Chapter 34 Episode 34: Survive

Akira’s POV

My mind drifted to our fleeting moment at the wrong time.

That was the honest summary of the last mission, and of the past four days more generally. I had developed, apparently, the kind of preoccupation that lived in the background of everything and surfaced at inconvenient times.

This one didn’t have action item. It had a narrow corridor and a hand on a shelf beside my head and the smallest degree of tilt in my own chin before a customer asked for the bathroom and the moment dissolved.

I had replayed it more times than I was supposed to count.

The thing that made it worse, or better, or whatever it was that lingered in the back of someone’s mind, was that he had left before I came out. I had heard the shop door from the kitchen and came through to find the dining room empty, the apron folded neatly and my mother doing the close-down prep.

She was biding her time. I knew her well enough by now to know that.

The problem... I was identifying it as a problem because that was the only framework I had for something that was disrupting my operational capacity... was that the craving and its consequences were in a direct conflict.

I wanted things I did not have the space or leisure to want. I knew things that didn’t leave room for wanting, or shouldn’t, or wouldn’t if I was being disciplined about it.

I was here for a reason. The system had given me that reason in a clean impersonal text and I had accepted it. I had been working toward it since the times between the hospital bed, the goblin and the wolf.

I had a mission, a progression. I had ten missions logged and a rank that the guild couldn’t see plus a mother who ran a ramen shop and my Celestial Dragon who told me to stop thinking so much.

I had absolutely no business standing in a corridor with Kael Vixar’s hand on the shelf beside my head, thinking about the tilt of my own chin and the way I had completely surrendered myself to him.

This was what I was telling myself on the way into the gate to complete the tenth and last mission. This was also why mission ten nearly went badly.

***

The gate was in the warehouse district. I went in with the focus of someone who had done this nine times and already knew the rhythm of it and how things would likely unfold.

That focus lasted until the second level, when a blood fiend on the far side of the chamber moved and something about the angle of the movement caught the light the way the corridor had caught the light and my footwork stuttered.

Half a second. That was all it took. Half a second of my attention going somewhere it had no business going. That fleeting moment arriving uninvited into my mind in the middle of a dungeon.

The blood fiend read my stutter the way all blood fiends observed everything and came through the gap before I could come close it.

The claws opened my left shoulder.

The passive reinforcement absorbed the worst of it but the contact was real, the blood was real and the blood fiend had blood now which was the worst thing a blood fiend could have access to.

Then the next three seconds were the most genuinely unpleasant three seconds I had experienced since the wolf.

I moved. An honest and pure movement, the kind that came from somewhere below a conscious direction when the body understood that thinking was currently the slowest available option.

The blood fiend had the blood working before I could deliver the first move. I felt it, the wrongness of the mana reaching into deep into the wound and finding its spot.

And I knew I had approximately four seconds before that became a problem I couldn’t outrun. So I ran. As fast as I could and as fast as my legs could carry me.

I wasn’t out of the dungeon, there wasn’t enough time for that. Plus the gate was two levels up. I ran through the chamber and hit the far wall and went up, my mana-boosted speed doing the only thing it was supposed to do.

The blood fiend lost the angle on me for the two seconds it had taken to recalculate. Those two seconds was enough. I came off the wall with the exact trajectory I needed and my dagger found the blood fiend’s guard from above rather than direct. The blood fiend went down on the fourth blow.

I stood in the chamber with my left shoulder open, blood gushing out and my mana expenditure significantly above its optimal level. The system confirmed the kill in the robotical way it confirmed everything.

[Mission 10/10: Complete.]

[Quest: Ten D-rank solo missions in thirty days. Cleared.]

[Rank progression credit: Awarded.]

[System commendation: Awarded.]

[Note: Performance anomaly flagged in mission ten. Attentional disruption detected during engagement sequence. Recommend review.]

I read the last line and felt, for the first time, the specific embarrassment of being assessed by a system that apparently tracked attentional disruption.

