Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

I stepped out of the car and peeled off the face mask.

Hogsby. Dark and quiet, the way schools are at midnight when the people inside them don’t know a mission just happened. Wells, Mute, and Annabelle split toward their wing. Me and Sherry walked toward ours.

The challenge wasn’t charging. The challenge was finding someone new. That was the system’s specific requirement and it was inconvenient in the specific way of requirements that didn’t care about circumstances.

Mable would open her door before I finished knocking. May would have known I was coming before I left my room. Annabelle would offer before I asked. None of them counted tonight.

"What a night," Sherry said beside me.

The blonde wig was still on. It fit her so naturally I had to remind myself it wasn’t hers. She was walking slightly off-center, the specific drift of someone running on adrenaline and relief and not quite enough sleep, and at intervals she knocked gently into my shoulder without correcting it.

"Yeah," I said. "I love busy nights."

"Yes, you do," she said, and found something funny in it that I let her keep.

We reached our wing. I watched her work the key into her door with the focused effort of someone whose fine motor skills had decided the evening was over.

I stood in the corridor and didn’t open my door. She felt my eyes.

"What?" She turned.

"Nothing," I said. "Just staring."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she removed the wig and threw it through the open door without entering her room and came to where I was standing. She put her arms around the back of my neck, her heels bringing her close to my height, and kissed me.

I held her face and kissed her back. It was unhurried and genuine, the kind of moment that doesn’t announce itself, it just arrives and means something without being told to. Something between us had been building since the gate crossing and the corridor and the hands held in the back of a car, and this was where it had gotten to. She pulled back.

"Are you expecting anyone tonight?" she asked.

"No," I said. Honestly.

She nodded, like that settled something. "Good night, Bram."

She went into her room and closed the door. I stood in the corridor.

She kissed me and went to bed, I thought. That is the most Sherry thing that has ever happened.

I went into my room and lay on the bed without closing the door. The system countdown was running. Sherry was next door. And Sherry, I had accepted some time ago, was not the kind of person who opened that particular door on a timeline that anyone else set.

She was attached to Max Donman in ways she hadn’t fully mapped yet. She was building toward something with me that had its own pace and its own requirements. And none of that pace involved tonight.

Daphne, I thought.

Her door is always open. Her words. Said with enough plausible deniability that she could mean it professionally if pressed. I had chosen to take it literally since the moment she said it.

I was up in thirty seconds. Bathed, changed, out the door in five minutes, which was a personal record I didn’t stop to appreciate because the countdown was running and the teachers’ quarters were a full campus away.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Full charge incomplete. New female ability user required.]

[Failure to charge risks system reset.]

[Countdown: 01:29:04]

I know. I’m moving.

The campus at midnight was dim and still. I passed through it the way I moved through every new environment, reading it, noting exits, filing the shapes of things. Old habit. The plain dressed up as instinct.

Teachers’ quarters. Four apartments. Three of them dark. One window lit.

She doesn’t sleep on easy nights either, I thought, looking up at it. Good.

The balcony was empty. No binoculars tonight. I climbed the stairs without a plan but with a direction, which was exactly how I had walked to the walls with no ability. Luck, flexibility, and circumstances. The only strategy the outside had ever endorsed.

I reached her door and knocked. Waited.

Inside, something. A sound, muffled by the door, the specific quality of audio coming from a screen. A woman crying, or something that sounded like it.

Whatever Daphne was watching at midnight alone in her apartment, it had the texture of something she watched when nobody was supposed to know she was watching it.

I knocked again. No answer. A minute passed. Then another. Then I thought about the countdown, about the reset, about everything I had built over the past days that I was not prepared to lose because I hadn’t tried hard enough.

Her door is always open, she had said.

I turned the handle. It opened. I didn’t push it inside. Not yet.

The sound came through clearer now, low and unmistakable, the specific frequency of something people didn’t leave playing loud when they expected to be interrupted. A woman’s voice. Then another. The kind of audio that explained why Daphne hadn’t answered the door and also explained why she hadn’t locked it.

She didn’t come to the door. Which meant one of two things. Either she hadn’t heard it open, or she had, and didn’t consider it a problem.

Which was either an invitation or a boundary, and the difference between those two things was the door I was currently holding open by exactly one inch.

I stayed where I was, just outside the door, measuring the risk of stepping in. I found myself wondering which version of her I was about to meet. In the end, it didn’t matter. None of it did.

Tonight, she was my last hope. The only ability user I could rely on. That alone made the decision for me. I exhaled slowly and made up my mind.

[Countdown: 01:19:11]

The system pulsed again, more insistent this time, like it wasn’t going to let me forget what was at stake. The numbers kept ticking down, indifferent, steady.

No more hesitation.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside.