Hunter of Marvel - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Pretend

The walk back to the apartment was quiet, the adrenaline from the encounter in the park slowly bleeding out of Veer’s system. He navigated the dimly lit streets of Queens with a newfound ease, his heightened Perception mapping the shadows and alleyways effortlessly.

When he finally unlocked the front door and pushed it open, he expected to find the apartment dark and silent.

Instead, the single, flickering lamp in the living room was on. Mark was sitting perfectly rigid on the edge of the worn sofa, his hands clasped tightly between his knees. He looked atrocious. His face was a pale, sickly green, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was trembling slightly.

The moment the door clicked shut, Mark’s head snapped up.

“Veer, I am so sorry,” Mark blurted out, his voice a hoarse, desperate rasp. “I swear to God, I didn’t know. I was so drunk, the room was spinning, and the phone was just sitting there on the table. I didn’t know it was yours until I woke up an hour ago and checked my own pockets. I’m an idiot. I’m a dead man. Flash is going to kill both of us, and it’s all my fault.”

Mark looked like he was on the verge of a genuine panic attack, his breathing growing shallow and rapid.

Veer took a slow breath, absorbing the frantic energy of his roommate. He walked over to the small kitchenette, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and tossed it to Mark, who caught it clumsily against his chest.

“Relax, Mark,” Veer said, letting a faint, reassuring smile touch his lips. “It’s okay. Seriously.”

Mark stared at him as if Veer had just sprouted a second head. “Okay? Veer, I sent a psychotic, love confession to the quarterback’s girlfriend from your number. Flash Thompson probably wants to wear your skin as a jacket right now!”

“I told you, it’s fine,” Veer lied smoothly, keeping his tone light. “I’ve done plenty of drunk texting in my time too. Usually to the wrong people. It’s normal. It happens.”

Mark blinked, his anxiety stalling in the face of sheer confusion. “Wait… when did you do that? You never drink. And who did you even text? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Veer didn’t miss a beat. He effortlessly changed the topic, stepping away from the interrogation. “More importantly, how is that hangover treating you? You look like you went ten rounds with a freight train.”

The pivot worked perfectly. The reminder of his physical condition immediately brought Mark’s attention back to his pounding skull and churning stomach. He groaned, pressing the cold plastic of the water bottle against his forehead.

“I am never going to drink again in my life,” Mark moaned pitifully, squeezing his eyes shut. “Ever. If you see me looking at a beer, shoot me. Please.”

Hearing the universally recognized, hopelessly naive lie of the hungover, Veer just laughed softly. He walked past the living room and headed for his bedroom. “Get some sleep, Mark. We have school tomorrow.”

Veer closed his bedroom door, the amusement fading from his face as he pulled his smartphone from his pocket. He unlocked it, navigating straight to the junior class group chat.

The chat was completely dead. Not a single person had replied to the massive block of text Mark had sent, likely out of sheer, terrified respect for Flash Thompson’s wrath.

Veer stared at the screen, his mind calculating the social dynamics of Midtown High. If he did nothing, the tension would remain unresolved. But if he played into the established hierarchy, he could render himself completely invisible again.

His thumbs hovered over the digital keyboard, and he began to type.

‘@MJ I am so sorry about that message. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had too much to drink and made a massive idiot of myself. Please ignore it. Flash, I am incredibly sorry for disrespecting you both. It will never happen again.’

He hit send.

He didn’t need to be a psychic to know exactly how the school would interpret that message. The timing was perfect. After the cafeteria incident, the narrative would write itself: Flash Thompson had tracked down Veer after school, beaten the absolute hell out of him, and stood over him while forcefully making him type out a humiliating public apology on the group chat.

It preserved Flash’s terrifying reputation, stroked the quarterback’s ego, and firmly placed Veer back at the bottom of the food chain as a cowed, broken nerd. It was the perfect cover story.

Satisfied, Veer plugged his phone into the charger and went to sleep.

—

The next morning, the reality of the System’s progression curve finally caught up to him.

Veer arrived at the park before dawn, dropping straight into his grueling routine. But things had fundamentally changed. His Vitality was at ten. His muscles didn’t burn easily anymore. His lungs didn’t scream for air. He was a highly efficient, tireless machine.

