The Wonderful Use of Money
"Letty, please, let me stay here for a few days!"
When Letty Ortiz finally came home after a long morning, she found Mia Toretto anxiously waiting right at her doorstep. Letty, possessing the sharp, incredibly observant instincts of a woman raised on the unforgiving streets of Los Angeles, could see the profound physical and emotional shift in the younger girl at a single glance. Mia was glowing with the undeniable, flushed aura of someone who had just entirely surrendered to life's great, unrestrained harmony with her new boyfriend.
Letty naturally knew exactly how much her own boyfriend, Dominic Toretto, cherished and cared about his little sister.
It was just that Dom was notoriously terrible at actually expressing his protective feelings in a healthy way. When it came to the delicate subject of choosing Mia's future husband, the massive man seemed to have developed a stubborn, overbearing obsession. That toxic, unspoken approval was the exact reason why the hulking, violent Vince had spent all these years aggressively harassing Mia and making her teenage life utterly miserable.
Thinking of all this heavy family baggage, Letty actually felt a massive amount of genuine sympathy for Mia's desperate situation.
But Letty also possessed a fiercely loyal, carefree personality; not only had she grown up side-by-side with Dominic, navigating the dangerous underground racing circuits together, but she was also childhood friends with Vince.
Although Letty really didn't like Vince's crude, overly aggressive ways, she didn't exactly hate him either. He was family.
Right now, looking at the glowing girl on her porch, Letty knew Mia was clearly being led entirely astray by a dangerous outsider—most likely that quiet, ruggedly handsome young mechanic from Old Parker's garage.
Just imagining exactly how her fiercely protective boyfriend and the explosively jealous Vince would violently react once they found out the truth made Letty's scalp tingle with absolute dread.
"Mia, you can stay here as long as you like," Letty finally said, unlocking the door and ushering the trembling girl inside.
"But I have to let Dom know you're with me. I won't lie to him."
Letty turned, her dark eyes locking onto Mia's amber ones. "You know how much Dom cares about you. He's probably tearing the city apart right now."
"So, whoever this punk is that you spent the night with," Letty warned, her voice low and serious, "he's really in for it this time."
Seeing the deeply pitiful, terrified look cross Mia's beautiful face, Letty's tough exterior softened, and she firmly decided to take the younger girl in for now to weather the impending storm.
She knew her boyfriend would be absolutely, terrifyingly furious; the only real question was exactly how big the violent explosion would be when it finally detonated.
Mia opened her mouth, desperately wanting to plead on Arthur's behalf and defend his honor.
But she quickly swallowed her words. She could easily guess that after angrily hanging up on her big brother so many times yesterday, and even violently smashing her own cell phone against the wall when she'd been completely lost in the heat of passion...
...Dom must have logically assumed that the phone had been forcibly switched off by the mechanic after she'd stayed out all night.
It was horrifyingly easy to imagine that his blazing rage absolutely wouldn't be soothed by a simple, tearful apology.
Now, even Sister Letty wasn't willing to speak up and defend her choices.
For a long, agonizing moment, Mia simply didn't know what to do to stop the incoming violence.
After all, she was only eighteen years old and had dropped out of school not long ago to run the family cafe; she wasn't equipped to handle an underworld war over her heart.
Meanwhile, in a gritty, sweat-scented boxing club somewhere across the sprawling city...
Arthur Sterling, heavily gloved up and sweating profusely, was intensely training under the strict guidance of a supposedly retired professional boxer.
Long ago, he had logically suspected that intense combat sports like boxing, mixed martial arts, and the like could effortlessly trigger new, highly lethal system skills.
He just hadn't been entirely sure how to correctly activate them or how to rapidly raise their base levels at the time.
Now, with a massive stack of cash burning a hole in his pocket, he had successfully confirmed his earlier, strategic guess.
After slapping down crisp hundred-dollar bills, hiring the massive former pro at the local club for two hundred dollars an hour to personally coach his form, the absolute instant he slipped on the heavy leather gloves and threw his very first, calculated punch, the familiar, cold mechanical voice of the proficiency system rang out clearly in his mind.
He had successfully gained the [Boxing] skill.
Bang!Bang!Bang! Bang! Watching Arthur expertly shuffle his feet left and right, moving exactly as instructed, and violently pound the heavy leather sandbag again and again, his massive coach, the ex-pro named Eddie, clicked his tongue in genuine, shocked admiration.
"Kid, I have to admit, I completely underestimated you," Eddie called out over the rhythmic thudding.
"At first glance, seeing you walk in, I thought you were just some skinny, spoiled rich kid with entirely too much money to burn, here just to blindly blow off some steam."
"I never expected to see such explosive, raw power hidden in that thin frame of yours."
"Not bad at all—you've got real, undeniable potential for the ring."
"Ever thought about turning pro?" Eddie asked, crossing his massive, tree-trunk arms.
Arthur stood at roughly the exact same height as the towering Eddie, but their underlying physical builds were entirely worlds apart.
Eddie, a former heavyweight pro, had clearly spent decades lifting heavy iron, training specifically for intimidating mass.
