My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 751: We Will Need A Lunch Break

Transmuting the metallic hydrogen took a bit of time, but it went off without a hitch. Once it was done, Liam vanished from the fab section of the industrial base and appeared in the Lunar Base office, where Lucy was still seated at her desk, exactly where he’d left her.

Yanxia had never once let go of him the whole way there. The moment they appeared, she peeked out from his side and made a face at Lucy. It was a small, smug thing, chin lifted, the exact expression of a younger sibling rubbing a victory in an older one’s face.

Liam caught it out of the corner of his eye and said nothing. He just smiled.

He crossed the room and set the small case down on Lucy’s desk, opening it to show her the sample resting inside. The metal hydrogen was stable now, gleaming faintly, utterly unremarkable to look at and utterly impossible in every way that mattered.

"Pick a random viewer from the livestream and give it to them," he said.

"I’ll handle it," Lucy said, already reaching for the case.

Liam reached out and ruffled her hair warmly. "I trust you. I’ll see you later."

Then he was gone.

***

Back in the space shuttle, Liam’s friends were still dazed, though at least they were moving now, drifting around the cabin in the loose, aimless way of people whose bodies had recovered faster than their minds.

They kept trying to talk about Liam going into Jupiter, coming out clean, and kept failing, the sentences falling apart halfway through, nobody quite able to land on a full thought.

Matt had gone through more than two liters of water and was eyeing a third.

"I don’t even know why I’m this thirsty," he muttered, cracking open another bottle after drinking more than 2l already. "I didn’t do anything. I just watched."

"Trauma makes you thirsty, apparently," Alex said.

Stacy looked up from where she’d been sitting with her knees pulled to her chest. "Okay, but — is no one else wondering what the governments of the world are thinking right now? Like, genuinely. Our friend is basically a god. A literal god. And I was here worried for nothing."

The others nodded slowly, because there wasn’t much to add to that.

Alex let out a long breath and flopped back against his seat. "I miss when the craziest thing about him was the seventy-million-dollar Bellmere mansion and a garage full of hypercars," he said. "Remember that? That was normal. That was a normal amount of rich. Now we’ve got a private luxury space shuttle and a cosmic-level entity for a best friend, and I don’t even know what tier of insane we’re supposed to be adjusting to anymore."

The group nodded solemnly. Then Kristopher chuckled, oddly serious for a chuckle, and completely out of character for him in that moment. Everyone turned to look, curious.

He smiled faintly. "I was just remembering," he said, "when Matt asked Liam for his sister’s contact info."

Everyone’s eyes slid slowly toward Matt.

"I’m just saying," Kristopher went on, "I wonder if Matt could even handle Yanxia on her own. Forget Liam. Just her."

Matt’s smile went wry and a little pale. "...Let’s not think about that today."

A few tired laughs went around the cabin, small but real, the first proper ones since they’d left Callisto’s surface.

They’d been trying, for months now, to understand Liam — really understand him, not just accept the shape of who and what he is from a distance. And every time they thought they’d gotten hold of something, some piece of the picture that finally made sense, they were reminded, gently or not so gently, that whatever they’d grasped was the smallest fragment of something enormous. The tip of an iceberg they couldn’t even see the bottom of.

They wanted to be more for him. That was the quiet thing underneath all of it, the thing none of them said out loud very often. He’d given them so much — the shuttles, the exosuits, the trips, the casual, easy way he folded them into a life none of them could have imagined a few years ago — and it left them with a strange, persistent ache, because there was so little they could ever give back.

What do you get someone who could, if he wanted to, simply make anything he wished for? What did loyalty or friendship even look like, set against a person who had access to everything the world had to offer and plenty it didn’t?

Liam had told them that he wanted them to stand out on their own, and not live behind him and become footnotes to his name. They believed he meant it. But believing it and managing it were different things, and every one of them privately suspected it would be the hardest thing any of them ever tried to do.

Harder didn’t mean impossible, though. That was the thought Harper kept circling back to, quietly, while the others talked around him.

They were so deep in their own heads that none of them noticed Liam had already appeared a few steps away, standing there patiently, watching them not notice him, for a solid five minutes.

Eventually he coughed, lightly, to announce himself.

Every one of them jolted at once, like a single startled flock of birds.

Liam sighed, a small, fond sound. "Come on, guys," he said. "We’re supposed to be having fun. Not sitting around in a daze."

"Easy for you to say," Lana said, laughing despite herself.

"Genuinely," Alex added. "You went into a planet. We watched you go into a planet. There’s a difference in recovery time."

Kristopher shook his head slowly. "We really shouldn’t even try to make sense of his line of logic anymore. I think that’s the lesson of today."

That got a proper round of laughter, the tension in the cabin finally starting to loosen.

Liam smiled at all of them. "We’re on a trip to have fun," he said. "So let’s start having it."

"It’s true," Matt said, holding up his water bottle like a small shield, "but maybe give us a little more time to recover first. Like, a lunch break. At minimum."

Liam chuckled and gave a small nod, and then, without another word, vanished from the shuttle.

He reappeared on Callisto’s surface, alone, and looked out at the distant sun. It was small and bright even from all the way out here. It was like a pinprick of gold against the blackness of space.

A faint smile crossed his face. He really had come a long way.

***

Meanwhile, on the far side of the Moon, Lucy sorted through the staggering number of LucidNet IDs that had tuned in to watch Elise’s livestream.

Millions upon millions of them, a scrolling mass of names and accounts stretching further than any human eye could ever have read through — and she moved through them in the space of a breath, weighing nothing but chance, choosing one.

A single account, out of all of them and she sent a message.

Congratulations. You have been selected as the recipient of a stable sample of metallic hydrogen, sourced from the interior of Jupiter. Please reply with a delivery address so that it may be sent to you.

Somewhere on Earth, a notification blinked quietly on a stranger’s screen.