Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

The celebrations had spilled out into the streets like a dam finally breaking. Shouts and wild, unrestrained laughter rose above the pounding music, raw with the kind of desperate joy that only comes when people are handed back something they had long stopped believing was possible.

The new government’s announcement had been blasting from every speaker in town since dawn: All people would be given abilities. The stray label—the brand that had marked them, confined them, kept them as the lowest caste behind the walls—was ending tonight.

Daphne sat alone at a corner table in the little restaurant, watching it all unfold through the open doorway like a fever dream.

Inside, the bar was wide open. Food was free. Drinks flowed without question. Couples swayed slowly to the familiar old music drifting from the corner speakers, bodies moving with a lightness born from years of carrying too much weight. Others hunched over plates of food they couldn’t have afforded yesterday, eating with deliberate reverence, savoring every bite as if it might vanish at any second.

Daphne had been coming to this town for years. Every free weekend from Hogsby, every stolen gap between classes, duties, and the particular hollow loneliness of being a burnout in a system that only measured worth by level. This place had always been steady. Same faces. Same slow music. Same duck soup.

She had never seen it like this.

A waitress approached, warm smile already blooming on her face.

"Hey." She reached the table. "You’ve been gone a while."

"I moved to Central," Daphne said, returning the smile. "But I’m back now."

"Everything okay?"

"No." The smile held. "Central closed. Lost the job. So... here we are again."

"I’m sorry, Daph." The waitress’s eyes softened with genuine sympathy. "Duck soup or beans?"

Daphne let out a quiet laugh. In a world flipping upside down, some things refused to change—and right now that felt like the deepest comfort she could ask for. "You already know my order."

The waitress disappeared toward the kitchen.

Daphne turned her gaze back across the room, trying to absorb the magnitude of what was happening outside. The stray label was lifting from all these people. Real abilities. Real futures. She tried to hold the full weight of it and found she couldn’t. It was too big. Too bright.

Her eyes drifted to the far corner.

An elderly man sat at his usual table—the same one he’d occupied the last time she was here, the time she’d brought Abram along. Their eyes met across the smoky, crowded room. A smile began tugging at the corners of his mouth, and she felt her own starting to answer.

He caught himself. Looked away quickly, as if it had been an accident.

"Damn," Daphne whispered, the smile finishing anyway. "It’ll be okay, Dad."

The waitress returned, setting two steaming plates of duck soup and two generous servings of rice on the table. She glanced at the empty chair across from Daphne.

"Mind if I join?"

"You’ve already decided," Daphne said softly.

The waitress slid into the seat with a small, tired smile of her own. For a moment, the noise and celebration outside faded just a little, held back by the quiet, familiar warmth of the table between them.

***

Daphne pulled her plate closer, the steam rising warm and fragrant from the duck soup. "How is he?" Her eyes remained fixed on her father across the room. He was working through a large glass of wine with the slow, deliberate focus of a man who had nothing else left on his list.

The waitress didn’t answer right away. She didn’t need to. The truth sat heavy in the corner: her father had burned out completely. The ability had been stripped from him. The identity built around it, gone. Whatever version of himself had existed before the extraction cycle finished its work... that man was gone too.

"Good thing there’s hope now," Daphne said quietly, and took a slow bite.

"But how does it actually work?" the waitress asked, leaning in. "Turning all of us into ability users. How?"

"The government holds everything extracted through the life layer. Injections, probably."

"Injections." The word left the waitress’s mouth like something bitter she hadn’t agreed to swallow.

"I’m not certain," Daphne admitted. "But look at them." She nodded toward the room full of people laughing, eating, dancing with reckless abandon. "Whatever the method, it’s giving them something they haven’t had in years."

Then the atmosphere shifted violently.

A fight erupted in the middle of the dance floor—sudden, ugly, and committed. A large woman had a thin man pinned beneath her and was hammering his face with both fists in a steady, methodical rhythm. The crowd formed a loose, eager circle around them, shouting encouragement but doing nothing to intervene.

Daphne and the waitress didn’t even turn their heads.

"Gertrude?" Daphne asked flatly.

"Who else?" the waitress replied, smiling into her spoon.

The circle swelled. The noise climbed higher—jeers, laughter, the wet, rhythmic sound of fists meeting flesh.

"You should stop it," the waitress said, glancing at Daphne. "You’re the only person in this town everyone still respects."

"No," Daphne answered simply.

She looked anyway.

A brilliant blue light sliced through the chaos, sharp and unnatural, cutting across the smoky air like a blade. A portal tore open in the middle of the dance floor, edges crackling with raw energy. A body tumbled out of it—crumpling hard onto the worn wooden planks with a sickening thud.

Ernesto Mela.

"What the hell—" Daphne was on her feet before her mind caught up, fork still clenched tightly in her hand like a weapon. She stared at the blue-haired boy sprawled on the floor of the stray town bar, looking like he had been violently ripped from somewhere impossibly far away.

The fight died instantly. Gertrude froze mid-punch. Every head in the room snapped toward the boy in the sudden, ringing silence that follows something no one can explain.

Daphne was already moving, heart pounding, the fork forgotten but still gripped like a weapon.

***

A/N: If you ever need a refresher for anything from earlier Chapters, just let me know in the comments. I’ll happily point you to the relevant Chapters so you don’t have to search through the story yourself.

For this one in particular, Chapters 23 and 24 cover Stray Town, so they’re worth revisiting if you’ve forgotten some of the details.