Chapter 27 Episode 27: I Knew It

Akira’s POV

The call came through the guild board at seven in the morning, flagged urgent in the way that meant someone’s plans had changed and the gap needed filling before the gate’s upgrade window closed. B-rank team, residential zone, one member pulled for a medical hold. They needed a fourth.

The posting specified D-rank support, which was the guild’s way of saying: we need a body to complete the authorization requirement, not a contributor. I read it and thought about the upgrade window. It was forty minutes from posting, which meant the gate had been active since before dawn, then I put my name on the request.

Sena was already on the team.

I found this out at the gate when she looked at me across the place with the expression of someone who had not requested this pairing and had opinions about it and had decided to keep those opinions internal for the duration of the mission.

The other two were hunters I hadn’t worked with before. Jen, A-rank transfer on a temporary main guild rotation, the kind of hunter who communicated capability through the quality of her stillness rather than anything she said. Park, B-rank, the team’s regular fourth before the medical hold, replaced today by me, which he was handling with the professional neutrality of someone who understood each assignment without enjoying it.

"D-rank support," Sena said to me, quietly, while Jen ran the pre-entry check. "Stay central. If something breaks toward you, redirect it and call."

"Understood."

She looked at me for a half-second longer than the instruction required. Then she turned to the gate.

Then we walked in.

***

The first level was already showing signs of a misclassified interior, which I picked up from the mana density before anyone said anything. The air was running heavier than a standard B-rank gate, the demon signatures in the walls carrying the specific layered quality of something that had been building longer than the external classification suggested. I tracked it and said nothing because it was Jen’s call to make and Jen was already adjusting formation without being told, which meant she had read the air too.

Sena glanced at me once while I kept my expression neutral.

The second level confirmed it. The dungeon was running high B, possibly low A in the deeper chambers, and the team was good but the recalibration required time. Jen called a formation shift at the entrance to the third passage. Park took the left flank. Sena covered the approach from the rear.

A blood fiend came out of the wall.

Not through a passage but the wall itself, which was the specific ability that made blood fiends the problem they were and which the team’s formation had not been oriented to cover because the wall emergence was a high B behavior and this gate had been classified as a standard B. It hit the gap between Park and Jen before either of them had fully processed the entry point.

It had blood from the initial contact inside three seconds.

I was already moving.

The decision happened somewhere between registering the blood fiend’s emergence and arriving at the position I needed to be in, which meant it wasn’t really a decision in the deliberate sense. It was the natural output of a body that had been building toward a specific response and had found the moment that required it. I let the suppression up.

The speed that came with enough was different from the speed I had been presenting for three missions, and I was aware of it so I moved anyway because the alternative was watching Park get his blood used against him.

The blood fiend read my moves the moment the suppression came up. They did that, they were surgical in exactly that way, and it turned from Park with the specific pivot of something that had found a more interesting problem.

I needed it to do that.

I had moved into the position specifically so it would do that, which meant I now had a blood fiend’s full attention and about two seconds before it found the angle it wanted.

I didn’t give it tge estimated two seconds.

The mana output at the level I was running was enough to sustain a defensive screen and the blood fiend’s first attempt at the forearm wound broke against it, which was the first time I had successfully run that specific defense in a live encounter.

The dagger found the blood fiend’s reach on the third exchange.

The whole sequence took forty seconds.

Park was already back in position. Jen was covering the passage. Sena was where she had been, covering the rear approach, and she had not moved from that position during the forty seconds, which meant she had made a decision not to redirect toward the blood fiend and had held it while I handled it.

She had watched the whole thing.

The dungeon head was on the fourth level. Jen took it with Park running support while Sena and I held the level three passage in case anything came up behind them, and the dungeon head went down clean.

The gate collapsed forty seconds after we exited, which was inside the upgrade window by a margin I would not dare describe as comfortable.

On the street outside, Jen ran her post-mission check and noted the blood fiend encounter and the misclassification in her report with the efficient brevity of someone who had dealt with enough of them to have a standard notation. Park was already on his comm, updating the medical-hold replacement request now that the mission was logged. The residential zone around us was doing its morning business, ordinarily and unhurried.

Sena stood next to me.

She didn’t say anything immediately. She stood there looking at the space where the gate had been, her arms crossed loosely, her weight on her back foot. I waited.

Jen finished her report and said something about the debrief scheduling and walked off with Park toward the transit line. Their voices faded.

