Chapter 43 Episode 43: Worse Plans

Akira’s POV

The official notification arrived through the official guild channel at nine in the morning, routed to my mission inbox between a gate activity summary and a reminder about the quarterly equipment registry update that I had been ignoring for two weeks.

I read it. Then I read it again.

[Mission Pairing: Joint Authorization; A-Rank Gate Investigation.]

[Primary Hunter: Vixar, K. S-Rank.]

[Secondary Hunter: Renshi, A. D-Rank.]

[Authorization: Standing. Issued by Senior Council Review.]

[Mission classification: Active investigation, no fixed timeline.]

His name and mine. In an official guild documentation. And on the same line.

The gap between an S-rank and D-rank, laid out in the mission pairing field with the complete indifference of a system that recorded what it was given without commenting on the mathematics of it.

I put the notification down and pulled up my systems stat screen.

Internal rank: mid-B, advancing. This was number the system tracked and nobody else could see, the real version, the one that belonged to the actual shape of what I had become across three months of missions and one very instructive encounter with a black unicorn.

External display: D.

The same D it had been since the beast hall. The same D it was going to be regardless of what happened on the internal side, which was the arrangement and I had made peace with it. But a problem now existed, in the context of a joint A-rank mission with Kael Vixar. It suddenly produced a specific problem I had not fully worked through yet.

Kael knew the external display was wrong. He had known since the second week and had watched the gap widen across every Thursday session and mission log and dungeon encounter.

He had closed the equipment registry flag and signed the sword authorization. He had followed us into a B-rank gate for reasons that had nothing to do with the posted classification. He knew I was not D-rank.

What he didn’t know was the precise number on the internal side.

What he didn’t know was that the number was mid-B, which meant there was still a meaningful gap between my actual capability and A-rank, but that also meant that when we entered an A-rank dungeon together I was going to be operating at a level below what the dungeon required for clean clearance, which meant Kael was going to be doing the heavy lifting whether I showed my real capability or not.

The question was whether I showed it.

Running at D-rank capacity in an A-rank interior with Kael present was a different situation from running at D-rank capacity anywhere else. Kael knew how to read mana signatures the way most people read text, automatically and in real time, and he would obviously know the gap between D-rank output and mid-B output.

I mean, it was visible to anyone with sufficient sensitivity, and Kael’s sensitivity operated at S-rank.

He would know.

He already knew something. But the specific amount of information I hadn’t given him and giving it to him inside a dungeon was not the clean version of disclosure. Clean disclosure was a conversation in a room somewhere, with time and context, not a mana output differential mid-engagement with something that was trying to kill us.

So. D-rank capacity. Run at the floor, let him carry the weight, come out the other side with the external display and the internal reality still occupying their separate columns and Kael carrying the full picture of my operational level in his head without having received the number directly.

He was going to know anyway. He always knew.

But there was a difference between knowing and being told and this difference mattered to me in a way I wasn’t ready to examine closely.

I had one day before the planning session Kael had already sent a schedule request for, which was apparently how he operated, which was efficiently and ahead of time and with the assumption that I would be available because I was always available when it was him asking.

This was accurate and I was not going to examine that either.

I put the stat screen away and went to the canteen.

Sena was already there, which she usually was at this hour, and she read my expression with the specific attention she had been developing since mission five and simply asked, "What happened?"

"Mission pairing notification," I said. "Official guild channel."

She waited.

"Vixar and Renshi," I simply said. "A-rank gate investigation." The weight of my words resonated once more.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she put her spoon down with the deliberate care of someone who wanted both hands free for this conversation. "Official documentation?"

"Yes."

"Your name? Next to his? In the guild system?"

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long moment with the assessment and underneath it something that was trying not to be amusement and was losing. "How do you feel about that?"

"I’m working out the operational implications."

"Renshi!"

"The rank gap is going to be visible when we’re in the dungeon together..." She thought i was talking about feeling inferior. If only she knew.

"Renshi," she called again. "How do you feel about it?"

I looked at the table. And stared at my hands

The honest answer was that seeing my name next to his in official documentation had introduced the feeling I had been thinking of since nine in the morning that was not necessarily in any way.

It was in the same category as the ramen shop discovery, the Thursday evenings, the industrial district steps. The same warmth in the same register, slightly louder than before because official documentation had a quality of reality that informal arrangements didn’t, a weight that came from being recorded somewhere that wasn’t just the inside of my own head.

"It’s complicated," I said.

"It always is with you." She picked her spoon back up. "And the operational implications?"

"I’m going to run at my own capacity and let him carry the weight."

She looked at me with a sneer. "That’s your plan?"

"ITS a plan." I made sure I laid enough emphasis on that.

"It’s a plan with a significant flaw, dumbo." She snapped. "Which is that Kael Vixar has been watching your mana output across multiple dungeons and multiple training sessions for three months and he is not going to believe D-rank output from you at this point. Even I don’t believe that shit. You could run the suppression and he would still know you were suppressing."

I mulled her words over in my head. "I know."

"So the plan is to do something that won’t work and hope it works anyway."

"I’ve made worse plans."

She looked at me for a long moment with that expression, the sharp assessment and the something warmer underneath it.

"You have," she said. "The blood fiend comes to mind."

"My screen held." I reminded

"After four exchanges and a shoulder wound. But yes, pigs can fly." She ate a spoonful of soup. "What’s the actual plan?"

The actual plan was the same plan with the honest version of the reasoning attached, which was that I was not ready to have that conversation inside a dungeon that the mana differential was going to force.

So I was going to postpone it by running at the suppressed level and simply accept that he would know I was suppressing and then thd conversation would happen after rather than during.

That was a marginally better version of the same problem.

"Same plan," I said. "With the understanding that it’s temporary."

"Explain temporary here?"

"Until after the mission."

She considered this. "And then?"

"And then I tell him the truth." Part of it.

She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was deciding whether to say the thing she was thinking or the softer version of the thing she was thinking.

"The truth," she said. "Just the truth."

"What else would I..." I stopped.

She looked at me with patient attention and said nothing.

The canteen moved around us with its lunch hour traffic and the notification was still sitting in my inbox with his name next to mine and the warmth from this morning was still present in its register and Sena was looking at me with the expression of someone who had been watching something develop for three months and had run out of patience with the pace of it.

"One thing at a time," I said.

"Of course," she said. "The truth first." Sarcastic comments. She was being sarcastic. Typical.

She returned to her food with the air of someone who had made her point and was satisfied to let it settle. Sena was the true definition of a foodie. She even had energy bars stashed in her pockets during training sessions and in dungeons.

I looked at the table.

His name and mine on the same line in official documentation. The weight of that sitting in the same place the other weights sat, accumulating with the patience of things that intended to be accounted for eventually.

D-rank capacity. Let him carry the weight. Simple as that.

The plan had the quality of a plan that was made by people who understood they were temporary measures. Placeholder strategies. The kind you made when a real decision was still forming and you needed something to do with your hands in the meantime.

It would help for just one mission.

After that I was going to need a real answer to what Sena was asking.

I knew what the answer was. I was getting there.