Chapter 90: Five Wives for an S-Rank Support and a Kiss

Chapter 90: Chapter 90: Five Wives for an S-Rank Support and a Kiss

The kiss didn’t feel different or strange this time.

That was the part that unsettled me more than the act itself.

No jolt of wrongness, no immediate instinct to pull back, no echo of Gianna’s anchor flaring in protest.

Just contact, heat, the faint taste that still lingered from her blood, and the registration that my body had already begun filing Rei Lawless under something familiar.

Am I getting used to her too?

The bracelet on my wrist blinked twice, sharp red, then amber, before settling back to its usual restrained green.

Rei noticed immediately. Her eyes flicked down to the band, then up to my face.

"Has that happened before?"

I shook my head.

"First time."

"Ooh. Nice."

She stepped away without further comment, walked to the mirrored wall, and slid down until she was sitting against it.

She pulled a bottle from her bag, cracked it open, and drank.

"How do you feel?"

"Normal."

"Your normal is concerning."

"Thanks for the review."

She smiled at that, small, almost pleased, then studied me over the rim of the bottle.

"You didn’t protest after the kiss."

"No use. It didn’t mean anything."

"Finally. You’re getting used to these things."

I didn’t reply. I walked to the corner where I always left my own bottle, picked it up, and drank.

The water was warm. The cut on my cheek had already sealed into a line. The system remained quiet, though I could still feel the log of her favorability and arousal numbers sitting somewhere in its recent memory.

Rei watched me for a few seconds longer, then tilted her head.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"About what?"

"What happened. Why your power is unstable right now. Why Jenna is walking on her toes every time someone mentions your name in the same sentence as her daughter."

"I’d rather not."

"Come on."

She stretched her legs out along the mat, boots crossed at the ankles.

"We’re friends with benefits. Let me in."

The phrase should have irritated me more than it did.

I capped the bottle and leaned against the opposite wall.

"You said you studied me."

"I did."

Rei turned the bottle slowly between her fingers.

"I asked Cillian too. He’s my mother’s support. S-rank. More like a husband, except he has five wives."

That landed with a small, delayed weight.

Guild masters marrying their primary supports.

Polygamy treated as ordinary structure rather than scandal. I had seen the shape of it in the way Draven moved through camera flashes with multiple women at his side, but hearing it stated so casually still recalibrated something.

"What did you ask him?"

Rei’s eyes gleamed with quiet amusement.

"Curious, aren’t you? Kiss me, and I’ll tell you."

I looked at her for a moment.

Then I pushed off the wall, crossed the mat, and leaned down.

Rei’s free hand came up immediately, fingers sliding to the back of my neck, and she pulled me the rest of the way into the kiss.

This one had nothing to do with sealing a cut. It was slower, more deliberate, the kind of contact someone used when they were both collecting data and enjoying the collection.

When she finally released me, she tugged me down to sit beside her against the mirror, close enough that our shoulders almost touched.

"You know how ordinary supports work?" she asked.

"They loan."

"Yes. Clean transfer, temporary ceiling raise, withdrawal. Most of them are batteries with good timing."

She took another drink, then rested the bottle on her thigh.

"Cillian is different. He can drop a zone where everyone linked to him becomes effectively unkillable for a short window; no permanent damage takes hold. He can also push a full invisibility state across his network for about ten minutes. High-end utility. The kind of support entire raids get built around."

I listened without interrupting.

"So I asked him, casually, whether he had ever noticed a change in his own core from the work. Long-term structural change, not just temporary strain."

Rei glanced sideways at me.

"He thought about it and said yes, he had expanded his own core over the years by consuming monster essence and by the cumulative effect of supporting high-output partners. But he had never expanded someone else’s core. Not the way you did. Not foundational rewriting."

She shifted closer, the line of her arm pressing lightly against mine.

"So you see, permanent core change isn’t some mythical event that only happens in broken anomaly cases. It happens. The difference is direction and mechanism. Cillian grew himself. You’re sending output that forces other people’s cores to adapt and enlarge around what you give them. That’s why Gianna jumped the way she did. That’s why my blood manipulation mutated instead of just getting a temporary boost. You’re not loaning power. You’re editing the recipient."

The training room felt quieter than it had a moment before.

I stared at the far wall, turning the distinction over.

Loan versus rewrite. Temporary ceiling versus permanent structural change. The system had called it foundational influence. Jenna had compared it to the rare historical cases that ended in containment.

Rei was describing the same phenomenon as a usable specialty.

"You’re very calm about being edited."

"I’m calm about anything that makes me stronger and doesn’t require me to pretend the cost is romantic."

Rei tipped her head back against the mirror.

"Jenna is careful because she has to be. She has a daughter who got rewritten in one night and a provisional support whose class keeps trying to finish the job when his attention slips. I’m careful for different reasons. I want the growth. I want to know how far the rewrite can be pushed before it becomes absorption. And I want to know whether you can learn to stop treating every instance of your own nature as a moral emergency."

She turned her face toward me again.

I looked at her eyes.

"Why do you care about me?"

Her face turned grim.

"I’m not going to answer that," she said, looking straight ahead.

"But choose whatever motive keeps you functional. Tell yourself I want your body. Tell yourself I’m using you to study your class. Pick whatever variable keeps your mind stable. I can adapt to any version of the narrative you need to believe."