Chapter 55 Episode 55: Mana Suppression?

Akira’s POV

The apartment still carried the residual quiet of the night before. The north-facing light, the thin walls. The low continuous press of the city’s mana field against the glass.

I had woken earlier than usual, another dream still clinging in places the suppression protocols could not quite reach. The phantom stretch. The weight of Kael’s hands. The way the peachy scent had thickened in the dark until it felt like something separate from me.

I made coffee but did not drink it. Couldn’t rather. The sat at the small table with the same light that had appeared in the Winged Lion’s projection and let the morning settle around the facts I already knew.

Thursday was tomorrow.

Our kiss had happened. And the dreams had followed. The doubts however remained. They were clear, quiet, and unrejected. We were men. Are men. The shape of what sat between us did not match the ordinary patterns the system or the previous Akira’s memories had prepared me for.

I turned the fact over the same way I turned mission data. But it refused to disappear. And neither did the warmth that had been in his mouth or the certainty in the way he had said my name against the column.

I was still sitting there when the first wrong note registered.

It was not a sound neither was it a visible shift in the light. It was a thinning, an almost imperceptible reduction in the ambient mana field that normally pressed against the windows like weather.

The city’s residual signature dipped by a fraction, then another. Suppression. But not the kind I would use on myself. Hell, no one would ever purposefully use a suppression technique on themselves. I had come across it one on Earth.

This one was harsh, external and focused. The edges of my own output began to feel muffled, as though someone had laid a careful hand over the top of it and pressed down.

I set the cup aside and struggled to stand on my own.

The apartment was still empty. The wards I had set after registration were intact. There was no entry signature and no visible breach. Yet the pressure continued.

It was slow, precise and it aimed directly at the frequency I used for baseline suppression. Whoever was doing it knew the techniques I opearated with and they knew how to match it closely enough that the system’s ordinary alarms stayed quiet.

I reached for the combat knife I kept under the table edge. The movement felt heavier than it should have. The external suppression was already leaching into my motor response, dulling the edges of speed and force. My own D-rank ceiling, the one I had spent four months reinforcing, began to compress further under the foreign weight.

My peachy scent rose sharply. Like a stress response and pulse climbing. My mana trying to push back against the muffling. I forced a breath and held the internal suppression steady. Fighting the external pressure with more output would only make the signature clearer. Better to stay small. Better to wait for the source to commit.

A soft knock sounded at the door. Three measured taps. Familiar rhythm.

Sena.

I did not lower the knife. The external suppression did not ease. If anything, it hesitated when the second signature registered outside the wards.

Sena’s mana was clean mid-B, steady, the kind that carried no aggressive edge unless she chose to show it. The foreign pressure recoiled a fraction, as though the presence of a second registered hunter had altered the risk calculus.

I crossed over to the door struggling and opened it with the knife still angled low against my thigh.

Sena stood in the narrow hallway holding a paper bag and two insulated cups. Dark hair pulled back. Standard civilian jacket over training layers. Her eyes moved across my face once, then down to the knife, then back up.

"You’re holding a blade at ten in the morning," she said. "That’s new."

"Something’s wrong with the field."

She stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, set the bag and cups on the table, and closed the door behind her with her heel. The moment the latch clicked, the external suppression thinned further, then withdrew entirely.

The city’s ambient mana settled back into its ordinary press against the glass. My own output expanded to fill the space it had been occupying. The dullness in my limbs receded.

Sena watched the shift in my posture and did not comment on it immediately. She unpacked the bag, two containers of rice, pickled vegetables, the plain protein she always brought when she decided I had skipped too many meals after a gate run.

"Eat," she said. "Then talk."

I put the knife down. Sat. The coffee she had brought was better than the one I had made. We ate in the quiet for a few minutes while the residual of the external pressure worked its way out of my system. The peachy scent was still stronger than baseline. Sena’s nose wrinkled once, almost imperceptibly, but she did not mention it.

"You felt it," I said eventually.

"Something tried to sit on your output. Clean work. Matched your frequency close enough that the building wards didn’t trip." She set her chopsticks down. "How long?"

"Less than a minute before you knocked. It pulled back when your signature registered."

Sena’s expression stayed level, but the small muscle at the corner of her jaw tightened. She had been the one who taught me the early recovery drills after the first wish-projection incident. She knew what a targeted suppression attempt looked like from the outside.

"Any idea who?"

"No. The signature was blanked. Professional even."

She nodded once, filed the information, and returned to the food. We finished the containers without further discussion of the pressure. Sena did not ask about the dungeon. She did not ask about Kael.

She had a gift for leaving certain doors closed until the person on the other side decided to open them. It was one of the reasons the friendship had lasted through the registration period and the four months of Thursday sessions that followed.

When the food was gone she gathered the containers, rinsed them in the small sink, and left them to dry. At the door she paused.

"Thursday’s still on?"

"Yes."

"Don’t skip the recovery protocol after. Whatever that was, it knew your frequency. Someone’s watching the numbers."

I nodded. She left the same way she had arrived. She was always quiet, efficient and wasted no motion. The hallway stayed empty after the door closed. The city’s mana field pressed against the glass at its ordinary strength. No thinning. No foreign weight.

I locked the wards again and stood in the center of the apartment for a long time, cataloguing the residual. The suppression attempt had been precise. Targeted. Aimed at the exact register I used to keep the higher output buried. Someone had been close enough, or informed enough, to match it.

And they had withdrawn the moment Sena’s signature entered the equation.

I sat back down at the table. The insufficient light. The quiet. Tomorrow was Thursday. Kael would be there. The kiss would still be between us. The dream would still be in my system. The doubts would still be unrejected.

And somewhere outside the wards, a blanked signature had already learned the shape of my suppression.

***

Sena’s POV

The stairwell was empty. I took the steps at ordinary speed, paper bag folded under one arm, and did not look back at the door. The building’s ambient field had returned to baseline the moment I crossed the threshold. Whatever had been pressing on Akira’s output had chosen not to contest a second hunter’s presence.

I waited until I was three blocks away and under the denser cover of the commercial district before I took out the secondary phone. Encrypted. Separate from the unit channels. The connection opened on the second pulse.

"Report."

The voice on the other end was filtered, genderless, stripped of identifying resonance. I kept my own tone flat and professional.

"Target is stable. Baseline output remains within the adjusted D-rank ceiling. Residual from the recent gate run is elevated but controlled. Emotional signature is present but higher than previous weeks. Suppression discipline is intact under ordinary conditions."

A brief pause on the line.

"The external attempt?"

"Detected. Clean frequency match. Withdrew the moment my signature registered at the door. No direct contact. No visible breach of the apartment wards. Target is aware something occurred but has no identification on the source."

"Condition?"

"Functional. Alert. The peach marker is stronger than the last recorded baseline, stress or residual arousal, possibly both. He is still attending the Thursday sessions. No indication he intends to cancel."

Another pause. It was longer this time.

"Continue observation. Do not intervene unless the suppression attempt escalates to direct contact. Priority remains the target’s output stability and the secondary influence."

"Understood." And the line went dead.

I put the secondary phone away and continued walking. The city moved around me in its ordinary patterns. No one looked twice at a mid-B hunter in civilian layers carrying a folded paper bag.

Akira’s numbers were still within acceptable range.