Chapter 9: New Skin
Queens, New York — April 2, 2008
The Common essence hit different.
Ethan stood in the Forge Space with both palms on the anvil and two hundred units of Common-grade essence flowing through the channels like liquid light — white instead of gray, denser, warmer, carrying a weight that Turbid essence could only dream of. The reward for ten Hydra kills, delivered in a single compressed payload that the Forge processed with an efficiency that made the previous weeks of Turbid grinding look like scooping the ocean with a spoon.
[E-Rank Mission Reward Claimed: 200 Common Essence. +1 Fortune.]
[Fortune: 5 → 6.]
The Common essence merged with his remaining reserves — the accumulated Turbid from the garage fight, converted and combined — and the total pushed BT2 into motion. His muscles tightened. Not the surface-level tightness of BT1's skin tempering but something deeper: the tissue itself restructuring, fibers thickening, the architecture of each muscle group reorganizing along lines of force that no personal trainer in the world could prescribe.
It was worse than BT1.
He dropped to the platform. Hands and knees, forehead pressed against dark stone, teeth grinding so hard his jaw ached. The restructuring moved in waves — calves first, then thighs, glutes, core, shoulders, arms — each wave a few seconds of fire followed by a brief reprieve before the next one hit. His forearm wound reopened during the arm phase, blood soaking through the makeshift bandage, and the pain there layered on top of the tempering pain in a way that made his vision blur.
The body is becoming something new. Not superhuman — not yet — but better than it was. Each muscle fiber is being rewritten at the cellular level, compressed and strengthened and realigned. The process is agonizing because it's real. It's not a stat number going up — it's my actual flesh changing.
Twenty minutes. The waves subsided. He lay on the platform, drenched in sweat, breathing like he'd run a marathon, and the body he was lying in felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone stronger.
He flexed his right hand. Closed it into a fist. The grip strength was measurably different — he could feel it in the way his fingers compressed, the force available before the tendons reached their limit. He pressed a palm against the stone and pushed to standing, and his legs responded with a solidity that was new.
[Body Tempering Stage 2 (Flesh): COMPLETE.]
[STR: 10 → 13 | AGI: 10 → 12 | VIT: 11 → 12]
[BT3 (Bone) unlocked. Progress: 0%.]
[Forge Mastery: 3 → 5. (Cultivation advancement bonus.)]
That last line made him blink.
FM5. The breakthrough bonus pushed Forge Mastery past the threshold. Basic Mortal-grade weapon forging is now available.
He pulled up the crafting menu. The empty shelves had changed — a single blueprint glowed faintly on the lowest shelf, unlocked by the mastery milestone:
[Blueprint Available: Mortal-Grade Spirit Weapon — Requires: 3+ quality materials (minimum Common-grade steel or equivalent), 50+ Essence (any grade), FM 5. Success rate at FM5: 40%. Failure consumes materials and 50% of essence.]
Forty percent success rate. That's a coin flip minus ten percent. And failure eats half my resources.
But it's possible now. It's actually possible.
He dismissed the menu and checked his forearm. The reopened wound was already closing — not fast, not dramatically, but faster than any baseline human wound should close. BT2's enhanced muscle tissue came with enhanced recovery, the accelerated healing extending from skin to the deeper layers.
The status screen reflected the changes:
[Status: Ethan Crawford] [Cultivation: Body Tempering 2 — Flesh (complete)] [STR: 13 | AGI: 12 | VIT: 12 | SPI: 2 | PER: 9 | FOR: 6] [Essence: 47 / 1,000] [Forge Mastery: 5] [Interface: Tier 1 — Ember]
STR 13 means I can hit harder than a professional heavyweight. AGI 12 means my reflexes are faster than Olympic-level athletes. This body is no longer a desk worker's — it's approaching the lower end of what action movies pretend normal people can do. Not superhuman. Not enhanced. But dangerous.
And still, compared to anything coming — Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Loki, the Chitauri — I'm a child playing with blocks.
He willed himself back to the boarding house. The room materialized around him, the radiator clanking, the coffee maker cold on the windowsill, morning light through the airshaft painting a stripe across the floor.
The forearm wound was scabbing over. The stomach bruise from the garage fight had faded from black to a greenish-yellow that would be gone in days. His ribs — the original cracked rib from three weeks ago — barely registered anymore. BT2 recovery was doing what rest and ibuprofen couldn't.
Phase one of the next problem: identity.
---
The Social Security Administration office in Jamaica, Queens, occupied the ground floor of a federal building with fluorescent lighting, plastic chairs bolted to the floor, and a ticketing system that made the DMV look efficient. Ethan took a number — B-347 — and sat between a woman with three children and an elderly man reading the Daily News through glasses held together with tape.
He waited forty minutes. When his number was called, he walked to the counter, sat down, and asked about replacing a lost Social Security card — a routine request that required a form and existing identification.
He didn't have existing identification. That wasn't the point.
The point was the kiosk.
He'd spotted it on the way in: a self-service terminal near the entrance, touch-screen, connected to the SSA's internal network for basic lookup functions. While the counter clerk processed someone else's paperwork, Ethan walked to the kiosk, pressed his palm flat against the side of the housing, and pushed.
The technopathy was still agonizing at Latent stage. The data flood came in garbled — network addresses, database handshakes, authentication tokens that looked like static in his mind's eye. But the system was simpler than the laptop had been. Designed for public access, security minimal, and buried in the data stream was what he needed: the format of a valid Social Security number, the structure of the identity records, and — after eight minutes of concentration that left him pale and sweating — a dormant record.
David Allen Crawford. Born 1978. Died 2003. No surviving family. SSN never flagged for post-mortem fraud.
