Chapter 2: The Otaku Meets His First Test
"Drop it," Meliodas said.
The gang member's eyes went wide. "What the—who the hell are you?"
"Someone having a very strange day. Drop the gun."
The man's finger tightened on the trigger.
{Rush} was on cooldown. 55 seconds left.
Meliodas moved anyway.
Five levels of {Agility} meant he didn't need time slow to be fast. He crossed the distance in a blur, his free hand knocking the gun aside as Reflection came up—
He stopped the blade an inch from the man's throat.
The gang member froze. The gun clattered to the ground. His red aura flickered, weakened by fear.
"Please," he whispered. "Please don't."
Meliodas looked at him. Looked at the two unconscious men. Looked at the brownstone door, still closed, still safe.
"Leave," he said. "All of you. Leave and don't come back. If I see you here again, I won't stop the sword."
The man ran.
Meliodas watched him go, then sheathed Reflection. The chitin receded from his skin, disappearing back into... wherever it went.
'I just did that. I just—'
The brownstone door opened.
A wall of a man stood there. Six foot five, built like a brick shithouse that had been eating smaller brick shithouses, with arms that could probably bench press a car. His eyes were old—ancient—and they studied Meliodas with an intensity that made him feel like a bug under a microscope.
"The Purple Dragons," the man said. His voice was deep, rough, the kind of voice that had yelled orders across battlefields. "They've been circling for weeks. You just solved that problem."
"Uh. I just... they were going to..."
"I know what they were going to do." The man stepped aside. "Name's Poppy. Come inside before someone calls the cops and we have to explain why three gang members are sleeping on my stoop."
Meliodas hesitated.
Then he followed Poppy inside.
---
The inside was warm. That was the first thing he noticed. Warm and lived-in and safe. Worn furniture, home-cooked smells, the faint hum of protective magic he could sense with {Knowledge Mage}.
Half a dozen people lounged around—a girl reading a book, two guys playing cards, an older woman knitting something aggressively comfortable.
"New kid," Poppy announced. "Just put down three Purple Dragons outside my door. He's staying until I figure out if he's trouble or not."
Everyone stared at him.
The girl with the book—blonde, intense, with eyes that missed nothing—spoke first. "Three? By himself?"
"They had a gun," Meliodas said weakly. "I had a sword."
"You have a sword?"
"Three swords. Technically."
The card players exchanged glances. The knitter kept knitting, but her lips twitched.
Poppy gestured to a chair. "Sit. Explain. Who are you?"
Meliodas sat.
And for the first time since waking up in New York, he told the truth.
"My name is Meliodas. I woke up in this city about three hours ago with no memory of how I got here, three magic swords, and powers I don't fully understand. I saw those guys about to do something bad, and I couldn't just... stand there."
Poppy studied him for a long moment. "No memory?"
"None. Just... instincts. And the swords."
'Technically true. I don't remember being Kaito. I remember being Kaito, but that was different. That was another life.'
The knitter—Mama Rose, he'd learn later—spoke without looking up from her work. "He's telling the truth, Poppy. At least as he knows it."
Poppy grunted. "Magic user?"
"Witch," Mama Rose said. "And he's got something around him. Something... new. Like he was just born, but also not."
Meliodas blinked. "You can sense that?"
"I can sense lots of things, child. Sit still and let me finish this row."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[QUEST UPDATE: TUTORIAL - Making Friends]
[PROGRESS: 1/1]
[REWARD: 1 DESTINY SHARD]
[QUEST UPDATE: TUTORIAL - First Blood]
[PROGRESS: 3/1 (OVERKILL)]
[REWARD: 1 DESTINY SHARD]
[BONUS: EFFICIENCY REWARD — ADDITIONAL 1 DESTINY SHARD]
'Overkill? I didn't even kill anyone!'
[EFFICIENCY REWARD: NEUTRALIZING THREE THREATS WITHOUT FATALITY IN FIRST COMBAT]
[WELL DONE]
---
An hour later, Meliodas had a bed.
It was small, in a shared room, with a mattress that had definitely seen better decades. But it was a bed. In a safehouse. With people who hadn't kicked him out.
Poppy had given him the basics: this place was for "weird cases." Mutants hiding from registration. Magic users who'd burned bridges. People who'd fallen through dimensional cracks and couldn't go home. Everyone here had a story. Everyone here had nowhere else to go.
"You can stay," Poppy had said. "But you work. You train. You pull your weight. And if you turn out to be trouble—" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Meliodas had nodded.
Now he lay on the lumpy mattress, staring at the ceiling, running through everything that had happened.