I went home.

***

The system dropped the next quest at midnight.

I was already awake, which was becoming a pattern on significant nights, the three-in-the-morning quality of hour that the system had decided was the correct time for information I was going to need to sit with. I read it in the dark of the room with the city quiet outside.

[New Quest: A-Rank Dungeon Encounter.]

[Objective: Survive contact with an A-rank dungeon interior.]

[Clarification: Clearance is not required. Survival is the parameter.]

[Note: This quest has no specified timeline. It will activate when the gate presents itself.]

I read it three times. Survive.

This message wasn’t clear. Not defeat the dungeon head or reach the second level or demonstrate technique under pressure. Just survive?

The system had been specific about this before, on the wolf mission. The system did not choose words accidentally. Surviving as the parameter rather than clear meant the system expected me to encounter something in that dungeon that I was not yet capable of defeating, and the measure of success was simply coming back out.

I thought about the gap between those two things.

Survive and clear were the distance between where I was and where I needed to be, laid out in a single word substitution. I was a low B-rank internally. The A-rank gap was real and large and the system was not pretending otherwise.

I closed the screen.

I got up and went to the housing unit.

***

Gleam was awake. She always was when I came. I had stopped questioning how she knew and started accepting it as a feature of the bond that I didn’t need to fully understand in order to use.

I sat beside her and she looked at me with those piercing blue eyes and the bond was warm and steady and I fed her from the late-night supply the handler left accessible and watched her eat with the focused attention she brought to everything.

"Survive," I said, when she was done.

She looked at me.

"The next mission parameter," I said. "I’m meant to survive. And not clear it. Just survive."

’Yes,’ she said, through the bond.

"That’s a large gap."

’Yes.’

"I’m going to need to close it faster than the current rate."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, ’The corridor.’

I looked at her. "What about it?"

’You were thinking about it in the dungeon.’

"That’s not..." I stopped. "The system flagged an attentional disruption."

’I know.’ Her tail moved once across the floor. ’You need to decide what to do with it.’

"I know what to do with it," I said. "I’m going to focus."

She looked at me with the expression that meant she had an opinion she was choosing not to fully deliver. "What?" I said.

’Focusing and deciding are different things.’

"Gleam."

’You’re doing the same thing you did with everything else you didn’t want to look at directly.’ A pause, the bond carrying the particular quality of her patience with my specific variety of avoidance. ’You’re managing it instead of addressing it.’

I sat with that.

The corridor. The hand on the shelf. The chin tilt I hadn’t chosen. The three days of replaying it and the half-second stutter in the dungeon and the blood fiend finding the gap and the shoulder that was going to need dressing when I got home.

"It’s complicated," I said.

’Most things that matter are.’

"I have a quest that says survive. That’s what I need to focus on."

’You can do both.’ She looked at me steadily. ’You’ve been doing both since you arrived. The missions and the other things. They were never separate.’ The bond hummed. ’Stop pretending they are.’

I looked at her for a long moment.

She looked back with the patience of something that had centuries of practice at it and was prepared to wait.

"I’m not thinking about it tonight," I said.

’That’s fine.’ She settled her head on the floor. ’Sleep first. Think tomorrow.’

"I thought you told me to stop thinking so much."

’I told you to stop thinking in circles.’ Another pause. ’These aren’t circles.’

I sat against her side for a while after that, the warmth of her steady and present, and I thought about survive and about the gap it named and about the shoulder that needed dressing and about the specific half-second in the dungeon where the corridor arrived and my footwork stuttered and a blood fiend found the gap.

I thought about deciding versus focusing.

I thought about both of them at once, the way she said I could.

I didn’t arrive at anything thoroughly.

But I sat with it rather than setting it aside, which was, I was beginning to understand, what Gleam had been trying to get me to do since the corridor.

Tomorrow then I concluded.

I’d look at it directly tomorrow.