My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 331: The Prince of Earth: Marcus’s True Influence

Chapter 331: The Prince of Earth: Marcus’s True Influence

Phei had almost forgotten—somewhere between almost dying, awakening an unknown power, and gaining enough seduction abilities to make gods nervous, the whole basketball challenge had slipped his mind.

But Paradise Elite Academy hadn’t forgotten.

Paradise Elite Academy had gone absolutely fucking mental about it.

The hallways were plastered with flyers—actual printed flyers, like it was 1985 and someone had discovered a Kinko’s.

Phei’s face stared out from every bulletin board, every locker door, every available surface. His old pictures sat side-by-side with newer ones: the before and after of his transformation laid bare for everyone to see.

Before: skinny, forgettable, a face you’d walk past without registering. The charity-case ghost haunting the edges of every photo.

After: that.

The jawline that could cut glass. The shoulders that had broadened overnight. The eyes that made women forget their own names. The predatory grace that had replaced his former awkwardness.

People had noticed.

The whole school had noticed.

Girls whispered. Boys glared. Teachers stared too long. Even the janitors paused mid-mop to do double-takes.

And now they were treating his basketball challenge like it was the fucking Super Bowl—if the Super Bowl had now been organized by horny teenage girls with unlimited graphic design software, daddy’s black card, and a collective vendetta against boredom.

"THE PRINCE OF ACADEMY PHEI VS. THE PRINCE"

"MAXTON CHALLENGES HEAVENCHILD"

"WITNESS HISTORY: ONE GAME. ONE WINNER. NO MERCY."

The flyers were dramatic. Overwrought. Borderline unhinged. Exactly what happened when you let Emily and Delilah—the two most dangerous simps in Paradise—loose with Canva, a printer, and zero chill.

Emily and Delilah.

Of course.

Those two had taken the PheiCrush Simps—the unofficial fan club that had sprung up around him like mushrooms after a rain of pure, unfiltered thirst—and weaponized them with terrifying efficiency.

Every corner of Paradise knew what was happening today. Not just the Academy. Not just the Main Paradise. Downtown Paradise. The shopping districts. The beach clubs. The restaurants where Legacy families took their business lunches and pretended they weren’t already drunk by noon.

Everyone knew.

And apparently, everyone wanted to watch a charity case either dunk on royalty or get publicly curb-stomped by it.

The money had been Delilah’s idea.

"If they want to see it," she’d told Emily with the cold certainty of a girl who’d never had to check a price tag in her life, "they can pay for the privilege."

And they had.

The VP—that, easily-manipulated administrator who’d learned long ago that Main Legacy kids got whatever they wanted unless they wanted something that might accidentally make him grow a second spine—had approved the whole scheme without even blinking.

Ticket sales for the game. Premium seating for higher donors.

A percentage going to "charity" (read: whatever fund Delilah decided was worthy, which probably meant her own shopping budget or the "PheiCrush Simp Emergency Lingerie Reserve").

People had lined up.

Not just students. Parents. Siblings. Cousins twice removed who’d heard about the drama through three different group chats and wanted front-row seats to watch the charity case either triumph or get humiliated by Paradise royalty while sipping overpriced kombucha.

The streaming had been Yuki Tanaka’s department.

The Tech Empire Princess—daughter of current most powerful technology conglomerate, heiress to a fortune that made most trust funds look like middle-class aspirants trying to cosplay wealth—had locked down every unauthorized broadcast with surgical precision.

No bootleg streams.

No phone recordings going viral.

You wanted to watch Phei Maxton challenge Marcus Heavenchild? You paid. You went through the official channels. You contributed to the spectacle that the PheiCrush Simps had orchestrated like they were running a cult with better lighting and worse impulse control.

Yuki had done it as a favor.

Or maybe not a favor—maybe she had her own reasons for wanting this event controlled, catalogued, contained. The girl was impossible to read, all polite smiles and technical jargon and eyes that calculated seventeen steps ahead of everyone else in the room while silently judging your entire bloodline.

But whatever her motivation, the result was the same: the Challenge had become an event.

A social media sensation. A trending topic not just in Paradise but across every platform where the Legacy world’s next generation was tracked, thirsted over, and memed into oblivion.

And that was the entire fucking world!

The Heavenchilds had helped.

That was the part that would have made Phei laugh if he’d had the energy for laughter instead of "staring into the void until it stares back and asks for nudes."

The most powerful family in the world—the dynasty that made Ashfords and Maxtons and every other Paradise Legacy look like regional players trying to cosplay global dominance—had actively amplified the hype around a high school basketball game like it was world cup or Olympics.

Because Dravenna had played them perfectly.

Her Pride Card, she and Phei called it.

She’d reached out to the Heavenchild patriarch directly. Framed the Challenge not as a threat but as an opportunity.

This charity case, she’d explained with the calm certainty of a woman who knew exactly which buttons to push, has publicly challenged the Prince. Has stared down Marcus Heavenchild in front of the entire student body and declared that he can not only beat the Ashford Elite team single-handedly. But also challenge the Prince and now it’s viral.

The audacity of it.

The sheer, unforgivable presumption.

What better way to crush that presumption than to let the whole world watch? Let the cameras capture every moment. Let the viewers see what happened when some nobody from nowhere tried to challenge Heavenchild dominance. Let Marcus assert himself publicly, definitively, in front of an audience that spanned continents and income brackets.

She’d suggested to them! 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

The Heavenchilds had agreed.

More than agreed—they’d thrown their considerable influence behind making the Challenge as visible as possible. Their media contacts. Their social platforms. Their network of celebrity connections who suddenly found themselves "interested" in a high school basketball game happening in a gated community because someone with a Heavenchild last name had posted about it.

The Prince of Earth, the whole world called Marcus that. And in a way it was true.

The most influential teenager on Earth, heir of the family that everyone knew ran the world!

And the Prince of Earth was about to demonstrate why that title wasn’t just empty words.

That was the narrative the Heavenchilds were pushing.

They didn’t know about Phei’s abilities or skills.

To them, this was a foregone conclusion—a slightly talented but arrogant charity case about to be publicly humiliated by Earth’s royal Prince while the world watched and took notes on how not to fuck with the natural order.

The whole world was now watching.

Well—the whole world that cared about Legacy politics and the drama of Paradise’s golden children.

Which, admittedly, was a surprisingly large audience.

Like 70% of the population.

People loved watching the rich and powerful. Loved the soap opera of their lives. Loved seeing who rose and who fell and who fucked whom behind closed doors (and sometimes in front of them, if the lighting was good).

And today, they were all tuned in.

Ready to see what happened when a charity case dared to challenge a Heavenchild.

Ready to watch him get crushed.

At least—that’s what they expected.