'I'm in Marvel. I have powers. I just fought actual gang members and won. I have a place to stay. I have—'
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[NEW OPTIONS UNLOCKED]
[ADDITIONAL CYOA PURCHASES AVAILABLE VIA DESTINY SHARDS]
A new menu appeared:
---
[CYOA EXPANSION — DESTINY SHARD PURCHASES]
Current Destiny Shards: 4 (1+1+1 from quests, 1 from overkill bonus)
---
{Mental Defense — Cost: 20}
{Your mind is a protected fortress. Perfect recall. Immunity to mind reading, memory alteration, temporal effects.}
---
{Runscript — Cost: 10}
{Possess a spell book on demonic runes and their uses in rituals. Warning: unguarded minds may be driven mad attempting to read it.}
---
{Dapper — Cost: 10}
{Own a set of exquisite clothes. They take on any design or shape you desire. Mundane armor can be assimilated. Self-repair. Full body protection regardless of coverage.}
---
{Pocket Space — Cost: 5}
{Possess a simple pocket dimension with 15 cubic feet capacity. Cannot store living beings. Time does not move inside. Each purchase adds another 15 cubic feet.}
---
{Indistinct — Cost: 5}
{People are less likely to notice your appearance unless you draw attention. Images drawn or taken of you are never clear. Can toggle effect at will.}
---
{Scry — Cost: 5}
{Obtain brief impressions of historical memories or sensations concerning beings and objects you observe. With objects: learn makers, users, history. With living beings: learn general life-history or sense of location.}
---
{Titan — Cost: 20}
{Transform to titanic size. Crush humans underfoot. Strength and durability scale appropriately. Cannot use movement abilities in this form. Limited to 10 minutes in most realities.}
---
Meliodas read through the options, his mind racing.
'Dapper. Pocket Space. Scry. Those are affordable. Those are useful.'
'Mental Defense and Titan are endgame. Later. Much later.'
He had 4 Destiny Shards. Not enough for Dapper (10) or Runscript (10). But Pocket Space (5) was close. Scry (5) was close. Indistinct (5) was close.
'One more quest. One more shard, and I can buy something.'
He smiled in the darkness.
'This is going to be fun.'
---
The next morning, Meliodas woke to the smell of cooking and the sound of arguing.
"You can't just—he showed up YESTERDAY—"
"And he put down THREE Purple Dragons before breakfast. That's more than you've done all month."
"That's not FAIR, I've been—"
"You've been playing cards."
"I've been STRATEGIZING."
Meliodas stumbled out of his room to find Tandy—the blonde girl with the book—arguing with one of the card players while Mama Rose calmly made pancakes.
Poppy sat at the table, reading a newspaper like nothing was happening.
"Morning," Meliodas said.
Everyone turned to look at him.
Tandy's eyes narrowed. "You. We're sparring after breakfast."
"We are?"
"You need to prove you're not a liability."
"She means," one of the card players said, "that she's mad you did something cool and she didn't get to do anything."
"I do NOT—"
"Sparring sounds fun," Meliodas interrupted quickly. "I'd like that. I need to learn how to actually fight instead of just... reacting."
Tandy blinked, thrown off by his willingness. "Oh. Well. Good. After breakfast."
Mama Rose slid a plate of pancakes toward him. "Eat, child. You'll need your strength."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[QUEST PROGRESS: Training Montage — 0/100 hours]
[SPARRING SESSION DETECTED: POTENTIAL PROGRESS]
Meliodas dug in.
'One day in Marvel, and I've already made friends, fought gang members, and earned pancakes.'
'Not bad for a dead otaku.'
---
The sparring session was... educational.
Tandy was fast. Not Meliodas fast—five levels of {Agility} meant he was in a whole different category—but she was skilled in ways he wasn't. Every move had purpose. Every strike flowed into the next. She moved like she'd been fighting her whole life.
Which, he later learned, she basically had.
"You're telegraphing," she said, for the fifth time, as she dodged another of his clumsy attempts to land a hit. "You move like you're surprised your body can do this."
"I am surprised my body can do this," Meliodas admitted, breathing hard. "Yesterday I was a—" He caught himself. "I was normal. Completely normal."
Tandy studied him. "You really don't remember anything?"
"Nothing useful. Just... instincts. And this." He activated {Chitin Slayer}, letting the organic material flow over his skin.
Tandy's eyes widened slightly, but she didn't flinch. "Neat. Can you control it?"
"I think so? I'm still learning."
"Then learn faster." She dropped into a fighting stance. "Again."
They sparred for another hour. Meliodas improved—slowly, but noticeably. {Knowledge Mage} helped, feeding him information about Tandy's movements, her weight distribution, the subtle tells she didn't even know she had.