Stamina was no longer his bottleneck. Time was.

He moved through thousands upon thousands of repetitions. Squats, pushups, lunges, and strikes. The hours dragged on. The sun rose higher in the sky. To earn a single point of Experience, he had to invest an agonizing amount of consecutive movement.

After three solid, unbroken hours of maximum-effort exercise, Veer finally collapsed, completely draining his fatigue meter.

The blue light flared.

[Level Up!]

He lay on the concrete, panting lightly as the restorative energy washed over him. He checked the interface. Three hours of nonstop physical exertion had netted him around 30 EXP. It was enough to push him to Level 7, but as he looked at the new requirement, a grim realization settled over him.

He needed 36 EXP to reach Level 8.

Tomorrow, assuming he had the same three-hour window before school, he wouldn’t even level up once. The exponential scaling of the System was designed to slow him down. Physical exercise was providing the same amount of EXP, but he needed more EXP to level up.

He opened his status panel to distribute his newly acquired stat points.

—

Name: Veer Pratap Singh

Level: 7 (2/36)

Affinity: Specialisation

…

HP: 90/90 [Recover 0.1% per minute]

AP: 9000/9000 [Recover 0.1% per minute]

Fatigue: 0%

…

STR: 4

DEX: 4

VIT: 10

INT: 13

PER: 6

…

Skill: Ten Lv2(1%), Zetsu Lv1(9%), Ren Lv0(0%), Gyo Lv0(0%), Silent Gait Lv0(0%)

…

[Quest]

[Inventory]

—

He placed one point into Strength and one point into Dexterity, keeping his physical baseline progressing. But for the remaining three points, he dumped them all directly into Perception.

The change was jarring. His PER stat doubled from three to six.

For a terrifying second, the world exploded into a chaotic symphony of sensory data. The microscopic friction of an ant crawling across the concrete vibrated in his ears. The complex, layered scents of exhaust, ozone, wet dirt, and distant bakeries assaulted his nose.

But with his Intelligence sitting at a high 13, his brain rapidly sorted, categorized, and filed the information. He mentally adjusted the dial, filtering out the noise.

What remained was an absolute, razor-sharp spatial awareness. Perception was no longer just about seeing and hearing better; it functioned as an active, localized danger sense. The air around him felt textured. He could sense the displacement of mass within a five-foot radius without even looking. It was a crucial survival tool.

Veer sat up, shifting his focus to his Nen skills.

He pulled up the details for ‘Ten’. At Level 2, the math was brutal. It now required ten straight minutes of active meditation just to earn a single percent of proficiency. To push the skill to Level 3, he would have to sit in uninterrupted meditation for around seventeen hours.

And that was only if he meditated. If he actively deployed the ‘Ten’ shroud in its combat state, draining 8 AP per second, his massive 9000 AP pool would be completely dry in about eighteen minutes.

The limitations were severely restrictive. He couldn’t meditate while walking, and he certainly couldn’t meditate while pretending to pay attention in Physics.

“I need a better way to grind,” Veer muttered, picking up his backpack and heading home to get ready for school.

—

Walking through the front doors of Midtown Science High School with Mark an hour later was a surreal experience.

The moment they stepped into the crowded main hallway, the ambient chatter died down noticeably. Eyes flicked toward them, followed by frantic, poorly concealed whispers behind locker doors.

Mark, still looking slightly pale from his hangover, shrank in on himself, clutching his messenger bag to his chest as if it were a shield. “They’re staring,” he hissed. “Veer, everybody is staring.”

“Let them,” Veer replied quietly.

He didn’t stand up straight. Instead, he hunched his shoulders forward, keeping his head down. He slightly dragged his right foot, introducing a subtle, painful-looking limp into his gait. He held his left arm close to his ribs, mimicking the posture of someone guarding heavily bruised bones.

He played the part of the severely beaten, humiliated nerd to absolute perfection.

A kid leaning against a row of lockers snickered loudly as they passed. A few others pointed.

