Chapter 37 Episode 37: Again…

Kael’s POV

The next gate assignment came through my board at seven in the morning and Reiss flagged it before I had finished reading the overnight reports.

"Sector twelve," he said. "B-rank classification, two-hunter team assigned. Renshi and a B-rank named Sena... she’s been on several of his team missions."

I knew who Sena was. I had read her file three weeks ago with the attention I applied to anyone operating in consistent proximity to Akira, and what I had found was someone sharp enough to have noticed the rank discrepancy early and loyal enough to have said nothing about it to the board.

She was competent. Good instincts, solid technique, the kind of hunter who made everyone around her incrementally better by the quality of her attention.

One B-rank hunter and a D rank hunter in a B-rank gate should have been straightforward.

The gate hadn’t been planned. It had appeared on the random monitoring network the previous evening, flagged the routine, and had been assigned through a normal rotation. Nothing about it should have produced the specific quality of alertness that was running through me reading the assignment.

Except the images of his injured left shoulder that still plagued my memories and dreams, the blood fiend, the four exchanges instead of two and the attentional disruption.

These were the images I had been carrying since I read the report that seemingly could have had a different endings and I could not seem to put the wrong one down.

"Clear my morning schedule," I said.

A direct order that left no room for questions.

***

I was at the sector twelve gate even before they arrived. The gate’s exterior signature was reading a standard B-rank, clean construction, no overlap interference from the surrounding district. I positioned myself at a perimeter at the far edge and watched them approach.

They came together, something I had not expected but made sense immediately I saw them. Sena talking, Akira listening with the same sideways attention he paid things that required both processing and a spatial awareness simultaneously.

They displayed the proximity of people who had developed a working rhythm. They ran the pre-entry check with the efficiency of a team that had done it enough times to stop acting it out.

Then they went in. I followed at a forty-meter gap, while using a suppression technique to hold my mana down, the Phoenix above the building maintaining the surveillance altitude she had learned to keep on these occasions.

The first two levels were clean. I tracked them from distance and watched Akira work with his sword, which was still new enough that the adjustment was visible in the first exchanges but it settled into something more natural by the end of the second level.

His grip was better than Thursday. His footwork was compensating less for the weight differential. Whatever he had been doing between Thursday and today had moved the forward faster than the timeline I had estimated.

I noted this and moved on.

The third level was where it went wrong. The dungeon’s interior had been running B-rank on the first two levels and the third level suddenly changed without any announcement.

The mana density spiking in the specific way of a dungeon that had developed a secondary structure below the posted classification. Low A-rank density. It wasn’t a full misclassification... the gate genuinely was B-rank at entry, the third level had developed independently.

This kind of organic growth happened in dungeons that had been active longer than the monitoring estimate suggested.

Sena read the change the same moment I did and called for a formation adjustment immediately which was the correct response. She moved to point and Akira took the left flank and the two of them tightened the spacing and the dungeon head.

A standard B-rank demon in the posted classification, was not the dungeon head I was looking at from sixty meters back.

A Black Unicorn.

Low A-rank. Its horn already angled toward the chamber entrance.

Sena saw it a half-second before the horn discharged and pulled left. The disorientation beam caught the edge of her coverage and she went down to one knee, not unconscious but struggling with the perception scramble, the world rearranging itself in the way the black unicorn’s beam made fit.

Akira dodged right as the beam missed him fully, which was a good version of the event about to unfold. The bad version was that he was now on the right flank with Sena compromised on the left and the black unicorn already recalibrating for the second discharge and the gap between his current capability and low A-rank was real and measurable.

I had been aware of it and had been preparing him for it. What I hadn’t expected was for it to come so soon. So I quickly dropped the suppression.

I did not say anything about it neither did I call out from my position sixty meters back. I simply released the signature compression and let my full S-rank output fill the chamber.

The black unicorn felt it the way in every way a demon felt the weight of an S-rank presence, the instinctive full-stop of something that has just identified a category of threat above its operational ceiling.

I watched its horn lowered. So I walked out of the passage into the chamber.

Akira turned. The expression on his face cycled through several things in a rapid succession... recognition, then the calculation of someone working out a timeline, then it morphed to something that was not quite anger and not quite warmer. It was stuck somewhere between the two.

Sena was still on one knee, the disorientation working through its duration, one hand on the ground and the other pressed to her temple.

I looked at the black unicorn and it looked back at me. We reached the understanding that demons at its tier reached with S-rank hunters.

So it withdrew toward the far passage. And I let it go.

"You were here?" Akira asked.

"Yes."

"The whole time?"

"Third level down," I said. "The first two levels you didn’t need me."