By the end, he could dodge her attacks consistently. He still couldn't land a hit, but he wasn't getting hit either.
"Not bad," Tandy admitted, wiping sweat from her forehead. "For someone who forgot how to fight."
"Thanks. I think."
Poppy appeared in the doorway. "Kid. Got something for you."
---
Poppy led him to a small room in the back of the brownstone. It was cluttered with boxes, old furniture, and the kind of accumulated junk that suggested no one had cleaned it in decades.
"Safehouse has a rule," Poppy said. "Everyone contributes. You pulled your weight yesterday with the Dragons, so you're ahead of the curve. But you need a job."
"A job?"
"Something to do. Something to learn. Something that keeps you busy when you're not training or helping out." Poppy gestured at the room. "This is the storage room. It's a mess. Your job is to organize it."
Meliodas looked at the chaos. Boxes stacked haphazardly. Furniture piled in corners. Dust thick enough to write your name in.
"...You want me to clean?"
"I want you to organize. Figure out what we have, what's useful, what's junk. Use that fancy knowledge power of yours to identify things." Poppy's lips twitched. "Consider it training."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE]
[NORMAL: Storage Sweep]
{Organize the safehouse storage room and identify at least 20 items with Knowledge Mage.}
Reward: 2 Destiny Shards
Meliodas sighed. "Fine. But I'm going to need a lot of dust masks."
---
Three hours later, Meliodas had made a discovery.
The storage room wasn't just junk. It was a treasure trove of weirdness.
A box of old books in languages he couldn't read—but {Knowledge Mage} told him they were occult texts, some genuine, some fake.
A set of throwing knives that hummed with faint magic.
A mirror that didn't reflect anything.
A clock that ran backward.
A collection of masks from various cultures, one of which made him feel dizzy when he looked at it too long.
A locked chest that {Knowledge Mage} identified as "wards active, do not open."
A guitar that played itself when no one was looking.
A jar of something labeled "DO NOT EAT" in twelve languages.
And buried at the very bottom, wrapped in cloth and hidden inside a false-bottomed box—
A book.
Not just any book. A book that screamed at his senses, that made {Knowledge Mage} light up like a Christmas tree, that pulsed with something dark and ancient and hungry.
[ITEM IDENTIFIED: RUNSCRIPT — DEMONIC TOME]
{WARNING: This book contains knowledge that can drive the unprepared mad. Reading requires a strong mind and stronger will. Contains rituals, summoning circles, and pacts with entities beyond mortal comprehension.}
Meliodas stared at the book.
'...I want to read it so bad.'
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[NEW PURCHASE UNLOCKED: RUNSCRIPT]
{Cost: 10 Destiny Shards}
{You have discovered this item in the wild. You may now purchase it directly, or attempt to study the physical copy at your own risk.}
'Purchase it? I'm holding it in my hands.'
[THE PHYSICAL COPY IS UNSTABLE. USING IT DIRECTLY MAY HAVE CONSEQUENCES. PURCHASING INTEGRATES IT SAFELY INTO YOUR SYSTEM.]
Meliodas looked at the book. Looked at his Destiny Shard count: 4.
'...Later. Definitely later.'
He carefully re-wrapped the book and placed it back in the false-bottomed box. Then he put three other boxes on top of it for good measure.
'Problem for future Meliodas.'
---
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[QUEST COMPLETE: Storage Sweep]
{Items identified: 24/20}
Reward: 2 Destiny Shards
Total Destiny Shards: 6
---
That evening, Meliodas sat on the rooftop of the brownstone, watching the sun set over Harlem. The city hummed below him—traffic, music, voices, life. It was so different from his old life. So much more real.
'Why am I here?'
The question surfaced again, unbidden. He'd been avoiding it, burying it under excitement and system menus and the thrill of new powers. But now, alone on a rooftop in a world that wasn't his, it demanded an answer.
'Did someone put me here? Some god? Some cosmic accident? Am I supposed to do something? Save someone? Stop something?'
He thought about Thanos. About the Snap. About the billions of lives that would end in a decade if nothing changed.
'Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm here to stop him.'
But that was ridiculous, right? He was one guy. One guy with some agility and a knowledge power and three swords. Against the Mad Titan with the Infinity Gauntlet.
'...I'm going to need a lot more shards.'
He laughed at himself. Here he was, on day two, already planning to take on Thanos. Classic protagonist syndrome.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]
[NEW PURCHASE AVAILABLE]
He had 6 Destiny Shards now. Enough for {Pocket Space} (5) or {Scry} (5) or {Indistinct} (5).
Which one?
