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The creak of the floorboard under his own weight was a calibrated sound. James Howlett measured his descent down the grand staircase, each step a conscious performance. He had mapped the acoustics of the house in the silent night hours, identifying which boards sang and which remained mute. He chose the path of minimal noise, not out of stealth, but as an exercise in control. Everything was an exercise now.
Four days had passed since the System's emergence. The 60 points in his mental ledger were a constant, quiet hum of potential. The Passive Sensory Filter had transformed existence from a debilitating barrage into a manageable stream of data. He could now sit in the bustling kitchen and separate the individual sizzle of fat in the pan from the crackle of the hearth-fire, from the whisper of his mother's skirts. He could acknowledge the scents of baking bread, lye soap, and the damp wool of the groundskeepers outside without his mind recoiling. It was no longer an assault; it was a dashboard.
He entered the dining room. The morning light, sharp and Canadian, cut through the leaded glass windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Elizabeth sat at one end of the long oak table, her posture as delicate as fine china. John Howlett dominated the other end, a broadsheet newspaper held like a shield before him. The space between them was a chasm filled with unspoken words and the ghost of a dead dog.
"James," Elizabeth said, her voice a fragile thing. She offered a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "You're dressed. Are you feeling… stronger?"
He had practiced the expression in the mirror—a tentative, fragile lifting of the corners of the mouth, eyes that held a shadow of their recent terror but showed a glimmer of determined normalcy. It was a masterpiece of minor-key emotion.
"A little, Mother," he said, his voice softer, thinner than the one he used in the silence of his mind. "The sleep helped." He took his designated seat, the high-backed chair making him seem even smaller.
John Howlett lowered his paper a fraction, his gaze, flinty and assessing, sweeping over his son. James could smell the ink on the newsprint, the faint, sharp scent of his father's bay rum cologne, and beneath it, the base note of something else—a simmering, protective anger, and a deep, grudging relief.
"Good," John grunted, the single word a dismissal and an approval all at once. "A Howlett doesn't hide in his room. The world doesn't stop for a… for a upset." He carefully avoided the word 'trauma,' the word 'violence.' He was a man who built his reality with solid, unshakeable facts, and what had happened challenged that foundation.
"Yes, Father," James replied, looking down at his place setting. The submissive gesture was calculated. It was what they needed to see. The broken, but recovering, son.
A servant placed a plate of eggs and ham before him. He ate with a measured slowness, analyzing the textures, the chemical composition of the food as his body broke it down with an efficiency he knew was not normal. His healing factor required fuel. Everything was knowledge.
"I was thinking," James began, hesitantly, after a period of silence filled only by the clink of cutlery. "I'd like to… to read in the library today. If that's alright."
Elizabeth's face brightened with a relief that was almost painful to observe. "Of course, darling! Of course. It's so much better than moping in that room. Your father's histories, they're so… substantial. They'll take your mind off things."
John gave a curt nod, returning to his paper. "Knowledge is a solid foundation. Better than fairy stories. Just don't bother the ledgers in my study."
The permission was granted. The first phase of his objective was complete.
The Howlett library was a room of masculine austerity, smelling of old leather, dust, and beeswax. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with volumes on agriculture, animal husbandry, and the dry annals of British and Canadian history. It was a practical man's collection, but for James, it was a portal.
He started with the most recent newspapers, the ones John discarded. The Toronto Globe, the Montreal Gazette. His eyes, capable of perceiving miniscule imperfections in the print, scanned the columns not for the main stories of political squabbles and railway expansions, but for the fragments buried in the corners. The oddities.
He found a brief mention in a two-week-old paper from New York. A report from the Fourteenth Precinct about a "wild man" of incredible strength who had torn apart a dockyard brawl before vanishing into the night. The police superintendent dismissed it as drunken hysteria. James filed the data point away.
He pulled down a heavy atlas. He traced the borders of nations, his finger moving over Europe, Asia, Africa. The world was so vast, so interconnected. Was what happened here, in this remote corner of Alberta, happening elsewhere? Were there others with… unique instruments? The System's Shop, with its offerings of [Metabolic Overclock] and [Telepathic Shielding], implied a universe where such things were not only possible but classifiable.
He spent hours cross-referencing mythology texts with historical accounts. Legends of Norse gods, tales of Grecian heroes. Were they mere stories, or a distorted cultural memory of other Users, other points of data with access to different Systems? He read about berserkers who felt no pain, about shamans who could speak to animals. It was all noise, but within the noise, there might be a signal.
His enhanced hearing kept track of the house. He heard Elizabeth instructing the maid on the dinner menu, her voice a constant, anxious melody. He heard the solid, rhythmic tread of John Howlett pacing in his study, the clink of a glass, the rustle of account books. And he heard the other presence.
Victor. Dog Logan.
The boy moved through the world with a different sound. A heavier, less cautious tread. His scent, when he passed near the house, was a potent mix of sweat, soil, and a peculiar, sharp musk that was uniquely his. Since the incident, he had been kept at a distance, working the far fields with his father, Thomas. But the estate was a small world. Their paths were destined to cross.
It was on the third day of his research that James, sitting by the library window, observed Victor in the courtyard below. One of the working dogs, a large, ill-tempered mastiff used for protection, had gotten its chain tangled in a cart. The animal was snarling, thrashing in a panic. Victor approached it, not with the cautious respect the handlers used, but with a casual, almost challenging stride.
"Stupid mutt," Victor growled, his voice carrying clearly to James's attuned ears.
