'Who the hell is that?' Jiro thought, staring blankly at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror the next morning.
The agonizing pain of the system readjustment was completely gone, but the person actively looking back at him didn't even look like him anymore. His hair had completely changed to a striking ash blond, and his irises had shifted to perfectly match the exact same color.
'Why would a skill change my literal hair and eye color?' he thought, lifting a hand to run his fingers through the ash blond strands.
The changes didn't just stop at his face. He looked down and pulled his ruined, blood-stained shirt off over his head. Underneath, his frail, sickly frame had been entirely reconstructed.
He was actually pretty built now, with dense, defined muscles covering his chest and arms. He looked exactly like he had been intensely working out for months instead of just surviving a near-death experience overnight.
'I've never felt this light before,' he thought, rolling his shoulders and feeling absolute zero resistance or sickness in his joints.
The chronic weakness that had dragged him down for years was totally gone, completely burned away by the four cores currently humming in perfect unison inside his chest.
'Just what is this system?' he thought, leaning his hands against the sink counter.
It wasn't just some standard progression interface. The fact that it had the power to physically rewrite his body and completely alter his appearance meant it was operating on a completely different level of reality than anything the academy taught.
'Let's see what else changed,' he thought, stepping back from the sink. "Status."
A sharp blue screen instantly materialized in the air in front of the mirror.
[User: Jiro]
[Rank: E-Rank (Progression to D-Rank: 0 / 500,000 Points)]
[Cores: 4 (Stable)]
[Mana Capacity: High (4 Cores Linked)]
[Unique Trait: Absolute Mimicry (Rank: Unknown)]
[Active Skill: Domination (Rank: E) (Progression to D-Rank: 0 / 1,000,000 Points)]
'Half a million points just for a rank up... and a full million to upgrade the skill?' he thought, his eyes locking onto the progression meters in complete disbelief.
He had to actively stop himself from laughing out loud. Regular students fought tooth and nail taking dangerous academy missions just to earn fifty or a hundred points a month.
Half a million points just to reach D-Rank was completely outrageous on its own, but a million points for a single skill upgrade was a target designed to be literally impossible for anyone to reach.
'Any normal person would just give up seeing those numbers,' he thought, feeling a cold smile slowly creep back onto his face, 'But I am not normal anymore.'
With the Domination skill compounding his growth by three hundred percent, and four separate cores acting as absolute mana engines inside him, that impossible number suddenly didn't look completely out of reach.
'I still don't even know why I need four of them,' he thought, letting the system screen vanish into thin air. 'But I can figure that out later.'
Right now, he had to hurry up and actually get to class before he was officially marked late.
He quickly threw on his academy uniform, which now fit a lot tighter across his chest and shoulders than it did yesterday, then hurried out of the dorms. He was assigned to Class F, the absolute lowest of the lowest ranks in the entire academy, where all the failures and unawakened students were grouped together.
Ten minutes later, he reached the familiar hallway and grabbed the handle of his classroom door.
'Just another boring day,' he thought, pushing the door open and stepping inside.
But the moment he walked into the room, the loud, overlapping chatter of thirty students suddenly dropped dead.
'Hm?' he thought, pausing near the front podium as the entire room went completely silent.
Every single person in the classroom was staring directly at him. Some people even stopped mid-sentence with their mouths still hanging open in shock.
"Who the hell is that?" a guy sitting near the front row whispered loudly to his friend.
"Is he a new student?" a girl a few desks away whispered back, her eyes completely glued to him. "Why would a guy that built get placed in Class F?"
'Right... I look completely different now,' he thought, feeling a little weird as the whispers rapidly started spreading across the entire room.
"It's just me," he said, speaking plainly into the totally silent room. "Jiro."
For a second, nobody even breathed and then, the entire classroom absolutely lost it.
"What?!" a guy sitting in the middle row practically shouted, jumping halfway out of his seat. "That wimp Jiro? No way!"
"What the hell happened to you overnight?!" another student yelled over the noise, staring wide-eyed at his completely altered physique.