As they neared their first-period class, they crossed paths with Mary Jane Watson. She was flanked by her friends, looking as immaculate as ever. She paused, her eyes dragging over Veer’s simulated injuries. A faint, knowing smirk touched the corner of her lips—a look of vindication. In her mind, her boyfriend had defended her honor and crushed the weird kid who dared to step out of line.

A few feet away, Felicia Hardy was retrieving textbooks from her locker. She didn’t even turn her head. She completely, utterly ignored his presence, just as she had promised.

But it was the reaction of Flash Thompson that Veer found the most amusing.

Flash was standing near the classroom door with the linebacker whose wrist Veer had nearly shattered the night before. When Flash saw Veer limping down the hallway, looking like a broken, cowed victim, the quarterback’s face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated bewilderment.

Veer’s Perception picked up the spike in Flash’s heart rate. The larger boy looked terrified, utterly confused by the performance. Flash thought Veer was going to spread the story of his victory—that Veer was going to brag about swatting the varsity team like flies.

Instead, this terrifying guy was willingly acting like a punching bag, actively making Flash look like the villain who had beaten him up and forced an apology. The psychological dissonance was tearing Flash’s teenage brain apart. He didn’t know whether to be relieved, terrified, or offended.

Veer didn’t make eye contact with Flash. He just limped past him, took his seat at the back of the classroom, and carefully lowered himself into the chair with a soft, perfectly acted wince.

As the teacher began the morning announcements, Veer began to analyze the fundamental structure of Nen.

The basic principles—Ten, Zetsu, Ren, and Hatsu—were just the foundation. But in the world of ‘Hunter x Hunter’, true combat prowess came from Advanced Nen skills. These advanced techniques were literally just derivatives and combinations of the basics.

Take a skill like ‘Ko’, for example. ‘Ko’ was the ultimate offensive strike. It required a user to utilize ‘Ten’ to contain the aura, ‘Zetsu’ to shut off aura to the rest of the body, ‘Ren’ to output a massive amount of energy, ‘Hatsu’ to give it personal flavor, and ‘Gyo’ to focus it all into a single fist or weapon.

Veer’s heavily enhanced Intelligence processed the logic instantly.

If an advanced skill was just a combination of basic skills, wouldn’t training the advanced skill simultaneously train the basic components? If he activated ‘Ko’, and it consumed a massive amount of AP, wouldn’t he theoretically be earning proficiency for all five foundational skills at once, for the price of one action? It would be a massive efficiency multiplier.

“System,” Veer thought clearly. “I want to learn En, In, Shu, Ko, Ken, and Ryu.”

The now-familiar frozen sensation washed over his brain as the System dumped the complex theoretical knowledge directly into his neural pathways.

The holographic blue panel flickered into existence.

—

[In (Level 0)]: An advanced application of Zetsu. Makes aura completely unnoticeable to Nen users who can normally see it. Hides presence from all five normal senses and extrasensory perception. Can only be countered by Gyo.

[En (Level 0)]: An advanced application of Ten and Ren. Extends the aura outward, usually in a sphere. Anything entering the sphere is instantly detected by the user.

[Shu (Level 0)]: Allows a user to enshroud an object with their aura, treating it as an extension of their own body. Strengthens and protects the object.

[Ko (Level 0)]: A combination of Ten, Zetsu, Hatsu, Ren, and Gyo. Focuses the entirety of the user’s aura into one specific body part for a devastating attack, leaving the rest of the body completely defenseless.

[Ken (Level 0)]: An advanced application of Ten and Ren. A primarily defensive technique that uses extended Ren to defend the entire body equally.

[Ryu (Level 0)]: The real-time, combat application of Gyo within a state of Ken. Allows the rapid shifting of aura percentages between different body parts on the fly.

—

Veer sat in his chair, staring at the fresh list of Level 0 skills.

He immediately focused his intent, trying to mold his aura into the hyper-condensed state of ‘Ko’ into his right fist.

‘[Error: Minimum requirement not met. Host requires Level 2 in Ten, Zetsu, Ren, Hatsu, and Gyo to activate Ko.]’

