Garrett Orion woke the next morning in his chair.
Not a bed. Never a bed. Beds were for healthy people who didn't run the risk of suffocating if they rolled over wrong. Beds were the kind of thing he saw in glossy advertisements for couples, all sunshine and tangled sheets. For him? Beds were death traps.
So he slept in his chair—an expensive recliner built custom to his body's fragile angles, with the padding of clouds and the recline of a throne. It adjusted itself every hour, shifting him automatically to prevent bedsores, because even the diseases inside him had limits.
He groaned as consciousness returned, his lungs inflating like old bellows. A hacking cough tore through him, and he clutched his chest, blinking tears from his eyes.
"Morning, Garrett," he muttered to himself, his voice raspy. "Still alive. Congratulations."
The System panel blinked faintly in the corner of his vision, polite as ever.
[Wolverine Bloodline (1%)]
[Effect: Slightly faster cell regeneration. Minor immunity boost.]
Garrett let his head thunk back against the chair. He snorted. "Slightly faster? Minor immunity? That's what I paid millions for?"
He rubbed his face with trembling hands, then let them drop. Slowly, with the kind of determination normally reserved for Olympic athletes, he braced his arms on the chair and pushed himself upright.
Standing was always a production. His legs trembled like reeds in the wind. His bones creaked. Every joint in his body protested like a rusty hinge.
"Up, up, up we go," Garrett muttered through clenched teeth. "Come on, you useless meat sticks. Pretend you're legs for once."
He managed to get upright, swaying dangerously. For a moment, he was sure his knees would buckle. But they didn't. He stood.
He actually stood.
A laugh bubbled out of him, half hysteria, half triumph. "Would you look at that? Wolverine's miracle healing, folks! One percent power, and I can… stand without dying immediately."
The laugh turned into a wheeze. He stumbled to the table, grabbed one of the bananas Granny Chip had left, and peeled it with shaky fingers. He bit into it, chewing slowly, the mushy texture sliding down his throat.
While he ate, he thought.
Wolverine wasn't just some guy with sideburns and a bad temper. He was a walking murder machine. A man who could slice through tanks with claws of unbreakable metal, heal from wounds in seconds, live through things that should've left him in pieces. His DNA was the gold standard of mutant survivability.
And Garrett had gotten… what? Slightly stronger bones. Maybe a fraction of a fraction of healing. Enough to make standing possible, but nothing more.
He held up his thin, shaking hands, flexing the fingers. No claws. No sudden rush of vitality. Just the same pale, weak flesh.
"You're a liar," he told the System flatly. "One percent my ass. This is like… zero point one. Maybe less. Wolverine gets bullet holes and shrugs them off. I get a paper cut and still bleed for an hour. Where's my return policy?"
The System, of course, didn't answer.
Garrett sighed, collapsing back into his chair. "Figures. Even my miracle cheat system is defective. I get the clearance rack version."
His thoughts drifted, as they often did, to what could have been.
He remembered Stryker. That smug bastard had approached him years ago, back when Garrett was barely sixteen. He'd come with his men in black coats and fake smiles, whispering promises of "a brighter future."
"Your unique condition, Mr. Orion," Stryker had said, voice oily with persuasion. "It could be the key. If you let us experiment, we might give you the strength you lack. Imagine being free of your illnesses. Imagine standing tall."
At the time, Garrett had laughed in his face. He hadn't been strong enough to spit on him, but the laughter had been close enough.
"You want to cut me open and poke around?" he'd said. "Be my guest. Just don't expect me to say yes."
He'd turned them down. He didn't trust them. And frankly, the thought of being some military guinea pig was worse than being fragile.
Now, sitting in his chair with his "one percent" Wolverine power, he wondered if he'd been too hasty.
Then again… nah.
"It'd be weird if I crawled back to him now," Garrett muttered. " 'Hey Stryker, remember me? The gray-haired disease piñata you wanted to slice open? Well, I changed my mind. Please stab me until I'm useful.' Yeah, that'd go great."
He shuddered, pulling the blanket tighter around himself. "No thanks. I'll pass on the whole lab rat thing. I'd rather keep buying powers piecemeal than end up a corpse on some operating table."
His gaze drifted to the skyline outside his window. The city sprawled endlessly, skyscrapers glinting in the morning light. Somewhere out there, Superman probably saved a cat from a tree in Metropolis. Thor probably called down lightning for fun. Spider-Man probably swung past a dozen mugging victims on his way to school.
And Garrett Orion sat in his penthouse, munching on a banana, wondering if his bones were half a percent stronger than yesterday.
"Aliens, mutants, gods… and me," he said softly. "What a lineup."
He wasn't all-knowing. He wasn't some reincarnated sage with cheat knowledge. To him, Thor wasn't a god—just an alien with lightning in his veins. Mutants weren't "the next stage of evolution," they were just unlucky bastards like him, hated and hunted because people needed scapegoats.
He didn't know if gods were real. He didn't care. All he knew was that life was ugly, cruel, and unfair. And the only thing he had to protect himself was money and now, apparently, a busted system that gave him crumbs of power.
Garrett finished the banana, tossed the peel into a golden trash bin, and leaned back in his chair.
"Fine," he muttered. "If I only get scraps, then I'll hoard scraps until I've got a pile big enough to matter. Wolverine was step one. Who's next?"
The idea made him smirk, despite the bitterness. He was rich. Filthy rich. Rich enough to make entire governments look the other way. If anyone could collect DNA samples like trading cards, it was him.
"Spider-Man's blood… maybe. Something from Stark? Hell, if Thor really is an alien, maybe I can bribe SHIELD for a vial of lightning spit or whatever he's got."
The thought made him laugh again, weak but genuine.
He shook his head, letting the laughter fade. "One percent or not, it's still more than I had yesterday."
The System pulsed faintly, as if agreeing.
Garrett pulled the blanket up, closing his eyes. He was already exhausted again. Standing for two minutes had drained him like he'd run a marathon.
"Tomorrow," he whispered. "Tomorrow I'll start planning. Today, I rest. Because even with Wolverine's genes, I'm still me."
And with that, Garrett Orion drifted back into sleep, the city humming around him, the faint glow of the System hovering like a promise he didn't yet understand.