Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

Stan watched the empty sky for a heartbeat before a faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

’Not bad.’

He had perhaps six seconds before impact. The bone-tempering that had rewritten his skeleton the previous day had, by his best estimate, made him roughly five times more physically durable than an ordinary human.

The jade purity elixir had reinforced everything else. The qi circulating through his body now added an additional layer of shock absorption that the elixir had, in some way he did not yet fully understand, activated in his muscles.

He was as prepared for a high-altitude landing as anyone in the modern world could be with a parachute.

But he had also never actually tested this. He was, in the most literal sense, about to find out whether his current physiological baseline could survive a fall from what had to be at least two hundred feet.

’With my tempered bones and the elixir’s reinforcement, I should be able to survive this... Right?’ He thought as he braced.

He shifted his body posture in the fall the way his newly-integrated martial arts mastery told him to, legs slightly bent, spine aligned, weight distributed to absorb the impact through the largest possible surface area.

His combat training, decades of knowledge installed into his mind hours earlier, took over the landing preparation with the calm, unhurried efficiency of a discipline he had somehow always known.

Three seconds to impact.

He picked his landing spot, a patch of relatively level snow, wind-packed and dense, roughly forty meters from the surface point above the Spirit Pool.

’Two seconds.’ He centered himself.

’One second!’

He hit the ice with full force!

The impact was enormous!

His feet drove into the compressed snow with the force of a heavy truck at highway speed. His knees flexed, absorbing the initial shock, and his body continued downward into the powder as the momentum carried through his frame.

The snow beneath him crumpled and compacted around his boots. The impact rippled outward through his skeleton in a wave of pressure that he felt, clearly, distinctly, the specific sensation of his bones registering the load and holding it, but did not break under.

His knees compressed to nearly a full crouch as the deceleration completed.

He held there for a moment, motionless, testing his body’s response.

Nothing had broken. Nothing had cracked. Nothing was even bruised.

He rose slowly to his full height, the compacted snow crunching softly under his boots as he shifted his weight. He rolled his shoulders. He flexed his hands. He tested each of his major joints in sequence.

Everything worked. He was, remarkably, completely uninjured.

He let out a long, slow breath into the frozen air.

”...That worked.”

The exhale steamed white in the sub-zero air. Around him, the Antarctic interior stretched out in an endless white plain, the wind blowing hard across the flat, the sky above him a pale, elongated dusk of high-southern-latitude daylight, the horizon completely empty in every direction.

He was standing above the Spirit Pool. He was alive.

He was, by any honest reading, further ahead of every other party racing for the pool than he had any right to be.

He took a step forward.

Then he felt it. A cold, precise sensation at the back of his neck, not the cold of the wind, but a different kind of cold, the specific, primal cold that human survival instincts sent out when they detected something wrong in the environment. It was the sensation his body used to communicate predator.

He turned his head sharply. At the eastern horizon, four small streaks of movement were resolving out of the featureless white.

They were closing fast. Insanely fast.

He watched them for exactly one second. In that second, they crossed a distance that no human being, no vehicle, no aircraft, no living creature that he had ever seen documented, should have been able to cover on foot.

They were resolving into individual figures now, each one distinct, each one moving with the fluid, unstoppable rhythm of something that ran across the polar surface the way ordinary men walked across a room.

Two seconds. They were close enough now for him to see details.

Four figures. Male. Each of them shirtless in the sub-zero Antarctic air, their bare torsos steaming faintly with the raw, contained heat of bodies that were producing enough internal energy to make ambient temperature irrelevant. Each of them carrying his weight with the loose, ready quality of a physical athlete of a caliber Stan had never encountered before. Their faces were human. Their bearing was human. Their movement was not.

Three seconds. They arrived and surrounded him...

The four of them settled into a wide, encircling formation with the unhurried coordination of hunters closing on prey they were confident of, spacing themselves at four points of an equidistant circle roughly ten meters in radius, cutting off any possible exit vector. Their breathing was completely steady. None of them had broken a sweat, despite the fact that they had just crossed several kilometers of Antarctic surface in seconds.

The lead one, a lean, powerfully built man with dark eyes and long hair, looked Stan up and down with the quiet, assessing calm of a predator identifying the species of its meal.

He spoke. His voice was casual. Almost bored. ”So livestocks are attracted to this spirit pool too.”

Stan stood very still. The words landed in his ears with the specific weight of a term that had, in another era, been used to describe ordinary humans by beings who had considered themselves categorically superior. The book had used the same framing. Vampires, and, werewolves, regarded ordinary humans as little different from livestock.

The second man, taller, with a scar running from his jaw down into his collar, narrowed his eyes.

”There’s something strange in this one,” he said. His voice was lower than the first man’s. ”I can feel it. His aura is, unusual.”

The third man tilted his head slightly. His hair was silver, though his face suggested he was no older than thirty.

”Don’t be afraid. He’s no True Human.” The fourth man, the tallest of the four, and by the way the others’ attention deferred to him almost certainly the highest-ranked, simply watched Stan without speaking.

His eyes were pale, almost colorless, and there was a stillness in his gaze that made every other threat in the circle feel secondary. He was the one Stan should have been most afraid of. He knew it instantly.

Stan’s mind worked at high speed

’They said ’livestock.’ They said ’not a True Human.’ They know what a True Human is. They know the taxonomy of the old world. Then they should be of the old world.’