Chapter 19: THE CAST COMES OFF
The orthopedist's saw whined through the fiberglass, and six weeks of itching finally ended.
"Flex for me," she said. "Slow."
I made a fist. The tendons pulled smooth. No pain, no grinding, just the satisfying stretch of muscle that had been trapped too long. The skin underneath was pale and flaky—dead cells that hadn't seen air since a V-enhanced psychotic break changed everything—but the bone was solid.
"Full mobility," she confirmed. "You healed clean. Take it easy for a week, but you're cleared for normal activity."
I flexed again in the elevator down. The hand felt foreign after so long in plaster—lighter than it should be, more responsive. I caught my reflection in the polished metal doors: a man standing straighter than the one who'd woken up in a Vought trailer, wearing the body like it fit instead of borrowed.
"Six weeks," I thought. "Six weeks since I died in one world and woke up in another."
The doors opened. I walked out into Queens sunlight and kept flexing.
The gym was a twenty-four-hour place three blocks from my apartment—the kind with peeling motivational posters and equipment that had been new during the Clinton administration. I'd been here twice before, once to test the original Harley's baseline and once to learn his stunt training muscle memory. Both times, I'd been working around the cast.
Now I had full range of motion, and I wanted to know what that meant.
[PHYSICAL ASSESSMENT INITIATED]
[BASELINE COMPARISON: PRE-INCIDENT RECORDS DETECTED]
Grip strength first. The dynamometer squeezed back against my palm as I clamped down—slow, steady, maximum effort. The digital readout flickered and settled.
Forty-seven kilograms. The original Harley's last recorded max had been forty-three.
"Eight percent above baseline."
I checked again. Same result. Then I moved to the bench press, the pull-up bar, the treadmill. Every metric came back slightly elevated—not dramatically, not enough to notice without precise measurement, but consistently higher than anything the original Harley had achieved.
[STAT ANALYSIS: SUB-VALUE GROWTH DETECTED]
[PRESENCE: 48 | FORTITUDE: 22 | ACUITY: 16 | MIGHT: 14 | CELERITY: 12 | RESONANCE: 8]
[NOTE: ALL STATS REMAIN RANK 0. GROWTH RATE: 0.3-0.7% WEEKLY]
The system was feeding belief-energy into my body at a rate too slow to feel and too consistent to ignore. I was getting stronger without training, more durable without conditioning, more present without practice. The believers were literally making me better.
"And I'm still basically human," I thought, watching the numbers hover in my peripheral vision. "Imagine what happens when something actually crystallizes."
I searched my own name for the first time in a week while cooling down on the gym's single functional exercise bike.
The results made me stop pedaling.
"MYTHMAKER" — the word was everywhere. Reddit threads, Twitter hashtags, a dedicated subreddit with 47,000 members, fan art that ranged from amateur sketches to professional-quality illustrations. Someone had compiled every piece of footage from my street-level work into a fifteen-minute "Best of Mythmaker" video with two million views.
I hadn't done any of this.
The term had appeared three weeks ago, coined by an anonymous Reddit user who'd posted a theory about "ordinary humans who become myths through accumulated belief." The theory was wrong about the mechanism but right about the effect—and the name had stuck in a way that felt organic, inevitable, like the audience had chosen it themselves.
[IDENTITY ANALYSIS: "MYTHMAKER" DESIGNATION]
[META-BELIEF LAYER DETECTED: AMPLIFIES ALL BELIEF SEEDS BY 12.3%]
[NOTE: IDENTITY NAMES THAT EMERGE ORGANICALLY CARRY HIGHER RESONANCE THAN IMPOSED LABELS]
The system confirmed what the search results suggested: I had a brand now. Not one I'd built deliberately—one that had grown while I was healing, cultivated by strangers who'd never met me but believed in what I represented.
The "super durability" seed sat at 7,823 believers. Still 2,177 short of crystallization.
"Street-level work isn't going to get me there," I realized. "I need something bigger. Something concentrated."
I shadowboxed in the gym's empty corner while I planned.
The stunt training muscle memory flowed through the original body's reflexes—jabs, crosses, slip-and-counter combinations that would have looked good on camera and gotten me killed against anyone with real training. But the movement felt right. My feet remembered positions the conscious mind had never learned.
[PERFORMANCE REHEARSAL DETECTED]
[NOTE: PHYSICAL DISPLAYS OF COMPETENCE GENERATE ADMIRATION-BELIEF AT 0.8x CONVERSION]
"A public event," I thought. "Concentrated viewership. Something that puts my resilience on display for hundreds of thousands of people at once."
Not a media interview—those generated curiosity, not conviction. Not another V-incident response—too unpredictable, too dependent on circumstances outside my control.
Something structured. Something the Mythmaker audience could participate in, share, amplify. Something that looked dangerous enough to prove durability without actually requiring powers I didn't have yet.
My phone buzzed. A DM notification from an account I didn't recognize.
@anonymous_F: saw you handle that kid in the Bronx. we should meet. come alone. — F
I stopped shadowboxing.
"F."
The letter sat on the screen like a dropped match.
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