The next few days went by rather uneventfully.

He had really been enjoying the time with his father out of the picture. He got to have all the fun he wanted with Jackie and spend the entire night with her as an actual couple rather than skulking around like thieves in the night. He couldn't wait for a time where he could live like this all the time.

His physique was still slowly improving as he continued to scale up his exercises as his rapidly body adjusted to them. He was going to have to buy some equipment for at home to continue scaling his exercises. At a certain point you couldn't really just keep increasing the amount of reps and sets you did without significantly increasing the time spent working out which he didn't want to do. Adding extra resistance would be a better way to continue pushing himself without increasing the duration.

Where he had noticed the biggest difference was in class. The effect of his new ability was becoming clearer to him as his studies seemed to be smoother than ever. Rather than having to revise the same information over and over he seemed to only need to read the material once to get a solid understanding of it and he seemed to have no issues remember it like some minor form of eidetic memory. It was really saving him a lot of time and improving his performance in class.

He noticed he couldn't really learn things he wouldn't have before, but what he could learn he learned with much less effort. He could already see this was going to save him a lot of time in the long run. Also if he gained abilities that further improved his cognitive abilities this should also let him expand the use of this ability even further by increasing the range of things he could learn at increased speed.

The best way to raise his cognitive ceiling would be stealing Jeffrey's ability. However Mara was a much harder target than Jackie and Kate had been. Jackie has been a perfect storm of circumstances. And not to demean Kate nor his former self, but her standards were far lower than Mara's as could be seen by each of their boyfriends. Jeffrey was the most popular guy in their grade while Brad was just some nobody.

Not only that, but Mara's ability also made her difficult to deal with. With her [Neural Empath] ability it took him almost all of his attention to maintain in a state of semi-self-hypnotism so she didn't realise he absolutely hated her guts now rather than felt hurt and was hoping to win her back somehow. Let alone actually trying to woo her to get into her pants.

He also didn't want to actually do too much for her since he still hated her. If he wanted to have revenge on her too he would need to make her feel as used and tossed away as she had made him feel. He didn't want her to feel like they were having some amazing relationship by the end of it. That would have to wait until further down the line though as despite his improvements and beating up of her boyfriend she hadn't quite accepted the new status quo yet if the glares she had been sending him were any indication. She actually talking down to him though so it was an improvement.

He had yet to find someone with a cognitive ability as good as Jeffrey's yet though so it remained very tempting on top of the desire for revenge.

He was getting quite surprised at how long it was taking Kate's boyfriend to speak up though. Ever since they had slept together and he got his reward he wasn't even trying to hide that they were more than friends in public and still nothing had happened. Now that he had received his reward he really would rather have the guy speak up so he could make it clear and make sure the guy was aware who's girl Kate actually was.

It was finally Friday. Dave woke up beside Jackie and looked at her with a smile, it stiffened a little when he thought about how his father should be returning home the next day. He wasn't quite sure what to expect. He hadn't gone to visit his father in the hospital and so far his father hadn't seemed to try reporting to the hospital or the police that he was responsible for his father falling and hitting his head. He wasn't sure why though and what might be going on in his father's head. He was trying to think of various courses of action he could take, but he wouldn't really know what to do until he saw what his father did when he returned.

His morning workout went by fast since he hadn't had a chance to get some weights yet. After a nice breakfast spent cuddling with Jackie and feeding each other he ran to school. He was now able to full on run rather than jog to school and arrive with energy left over. 

This morning it was time for P.E. again, the weather was good so they ended up on the outside field. To warm up he had them play his personal version of Traffic Lights, where Green meant run, yellow meant jog, and red meant stay in place doing pushups.

After warming up Coach Brown told them they were doing baseball that day which caused a few cheers and groans to resound. He brought out all the baseball gear and made them help him with set up.

Once everything was set up the Coach divided the class up in two teams for the game. Dave was happy he ended up on the same team as Kate. Jeffrey ended up on the other team, but unfortunately for him he didn't get to team up with his jock buddies which were spread across both teams instead. Even Mara ended up on Dave's team.

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