My Infinite Investment System

His unlocked phone stayed aimed away from him as Mika carried it into the private team room by one corner.

The room smelled of cold pizza, damp uniforms, and the lemon spray used across its single plastic table.

Nia entered behind him with her shield, while Jun secured the door before Amara claimed the chair nearest the medical cabinet.

Mika placed the phone on the table and kept two fingers over it while the unlocked screen stayed visible between them.

"I stole this for dramatic effect," she said as her real smile appeared crooked, "you can take it back whenever you want."

Ryan looked at the exit before sitting opposite her, choosing the plastic chair that offered no useful route to dignity.

"Keep it for one minute," he said as both hands settled away from the device.

"That sounded like consent delivered during a hostage exchange," she replied while lifting one finger from the screen.

"It is the best available version," he said as his attention remained on the exit.

Jun set his tablet beside the phone, then opened the source trail behind @KellerSoles.

"The fan account is a mirror," he said while three archive links spread across his display, "every old clip came from one deleted forum profile."

Mika lifted her fingers from Ryan’s phone while Jun’s source trail finished loading beside it.

The dead profile name appeared between them above six years of cached comments, saved clips, and deleted bookmarks.

@FieldMargin.

Ryan had chosen it at twenty-one after spending forty minutes rejecting names that sounded more embarrassing.

Age had improved his judgment enough to reveal that all forty-one options had been embarrassing.

"Yours?" she asked while keeping both hands flat on the table.

"Yes," he replied while the old handle remained reflected across her eyes.

Nia removed one damaged shield strap, looked at him over the crowded plastic table, then said, "You archived her."

"I saved public raid footage for tactical review," Ryan replied while refusing to call the four hundred clips reasonable.

Mika scrolled through a folder containing four hundred twelve clips.

"This is a hostage quantity of tactical review," she said as her thumb reached the oldest folder.

His ears went hot while she opened the earliest file.

Six years younger, Mika crossed a flooded train station with cheap armor and lightning she could barely keep away from civilians.

Ryan’s old comment sat beneath it with the timestamp preserved beside an avatar he had drawn badly himself.

Her rear foot slips before every wide discharge, so she changes the strike angle instead of asking the team to slow down.

Mika read the sentence aloud, stretching its serious syllables until his tactical note sounded like a court judgment.

"You wrote like somebody’s disappointed fencing instructor," she said as the old clip replayed beneath her finger.

"I was studying procurement," he replied while his ears heated beneath four interested stares.

"You used twenty-seven words to say I almost fell," she said as one eyebrow climbed toward her hairline.

"You did almost fall," he replied while the remembered frame remained paused behind her heel.

Her eyes rose from the screen, bright with the specific danger of someone discovering renewable material.

"This is the best day of my life," she said as delight escaped the public shape of her smile.

Amara opened a bottle of electrolyte solution, her overlapping tooth showing before she drank.

"Yesterday you won a national match," Amara replied while her bottle remained suspended near her mouth.

"This has layers," Mika said as she opened the next year of saved footage.

Jun restored the profile index from cached screenshots while Ryan considered stealing his own phone back, then rejected the idea as too physically sincere.

The comments followed Mika from local exhibitions into professional raids.

Some analyzed distance, wrist stability, or the delay between her camera smile and the moment pain reached her ribs.

Others defended her beneath people calling every victory sponsor editing.

One reply had earned nine years of forum silence from the person who received it.

If luck can reproduce the same correction under five different gate conditions, perhaps the rest of you should become luckier.

Mika stopped teasing.

Her thumb rested beside the comment while the Cup crowd thudded through the wall beyond them.

"You fought strangers in a dead forum over me," she said as her thumb stayed beside his old reply.

"They were wrong," he replied while one shoulder lowered beneath the admission.

"That is your emotional explanation?" she asked as every trace of teasing left her mouth.

Ryan rubbed the side of his index finger along his jaw.

"I admired how hard you worked before I knew you, and people kept treating the result like an accident."

The room changed around the plain sentence while the Cup crowd continued thudding beyond the wall.

Mika’s hands disappeared beneath the table, every camera-ready expression leaving her face.

’Say literally anything funny,’ she thought, ’why are my eyes burning, Jun can see me, the pizza smells terrible.’

Nia finished threading the shield strap without creating an escape for either of them.

Amara read her bottle label with medical concentration it had not earned.

Jun interrupted the stillness by enlarging one red archive marker on his tablet.

"There is a deleted post," he said while keeping the restore control untouched.

"No," he replied as his lids closed against the approaching memory.

"You gave me permission to recover the source trail," Jun said while his finger remained beside the control.

"Permission has matured," he replied without opening them.

Mika’s hands returned to the table while her earlier tenderness disappeared behind delighted suspicion.

"Jun, recover it," she said as one finger pointed toward the red marker.

"He can revoke access," the scout replied while looking toward the person attached to the post.

Four people looked at him.

He remembered writing the post after a midnight raid clip, deleting it eleven seconds later, then checking twice to ensure nobody had captured it.

"Recover it," he said as the last useful part of his dignity left voluntarily.

