The points left my account like a kidney leaving my body. Four thousand five hundred credits of survival converted into architecture, and the number in my vision dropped from 8,480 to 3,980 with the cheerful finality of a cash register at a funeral home. Three weeks of gate clears, two alpha kills, and one interdimensional near-death experience, all spent on a room upgrade so four women could yell at me in surround sound.
Worth it. Probably. Ask me in four hours.
I took Aurora's hand first because she offered it first, and then Naomi's fingers found my other palm, warm and calloused from her staff. Belle grabbed the back of my shirt. Addison grabbed Belle's belt loop, completing a chain of women connected to me through fabric and skin and a parasitic divine system that some old man in a cosmic library designed specifically to reward this exact behavior.
"Everyone hold on," I said.
"To what," Addison said. "Your ego?"
