The echo of the announcement still rang in his head.
Nebula.
Not the bottom. Not the top. Somewhere in the expensive middle row of the universe.
For a heartbeat, disappointment flared—small, mean, absolutely human. Then it settled into something flatter.
"A Nebula Star, huh," he muttered. "Guess even space thinks I'm middle management."
Back on Earth, Returnees weren't just survivors anymore. They were a career path.
Whole economies had grown around them—consultancies, training firms, government agencies whose entire job was to keep them sweet. Returnees got tax breaks, housing, hazard pay. Talk shows brought them on to cry about their trauma between commercials for coffee and insurance. Corporations hired them as mascots. Governments hired them as weapons.
If you had enough money, you could even hire one to go back in.
Families with missing people did it sometimes—sold houses, emptied savings, begged for loans. They'd pay a Singularity—a Returnee who willingly re-entered Yarion—to dive back into the dark and try to find a son, a sister, a mother. Clear a Scenario with them. Buy them a ticket home.
Most Singularities said no. Those who said yes had their own legends, and most of those legends ended badly. Whole units formed around them: carefully selected Dissapants, best Stars money and luck could buy, marching into the unknown with contracts, cameras, and smiles for the press.
For a thin, stupid moment, Nhilly let himself picture it.
Him, standing at the front of a formation in some polished uniform, Star flaring, reporters shouting his name. Nebula-ranked, with a gravity trick no one understood yet. A unit behind him. People depending on him. Headlines calling him courageous instead of pathetic.
Then reality put a hand on that fantasy's head and pushed it under.
He could barely get out of bed on Earth. He'd come to a beach to vanish because the idea of waiting around to die felt worse than erasure. The officer had looked him over once and decided, correctly, that he wouldn't make it to the facility awake.
Singularity material? Not quite.
Her voice came back to him, quiet and practical:
Depending on your situation, it might be better to just accept the YR world as your new home…
He didn't know yet whether he had a "situation" or just a lifetime of bad habits. Either way, her advice felt less abstract now.
His thoughts scattered when a streak of light tore across the void.
It moved without sound—no roar, no trail—just a clean, surgical incision through the dark. It stopped in front of him as if it had always meant to arrive at exactly that point.
The brilliance folded in on itself.
When it faded, something hovered in the space between them: a dark purple, diamond-shaped rune. It floated without wobble, as steady as if it had been nailed to the air. Gold inscriptions curled across its surface, glowing faintly. The shapes were alien and, at the same time, immediately legible on some level below language.
A Poor Man's Gravity.
The phrase stamped itself across his mind like a cheap brand.
Nhilly frowned. "That's it?"
He'd heard Returnees talk about their Star names: godly metaphors, dramatic titles, things that sounded like album covers. Dragon's Breath. Temporal Severance. Sun Eater. Nothing about this little purple shard gave off that energy.
"What's with that name?" he muttered. "Nebula rank and I get something that sounds like it comes with debt."
More like something a Stellar rank would draw and tell stories about to sound impressive. A poor man's gravity. Not real gravity. The knock-off version they sell you in the back of the catalogue.
Before he could spiral too far down that thought, the cloaked figure was there again.
No footsteps. No buildup. One moment empty; the next, the purple cloak and hooded void, as if the universe had remembered it had a receptionist.
Nhilly dragged a slow breath in. His chest still felt like it had ice packed around the organs.
Returnees always called their Star here. There was a phrase for it; they said it with too much drama on talk shows, like an incantation. Saying it aloud now felt stupid.
But stupid was better than ignorant.
"Star ability," he said. The words came out hoarse, like they'd been left in a drawer too long. "Show me."
The figure did not move. The hood didn't tilt. But the answer slid into his head with the same indifferent weight as the first announcement:
Gravitic Shift is the Star ability granted by the wielder of the Poor Man's Gravity Star.
It enables manipulation of the gravitational force acting solely upon your own body up to ten times that of your current location.
This enhancement is strictly self-contained. External objects, entities, and surfaces remain unaffected. Physical strikes, projectiles, or items you hold will not inherit the altered gravity.
The presence fell silent.
The meaning did not.
Nhilly let the description slot into place, piece by piece.
Up to ten times the gravity of wherever he was. On himself only. No environmental tricks. No pulling people out of the air. No pressing things flat. No dramatic crushing of enemies into the floor while delivering speeches about inevitability.
Just him.
If he'd been anyone else—someone with a body tuned for war instead of desk work—that might have sounded terrifying. Multiply your own weight in the right moment, and every step could hit like a drop hammer. Drop your personal gravity at the peak of a jump, and you'd glide where other people fell. Ten times heavier for anchoring yourself, ten times lighter for dodging.
Versatile. Elegant, even.
But the limits were precise and cruel.
The world around him didn't change. The ground wouldn't crack just because he weighed more for a second. A punch thrown with his arm wouldn't magically become a meteor. The system made sure of it: force didn't transfer, objects didn't inherit the trick, reality refused to cheat for him.
He couldn't pin enemies down, couldn't make them crawl under invented weight. He couldn't drag weapons out of their hands or send people flying with reversed pull.
He could only make his own body a problem.
A poor man's gravity, indeed.
On paper, it was deceptively strong. In the hands of a monster with discipline and muscle and time to practice, it could become something brutal. In the hands of a half-burnt office worker who'd just tried to resign from existence…
He exhaled, long and thin.
"Right," he said. "So it's like my life. Technically full of potential if you ignore reality."
His fingers curled, or tried to. There was no real hand to clench here, just the phantom sense of one. Still, the urge to grip something was there. To hold this power and shake it, demand a refund.
Nothing answered.
The rune hovered, patient and faintly amused.
He thought of the officer in the cruiser. Of the way she'd said sometimes survival meant giving up on going home. Of the faint scar under her hair where her own Star had marked her.
Poor Man's Gravity. Nebula rank. No crowd-pleasing tricks, no big beams, no easy answers.
Part of him wanted to laugh until the cold took the sound away. Another part wanted to cry, because of course this was what he got—something useful, but only if he did the work. No shortcuts. No cosmic apology for the last twenty-two years.
Under that, deeper than the self-pity and the tired jokes, something else moved.
It wasn't hope. Not exactly. Hope felt too clean for him.
Resolve. That was closer.
Ugly, reluctant, stitched together from spite and the faint desire to see what happened if he didn't lie down this time.
"For better or worse," Nhilly said quietly, to the void, to himself, to whatever was listening, "you picked me."
The rune pulsed once, like a heartbeat echoing his own.
"Fine," he added. "Then you're coming with me."
Poor Man's Gravity settled into him—not as a rush, but as a weight he could finally feel, coiled around his bones, waiting for the first bad idea.