My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 739: A World Breaking Broadcast Coming Up

The group looked at one another in surprise, then back at Liam, studying his expression as if trying to work out exactly what he was thinking.

Because in all the time they had known him, through every announcement and every livestream and every impossible thing Nova had done, Liam had never once put himself in front of a camera by choice.

He has always either let Lucy speak through the announcements, as he stayed, deliberately, in the background of his own empire.

And now he was telling them to livestream, while also taking himself out of the hosting chair in the same breath.

"Hold on," Matt said slowly, the pieces turning behind his eyes. "You want us to host a livestream. From the F1 final. With you there."

"Not at the livestream. I mean here, on Callisto," Liam replied.

The silence that followed was total.

Every one of them stopped, the excitement that had been building a moment ago freezing mid-breath. They looked from Liam to the surface beneath their feet — the ancient, cratered grey of Callisto — to the enormous banded face of Jupiter hanging overhead, to the hard black vacuum stretching in every direction, the vacuum that would have killed any one of them in seconds without the suits they wore.

And to Liam, standing in the middle of it in ordinary clothes, breathing air that wasn’t there, unbothered.

"...You want to livestream," Matt said very slowly, as though testing whether he’d heard it right, "from the surface of a moon of Jupiter. Six hundred million kilometers from Earth. With you standing in open space, no suit, no anything."

"That’s what I said."

"On Callisto."

"On Callisto."

Kristopher pressed his gloved fingers to the visor of his helmet as if to steady himself. "Liam. That’s not a livestream. That’s — I don’t even know what that is. That’s you telling the entire world, in one shot, that you can survive in the vacuum of space. Do you understand what that does? There’s no walking that back. There’s no ’maybe it was special effects.’ It’s live. It’s undeniable. The moment you do that, everything changes."

"I know exactly what it does," Liam said calmly.

That was what unsettled them most — not that he was proposing it, but that he understood precisely what it meant and was proposing it anyway.

"That’s the part I don’t get," Alex said, and for once even his enthusiasm had gone cautious. "You were never one to... you know? Be this open and now you want to go from barely showing yourself to standing unprotected on a moon of Jupiter on live broadcast? That’s not a step. That’s a — that’s a leap off a cliff, man. Why? Why suddenly so open?"

Liam let the question sit for a moment, looking out across the cratered plain, and when he answered, his voice was even and certain.

"Because only cowards hide behind the power they have," he said. "For a long time there was a reason to be careful. There were people moving against me, against Nova, against the people close to me. They were reason why I had to stay quiet, to not show my whole hand, to let them wonder and misjudge. But I’ve already dealt with the ones who were going against me. That’s finished. Handled. So tell me — what, exactly, do I have left to be afraid of? Who’s left that I need to hide from?"

None of them had an answer to that, because there wasn’t one.

What Liam did not tell them — what he kept behind his even expression — was the deeper reason. This was not simply about having nothing to fear. It was about a point he intended to make, quietly and unmistakably, to the entire watching world.

Because up to now, everything the world feared and marveled at had been Nova’s. The devices, the station, the shuttles, the medical nanites — all of it was technology. Extraordinary, impossible technology, but technology all the same, the product of a company.

And a company, however powerful, was a thing that could in theory be countered, out-built, out-lasted, understood. The world could tell itself that Nova was ahead, but only ahead, leading the world in technological advancements. It wasn’t a different category of existence.

Liam meant to correct that. He meant to show them, in a single undeniable broadcast, that the man behind Nova did not merely own impossible technology, but that he himself, personally, was something the world had no framework for at all.

That he could stand in the killing void of deep space, on a moon at the edge of the reachable solar system, without a suit, without a ship, without anything, as casually as another man might stand in his own garden.

It was a message with no words in it, and it would land harder than any announcement Lucy had ever made. But he kept it to himself, because it was not a burden his friends needed to carry, and because it would color how they behaved if they knew there was a purpose behind it. He wanted them relaxed. He wanted them themselves.

"So that’s it?" Matt asked, working through it aloud. "No fear, nothing to hide, so you just — do whatever you want now."

"Something like that," Liam said, a small smile returning to his face. "But listen — this is your stream, remember? Your names, your channel, your faces. If any of you don’t want to be part of something this big, this loud, this permanent, then don’t." He looked around at all of them, and his tone was entirely genuine. "I mean that. I’m not going to talk anyone into it. If you’d rather sit this one out, sit it out, and there’ll be no hard feelings from me at all. The offer stands, but only if you actually want it."

Matt was quiet for a moment, turning over the sheer scale of what Liam was handing them in his head and then a slow grin spread across his face.

"Are you serious? Miss the single biggest livestream in the history of the human species? The one where our friend proves he’s basically a god, live, from Jupiter?" He shook his head. "Not a chance. I’m in."

"I was in before he finished the sentence," Alex said immediately.

"In," said Kristopher, the caution finally giving way to a grin of his own.

One after another the rest of them agreed — Harper, Kristy, Stacy, Lana, Elise — the excitement flooding back now that the hesitation had passed, louder than before, because the fear had turned to exhilaration.

They weren’t just hosting a race stream anymore. They were about to broadcast the most extraordinary thing any human being had ever put in front of a camera, and they were going to do it *together.*

"Okay, okay," Harper said, raising his hands to gather the noise. "If we’re actually doing this, then we need to sort out who’s hosting. Liam said it’s our call. So — who’s the face?"

And that set off the real argument.

Alex volunteered himself instantly and was shouted down just as fast, on the unanimous grounds that he would, in the words of Kristopher, "turn the most-watched broadcast in history into a mess within the first thirty seconds."

Someone put Harper forward for being calm under pressure; she declined, saying she’d rather run things from behind the camera. Matt was suggested and refused, claiming he had never been good at such things.

Back and forth it went, everyone nominating everyone else, nobody quite willing to be the single face that billions of people would be staring at.

It was Kristy who finally cut through it.

"It should be Elise," she said simply.

The group turned to her, and then, one by one, to Elise — and the more they thought about it, the more obvious it became.

"She’s right," Harper said. "Elise practically lives on social media. She actually understands how this stuff works — the pacing, the audience, how to talk to a camera without freezing up. The rest of us would be lost."

"And she’s got the second-most followers out of all of us," Matt added. "She already has an audience of her own. She knows how to hold one."

Elise blinked, caught off guard at being the sudden center of the decision. "You all really want me to do it?"

"You’re the only one of us who won’t panic the second the numbers start climbing," Kristopher said. "And they are going to climb, Elise. This is going to be the biggest thing any of us has ever touched."

She looked around at the group, at their faces, at the certainty in them — and then at Liam, who simply gave a small, encouraging nod, leaving the choice entirely to her.

A slow, thrilled smile spread across her face, nerves and excitement tangling together.

"...Okay," she said. "Okay. I’ll do it."

"That’s settled, then," Liam said, pleased. "It’s your show. Whenever you’re ready."

Elise drew a breath, steadying herself, and mentally activated her Lucid, which had been linked to her exosuit by Lucy.

Around her, the others fell into place. Alex practically vibrating, Matt grinning, the rest arranging themselves against the impossible backdrop of Callisto’s cratered surface and the vast, banded giant of Jupiter filling the sky behind them. And in the center of it all stood Liam, calm and unhurried, a man in ordinary clothes at the edge of the solar system, waiting.

Elise looked into the camera, and a small indicator bloomed to life before her.

The stream was on.