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Under the united front of Ethan and the Hargrove father and son, the Langford family had no choice but to leave in disgrace.
After Hargrove's fury had subsided to a low simmer, Ethan stated the real reason he'd come.
"Dr. Hargrove, there's thirty million marks on this card. It's my way of thanking you for everything you've done."
Hargrove looked at the card. Then at the boy holding it out.
He knew, because Graves had told him, that the state had already reimbursed the fifty million in full. Ethan didn't owe him a single mark. And thirty million, for a kid who'd been borrowing money from his uncle six months ago, was an astronomical sum.
But here he was, offering it without hesitation. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to.
That told Hargrove everything he needed to know about the kind of person Ethan Mercer was.
"I accept the sentiment. Take the money back."
"Dr. Hargrove, I really think—"
The old man waved his hand with the authority of a man who'd been ending conversations for seventy years.
"If you keep arguing, I'm going to get genuinely angry. And you've already seen what that looks like once today."
Ethan put the card away.
With the matter settled, Marcus pulled Ethan aside and spent the next hour asking questions about the Mark One like a graduate student who'd just discovered a new field of physics. How did the flight stabilization algorithms handle turbulence? What was the theoretical upper limit of the shock absorption system? Could the reactor configuration be miniaturized further?
Ethan answered everything. Marcus took notes.
The Bureau had arranged a special car for noon.
Ethan would have preferred to take a regular train, but one glance at his phone, which was flooded with news articles and photos of his face on every platform in the Republic, convinced him otherwise. If he showed up at a public train station, the other passengers would tear him apart. Not out of malice. Out of enthusiasm. Which, in a crowd of several hundred, amounted to the same thing.
He had lunch with the Hargroves, said his goodbyes, and climbed into the waiting car.
The drive from the capital to Ashford City was over a thousand kilometers. Even on empty highways, it took the entire afternoon. By the time the car pulled up outside the Holloway house, the sky was dark.
Ethan thanked the Bureau driver, walked to the front door, and let himself in.
The house smelled like Linda's cooking. Specifically, like every dish she knew how to make had been prepared simultaneously, which was Linda's way of dealing with emotional situations she couldn't otherwise express.
But the living room was quiet. Only Linda was home.
"Aunt Linda. Where's Uncle Frank?"
Linda's expression combined annoyance and pride in roughly equal proportions.
"Don't get me started. Those people at the Education Bureau move fast when they want to."
"The second your verification meeting ended, they reinstated your uncle. Like magic. One phone call and suddenly he's employable again."
"Reinstated? That's it?"
Linda caught the tone and shot him a look.
"Of course that's not it. He's been sent on a month-long professional development program. When he gets back, he's being reassigned as the principal of Third Middle School."
Third Middle School. A step up from his previous posting. A real school with a real budget and a student body that didn't include the children of the families who'd been tormenting Frank for years.
Ethan felt a genuine smile cross his face.
"Here, Auntie." He held out a bank card. "Don't tell me I only know how to spend money anymore."
Linda didn't look at the card.
"Don't rush to give me things. First, go buy back that house of yours."
"You've been freeloading off us for months. Eating our food. Sleeping in our guest room. The least you can do is get your own roof back."
"Aunt Linda—"
"And calculate the interest on that loan you took from the house sale. If you're one mark short, you're sleeping on the sidewalk tonight."
Ethan leaned close and whispered a number in her ear.
Linda went very still.
Then she snatched the card from his hand and said, with the specific stubbornness of a woman who refused to be impressed:
"That's all? After everything you went through, I thought you'd have made more."
Ethan shook his head, grinning, and went to his room.
The next morning, he set about reclaiming his parents' house.
It was the only thing they'd left him. A small house in a quiet neighborhood. Not valuable by any market standard. Priceless by every standard that mattered.
The three-month sale agreement had long expired, and the new owner had already moved in. But the buyer hadn't had the money for renovations, so the interior was largely unchanged. Same furniture. Same layout. Same scratches on the doorframe where Ethan had marked his height every birthday until he was twelve.
Ethan knocked on the door and made a direct offer to buy it back at a premium.
The new owner recognized him immediately. The face that had been on every screen in the Republic for the past forty-eight hours was standing on his doorstep, offering to buy back his childhood home.
The man agreed on the spot and refused to accept any extra money.