The dog lunged, snapping its powerful jaws. It was a blur of motion to a normal eye, but to James, it was a sequence of individual frames. He saw Victor's hand shoot out, not to untangle the chain, but to backhand the animal across the muzzle.
The crack of the impact was sharp, definitive.
The mastiff, a beast that could terrify a full-grown man, yelped—a high-pitched sound of shock and pain—and cowered, whining, backing away as far as its tangled chain would allow. It submitted instantly.
James's eyes narrowed. The force of the blow was… excessive. Unnaturally so. A boy of Victor's size should have been bitten, or at best, achieved a stalemate of fear. He hadn't. He had dominated completely, through pure, overwhelming force. And there was something in the way he had moved—a fluid, explosive grace that was at odds with his brutish appearance.
Later that afternoon, under the guise of taking the prescribed "air," James walked the perimeter of the estate. His senses were dialed to their maximum, the Filter ensuring he could process the input without overload. He was hunting for data.
He found it near the old logging trail that bordered the Logan property.
The smell hit him first—the coppery stench of blood, old and thick. And beneath it, that same sharp, feral musk he associated with Victor.
He followed the scent trail, his movements silent, his small body blending into the dappled shadows of the woods. It led to a small clearing. And there, the story was written in the dirt and the leaves.
A deer. A full-grown buck. It was not merely dead; it was… deconstructed. Its body had been torn apart with a violence that went beyond hunting. Great gouges were ripped in its flanks, deep enough to shatter bone. The kill was not clean. It was a frenzy. The tracks in the soft earth around the carcass were a mix of animal—wolves, most likely—and one set of human boots. Victor's boots.
But the narrative was wrong. The wolves had come after. They were scavengers on a kill they had not made. The initial, catastrophic damage had been done by something else. Something with immense strength and a disregard for form. The boot prints were placed right next to the body, in the epicenter of the violence, not in the cautious pattern of a hunter who had stumbled upon a wolf kill.
James crouched, his fingers hovering over a deep set of parallel gashes on the deer's neck. They were too clean, too deep to be wolf claws. They were spaced like… like fingers. Or like the impressions that might be left by something attached to knuckles.
A cold, logical thread connected in his mind. The explosive strength with the dog. The feral musk. This savagery. Victor was not normal. His instrument was also flawed, but in a different way. Where James's was controlled, surgical, and hidden, Victor's was wild, chaotic, and left a mess. It was a crude, blunt-force version of the same principle.
A fellow mutant. The term surfaced from his research, from the whispers of abnormal beings in the newspapers. It was the only logical conclusion. They were both aberrations. Two different expressions of the same error in the human code.
He felt no kinship. Only a heightened sense of assessment. Victor was a variable. An unpredictable and dangerous one. His brutality was untempered by intellect, a weapon without a safety. He was a problem that would need to be managed.
That evening at dinner, the tension was a third presence at the table. Victor and Thomas Logan had been invited, a strained attempt at reconciliation orchestrated by Elizabeth. The air was thick with the smells of roasted meat, of wine, and of barely suppressed animosity.
Victor sat across from James, his eyes, a pale, predatory yellow, fixed on him. He ate with a voracious, messy intensity, his manners a deliberate provocation. James met his gaze only once, for a fraction of a second. He let none of his new understanding show, only the expected flicker of fear before looking down at his plate.
"The north fence needs mending," John Howlett said, his voice cutting through the awkward silence. "The storm last week took down a quarter mile of it. Your men can see to it tomorrow, Thomas."
Thomas Logan grunted, a sullen sound. "Aye. If we're allowed to work in peace."
"The boy can help," John continued, his gaze shifting to Victor. "Good, hard work. Builds character."
Victor smirked, a cruel, knowing expression. "I like hard work, Mr. Howlett. I'm good with my hands." He flexed his fingers, and for a moment, James saw not a boy's hand, but a weapon. He could almost smell the blood of the deer on them.
It was then that James felt it. A faint, almost imperceptible vibration in the air, a subsonic hum that resonated with something deep within his own cellular structure. It was a feeling, not a sound or a smell—a primitive, atavistic recognition. It was the same feeling he got when he pushed his claws to the brink of emergence, a signature of activated, aberrant biology. And it was emanating from Victor.
Victor's eyes narrowed slightly, his chewing slowing. He was looking at James with a new, confused intensity. The smirk had vanished. It was as if he, too, had felt a tremor on a frequency only they could access. A silent, animal challenge passed between them, a moment of mutual, uncomprehending recognition that bypassed all pretense of civility.
He knows, James thought, his mind perfectly calm. He doesn't understand what he knows, but he senses it. He senses that I am not what I appear to be.
Elizabeth, sensing the shift in the atmosphere but misreading it completely, tried to dispel it. "I'm sure James will be back to his studies soon enough," she said brightly. "He's been so diligent in the library."
Victor's gaze broke from James, but the tension remained. "Reading," he sneered, the moment of strange connection broken by his default contempt. "That's all he's good for."
James said nothing. He simply took a sip of water, his mind already working, calculating. The world was not just filled with hidden history and potential others. The other was here, living in the same house, eating at the same table. The experiment had just acquired a new, volatile subject. And James, the prime observer, would need to study him very, very closely. The peaceful convalescence was over. The real work was about to begin.
The game had just become infinitely more complex, and the player who understood the rules held an advantage he intended to exploit to its fullest. The shadows in the Howlett estate had just grown longer, and in them, something feral and something infinitely colder began to circle one another, two strange flowers blooming in the same poisoned soil.
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(How am i doing😅😅)[this is earth 616 alternate version 😁]