Veer let out a quiet, frustrated breath, leaning his head on his hand. The System wasn’t going to let him cheat the progression tree that easily. He had ‘Ten’ at Level 2, but his Zetsu was only Level 1, and the rest were untouched at Level 0. The advanced combat skills were locked behind a rigid foundational requirement.

He scanned the list again, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the components of each skill.

He couldn’t train ‘En’ or ‘Ken’ because they required ‘Ren’, which he hadn’t leveled.

But there was one advanced skill that only required the manipulation of ‘Ten’.

‘Shu.’

Enshrouding an object. It was just ‘Ten’ extended beyond the boundaries of his own skin.

Veer reached into his backpack and pulled out a plastic ballpoint pen. He hold the pen in his right hand.

He closed his eyes halfway, making it look like he was struggling to stay awake during the lecture, and reached for his aura.

He activated ‘Ten’, feeling the warm shroud wrap around his hand. Then, visualizing the process meticulously, he tried to push that shroud outward. He tried to force the energy to bleed off his skin and coat the plastic surface of the pen.

It was incredibly difficult. The aura naturally wanted to cling to his living tissue. Pushing it onto an inanimate, dead object felt like trying to force two repelling magnets together. The energy kept snapping back to his fingers, refusing to stick to the plastic.

But Veer was nothing if not patient.

He adjusted his mental grip. He stopped trying to ‘push’ the aura onto the pen, and instead tried to expand his own sense of self, trying to trick his brain into believing the plastic cylinder was literally an extension of his own finger.

The minutes ticked by. The bell rang for the next period. Veer moved to his math class. He is still holding the pen, and resumed the exact same mental struggle.

Sweat began to bead on his forehead. The sheer concentration required was staggering, even with his high Intelligence stat.

Finally, precisely one hundred minutes after he had begun the attempt, the breakthrough happened.

The aura flowing around his fingers suddenly elongated, stretching like a layer of invisible, viscous honey. It wrapped around the plastic pen, coating it entirely in a dense, humming shell of energy.

[Skill Level Up: Shu has reached Level 1!]

Veer’s eyes widened slightly. He could physically feel the pen without actually touching the plastic. It was a bizarre, phantom sensation, as if the object were now a functioning limb connected to his nervous system.

But before he celebrated, he immediately pulled up his system interface and checked the proficiency rating of his basic skills.

He scanned down to ‘Ten’.

Skill: Ten Lv2 (11%)

A sharp thrill of victory surged through him. His theory was absolutely correct. By training ‘Shu’, which was fundamentally an application of ‘Ten’, he had passively earned 10% proficiency for his foundational defense skill without having to sit in the park meditating. The synergy was real.

However, his victory was short-lived.

He glanced at his AP meter.

AP: 8990… 8980… 8970…

Activating ‘Shu’ was draining 10 AP per second, treating the Level 1 skill exactly like his other active combat abilities. He quickly severed the connection, watching the aura snap back from the pen to his hand, and stopped the drain.

He tapped the pen thoughtfully against the desk. The System knowledge provided a new, critical nuance. The AP consumption of ‘Shu’ wasn’t fixed; it scaled exponentially with mass and volume. Coating a tiny plastic pen consumed 10 AP per second at Level 1. If he tried to coat a baseball bat, it would cost more. If he tried to coat a car, it would instantly drain his entire 9000 AP pool in a fraction of a second and likely kill him from aura exhaustion.

“Nen is a ridiculously complicated power,” Veer whispered to himself, a genuine smile touching his lips. It wasn’t just raw, mindless magic. It was a highly technical, mathematical discipline.

The rest of the school day passed in a blur of mundane teenage drama.

Veer maintained his pathetic, injured facade with flawless consistency. He limped through the cafeteria, kept his head down in the hallways, and completely ignored the whispers and pointing. Flash Thompson spent the entire day avoiding him like the plague, physically turning around and walking the other way whenever they ended up in the same corridor.

When the final bell finally rang, cutting through the heavy, stale air of the school, Veer packed his bag slowly, acting as though every movement pained his bruised ribs.

He walked out of the double doors with Mark, blending perfectly into the sea of departing students, holding onto his secrets, and beginning the long walk back home.