Ethan wouldn't let it go. He'd learned that the buyer had purchased the house with a loan, and the interest alone was significant. Under Ethan's insistence, the transaction closed at twenty percent above market value.
The door opened. Ethan stepped inside.
The same hallway. The same kitchen. The same living room where his parents had sat in the evenings, where his father had helped him with homework, where his mother had told him stories before bed.
He stood in the center of the room and let the silence settle around him.
Six months ago, he'd walked out of this house with nothing. No money. No prospects. No future that didn't involve being someone else's punching bag for the rest of his education.
Now he was back. With a hundred million marks, two revolutionary patents, government backing, military allies, and technology that had changed the balance of power on the planet.
But this house was still the most valuable thing he owned.
He closed his eyes and let the memories wash over him. His mother's voice. His father's hands. The feeling of being small and safe and loved.
Then he opened his eyes and got to work.
Open System interface.
The familiar display unfurled in his mind. Blue text against darkness. The tattoo on his left hand pulsed faintly.
He navigated directly to the Prestige balance, because after a verification meeting that had been broadcast to the entire Republic, watched by hundreds of millions, and had involved powered flight, a missile strike, and the destruction of two foreign fighter jets, the emotional reactions generated should have been...
179,900
Ethan nearly tripped over his own feet.
One hundred and seventy-nine thousand, nine hundred Prestige Points. The verification meeting had been, by an absurd margin, the single largest Prestige harvest in the System's history. The shock, the awe, the terror, the grief when they thought he was dead, the euphoria when he survived, the fury at the Aurelian Republic, the pride in what he'd built — hundreds of millions of people experiencing intense emotions simultaneously, all directed at him.
The System had been gorging itself for hours, and the result was a number that made every previous balance look like pocket change.
There was no hesitation.
He opened the Level 1 Mall and found the final item on the list.
Super Soldier Serum — Manufacturing Theory: 100,000 Prestige Points
The most expensive item in the tier. The last reward before the mall upgraded to Level 2.
He spent it.
The deduction was instantaneous. 100,000 points gone. Balance: 79,900.
And then the knowledge hit.
It wasn't like the reactor download, which had been a focused blast of physics and engineering. It wasn't like the armor download, which had covered metallurgy, weapons systems, and flight dynamics.
This was biology. Biochemistry. Genetics. Human physiology at the molecular level. The download was longer, denser, more complex than anything the System had transmitted before, and Ethan stood in the center of his parents' living room with his eyes closed and his hands braced on the back of a chair while five minutes of information poured into his neurons.
When it finished, he opened his eyes.
And understood.
The Super Soldier Serum wasn't what he'd expected from the movies. It was deeper. More fundamental. In the Earth-Prime memories, Captain America's abilities had seemed like a simple "strength and speed boost." A bigger, faster human. That was the surface-level reading.
The reality, now that Ethan had the complete biochemical theory mapped into his brain, was far more nuanced.
The serum didn't just make you stronger. It restructured the human body from the cellular level upward. Muscle fiber density increased by orders of magnitude, creating tissue that was simultaneously stronger, faster, and more resilient than anything natural biology could produce. Bone density increased proportionally. Neural conductivity improved, enhancing reaction times to levels that made trained athletes look sluggish.
And the defensive implications were staggering. In the movies, Captain America had shrugged off gunfire. The reason, Ethan now understood, was that the enhanced muscle density was sufficient to absorb and disperse the kinetic energy of a bullet before it could reach vital organs. Not invulnerability. But a level of passive defense that made conventional small arms largely ineffective.
Unlike the armor, which protected from the outside, the serum made the person themselves the weapon. And personal, biological strength was harder to take away than any piece of equipment.
The armor could be damaged. Disabled. Removed.
A super soldier's body couldn't be confiscated.
Ethan thought about the missile. The fall. The bruised ribs and the swollen wrist and the ringing in his ears.
If he'd been enhanced when that warhead hit, the injuries wouldn't have existed.
The armor plus the serum wasn't an addition. It was a multiplication. Each technology amplified the other. Together, they created something that no force on the planet could match.
He looked at the System interface. 79,900 Prestige remaining. The Level 1 Mall was empty now, every item purchased.
Somewhere beyond it, the Level 2 Mall waited.
But first, he had a serum to build.