Soo-Jin.

My blade.

My weapon.

My most loyal soldier.

My guilt, given a passport and combat training.

Also—somehow—the person I felt worst about, which was impressive considering my current inventory of emotional entanglements and ethically questionable life choices could qualify as a minor war crime.

A few months ago, when I first met her in Miami, she'd been barely functional. A survivor in the strictest sense of the word—alive, breathing, and profoundly hollow.

The trafficking network had taken her apart piece by piece until there was nothing left but reflexes and the thousand-yard stare of someone who'd learned that feeling things was optional but dangerous.

She'd been a shell. A ghost with a pulse. Someone who kept moving because stopping meant remembering—and remembering meant shattering.

Now?

Now she was something else.

Outwardly, she played normal. College prep. Studying. Smiling at the right times. Passing as just another girl getting ready to become a college student with manageable stress and unremarkable dreams.

Underneath, she was a supernatural weapon wearing human skin.

She called it being my blade.

"My blade," she'd said once, with that unnervingly calm focus of someone who'd already decided that weakness was more terrifying than death. "Since I can't compete with your other women sexually, I'll be useful another way. I'll be your weapon. Your shield. Whatever you need."

Which managed to be both the most loyal and the most devastating sentence anyone can ever offered you.

A vow of devotion that tasted like ash and sounded like a bridge setting itself on fire.

I told her she was wrong. That she didn't need to earn her place. That survival alone was already a victory. That she didn't need to turn herself into something sharp just to justify continuing to exist.

She listened politely.

Then she ignored me completely.

She said she needed purpose. Something solid. Something that transformed pain into momentum instead of letting it rot inside her. Because just surviving wasn't enough—not when the alternative was becoming powerful enough that no one ever touched her without permission again.

And really, who was I to argue?

I was a teenage demigod with a women hero complex, a god complex, and a deeply suspicious habit of turning "rescuing women" into a lifestyle brand. My moral high ground was, at best, rented.

So I trained her.

Carefully at first. Self-defense. Movement. Control. Then hand-to-hand combat. Then weapons. The curriculum evolved naturally from how not to die to how to end someone decisively and make the paperwork boring.

She was terrifyingly good.

Years of abuse had sharpened her instincts. She read people the way predators read weather—tiny shifts in balance, micro-tensions, the exact moment intent hardened into action.

She didn't hesitate.

She didn't panic.

All she'd ever lacked were tools. And permission.

I gave her both.

Enhancement pills. System-bought upgrades. Potions that burned going down and rewrote her biology on the way through. Equipment that nudged her past human limits into a category better described as competitive nightmare fuel.

I min-maxed her like a deranged RPG player. Tuned stats. Optimized output. Built her like my primary damage dealer—fast, lethal, impossible to ignore—while I hovered somewhere in the background pretending this was all perfectly healthy and not at all a manifestation of my unresolved guilt.

She didn't just survive anymore.

She cut.

And every time she did, part of me wondered whether I'd saved her… or just taught my conscience how to fight back.

I'd spent over 150,000 system points on Soo-Jin in three weeks.

Just poured them in. No hesitation. Like a gambler who'd finally found a slot machine that didn't lie—every pull paid out, every upgrade compounded. I didn't train her so much as spec her, turning trauma into throughput, pain into output.

I made her otherworldly.

Not aspirational. Not heroic.

Beautiful and terrible.

By raw metrics, she was Level Five now. Possibly brushing Six after the latest upgrades.

Me? Still Level Four in my Peter Carter form.

The system had opinions about that. Restrictions. Locks. "Personal growth milestones." Apparently my body wouldn't evolve until I finished a gym mission from weeks ago. Because nothing says divine power fantasy like being soft-locked behind leg day.

Soo-Jin didn't have those limits.

She wasn't bound by earning power. She just took it.

So, she grew. Fast.

Stronger than me. Faster. Sharper. Deadlier.

Which meant—objectively—my Korean ex-trafficking victim could probably fold me in half if we sparred while I was in Peter Carter form. The irony landed clean and deep: I'd spent months forging someone powerful enough to beat the person who saved her.

Classic myth behavior. Create weapon. Lose control of weapon. Die screaming.

My dangerous Korean.

My blade.

Tonight, she proved it.

While I sat in a hospital chair watching machines cosplay as lungs, Soo-Jin swept the Dexter mansion alone—methodical, surgical, almost polite. Conducting a postmortem on a crime the world hadn't officially admitted existed.

No backup.

No team.

Just her, ARIA, and a refusal to ever be helpless again.

She wasn't protecting the mansion. She was protecting my people. Earning her place the only way she believed mattered—by becoming indispensable. By being the violence I couldn't deploy without detonating my entire life.

I owed her more than praise.

Not money. Not gifts. She'd already learned how temporary those were. Skills didn't get confiscated. Power didn't get repossessed.

I needed to ask her what she actually wanted.

Who she wanted to be beyond my weapon.

Because let's be honest—turning a trauma survivor into a supernatural assassin was a deeply questionable coping strategy. Effective, yes. Hugely so. But probably not something a therapist would recommend unless they billed in untraceable crypto.

Later.

After I dealt with the rest of the night's disasters. After I stopped treating people like problems with solutions and remembered they were human beings with futures that weren't supposed to orbit my guilt.

The mansion rose ahead—Lincoln Heights. Home.

Lights glowing warm in the windows. The gate already open, like it expected me. Like it knew I'd come back no matter how far I drifted, no matter how much blood I tracked in on my shoes.

My family waited inside. With love I hadn't earned and questions I couldn't answer.

And somehow… the door was still open.

Home.

Where Mom would absolutely accuse me of "disappearing again" like I'd gone out for milk and accidentally founded a small war.

Where the twins would demand updates I couldn't give without detonating several federal statutes.

Where Charlotte would look at me with those infuriatingly calm, all-seeing eyes—the kind that didn't judge, didn't flinch, and somehow forgave crimes I hadn't even committed yet.

"ARIA," I said as I approached, my voice flat with the kind of exhaustion that sinks past muscle and settles into bone. "Begin the long-awaited revenges. Trent. And Jack."

"Confirmed," she replied immediately. "Initiating now."

Because apparently my soul didn't already resemble a junk drawer of ethical compromises. No—now we were adding petty revenge to the résumé, filed neatly under character flaws I acknowledge but refuse to surrender.

Men, it turned out, were still shockingly bad at the whole don't brutalize women concept. Still clinging to the belief that money, surnames, and social insulation functioned as a force field against consequences.

They were wrong.

And I was about to become the world's most expensive remedial course in cause and effect. Tuition nonrefundable.

Graduation permanent.

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