My ABO System

New Quests

Elliot lasted four minutes at the dinner table before he gave up pretending to eat.

Start a conversation with Arthur Hale. It sounded so simple. It was the most frightening quest he had ever been handed, and the first one that had nothing to do with his fists.

"Excuse me," he said, and stood.

He felt his mother's eyes follow him out of the room.

The corridor to his father's study was long and dim, lined with framed patents. Elliot stopped halfway, hands damp, and rehearsed. Thank you for coming. Do you want tea. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I never told you.

None of them were usable.

The study door opened.

Arthur stepped out, folder gone, coat still buttoned. He saw Elliot and slowed by exactly one step. Nothing else in his face changed.

"Mr. Van Del."

"Elliot," Elliot said, too quickly. "Please. Just Elliot."

"Elliot." Arthur said it like a word in a language he was testing. "Your father's finished with me. I'll see myself out."

He started to walk past.

"Wait."

Arthur stopped. He didn't turn right away. When he did, his gray eyes settled on Elliot with the patient attention of someone waiting for a stranger to finish an unnecessary sentence.

Elliot's mouth had gone dry. Up close, there were details the stairwell had hidden from him. A small white scar through Arthur's left eyebrow. A tiredness under the eyes that no one ever seemed to notice. Ink on the side of his hand.

He's alive. His pulse is moving. I could touch his sleeve.

"Thank you," Elliot said, "for bringing the contract."

"It was paper." Arthur's tone was neutral. "A courier could have done it."

"Dante didn't want to?"

A pause, small and very controlled.

"Dante doesn't carry his own folders," said Arthur.

It was not quite a criticism. It was not quite anything. But Elliot had spent five years watching Dante's hands, and he understood that he had just been told something true about the Valois household in six words.

"We've met before, you know," Arthur added. "Twice. At the autumn reception and at your cousin's engagement. You didn't speak either time."

Elliot's chest tightened. In the first life he had looked right through this man, twice, three times, a hundred times, while the real Dante glowed at the center of every room.

"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it so much it came out wrong.

Arthur's eyebrow moved a fraction. "For what?"

"For not speaking."

"You were looking at someone else." It was a statement, flat, without bitterness. "That isn't a crime."

Behind Arthur, at the far end of the corridor, a door eased open. Elliot caught a flash of his mother's pale blue sleeve, a tray of tea in her hands. She had stopped. She was watching them with an expression he couldn't place, soft and thoughtful and very, very interested.

Oh no.

Arthur glanced at Elliot's hands.

"That's not a car door," he said.

Elliot blinked. "What?"

"Your knuckles. The split's on the first two, not the back of the hand. Someone's face did that, or ribs." Arthur's gaze moved to Elliot's lip. "And you took a hit on the left side, so you stepped the wrong way on the first swing."

Elliot stared at him. "How do you know I stepped the wrong way?"

"The bruise is under the cheekbone. If you'd stepped right, he'd have caught your jaw." Something that wasn't quite a smile touched the corner of Arthur's mouth. "Keep your thumb outside the fist next time. You'll break fewer things."

For a moment Elliot forgot to breathe. It was the longest thing Arthur had ever said to him, in either life, and every word of it was careful, specific, and entirely unasked for.

He noticed. He looked at me for three seconds and noticed everything.

"I'll remember that," Elliot said.

"Good." Arthur turned toward the front door. "Good night, Elliot."

The panel bloomed in front of his eyes before Arthur had reached the end of the hall.

> [ QUEST COMPLETE ]

> Conversation with Arthur Hale achieved.

> PER +2

A brightness crawled across the edges of his vision, as though someone had cleaned a window. The ink on Arthur's hand. The hairline c***k in the third patent frame. His mother, a little too still at the end of the corridor, a tray of tea held like an alibi.

Elliot turned. She was already walking away, but not fast enough to hide the small, pleased curve of her mouth.

She thinks...

He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. She absolutely thinks.

---

Calibration ended at midnight.

Elliot sat on the edge of his bed with the lights off, the house quiet around him, and watched the little blue timer slide to zero.

> [ CALIBRATION COMPLETE ]

> Baseline recorded.

> Starting record saved.

He read the status screen. STR 23. PER 53. Everything else unchanged. It was a good, honest ledger of a body that had grown by seven points in a day.

A single line sat at the bottom, small and gray.

> Note: Host's Willpower fluctuated sharply at 18:52.

> Cause: Target "Arthur Hale."

Elliot read it twice.

At 18:52 the study door had clicked shut, and he had stood in his father's hall with a fork in his hand. The system hadn't just seen him look. It had seen what it did to him. It had recorded it the way a doctor records a fever.

He lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

I came back to keep a monster from ruining the world.

He hadn't planned on being noticed by the one man who had died for him, and he certainly hadn't planned on his mother, in the next room, quietly deciding what to do about it.

Somewhere in the dark, the little blue panel waited.

> [ NEW QUEST AVAILABLE ]

> Open to view.

He didn't open it. He lay there a long time, thinking about a scar through a left eyebrow, and then about a courtyard, and then about nothing.