"Wait... he's actually really hot now," a girl near the window whispered loudly to her desk-mate, totally ignoring how chaotic the rest of the room was getting.
'This is way too loud,' he thought, feeling completely overwhelmed by the sudden barrage of questions.
Deciding it was better to just ignore them, he kept his face completely blank and walked straight past the front row, heading back to his usual seat in the corner. He slid into his chair and just looked out the window, totally ignoring the fact that half the class had physically turned in their seats to keep staring at him.
'Is that really him?' Ben thought, glaring from a few rows ahead while tightly gripping his pen. 'The fuck happened to that frail little loser?'
For the past year, Ben had practically made a sport out of shoving Jiro around. Seeing the designated class punching bag suddenly walk in looking completely built and different was rubbing him entirely the wrong way.
'Whatever, he's still unawakened trash,' he thought, aggressively standing up and pushing his desk forward.
He marched straight over to Jiro's row, casting a heavy shadow right over the desk.
"Hey, trash," Ben sneered, reaching down and roughly grabbing him by the shoulder. "Did you think dyeing your hair would suddenly make you stop being a failure?"
He didn't react at all, keeping his eyes locked exactly on the window.
"I heard the news about the cafeteria," he said, a nasty grin spreading across his face as his grip tightened on his shoulder. "Everyone is talking about how you got publicly dumped. I guess Leon finally got tired of waiting and just took your bitch right out from under you, huh?"
The rest of the class stayed completely silent, nobody daring to speak up. Compared to the rest of the F-Class failures, Ben had actually awakened a minor physical strengthening skill, making him the undisputed top dog of the room.
He genuinely believed that just because he was slightly stronger than them, he could rule over the class however he wanted.
'Why isn't he crying or stuttering?' Ben thought, his grin slightly faltering as Jiro just sat there without saying a single word.
Usually, the frail wimp would try to pull away by now, but right now he wasn't even flinching.
"Hey, are you deaf?!" Ben snapped, pulling roughly on his shoulder again. "I said—"
"Repeat exactly what you just said," he replied, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly calm whisper.
'What?' Ben thought, instantly feeling the temperature in the entire room plummet.
Thick, heavy aura suddenly started emitting directly off Jiro's body, looking exactly like rolling gray smoke. Before he could even let go of his shoulder in panic, Jiro violently snapped his head around to look at him.
"Domination," he whispered.
BOOM!
"Ghhk—!" Ben violently choked, his eyes rolling back in his head as the full conceptual weight of the skill crushed down into his mind.
It felt exactly like a physical mountain had just dropped directly onto his shoulders. His knees instantly buckled under the sheer pressure of the bloodlust, slamming hard against the classroom floor.
'I... I can't breathe!' He thought, his face turning completely pale as he stared up into his glowing ash-blond eyes in pure shock.
"You were saying something about her?" he asked, not breaking eye contact for a single second.
"N-No... please," Ben gasped out, his entire body violently shaking on the floor.
He was completely paralyzed by absolute terror. The heavy, suffocating aura radiating off Jiro completely shattered his mind, and an embarrassing, dark puddle of piss began rapidly spreading across the floor directly under Ben's knees as his bladder totally gave out.
The entire classroom watched the puddle spread in sheer, absolute horror.
'He completely broke him just by looking at him,' a student in the front row thought, trembling heavily as the distinct smell of urine hit the air, 'is that really the Jiro we knew?'
Jiro just stared down at the pathetic display for another second, feeling absolutely zero pity for the guy who had actively made his life a living hell for an entire year.
'To think a single skill could do all this,' he thought, watching the bully violently tremble.
He hadn't just scared him, he utterly subjugated Ben's spirit in front of the entire class, completely fulfilling the system's strict requirement for A-Rank efficiency copying without even needing to throw a single punch.
He slowly leaned down, his glowing ash-blond eyes looking absolutely menacing as he stared directly into Ben's terrified face.
"Since you're so eager to throw your weight around," he whispered, his voice completely cold. "Let me borrow that power of yours."