Chapter 12 : Understanding the Board - Mapping the Marvels
The holographic interface had faded, but the word still burned in my mind.
Conquest.
It wasn't just a name anymore — it was the axis around which everything I'd received seemed to turn. Every ability, every template, every strange gift was designed for one purpose. But what exactly did conquest mean to this system?
I leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling as the faint hum of the room filled the silence.
Was it about status?
About winning people over in a tangible, social sense — turning strangers into allies, allies into partners, partners into something more? Maybe every successful relationship, every person who accepted me as part of their life, counted as a conquest. That would fit the logic of a game system obsessed with social structure — progress through recognition, acceptance, even commitment.
But what if it wasn't about labels or social roles?
Maybe it was about emotion. Winning hearts, not titles. Earning someone's love, trust, and devotion — truly conquering their feelings. That interpretation felt… heavier. Deeper. It wasn't just manipulation or strategy anymore — it was connection. Genuine, complicated, human. If that was what the Gacha rewarded, then it wasn't a game about domination at all, but one about understanding.
Then again… this system wasn't exactly subtle.
Maybe the answer was the most primal one — sex. Physical conquest, simple and direct. The Seed of Potential ability practically screamed that. Pleasure Lock, too. Both linked power to intimacy, as if the act itself was part of the system's logic. Maybe that was what it wanted — influence through desire, control through pleasure. A biological transaction framed as progress.
Or maybe — and this was the unsettling part — it was all three.
Status. Emotion. Desire.
Different faces of the same coin. Conquest might not be about just one kind of victory, but the fusion of them — to gain not only someone's affection or attraction, but their recognition of me as someone worth following, trusting, maybe even belonging to.
That thought lingered, both fascinating and dangerous.
I exhaled slowly.
There was no clear answer, and the system wasn't offering one. Maybe it wanted me to find out the hard way.
Fine. If I couldn't define "conquest" yet, I could at least do something useful — something that mattered just as much.
I needed to understand where I was.
Not just the city, or the country, but the timeline — the version of Marvel's world I'd landed in.
Because knowing when and where you are determines how long you survive.
So, I started digging. First, I pulled on the memories of my new life — Alex Orzat, eighteen, college student, decent grades, average existence. Then, I cross-checked everything online. News archives, social media, tech articles, government databases — whatever I could access.
It didn't take long to confirm that Tony Stark had already become Iron Man.
That part was almost laughably easy — the man had literally announced it himself during a live press conference, just like in the movies.
His face, his company, his suit — all over the news.
If this world mirrored the one I remembered, then the age of heroes had already begun… just not in full swing yet.
Spider-Man, though? No headlines yet. No masked hero swinging across New York. But I knew for a fact that Peter Parker was still just a high school kid — awkward, brilliant, and one radioactive spider bite away from becoming a legend.
Then came the Fantastic Four.
Media outlets and scientific journals were buzzing — Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm had just returned from an experimental spaceflight that ended in a "radiation incident." No official report, but strong speculation about… changes.
If that was true, it meant the storm had already happened — and their public debut was only a matter of time.
The mutants, on the other hand, were a different story.
Their existence wasn't hidden — far from it. The internet was full of debates, protests, and hate speech directed at them. People knew mutants existed; they just didn't accept them.
But when it came to the X-Men, there was nothing — no official acknowledgment, no confirmed sightings, no reports of mutant teams operating in the open.
Still, I knew what to look for.
If Charles Xavier was alive in this world — and if things followed the pattern I remembered — then his school should exist.
A quick search confirmed it: Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, located in Westchester County, New York.
On paper, it was exactly what it claimed to be — a private institution for exceptional students, fully accredited, with faculty records and perfectly mundane photos.
No trace of superhumans, no mention of "mutants." But I knew better.
If the school was there, then so was Xavier — and that meant the X-Men existed, even if the world hadn't seen them yet.
And Magneto?
He was out there, but quiet. News archives showed older attacks, ideological manifestos — the kind of rhetoric that made governments nervous. But nothing recent. No activity in months. Almost as if he'd gone underground… or was planning something.
Piece by piece, the puzzle formed in my mind.
This was a world on the edge of transformation — the dawn of heroes, the rise of mutants, the birth of chaos.
And I was sitting right in the middle of it… with a system built around conquest.
I leaned back, exhaling through a dry laugh.
"Guess I really did roll into the tutorial level of a cosmic sandbox."
The map was clear, but the rules of the game were not.
The realization didn't bring fear — it brought focus.
Now that I understood where I was, the next step was figuring out how to use what I had.
I had the tools, the powers, the knowledge.