"Kael." His voice had a quality in it I hadn’t heard before. Not anger, though there was some of that underneath. Something more complicated than anger. And I hated to admit it, but it made me a bit scared.

"The black unicorn would have discharged twice more before you had the positioning to close," I said. "Sena would have taken the second beam fully. The disorientation duration at full contact is twelve minutes. You would have been managing a compromised partner and a low A-rank demon with a disorientation weapon while operating at a D-rank output." I held his gaze. "I was here."

He stared at me and then at the crouching Sena.

Sena replied from the ground, "I can hear everything you’re saying."

Neither of us looked at her.

The chamber was quiet around us. Akira’s sword was in his hand and the grip was the corrected one and his left shoulder was fine, the bandaging gone now, the wound long closed. He was looking at me with that expression, the complicated one, and the distance between us in the chamber was not very much.

"You followed us in," he said.

"Yes."

"Because of the mission log."

"Because of your injury," I said. And that was me being brutally honest. Even though I couldn’t fight the dread growing in me.

"The contact on mission ten. I have been... carrying an image I would prefer not to be carrying, and following you in was the more functional response to it than the alternative."

He was very still.

"What’s the alternative?" he said, quietly.

I said nothing.

The air that was always present in the space between us was present now and it was running slowly and the sword in his hand glistened in the light.He looked at me, his gaze stuck in mine and I looked at him and the image I had been carrying since the mission log was here in the same space as the real version of him, standing, both shoulders functional and the relief of that had been running underneath everything since I walked out of the passage and was still running now.

My hand moved. Found his jaw, the same way it had found the back of his head in the stairwell, and his breath adjusted and his eyes did the thing they did, and I tilted his face up and he let me and the space between us was...

"Okay," said Sena, from the ground, in the tone of someone who had been watching this develop for several weeks and had opinions about the timing. "I’m going to need both of you to focus, because I am currently experiencing significant spatial disorientation and this dungeon still has a black unicorn in it."

I let go while Akira stepped back while clearing his throat. Another attempt ruined. I glared at the means of interruption.

Sena was on her feet now, one hand still at her temple, looking at us with the sharp assessment she applied to everything and underneath it something that was almost amusement, carefully contained.

"We’re going to talk about this," she said, to Akira specifically. "Later. When I can see in straight lines."

Akira looked at the far passage where the black unicorn had retreated.

"Okay," he said. His voice was entirely level in a way that required something.

I looked at the passage.

"Together then," I said. Specifically to the man I was still holding onto his soft palm. "We clear it together."

Neither of them argued.

We went forward, the three of us, and I did not look at Akira and he did not look at me but the space between what had almost happened and what was actually happening was the length of the chamber, present and unnamed and entirely unresolved.

The black unicorn, when we reached it, had the good sense to understand the calculation.

It was over in four minutes.

***

Outside the gate, with the sector twelve street doing its ordinary business around us and the gate collapsed behind us and the mission chip registering complete, Sena looked at me with the specific expression of someone who has processed a significant amount of new information and has arrived at conclusions she is choosing not to deliver all at once.

"Thank you," she said. "For helping with the black unicorn."

"The beam would have been a problem."

"Yes," she said. "It would have." She looked at Akira, who was looking at the collapsed gate with the expression he used when he was thinking about something he hadn’t finished thinking about. Then she looked back at me. "I’m going to pretend I didn’t see anything in that chamber."

"That’s not necessary."

"It’s practical," she said. "Because if I acknowledge what I saw I have to have a conversation I don’t have the energy for right now, and I’ve just had a black unicorn rearrange my spatial perception for eleven minutes." She straightened her jacket.

"Later. When I can see in straight lines." She said it again, the same words, and they carried a different weight the second time.

She walked toward the transit stop while Akira watched her go. Then he turned and looked at me.

The expression was back, the complicated one, the warm and the frustrated and the something underneath both of them that I was done pretending I didn’t know the shape of.

"You followed us in," he said, one more time.

"Yes."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said, "Next time, tell me."

I held his gaze.

"Okay," I said.

The word landed the way words would have, carrying more than their literal content. And he heard it the way he heard most things I said, which was correctly.

He turned and walked in the direction of the guild to log the completion and I stood on the sector twelve street and watched him go and thought about the chamber and his jaw in my hand and the breath adjustment and what I had been about to do.

I was done pretending for some time. In the chamber, I had nearly stopped pretending like I was during practice.

Nearly.

The Phoenix sent something through the bond from her altitude above the street. The feeling of it was oddly specific while I ignored it.

Only one word echoed in my mind; Soon.