Brett cared about basketball.
The system wasn't telling him to just win a fight. It wasn't just going to give him tools to survive thirty seconds of getting punched in a parking lot brawl, afterwards. It wasn't preparing him for one confrontation that would be over in minutes.
It was telling him—without having to voice it explicitly, without giving him a separate independent mission for it—to take Brett down from his high horse.
To dethrone him completely. To replace him. To take everything that made Brett untouchable and claim it for himself.
And what does that mean? What is the system actually asking me to do?
Replace Brett from what he was most known for.
Take away his throne. His source of power. His claim to untouchability.
Which is what, exactly?
Not fighting. Not the parking lot showdown. That was just theater—one incident, one burst of violence. Win or lose, it wouldn't change the hierarchy. People would gossip, rumors would swirl, and by next week the school would move on.
Not boxing. Not wrestling. Those were hobbies. Expensive, ego-polishing extracurriculars. Ways Brett stayed in shape and reminded weaker people that pain was always an option. Useful, sure—but not foundational.
"Basketball."
The answer crystallized with absolute clarity.
Brett Castellano was one of the star players of Ashford Academy's basketball team. Not just a good player—the players. The guys coaches built entire strategies around. The names that appeared in local sports coverage whenever scouts came looking for future talent, whenever journalists wrote about high school athletics in Paradise.
When Ashford had a game—any game, against any opponent—the question wasn't whether they'd win. The question was whether Brett and his team would play. Without them, the team was good. Competitive. Respectable.
With them, they were dominant. Unstoppable. Championship contenders.
The whole Unholy Trinity was on that team. Brett, Anderson, Kyle—all three of them playing together, dominating the court together, using their athletic status to cement their social power.
And Danton too.
His cousin, the golden boy, adding his own shine to the crew.
Basketball was Brett's throne. His source of pride. His ticket to untouchability. The thing that made teachers overlook his cruelty when he bullied someone in class.
The thing that made administrators excuse his behavior when he crossed lines that would get other students expelled. The thing that made the entire school treat him like royalty even when everyone knew what a vicious bastard he could be.
Well, apart from being a Legacy. Two insurmountable advantages, really!
He's our star player. We can't afford to lose him. We need him for regionals. He's being recruited. He's going somewhere.
That's what they said. Every single time Brett did something that should have had consequences. Every time he put someone in the hospital, destroyed property, made another student's life unbearable.
The school protected him, covered for him, excused him—not because they liked him, but because he was valuable.
Because losing Brett meant losing games. Losing prestige. Losing the status and recognition that came with having a championship-level basketball program that attracted attention from college scouts and sports media.
Brett's value was athletic. His power was on the court. His throne was made of basketballs, championship trophies and recruitment letters from Division I programs and his blood.
And the system was giving Phei the tools to take that throne away.
To replace Brett as the basketball star. To become the player the school couldn't afford to lose. To steal the position that made Brett matter, that made him protected, that made him untouchable.
The implication crashed over Phei like ice water dumped on his head.
He pressed his hand harder against his mouth, heart pounding, eyes wide in the empty hallway.
If this was the system's aim—and it has to be, the logic was too clean, too perfect, too precisely aligned
—then the basketball skills he'd get couldn't be amateur level. Couldn't be basic. Couldn't be high school varsity level or even good college player level.
They couldn't be anything less than elite.
High-tier.
World-class.
Because to replace something, you had to bring an equal or better replacement.
That was fundamental. That was the basic rule of the universe. You didn't dethrone a king by being marginally less incompetent than the average peasant.
You had to be royalty yourself. You had to be better—significantly better—than what came before, or the throne wouldn't accept you. The court wouldn't crown you. The system wouldn't work.
If Phei was supposed to replace Brett as Ashford's star player, as the athlete everyone came to watch, as the talent that scouts tracked and coaches built teams around, then he couldn't just be good.
He had to be better than Brett. Better by enough of a margin that the difference was obvious, undeniable, impossible to ignore or excuse away.
Which meant the 60% wasn't measuring against amateur basketball skills.
It wasn't measuring against basic recreational player abilities.
It wasn't even measuring against advanced high school or good college level.
It was measuring against something much, much higher.
Professional level, at minimum. NBA-level skills, probably. Elite professional basketball—the kind played by all-stars and franchise players and Hall of Fame talents.
Maybe even higher. Maybe world-class. Maybe the absolute peak of what basketball skills could be—the knowledge and instincts and physical capabilities of someone who'd spent their entire life mastering the game at the highest levels imaginable.
Sixty percent of that.
Sixty percent of professional, elite, world-class basketball experience and knowledge downloaded directly into Phei's brain. Decades of muscle memory from someone who'd been playing at the absolute peak since childhood.
The instincts of a natural talent combined with the technical knowledge of elite coaching and thousands of hours of professional-level play.
That would make him better than anyone at Ashford Academy. Better than Brett by a mile—no, by several miles.
Better than the entire team combined, probably. Better than most college players he'd ever seen.
Potentially good enough to attract actual scouts from actual programs that mattered. Good enough to make Division I coaches start calling. Good enough to make Ashford's administration question whether they actually needed Brett at all.
Good enough to steal everything Brett had built his identity on.
Phei's breathing had gone shallow. His pulse hammered in his temples like drums. His hands were shaking slightly where he'd pressed them against his mouth.
The system wasn't just helping him survive a fight.
It is orchestrating a complete reversal of the power structure at Ashford Elite Academy one step at a time.
Take Brett's throne. Take his status. Take his untouchability. Take his protection. Take the one thing that made him matter in the eyes of the people who decided what mattered.
Become the star. Become the player everyone needed. Become the athlete who was too valuable to lose, too important to punish, too talented to let go no matter what else he did.
Take everything that made Brett Brett.
And all Phei had to do was win one fight against a trained boxer with a body that could barely handle fifty push-ups.
Simple, right?
He laughed quietly, the sound sharp and bitter in the empty hallway.
But underneath the bitter laughter was something else. Something darker.
Something that tasted like possibility and ambition and the specific kind of hunger that came from spending years at the bottom of a hierarchy, looking up at everyone else and wondering what it would feel like to stand at the top.
The system had given him a path. A brutal, painful, potentially catastrophic path.
But a path, nonetheless.
Five hours until the parking lot. Five hours to figure out how to beat someone who could probably knock him unconscious with one clean hit.
But now he understood what was actually at stake. What he was actually fighting for.
Not just survival. Not just pride. Not just proving that the charity case had changed.
A throne.
Brett's throne.
And thrones, in Phei's experience, were absolutely worth bleeding for.
Phei pushed off from the wall, ignoring the protest of his aching muscles, and started walking toward next period.
He had planning to do.
And a kingdom to steal.
****
He'd just turned the corner. Just a simple left turn into the main corridor that led to the cafeteria. Lunchtime foot traffic flowing around him, the ambient noise of hundreds of students talking and laughing and living their gilded lives.
And there she was.
Sierra.
She stood at the center of the hallway like she owned it—which, in every way that mattered at Ashford Elite Academy, she did like other Legacies. Four girls flanked her in a loose formation, her personal entourage, her weapons of social destruction.
All of them watching him with the particular alertness of predators who'd just spotted wounded prey.
But Phei barely registered the others. His eyes were locked on Sierra.
She was dressed exactly as she'd been dressed on Tuesday.
That Tuesday. The one from the week he'd never survived. The week that had ended with him stepping off a rooftop because living had become more painful than dying.
The memory slammed into him with physical force.
The Dark Queen had just made her entrance!!!!