[OHHHH! So that's a Cursed Spirit? That thing is disgusting, I've got goosebumps!]
[Baby Satoru is unfair. The way he cuts them down should be illegal. Mommy loves you!]
[My husband's family is loaded, look at the size of that house, that's rich-boy living. If only I could marry him!]
[Betty is adorable! Her face the first time she eats a burger melted me!]
[He's so good to Betty, the man's a certified little-sister addict!]
[Am I the only one who feels bad for Subaru? Satoru Gojo got to go home and he's still stuck in the other world.]
The comments had stopped fazing him a long time ago.
He'd grown used to the fervor and the teasing, and now and then he even caught himself reading a few extra.
What held his attention was the Popularity Points.
On that front, nothing disappointed.
The side story pulled in viewers fast.
Those viewers told others, and those told more, and the number kept climbing.
He could watch it rise, the counter moving quickly enough to follow with the naked eye.
He checked the balance.
After redeeming the Ten Shadows Technique, he'd been left with two hundred and fifty thousand.
In the span of a few minutes it had reached three hundred thousand.
Compared to before, the rate of gain had multiplied several times over.
His mouth curved, satisfaction flickering behind his eyes.
As word of the side story spread and his name grew, the climb would only accelerate.
Which meant more he could redeem, and more he could do for the Cursed Children.
The footage rolled on, running long enough to feel like a theatrical film, and holding attention the whole way.
He watched with half an eye while the numbers climbed, opening the System Store with a thought.
The shelves were as crowded as ever, abilities and items in every direction.
He didn't spend long browsing. What he wanted surfaced quickly.
Gastrea Virus Enhancement, 10%.
A ten percent boost to physical capability. Not an impressive figure.
For someone at his level, that increment barely registered.
But set against the corrosive enhancement running through the Cursed Children, this version was infinitely safer.
No side effects. No poisoning. No creeping Corrosion Rate, no eventual transformation into a Gastrea.
System merchandise came reliable and clean, every time, without surprises.
He confirmed the exchange without hesitating.
Ten percent came cheap, a few tens of thousands of points, pocket change at his current balance.
Skimming the listing, he saw the whole Gastrea series, ten percent all the way to a hundred, ran a million points total.
Compared to everything else on the shelves, that was the bargain bin.
Cheap as it was, he'd never once been tempted by it before.
Stacked against Adaptation or the Divine Protection of the Phoenix, a virus enhancement looked feeble, the returns barely worth the outlay.
He had the Limitless Cursed Technique. He almost never traded blows in close.
And on the rare occasion he did, his Cursed Energy alone flattened nearly anything standing in front of him.
One more physical boost added nothing. A waste of points.
That had been his position from the day he'd arrived in this world crawling with Gastrea.
Now, with his balance short of the million needed for Adaptation or the Phoenix, he'd chosen this apparently useless upgrade anyway.
Entirely because of those children.
Changing the fate of the Cursed Children wasn't the work of a day.
It would take years, endless obstacles, and a fight against everyone who despised and rejected them.
But first and above everything else, the girls had to be safe, and the thing hanging over them had to be dealt with.
He understood why people hated them.
Part of it was hatred of the Gastrea bleeding over onto any child carrying the virus.
The larger part was fear.
Once a girl's Corrosion Rate passed fifty percent, she lost her mind and became one of those monsters, a threat to everyone around her.
Nobody looks at a walking time bomb without flinching, and flinching turns into loathing.
That reflex was biological, the automatic human response to anything that could take your life.
Solving it meant going to the root.
What if these children could be freed from the virus, with no possibility of turning? Strip away that single threat and everything else shrank into a manageable problem.
Fear would stop driving the hatred, and the girls could live like ordinary children with something ahead of them.
That was why he redeemed it.
His plan was to get the research facility established, then hand himself to Sumire as a subject.
Let her study the enhancement in his body and see whether this safe version of the virus could be replicated in the girls.
A drug, some other method, it didn't matter, so long as it cut the worst thread and spared them the transformation.
