Lahat ng Kabanata ng Alejandro's Human Antidote : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

Alejandro’s POVZenith’s laughter usually sounds like sunlight. Warm and ffortless. But tonight, it’s missing. She is quiet. Too quiet. And not in the way I am.She is sitting cross-legged on the couch, knees drawn in, sketchpad open but untouched. Her pencil taps a rhythm against the edge of the page, but she has not made a single line. She keeps sighing.I sit by the window, watching the moon climb higher behind the trees. The wind rustles gently against the glass, but it cannot drown out the heaviness in her silence. Finally, she speaks. “Tomorrow’s the day.”I do not answer right away. I know what she means. School. Her first day back after summer. First time in a new district. No familiar faces. No parents dropping her off or hugging her goodbye. Just me. A stranger she let in. “It’s dumb, I know,” she says quickly, before I can respond. “I mean, I’m eighteen. I should be fine. I am fine. It’s just…” She does not finish.I rise from the window and walk over. She does not look up.

Zenith’s POVThere’s something blooming inside me. Something soft and sticky and persistent. It does not hurt, yet, but it’s… loud. It whispers when I see him fixing that ancient school printer like it’s a puzzle only he can solve. It pulses when the other girls giggle every time he passes by, acting like he is some Greek statue that decided to grace our gym class.And today? Today it screamed when Natalie from Chemistry “accidentally” dropped her water bottle and fluttered her lashes at him while he bent to pick it up. Mine. The word slammed into my chest like a rogue wave. It was loud, raw and territorial.I do not say anything, of course. I am still figuring this out. But later, as we walk home, side by side, not quite touching, I glance up at him, and it all presses heavier against my ribs. He is not just a guest anymore. Not just a mysterious boy I rescued under the observatory dome. He is everywhere.In my house. In my school. In my thoughts. And now, I think… He is under my skin

Alejandro’s POVIt’s ironic. Everyone here thinks I am just a temporary tech guy. A last minute solution to a problem the school could not fix fast enough. The janitor called me “kid.” The math teacher handed me a cracked tablet and asked if I knew how to turn it off. I did not correct them. Because the truth is that this is the perfect cover.No one looks twice at the quiet guy in the hoodie behind the rows of dusty monitors. But in reality, I have repurposed half of the school’s old storage server. It now runs the backend of my system, ArdentWolf OS, my own lightweight, artificial intelligence integrated platform. A clean slate. Encrypted, self-learning and adaptive.While students tap away at the now lightning-fast desktops, I am monitoring global user feedback, security pings, and analytics from businesses beta-testing my first software patch.A few security firms and startups have already reached out. Nothing flashy yet, just cautious investors who have noticed how ArdentWolf's p

Zenith’s POVSomething is changing. It is not loud or dramatic. It is quiet, like the way the air shifts before a summer storm or how your favorite song grows on you, without you realizing when you started humming it in the shower. It is about him, always.At first, I thought it was comfort. He was just easy to be around. Like warm tea or cozy blankets or candles that smell like vanilla and wood smoke. But now… it's more than that. I feel him. Not just when he’s in the room. But even when he is not.Like this morning, before I saw him, I was brushing my teeth and suddenly felt a wave of irritation bubble up in my chest. Totally random. But then five minutes later, I passed by the garage and found him with grease on his jaw, glaring at a broken tool like it had personally insulted him. Coincidence? Maybe.Then it happened again during lunch. I felt this low, aching kind of sadness. Almost made me tear up out of nowhere. I turned around… and there he was, by the field, watching some of

Alejandro’s POVNo one suspects a thing. Not the teachers. Not the students. Not even Zenith. To them, I am just the quiet guardian, the mysteriously competent temporary worker who somehow knows how to fix an entire IT system with a few taps and wires, and coach an entire gym class without breaking a sweat. But underneath this calm… I’m building.I log into encrypted servers before dawn, when Zenith is still tucked under her sheets, dreaming of stars and moonlight. I work from a borrowed desk in the tech lab after hours, camouflaged behind maintenance logs and outdated hardware.At first, the school was just a convenient cover. Now it’s more. It gives me time. Routine. And space to grow without being hunted. The school’s firewall? My design. The lab’s interface? Upgraded. The dusty systems that used to freeze every five minutes? They now run faster than most public libraries. I don’t brag. I don’t boast. But they noticed.One of the board members sent a discreet email two nights ago: