My ABO System

Activating The System

Dinner at the Van Del house had always been loud.

Elliot had forgotten that. In the end, the only sounds left in this house had been the fire and the machines dying one by one. Now the dining room rang with cutlery and overlapping voices, and he stood in the doorway for a moment too long, one hand on the frame, letting it wash over him.

His father sat at the head of the table with a bread roll in one hand and a pen in the other, drawing a circuit on the tablecloth while he argued with Aunt Marguerite about a tolerance value. His mother was trying, and failing, to confiscate the pen. Two cousins were fighting over the last of the roasted potatoes. Someone's gadget was beeping under the table, and no one was going to admit it was theirs.

Alive. He had said it that morning like a prayer. It was different to see it. A man at a table with ink on his cuff. A woman laughing so hard she had to put down her glass.

"Elliot," his mother bellowed, "come here, and quit looking like you haven't seen us in years"

"Am I?"

"Yes you are".

His throat closed. He crossed the room and sat in his usual chair, the one with the wobbly leg that no one in a family of geniuses had ever fixed, and said, as lightly as he could manage, "Maybe I just like the view."

"Oh, he's being sweet," said Aunt Marguerite. "Check him for fever."

"He's plotting something," said his father, without looking up. "Look at that face. That's the face he made when he rewired the garden lights to play music."

"That was one time."

"It was the whole neighborhood," said his mother, "and we got a letter."

The table laughed. Elliot laughed with them, and it came out strange and cracked, like a door that hadn't been opened in years. His mother glanced at him again, a small crease between her brows, and he lifted a forkful of potato to his mouth so he wouldn't have to meet her eyes.

He ate slowly. He memorized the sound of his father's pen scratching the cloth, the particular way his mother tilted her head when she was pretending not to be pleased. Whenever someone spoke to him, he answered. Whenever someone told a joke, he laughed. He was good at it, he realized. He'd had practice, in the last years of his life, smiling at tables while his heart sat somewhere else.

Elias sat three chairs down.

Elliot did not look at him. It took a deliberate, constant effort. But he was aware of him anyway, the scrape of his chair, the easy voice cutting into the cousins' argument, the bright, practiced charm. Everyone loved Elias at dinner. Everyone, Elliot thought, except the one person he needed to.

"So," said Aunt Marguerite, and Elliot's stomach dropped before she finished. "The Valois boy. Is he going to make an honest man of you, or do we have to start a pool?"

"Marguerite," his mother said, delighted.

"What? It's been six months of flowers and handwritten notes. In my days, that's practically a proposal."

"Dante's family called again this week," his mother said, softer, pleased. "About a dinner in the spring. I told them you'd need time to think."

Every head at the table turned toward him.

Elliot kept his face perfectly still. It was the hardest thing he had done all day, harder than the safe, harder than the mirror. The name sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. Dante, in the courtyard with his ruined voice and his hand through Arthur's ribs. Dante at a candlelit table, saying you're the only one who understands me.

"I haven't decided anything," he said.

"Look, he's blushing," said a cousin.

"I'm not."

"He is glowing."

"It's the potatoes," said his father, and the table roared, and the moment passed over him like a wave over a rock. Elliot picked up his glass and drank water he couldn't taste.

If they asked him now, if they pressed, he would say something he couldn't take back. So he said nothing. He let them tease him and ask nothing in return, and he let the noise close around the silence in him until it was almost bearable.

"Lucky," Elias said lightly from down the table. His smile was easy. His eyes, when Elliot finally allowed himself one glance, were not. "Some of us wait years for an invitation like that."

It was a joke. Everyone treated it as one.

Elliot held his brother's gaze for exactly one second, long enough to see what sat behind the charm, a small, tight, old resentment, worn smooth with handling. He'd never noticed it before. He'd had five years of his life and a dead world to learn what it looked like.

Then he looked down at his plate.

---

The house went quiet around midnight.

Elliot lay on his bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling fan. Down the hall, a floorboard settled. His mother's voice murmured through a wall, then stopped. He listened until the house had fully fallen asleep, and then he got up and opened the safe for the second time that day.

