Buffy: The Boy Who Adapts
Cole moves to Sunnydale a week before a sixteen-year-old transfer named Buffy Summers walks into the library. The dashboard only he can see logs the town like a battlefield: Adaptation Engine ticking up resistances every time something tries to kill him, Resonance Leech surging when he stands inside three meters of a Slayer or a Hellmouth or the wrong kind of demon. The Aegis Bonds list five names he has bled to keep alive — his mother, his younger brother, the classmate he saved on day one, Buffy, and the witch named Amy whose mother body-swapped her in chapter twelve. He intervenes early, badly, often, and the system promises that if anything kills him he reconstitutes twenty-four hours later on the nearest safe ground, minus most of what he had earned. Spike calls him the shiny boy. Drusilla wants to keep him. A demon collector called the Cartographer is filing his entry in a catalog older than the Watchers Council. Cole has already died once. The second one is going to cost more.