The screenshot appeared.

Mika stood on a transport roof wearing torn field trousers, one boot planted above a dead crawler while rain ran down both thighs.

His deleted caption remained below the rain-soaked image with its eleven-second lifespan preserved.

Tactical observation: those thighs could stabilize a collapsing bridge, and I would volunteer to be the bridge despite weakening the tactical value.

Nia stopped working while Amara lowered her bottle, then Jun turned toward the wall with both shoulders shaking once.

Mika stared at the screenshot with her lips pressed flat, fighting the laugh until it escaped through her nose.

"Tactical observation," she repeated while two fingers enlarged the sentence he had hoped nobody captured.

"I was twenty-three," he replied as both ears became painfully hot.

"You wrote this at two fourteen in the morning," she said while tapping the surviving timestamp.

"I was twenty-three at night as well," he replied without finding a defensible place for his hands.

She pushed back from the table and walked once around the room, laughter caught behind her wrist.

When she returned, she braced both hands beside his phone and leaned across it.

"Volunteer to be the bridge?" she asked as one hand flattened beside the screenshot.

"The account was deleted for quality control," he replied while Jun’s archive disproved the usefulness of deletion.

"Eleven seconds after posting," she said as her nail tapped the preserved duration.

"Quality control was responsive," he replied while one corner of his mouth betrayed him.

Her public pout appeared on purpose while the screenshot remained open between both hands.

"You never said anything that deranged to my face," she said as the deliberate pout sharpened.

"You owned a regulator I was trying to keep inside your chest," he replied as his eyes dropped toward its strap.

"Romance is alive," she said while pressing one palm against the regulator in theatrical relief.

The teasing kept his ears burning, yet something real remained beneath it.

Mika reopened the first saved clip, where her cheap armor failed to fit one shoulder correctly.

"You watched before VoltEdge," she said while the laughter left her voice, "before the sponsors made me useful."

"Yes," he replied with his attention fixed on the cheap shoulder plate in the old footage.

"Before you needed a guild," she said as her fingers stopped against the earliest clip.

"I did not know you had one," he replied while meeting her eyes across the phone.

Her gaze dropped to his mouth, then returned too quickly.

"You liked me when my footage had four hundred views," she said as the public performance disappeared completely.

"Three hundred eighty-six," he replied before good judgment could intervene.

Mika’s forehead lowered until it touched the table while one laugh escaped against the scratched plastic.

"That correction almost ruined the moment," she said without lifting her head.

"Almost?" he asked as one side of his smile escaped.

She lifted one hand without raising her head and caught his wrist across the plastic surface.

"Do not become confident," she said while her thumb pressed once against his pulse.

Ryan let her keep the wrist, watching chipped pink polish around her thumbnail press against his pulse.

The account archive on Jun’s tablet continued past his deleted profile.

Somebody had copied every clip, comment, and private bookmark before @FieldMargin vanished.

The export date was three months old, recent enough to overlap Apex’s first effort to recruit Mika away from Northstar.

Ryan’s forum login had been inactive for nearly two years.

"Who requested the archive?" he asked as his attention shifted from Mika’s hand to the timestamp.

Jun traced the purchase through a media broker, his fear settling into the careful rhythm of work.

"Protected client, paid with an Apex communications account," Jun replied as the broker trail narrowed on his display.

Mika straightened without releasing Ryan.

"Luca."

"Likely," the scout replied, "the mirror account uses his network relay, but it is posting from scheduled files."

Nia placed the repaired strap down too carefully while the payment trail remained visible across Jun’s tablet.

"Why expose Ryan’s praise?" she asked as her palm stayed flat beside the repaired buckle.

"To make him look obsessed," Mika said as her thumb stopped over his pulse, "then make Northstar look built around access to me."

Ryan saw the story Luca could sell once the private archive became a public timeline without context.

An auditor stalked a celebrity’s archive, found her ruined nightclub, bought expensive equipment, then created a guild around her.

Every true detail could be arranged into a lie if Luca controlled the order in which the audience received it.

His private support terms would look like a cover for ownership if the audience met the thigh post first.

"We publish the context ourselves," Jun said as his tablet opened a clean timeline, "full history, account records, consent terms."

Ryan thought about strangers opening each comment while his mother searched his name.

His body preferred the arena.

"Wait until we know what Luca has," Ryan replied while imagining his mother searching the dead profile.

Every Cup screen in the room switched from match statistics to a live press corridor.

Luca stood beneath an Apex crest with one gold-ringed hand around a microphone, cream suit bright under national lights.

His polished smile held while journalists shouted about the grounded loss.

"Northstar performed well," he said, "although its founder has followed Ms. Santos with unusual dedication for years."

Mika’s grip tightened around Ryan’s wrist.

A reporter asked whether he meant the anonymous fan account.

Luca lifted a black archive drive between two fingers while the press cameras narrowed around it.

"Tomorrow’s broadcast should answer that," he said, "the public deserves to know what kind of man purchased access to her career."

Ryan’s old profile picture appeared across every screen as the Cup scheduled Luca’s archive for the next elimination broadcast.