The vial was warm in his hand, as though it had been waiting.

He sat on the edge of the bed and turned it slowly between his fingers. The pale gold light inside drifted like smoke caught in glass. It weighed almost nothing. It had weighed the world.

He had spent the whole day trying to find another way. Hide it. Destroy it. Hand it to his father and tell him everything. But his father trusted him, which was exactly how it had started. The family would lock it away, and any lock the Van Del family could build, someone else could eventually open. Someone like Dante, who never needed to force a door when people would hold it open for him.

And destroying it, I have no idea what would happen after, otherwise grandfather would've destroyed it himself

If I throw this away, I'm just waiting for someone worse to find it somehow.And if I take it and turn into the monster Dante had turned into?

I don't think that's it, father said it only helps with evolution, perhaps Dante may have wanted to evolve the quickest way.

I wouldn't do the same, Right?

He thought of Arthur's hands raised in the light. Of his mother at the foot of the stairs.

"For what it's worth," Elliot said aloud, quietly, to the empty room, "if I'm not compatible with it, it'll just kill me. There won't be any system-granting vial left to fall into the wrong hands."

It was almost funny. He heard himself say it and almost laughed. It was the first honest joke he'd made all day.

He pulled the stopper with his thumbnail and drank the whole thing in one swallow.

It tasted like cold metal and static, like biting down on a battery. For a heartbeat there was nothing. Then something *opened* inside his chest, slow at first and then all at once, like a door swinging wide onto a sky he hadn't known was there. Heat tore down his spine. His fingers locked around the empty vial. His vision whited out, and he heard, very far away, a high, clear tone, like a struck bell.

Then it stopped.

Elliot gasped, hunched over his knees, hands shaking. His heart was pounding. Nothing had died. The house was still silent. The ceiling fan turned. Everything was exactly as it had been.

Except for the light in front of his face.

A pale blue panel hung in the air, thin as glass, edged in a fine silver line. Text appeared on it, crisp and perfectly steady.

> [ SYSTEM ACTIVATED ]

> System Granting Serum absorbed. Host registered: Elliot Van Del.

> You now have access to the System.

Elliot didn't move. The words were so plain they were almost insulting.

A second notice slid beneath the first.

> [ WHAT THE SYSTEM DOES ]

> The System measures your seven core attributes and records every change.

> It shows your current values. It does not show your limits.

> It does not give orders, and it does not choose for you.

Daily quests will be given to attain level ups and growth.

It measures. It doesn't decide.Elliot read the line twice. Whatever Dante had done with this, no one had forced his hand.

and what's with this question and level up stuff?

The panel changed again.

> ╔══════════════════════════╗

> PERSONAL STATUS

>

> Name: Elliot Van Del

> Secondary Gender: Omega

> Ability: Unawakened

> Ability Rank: Unclassified

>

> CORE ATTRIBUTES

>

> Strength — 18

> Agility — 22

> Vitality— 19

> Intelligence — 78

> Perception — 51

> Willpower — 46

> Stamina — 3

>

> Evolutionary Classification: Omega

> Ability Awakening: Incomplete

> ╚══════════════════════════╝

He read it the way he'd been raised to read everything, as a schematic, line by line, looking for the seams. A weak body. A sharp mind. An energy reserve so small it barely registered.

It was also honest. Nothing on the screen flattered him.

Is this what it showed Dante?

One last notice appeared, and this one waited.

> [ BASELINE CALIBRATION AVAILABLE ]

> The System will record your attributes under normal conditions for 24 hours.

> No action is required from you. Results will be stored as your starting record.

>

> Begin calibration? [ YES ] [ NO ]

Elliot looked at the empty vial in his hand, then at the panel, steady in the dark.

He had come back to change the future. Now he held the thing that had broken it, and nothing on that screen told him what to do next. It only waited for him to choose.

"Yes," he said.

> [ CALIBRATION STARTED ]

> Time remaining: 23:59:59.