For that he'd delay Adaptation and the Divine Protection of the Phoenix without a second thought, powerful as they were.
Those redemptions were decoration on an already strong foundation.
For children living hand to mouth with nothing guaranteed past tomorrow, this was survival itself.
[Ding! Gastrea Virus Enhancement 10% redeemed successfully. Enhancement taking effect...]
The chime landed in his ear.
The enhancement moved fast. The change hit him almost before the notification finished.
Within a breath, his body temperature began to spike.
Heat spread out from somewhere deep and swept through him, and his brow drew tight against it.
For a man who'd hardly been sick a day in his life, who rarely caught so much as a cold, the sensation was foreign.
His cheeks burned. His breathing shortened. The strength drained out of his limbs like water from a cracked basin.
"Hey. What's wrong with you?"
Betty had caught it.
She'd been mid-complaint when she noticed he'd gone quiet, standing there with a furrowed brow and something off in his face.
Wrinkling her small nose, she planted herself in front of him and looked up, concern threading through the confusion, and gave his arm a push.
Before he could answer, color climbed his pale face and spread all the way to his ears.
Her eyes widened, surprise breaking into something closer to amusement.
"You can blush? The sun's rising in the west."
In every memory she had of him, he was confident, lazy, untouchable. Never this.
Rare didn't cover it.
Still he said nothing, head bowed slightly, brow tightening further, the flush deepening and the heat climbing with it.
The amusement drained out of her face and left worry behind.
Something was wrong.
This wasn't a joke, and it wasn't a blush. It looked like illness.
She stepped closer, tilted her face up, and fixed on his eyes, urgency sharpening her voice.
"What is happening to you? Why won't you answer?"
Nothing came back. He swayed slightly on his feet, close to going down.
She took in the flush, the fine beads of sweat along his hairline, and the worry twisted tighter.
After a moment's hesitation she rose on her toes and pressed a small hand to his forehead.
Scalding.
She snatched it back the instant she touched his skin.
"You have a fever?!"
Her eyes went round, disbelief and alarm together.
She knew what the Reverse Cursed Technique was.
She knew he could heal any injury with it, that even a fatal wound would close in moments.
Which was exactly why this floored her.
Forget viruses and colds and fevers. Take a crippling blow from a Gastrea, come within inches of dying, and he'd knit himself back together.
And yet here he stood with a fever, a high one, looking thoroughly wretched.
She couldn't fit it into any shape that made sense.
One thing was clear enough. If he was sick, the situation was serious.
Anything strong enough to lay him out wasn't ordinary.
"Wait here. I'm getting help!"
She spun to run, meaning to fetch Sumire away from the screenings. A scientist would know how to fix this.
"No need."
He surfaced as she turned, catching her wrist gently. His voice came out thin, but there was reassurance in it.
His palm burned against her skin, the heat astonishing.
"What is going on?"
Rounding on him, she held his gaze, brow furrowed, demand riding under the alarm. "Don't try to lie to me. And don't tell me you caught a chill, because I won't believe a word of it."
She knew perfectly well he'd left the boundaries of ordinary humanity behind years ago.
At his level, chills and colds didn't come knocking.
Something had happened.
"It's nothing serious."
He raised his head slowly. The flush hadn't faded and his voice stayed weak, but his eyes had settled back into their usual calm. "I tried something new. There's a reaction. It'll pass."
Reaching up, he drew the sunglasses off and let her see his eyes.
Everyone in this world knew that infection by a Gastrea, the virus stirring to life inside, turned the eyes a solid red.
It was the clearest marker of a Cursed Child or a Gastrea, and one of the reasons people feared them.
But the Six Eyes meant his hadn't gone entirely red.
Only the pupils had turned that vivid crimson, ringed by the ice blue around them, the two colors playing off each other into something strange and luminous. Beautiful, and carrying an edge of threat.
She stared at eyes that bore no resemblance to the ones she knew, and froze.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. She stood there looking at him.
Aii had caught the conversation and drifted over, curious.
She wrinkled her small nose first, sniffing near him, catching something she recognized.