His massive muscles bulged against his tight shirt; standing at six-foot-two, he easily weighed at least two hundred and forty pounds—around a hundred and ten kilograms of pure, aggressive brawn.
Arthur, though standing a lean six-foot-three, had only just pushed his weight past eighty-two kilograms.
With nearly thirty kilos of raw mass standing between them, to a heavyweight monster like Eddie, Arthur really did look like a fragile bamboo pole.
Arthur just smiled warmly through his sweat and said nothing, maintaining his quiet facade.
His body was incredibly lean, but his muscles were dense, coiled like steel springs, and perfectly defined—just not as artificially exaggerated as Eddie's steroid-fed bulk.
Dominic Toretto was also roughly about Arthur's height, but the street king easily outweighed him by more than twenty heavily muscled kilograms.
Clearly, both Eddie and Dom had intensely focused their gym training entirely on building massive arms, legs, and core strength to physically dominate their opponents.
Arthur's body, however, had been flawlessly sculpted from the inside out by the system's golden finger, with every single one of his five core attributes continuously rising in absolute, perfect mathematical balance.
So he might not look nearly as visually bulky or intimidating as Eddie or Dom in a dimly lit alleyway.
But if it ever came down to a real, brutal, life-or-death contest on the asphalt, the final outcome was far from certain.
At the very least, Arthur absolutely didn't believe a massive tank like Eddie could ever hope to match his supernatural agility or his limitless, system-backed stamina.
Once he'd fully grown used to his terrifying new strength over the first hour, he began deliberately, carefully controlling the kinetic force of each punch to avoid tearing the heavy bag off its steel chains.
Blow after blow still slammed viciously into the sandbag, echoing like gunshots in the gym.
Yet Arthur's deep breathing only grew easier and easier as his body adapted.
His footwork stance and the precise, devastating angles of his punches rapidly became textbook-perfect as the system seamlessly fed decades of muscle memory directly into his nervous system.
He even found he had more than enough spare cardiovascular energy to casually chat with Eddie between combinations.
"No need for the pro circuit," Arthur replied, panting lightly to keep up appearances. "I really just wanted to train a bit for self-defense."
"If I actually entered a real professional match, this skinny body of mine wouldn't be able to take more than a couple of solid hits from a guy like you."
Arthur even gestured modestly with his gloved hands, self-deprecatingly comparing their vastly different builds.
Eddie's massive, fragile vanity was thoroughly and easily satisfied by the compliment.
He laughed loudly, the sound booming across the gym, completely unaware that in the short three hours of his expensive coaching, the young man standing across from him had already effortlessly raised his [Boxing] skill to Level 1—and the glowing blue experience bar in his mind was still rapidly climbing.
Several hours later, standing in the steaming shower room of an entirely different, high-end shooting club across town.
Arthur stood quietly in a private, tiled stall, letting the scalding hot water wash the heavy sweat and grime from his exhausted body.
His naked, dripping frame looked relatively unremarkable at a quick, passing first glance.
But had anyone actually walked in at that exact moment and closely observed the flawless, impossibly dense musculature and razor-sharp definition mapping his body from head to toe, they would have gasped aloud in shock.
"Whew!"
He wiped the steaming water from his face and vigorously toweled himself dry.
Not long before stepping into the shower, under a highly paid, professional tactical shooting coach's guidance on the private range, he had relentlessly fired more than seven hundred heavy pistol rounds in four deafening hours—engaging paper targets at ten, twenty, and fifty meters. Through sheer repetition and burning through brass, he had finally pushed his lethal [Shooting] skill to Level 3.
Just as Arthur had previously, correctly suspected: having plenty of disposable money could massively accelerate the experience gain of many practical skills.
It was just a profound pity that it was so incredibly expensive!
The massive twenty-thousand-dollar windfall he'd secretly gotten from Old Parker just yesterday had rapidly shrunk to a last, pathetic three thousand dollars by the second night of his three-day holiday.
Money really is a wonderful, magical thing, Arthur thought, dressing quickly in the humid locker room.
Looks like I desperately need to find a new, highly lucrative way to get more—and fast.
With that pressing thought weighing heavily on his mind, he quickly pulled on his freshly laundered, casual clothes.
After so much intense, rapid-fire shooting on the indoor range, the sharp, metallic reek of burnt cordite and gunpowder heavily clung to his hair and skin.
He didn't want some overly aggressive patrolling LAPD cop to catch a whiff, collar him, and illegally detain him for questioning the absolute moment he walked out the front doors of the club.
A thorough, soapy shower had definitely been a tactical necessity.
Thus, freshly washed, smelling clean, and in incredibly high spirits after leveling his combat abilities, Arthur mounted his roaring vintage bike and headed straight back to his rundown apartment complex.
He had barely killed the engine and parked the old, ticking machine in the shadowed lot when the quiet of the evening was shattered.
A furious, booming shout violently rang out across the asphalt.
"Hold it right there!"
Arthur smoothly turned around, looking toward the dark entrance of the dilapidated building. He saw a massive, sleeveless-shirted, heavily tattooed muscle-head charging aggressively right at him, his face twisted in a mask of absolute, murderous rage.
It was none other than Vince!