Sena looked at me. The look went on for long enough that I didn’t try to pre-empt it. She was doing the same thing she had been doing since the mission board, running the calculation, moving through what she had seen and finding its edges. Only this time she had significantly more data than the time splits and the goblin breakaway, and her expression carried the look of someone who had been building a picture for three weeks and had just received the piece that made the whole thing resolve.

"I knew it," she said.

"Knew what?"

She tilted her head slightly. "Don’t."

I was quiet.

"The suppression came up the moment you moved," she said. "I felt the mana shift from six meters away. Whatever you were running in there for the first three levels... that wasn’t it." She held the eye contact with the same immovable quality she brought to everything.

"And then you put a defensive screen against a blood fiend’s forearm attempt and held it, which is a B-rank technique minimum, and you did it without thinking about it, which means it’s not new."

"The blood fiend was going to get Park."

"I know why you did it," she said. "I’m not questioning the decision. I’m telling you what I saw." She paused. "How long have you been running at that level?"

"What level are you talking about?"

"Renshi!!"

"Fine. I learnt it a while ago."

"Higher than that?"

"Yes."

She exhaled. The sound of someone who had been holding a theory for three weeks and had just had it confirmed and was processing the specific feeling of being right about something she would have preferred to be wrong about.

"What’s your actual rank?," she asked.

"D."

"But you’re not..."

"Stop asking," I said with a tone that signified I was done.

She looked at me for another moment. I looked back and held it and didn’t offer anything more because there was nothing more I could offer that wouldn’t require explaining things I wasn’t ready to explain on a street corner in the residential zone at eight in the morning.

"Okay," she said finally.

"Okay?"

"I knew it." She said it again, differently this time. The first time had been confirmation. This time it was something more like acceptance, the sound of someone updating the model and setting it down.

"I’m not going to push for more than you can give right now. But I want you to know that I saw it and I’m not pretending I didn’t."

"That seems fair."

"It is fair." She pulled her jacket straight. "You handled that blood fiend well. The screen was cleaner than I expected."

"It was the first time it worked in a live encounter."

She looked at me sharply. "First time."

"I’d been working on it in training."

"You ran a technique you’d never tested live on a blood fiend in a misclassified dungeon."

"The alternative was Park’s blood on the floor."

She stared at me for a moment. Then she made a sound that was something between exasperation and reluctant acknowledgment and turned toward the transit line. "I have a debrief in forty minutes," she said. "Walk with me."

I did.

We didn’t talk about the dungeon for the first two blocks. The city moved around us in its usual way and Sena walked at a pace that was slightly faster than comfortable and I matched it because the alternative was falling behind, which she struck me as the kind of person who noted.

Then she said: "The man on the fourth floor?"

I said nothing. She really did love poking her nose into my business.

"Vixar," she said. "He arranged your access."

"You mentioned that."

"I’ve been thinking about it since." She didn’t look at me when she said it, her attention on the street ahead. "The blood fiend technique. The dagger. The suppression. The access card." A pause. "Someone’s been training you."

"I train myself."

"Someone’s been there while you do it," she said. "That’s different from the same thing." She glanced at me sideways. "You don’t have to confirm it. I already did"

I thought about the fence post. About the one word that had landed after ten minutes of silence and the hour that had followed it. "Is that a problem," I said.

"No," she said. "It explains some things that needed explaining." She left it there, which I was grateful for, because the things it explained were not a conversation I was ready to have on the way to her debrief.

We reached the transit stop and she pulled out her mission chip. "You once mentioned you needed to clear ten missions. Fight four of ten," she said. "You’ve got six more."

"I know."

"Try not to run untested live techniques on blood fiends for the remaining six."

"I’ll... consider it."

She looked at me with that sharp assessment, the one that had been running since the mission board, and underneath it now there was something that hadn’t been there before. Something that was closer to the beginning of trust than to suspicion.

"Renshi," she said.

"Yes."

"Next time you decide to drop the suppression in my dungeon..." she held the look for a beat, "...give me a signal first. So I know what I’m working with."

The transit came. She got on.

I stood at the stop and watched it go and thought about what a signal would look like, and thought about five more missions, and thought about the defensive screen holding against the blood fiend’s attempt in the clean way that things held when the training had actually done what training was supposed to do.

I thought about the walk back to the guild and the fifth mission logged and five of it left to go, and I thought about the uninteresting parts and whether the ship on that particular goal had fully sailed.

Probably, I decided.

Probably it had.