He couldn't modify the record from here. Latent technopathy was read-only at best, and even that was unreliable. But he had the number, the format, and the knowledge of how the system stored its records.
He visited the DMV the next day. Same approach: public terminal, palm contact, eight minutes of data parsing through frosted glass. He built a picture of the state's identity verification process — what connected to what, which databases cross-referenced, where the gaps lived.
The headaches were cumulative. By the second day, the migraine had settled into a permanent residence behind his left eye, and his nose bled every time he pushed past passive sensing. Twice he had to step outside and sit on a bench until his vision cleared.
On the third day, he tried something different. Instead of reading data, he attempted to write — to push a single modified record into the DMV terminal's queue during a routine system update. A name change. David Allen Crawford to Ethan Crawford. A minor administrative correction, the kind that processed automatically.
The terminal's screen flickered. His nose bled. The migraine hit with enough force to make him grab the counter for balance.
[Technopathy — Neural Strain Warning. Cease active use. Recovery: 12 hours minimum.]
But it worked.
The screen showed the updated record. Ethan Crawford. The SSN was clean. The name was new. And in seventy-two hours, when the DMV's batch processing caught up, there would be a valid identity in the New York State database for a man who had never existed until three days ago.
He picked the name deliberately. Ethan — his younger brother's name, the one person from the old life he missed with a constancy that surprised him, a quiet ache under the ribs that had nothing to do with cracked bones. Crawford — because it was common enough to disappear behind, unusual enough to feel like a real name, and it was his mother's maiden name in a world that no longer existed.
He said it to the bathroom mirror in the boarding house, blood crusted on his upper lip and dark circles under eyes that were still the wrong color.
"Ethan Crawford."
It sounded like a promise. Or a prayer. He couldn't tell which.
---
The driver's license arrived two weeks later — expedited processing, forty-seven dollars, a photo taken at the DMV in Flushing where the camera flash made him look like every other exhausted New Yorker getting their picture taken under fluorescent lights. The address was a P.O. box in Astoria. The occupation field was blank; he'd fill that in later.
In the meantime, he sold Hydra hardware. The weapons and tactical gear from the garage fight — minus the Makarov, which he'd dropped at the scene — went to a pawn shop in the Bronx that didn't ask questions and paid in cash. Eight hundred dollars. Not much, but enough to bridge the gap until the new identity was operational.
The D-rank mission board glowed in his mind's eye, two new entries replacing the completed E-rank:
[Mission: Hydra Weapons Cache — Locate and destroy 1 Hydra weapons stockpile. Rank: D. Reward: 150 Common Essence, +2 Fortune, Forge Blueprint (random).]
[Mission: Enhanced Threat — Eliminate 1 enhanced individual (minimum: above-human physical capability). Rank: D. Reward: 300 Common Essence, Refined Essence ×1.]
D-rank. A step up from the street-level grinding. The weapons cache is achievable — I know where two more Hydra depots are from the research phase. The enhanced threat... that's something else entirely. Someone stronger than human. Someone who fights back in ways a normal man with a crowbar can't handle.
But the rewards. Three hundred Common essence plus a Refined orb — that's worth more than everything I've accumulated since the Forge ignited. One good kill versus weeks of Turbid grinding.
He sat on the bed in the boarding house — the room he'd given notice on that morning, because Ethan Crawford had signed a six-month lease on a studio apartment in Astoria with clean documents and a handshake, and the landlady hadn't looked twice.
The apartment was small. Clean. Anonymous. Utilities included, laundry in the basement, a deadbolt that actually worked. The coffee maker went on the kitchen counter, and the crowbar went under the bed, and the gym bag went by the door packed for tomorrow's run.
I'm Ethan Crawford now. Freelance security consultant — a cover identity that explains odd hours, physical fitness, and an interest in surveillance equipment. The SSN is clean. The license is real. The credit history is thin but functional.
Ryan Callahan doesn't exist anymore. The apartment on Flatbush is abandoned. The lease will expire in March, and nobody will come looking for the man who lived there, because nobody came looking when he died the first time.
---
In the Forge Space that night, with the new apartment quiet around his physical body and the anvil humming beneath his palms, the crafting menu expanded. FM5's threshold unlocked a cascade of information that the system had been holding back — material quality assessments, basic blueprint parameters, the skeletal framework of what weapon forging actually involved.
[Forge Mastery 5 Achieved. Basic Mortal-Grade Forging Unlocked.]
[Available Materials: None (Forge inventory empty).]
[Recommendation: Acquire Common-grade or higher metal, minimum 3 pieces. Higher material quality = higher weapon quality ceiling.]
I need materials. Real materials, not kitchen knives and switchblades — the Forge already told me mundane steel is useless. Common-grade means military specification at minimum, and ideally something exotic. Hydra hardware might qualify, or I might need to find something better.
But the path is open. FM5 and BT2 in the same week. The Forge is warming up, the body is strengthening, and the mission board is offering targets worth hitting.
He stood at the anvil and placed his hands on the crystallized surface, feeling the warmth pulse beneath his palms. The dying stars overhead glowed fractionally brighter than they had a month ago — the Forge growing alongside its host, feeding on every orb of essence and every hour of practice.
May 2008 is six weeks away. Tony Stark will be in Afghanistan by then, building the Mark I in a cave. The MCU's first domino is about to fall, and I need to be ready — not to interfere, not to help, but to be strong enough that when the dominoes start hitting things I care about, I can push back.
He closed the crafting menu and pulled up the D-rank mission list one more time. The enhanced threat entry glowed amber, patient and waiting.
Three hundred Common essence. One kill. Someone above human.
Time to find out what that costs.
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