I Awakened the World's Worst Class, Then Became Unstoppable

Chapter 8: Women Only Play Mind Games To Ruin Me

By the time the five cabbages and the snow peas sold, Ethan was looking at a six-million-dollar payout. The ten percent cut left five point four. The cabbage price had softened by about two hundred thousand a head once the novelty spread, which he'd expected; the snow peas had been a first-of-their-kind wildcard anyway.

His balance climbed past six million.

He did not celebrate.

A man with no combat ability and six million in the bank was a man with a target on his back. The strong ate the weak in this era with a consistency that made nature look generous. Money only mattered if you could keep it.

He went out to the plot. The new round of seeds had pushed up into the green of a dozen new varieties—carrots, daikon, pumpkin, corn, cilantro, broccoli alongside the originals.

He was wiping his hands off when a horn blared from the front of his house.

Felix was sitting in the driver's seat of a hovercar that looked like a thrown star. "Boss. Got the car from my dad. C'mon."

Cars in this world didn't run on gasoline. They ran on Aberration cores—crystals pulled out of dead monsters—and they floated. Felix's particular ride had set his father back eighteen million dollars, and the level-one crystal that powered it alone cost half a million a shot.

Ethan didn't say anything about it. He climbed in.

The car lifted a meter off the dirt and slid toward the center of the city. The streets dropped away beneath them—row houses, strip of scavenger stalls, the high-voltage fence, the sprawl of the Mid District rising in lights. Ethan had never been up this high. It changed the way the city looked. From the ground, the Outer District felt like the whole world. From fifty meters up, it was a smudge at the base of a wall that went on for miles.

Felix did the talking on the way. A handful of A-ranks had come out of their school that year, and Michelle Liu stood above all of them—Holy Cleric was one of the rarest healing Classes in the country, and she had it at A-rank. She'd been on the front page of the city's newsfeed for three days. Brandon's party wasn't a class reunion. It was a campaign event, and Brandon was the candidate running unopposed because nobody with half a brain wanted to stand next to him on the ticket.

"Watch how he does it," Felix said, grinning as the Rose came into view. "He's been practicing his smile in a mirror for a week."

They reached the Rose Ballroom in ten minutes flat.

The Rose was one of those places that existed because the Awakening had made it possible. Dancer was a real Class, and high-ranked dancers could buff allies and debuff enemies with their routines. The truly good ones got snapped up by academies before they finished introductions. The women dancing at the Rose were D-rank and below—no future, no money, no better options than working a room where half the clientele was one bad Awakening result away from being in their seats.

The music hit them the moment they walked in. It was designed that way. Bodies moved under the lights. Heat pooled at the edges of the room, low and physical, and Ethan could feel it in his chest—a tug of arousal that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the Class standing on the stage.

Brandon had pulled a crowd. The White family was nobody, on the scale of the Liu family, but Brandon was a B-rank Brawler with a Capital academy letter and a smile to sell. People came because he'd asked them. They came because they wanted to be seen at the right table when the academy buses left.

He was already at a booth, leaning toward a girl, doing his best look-of-earnest-attention.

Michelle Liu didn't look back at him. She sat with her back straight, her face closed off, and radiated the specific kind of boredom that meant she'd already decided the man beside her was wasting her evening. Brandon didn't seem to notice. He kept talking, kept smiling, kept doing everything but taking the hint. He was telling her something—a story, probably, about a fight he'd won or a lift he'd hit—and she stared past his shoulder at the dancers like they were more interesting.

Ethan saw him clench his jaw under the performance. Brawler, Brandon was thinking. Combat Class. A future. You're a healer. A healer with no fighters is a healer with no army. We're going to the same school in the Capital. I'll wear you down. I just can't afford to insult the Liu family.

Ethan didn't know the thought. He only saw Brandon's smile and the way it never reached his eyes.

Michelle looked up.

She saw Ethan.

Something shifted in her face—polite interest, calculated, ready—and she stood up before Brandon had finished his sentence and walked directly to Ethan.

The room noticed. Ethan felt it before he saw it—the way the nearby conversations went quiet, the way heads turned. This wasn't just a girl walking across a room. This was the Liu family's daughter choosing to leave the seat Brandon White had been fuming in for forty minutes.

Brandon's expression went black.

He'd been talking for forty minutes. She hadn't given him one look. Ethan walks in the door and she crosses the room like he's the one person she came to see.

Him? What does he have? Brandon was thinking it. He's not even—he's an E-rank Farmer. A hoe. A goddamn hoe.

"Ethan." Michelle's voice was cool, pitched just loud enough to carry. She looked at him like they were old friends.

He stopped. He looked back at her.

This woman had never once done him a favor. Every time she'd walked near him, it had cost him something. The year Brandon had spent making his scholarship vanish, that was on her. She was the kind of trouble that didn't come with a warning label.

He looked at her the way he'd look at a stranger asking for directions, and kept walking. Past her. To an open booth at the back of the room.

Michelle froze where she stood.

She recovered fast. She pressed her lips together, not quite a pout, and walked after him. She slid into the seat beside him while the people at the next booth over tracked them with their eyes.

Ethan turned to face her directly.

"I don't know you," he said. "I don't know you. So stop following me around. And before you say it—no, I don't believe you like me. I'm not an idiot. What do you actually want?"

He was not Brandon. He had not been born with the part of the brain that short-circuits at a pretty face. Growing up in the system had aged him out of that particular disease years ago.