{Pocket Space} meant storage. A place to keep things. Useful.
{Scry} meant information. History of objects, location of people. Also useful.
{Indistinct} meant anonymity. People wouldn't notice him, images wouldn't capture him.
He thought about the Runscript book downstairs. About Thanos. About all the threats he didn't even know about yet.
'Information is power. {Scry} it is.'
[PURCHASE CONFIRMED: SCRY]
[COST: 5 DESTINY SHARDS]
[REMAINING DESTINY SHARDS: 1]
The knowledge settled into him—not like {Knowledge Mage}, which was passive and automatic, but something deeper. An ability. A skill he could actively use.
He looked at the rooftop beneath him. Reached out with his new power.
{Scry activated.}
Images flooded his mind. The construction of the brownstone, decades ago. Workers laying bricks, their conversations faint and distant. A family moving in, children laughing. A fire, decades later—contained, but damaging. Repairs. New families. The safehouse being established. Poppy arriving, younger but already hard. Mama Rose knitting in the corner even then.
And beneath it all, the faint echo of something older. Something that had been here before the brownstone. Before the city. Before—
He pulled back, gasping.
'That's... that's intense.'
But useful. So useful.
He looked toward Manhattan, toward the distant towers. Somewhere out there, Tony Stark was building a suit. Somewhere, Nick Fury was watching. Somewhere, a dozen heroes were living their lives, unaware of what was coming.
'Maybe I can't stop Thanos alone. But maybe I don't have to be alone.'
He smiled.
'Time to make some friends.'
---
That night, Meliodas dreamed.
Not of his old life, or his death, or the void. He dreamed of a woman.
She was bald, serene, dressed in robes that seemed to shift and flow like liquid gold. She stood in a place that wasn't a place—a nexus of light and shadow, of possibilities branching infinitely in every direction.
And she was looking at him.
Not through the dream. Not through some magical connection. She was looking at him directly, her ancient eyes piercing through whatever defenses he had.
"Interesting," she said.
Meliodas tried to speak, but his dream-self had no voice.
"You arrived today. From nowhere. With no warning, no ripple, no sign." Her head tilted. "The timelines around you are... chaotic. Conflicted. Every seer in every dimension is getting headaches trying to predict you."
She stepped closer.
"I should be concerned. An unknown variable, appearing in the heart of my protected world. A potential threat. A potential weapon."
She studied him for a long moment.
"But you're not a threat, are you? Not intentionally." A faint smile. "You're just a boy who died and got a second chance. Excited. Confused. Trying to do the right thing."
Meliodas's eyes widened.
"Oh yes, I can see more than you think. Not your future—that's a mess. But your past? Your soul?" She nodded slowly. "You're not from here. Not from this universe at all. And yet here you are, carrying powers you don't understand, facing threats you can barely imagine."
She reached out, and though she was dream and he was dream, he felt her touch—a featherlight pressure on his forehead.
"You will cause chaos. You will create misunderstandings. You will stumble into situations far beyond your comprehension and somehow come out the other side." Her smile widened. "I've decided I want to watch."
The dream began to fade.
"Be careful, little otaku. This world is more dangerous than you know. But it is also more wonderful." Her voice echoed as the light consumed him. "I'll be watching. And when the time comes, perhaps we'll meet for real."
Meliodas woke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright in his lumpy bed.
The room was dark. The safehouse was quiet. But in his mind, one word echoed:
"Interesting."
---
[END OF CHAPTER 2]
Current Stats:
Name: Meliodas
Race: Human
Class: Chitin Slayer + Knowledge Mage
Traits: Fit, Champion, Rush, Third Eye, Regeneration
Free Perks: Adorable, Smouldering, Well-Adjusted, Plot Armor, Conflicted Prediction, Theme Song
Items: Reflection, Moonsing, Siren
Hero Shards: 7
Destiny Shards: 1
Broken Shards: 5
Completed Quests:
· Tutorial: First Blood ✓ (+1, +1 bonus)
· Tutorial: Making Friends ✓ (+1)
· Normal: Storage Sweep ✓ (+2)
Active Quests:
· Training Montage (2/100 hours)
· Knowledge Seeker (24/50 identifications)
· Wall Crawler (0/10 miles)
· Urban Explorer (2/20 locations)
Promises Made:
· Owner (buy/build a home)
· Title (earn title from high position)
· Completionist (solve five quests)
· Smart (solve five quests without violence)
· Integration (become citizen)
Drawbacks:
· Restless Nights (can't sleep alone)
· Magnet (twice as likely to encounter danger)
· Recharge (2 hours meditation daily)
· Unarmored (cannot wear armor)