone read 10:47 when Jordan finally stopped pretending he was going to fall asleep.

Chloe had passed out against his shoulder forty minutes ago, one leg hooked over his and her hand splayed flat on his chest, right over the spot where his heartbeat lived. She always slept like this now. Like she’d staked a claim and the claim came with property lines. Her breathing was slow and heavy, the kind that meant she was fully under, past the point where his phone screen would wake her. The blue streak in her hair had come loose from whatever she’d done to it earlier and it curved across her cheek like a comma. Without the brown contacts, her lashes cast little shadows in the harbor light bleeding through the factory windows.

The Platinum Gacha screen glowed against the dark. Golden border, that stupid pulsing shimmer the System used to remind him that yes, this was special, yes, he should be excited, no, he could not simply close the app and go to sleep like a normal person.

Pull it. Whatever happens, we deal with it together.

Chloe had said it right before she brushed her teeth, matter-of-fact, like she was telling him to take out the trash. Then she’d climbed into bed, tucked herself against him, and left the decision sitting in his hands where it had been sitting for three days.

He’d waited until she was asleep. That decision sat in his chest the same way a lie did, small and specific, the kind of thing he could dress up with reasonable excuses but couldn’t quite hide from himself. Some part of him, a part that had been carved out across eighteen years of watching good things fall apart in his hands, did not want a witness for what came next.

The last time he’d pulled from a box this expensive, the System had dropped a fully staffed hot springs resort into his life. Six women who called him Master without irony. A general manager whose kimono operated on principles that made textile engineers weep. Before that, it had been the Tune Up trait that rebuilt him from the skeleton outward, turned his body into something that could keep up with the life he was somehow living now.

Platinum was a tier above anything he’d touched before. No precedent. No pattern to follow.

His life was, for the first time ever, sort of working.

Two girlfriends who wanted him. Not his wallet. Him. A kid coming in September that he’d made on purpose, with intent, with a woman who looked at him like he’d hung the moon and then immediately made fun of him for thinking he’d hung the moon. A business that existed on paper and would exist in physical space in two weeks. Real space. With employees and inventory and a lease agreement his father had called "ambitious but achievable," which was the closest David McKnight came to saying he was proud.

There were problems, sure. Human-shaped problems. Madison on his trail. Jessie counting down on a quest timer he hadn’t figured out how to approach yet. Alexis breaking down at four in the morning in his apartment, her perfect armor cracked open, trusting him to hold the pieces together while she figured out who she was underneath it.

But those were problems he understood. They had faces. Motivations. Solutions that involved words and time and occasionally showing up with coffee.

The System specialized in the other kind. The kind that spawned tumbleweeds during arguments and installed buffs that made his sister want to climb him like a tree. The kind that handed him solutions he never asked for and then sat back to watch him figure out how to live with them.

So basically, he thought, I’m about to gamble on a slot machine that once gave me the ability to have unlimited sex and once gave me the ability to make a plant roll past me when things get awkward.

His thumb hovered.

Chloe shifted against him, murmured something that might have been a number, and pressed her face harder into the crook of his neck.

Jordan pressed the button.

The animation started the way they all did, gold spilling across the screen from a single point at the center. Except this time it kept going. The light spiraled outward, fractured into a dozen threads, and reformed into something that looked less like a spinning wheel and more like a slowly opening flower made of circuitry. The phone got hot against his palm. Then cold. The room temperature dropped a degree, enough that the hair on his forearms lifted, enough that Chloe frowned in her sleep and burrowed closer for warmth.

The vibration started.

It wasn’t the sharp buzz of a notification or the long drone of a call. It came in a rhythm, two beats close together and then a pause, two beats and a pause, steady and organic and unsettling in a way Jordan couldn’t name. Like the phone had grown a pulse. Like it was matching itself to something.

Okay. That’s new. That’s deeply new. If this thing starts breathing I’m throwing it into the harbor.

The gold contracted. The flower folded in on itself, tighter and tighter, until it was a single point again, and then it snapped outward one final time and left a card floating in the center of the screen.

The border was ornate. Heavier than anything he’d pulled before, all interlocking lines and small symbols that looked vaguely medical and vaguely religious at the same time. Two hands, palm-up, cradled the text.

[Master Massage]

|Epic Skill|

You are a master masseuse, better than any mortal can be. Your massages can even heal injuries and ailments, your massages are therapeutic and cause immense pleasure and comfort. Even the bodies of gods are like putty in your hands.

Jordan read it once.

Then he read it again, because his brain had encountered the phrase "even the bodies of gods" and needed a second pass to confirm the System was, in fact, this dramatic about a back rub.

A massage skill. I saved a Platinum pull for three days, worked myself into an anxiety spiral, waited until my pregnant girlfriend was unconscious so she couldn’t watch me panic, and the reward is that I’m now really good at massages.

He stared at the ceiling.

Not super strength. Not the ability to un-know things about my ex. Not a trait that deletes my sister’s memory of the last six weeks of credit card statements. Masseur. I’m a masseur now. Epic tier. The System looked at my life, all the chaos, all the moving parts, and went, you know what this man needs? Better hands.

Except.

Except the warmth was already starting.