Chapter 63 Episode 63: The Showcase

Akira’s POV

The guild showcase schedule arrived in my inbox on a Monday morning alongside a mission board update plus the subtle reminder about a quarterly equipment registry submission I had still not completed.

This one was probably because the equipment registry submission required listing the sword and the sword’s registry entry still made me think about Kael signing the closure form personally.

I opened the showcase schedule and glanced through it twice just to be sure I wasn’t mistaken.

The D-rank division was the first event of the day. This meant everyone was likely to be present rather than the smaller crowd that filtered out as the higher ranks performed.

Every hunter registered at the main guild attended the opening division as a matter of institutional culture. The quarterly showcase was one of the few events that ran mandatory attendance across classifications.

Senior hunters, A-rank veterans, the guild’s administrative staff, the sponsor representatives whose engagement fees funded the facility improvements. Then the equipment subsidies and the training access that made places like the fourth floor possible.

All of them would be watching the D-rank division. All including me.

Technically I was almost at an A rank. But to the guild, I was still a D rank which meant that I was going to perform at a D-rank capacity in front of the most comprehensive audience I had encountered since registration.

And I was going to do it cleanly. I was going to do it while the system tracked the three separate internal adjustments required to bring my output down to a level that matched the designation on my guild file.

The most sustained act of deliberate underperformance I had ever attempted.

This bothered me for the rest of the morning and by afternoon, I had arrived at the conclusion that thinking about it further was not productive.

I needed to train. Or rather retrace my steps I order to function at a D rank once more. What could be more difficult?

***

The showcase was held in the guild’s main exhibition hall, a place I had walked through twice without fully registering it as a space designed for spectacle rather than function. Seeing it configured for the quarterly event was a different experience.

Tiered seating along three walls, the central demonstration floor marked with the classification boundary lines, the sponsor area elevated slightly above the general seating with the comfortable chairs and the individual refreshment setups that communicated: these are people the guild wants to impress.

D-rank division was called at nine in the morning.

There were eleven of us. I knew three by sight from the mission board, two from team assignments, the remainder from the guild canteen.

We were called to the floor in pairs for the standard demonstration sequence; weapon control, mana output reading, a controlled combat simulation against a training dummy configured to approximate low-tier demon response patterns.

I was paired seventh.

Six demonstrations to watch before mine, which gave me six opportunities to understand the audience and to observe the actual D-rank baseline across different hunters and confirm where the genuine ceiling sat versus where I needed to place my performance.

The genuine D-rank ceiling was lower than I remembered.

That was the realisation that settled in while watching the fourth demonstration, a competent hunter with solid footwork and a mana output that was exactly what D-rank produced.

The gap between that output and what I was holding back was larger than I had estimated. The three internal adjustments the system was tracking were not going to be subtle work.

They were going to be active and sustained plus they needed to look like nothing. Something leaning towards a natural capability rather than a restrained one.

I could do this. I hope. I took a huge gulp as I continued watching. I had done variations of it for months. The mission sandbagging, the calibration sessions, the team assignments where the restraint was constant background work.

I had built the suppression into a reliable tool. What I had not done however was sustain it at this level of precision for this long in front of an audience of this composition.

My name was called before I even knew it so I stood up and I walked to the demonstration floor.

The audience settled down when the next item on the schedule was beginning, a collective reorientation of attention and I took my starting position and brought the sword up and began.

The weapon control segment was the easiest part. The sword movements at D-rank output were clean and controlled and I ran the sequence with the ease of something I had practised enough times.

The training dummy’s response pattern engaged on schedule and I worked through it at the speed and force that D-rank produced genuinely, the system tracking the three adjustments in the background, steady and unhurried.

I was aware of the audience. But not in the way that performers were aware of audiences, not the surface-level awareness of someone reading the room for approval.

A deeper awareness, the spatial attention that had become part of how I moved through any occupied space, the peripheral tracking that catalogued positions and presences without requiring conscious direction. I could feel his eyes on me. His exact position even.

He was in the third tier.

Left side, end seat, the position with the clearest sightline to the demonstration floor. He wasn’t seating in the guild’s VIP allocation, he was not in the sponsor area and he was not anywhere that announced his presence as an official.

He had chosen a general seating position. Showing the utmost care of someone who wanted to be present without making his presence a statement. And he was watching with that quality of attention.

The quality I had catalogued across five months of fourth floor sessions, gate surveys and perimeter checks. The weight of it, applied to the demonstration floor, applied to me performing at D-rank capacity in front of an audience that did not know I was performing.

But he knew. He was the only person in the hall who knew exactly what the three internal adjustments were costing me, exactly how far the distance was between what I was showing and what I was holding back, exactly what the suppression looked like from the outside when it was being run by someone who had built it from his instruction.

I kept my eyes solely on the training dummy.

The mana output reading was the hardest segment. The guild’s measurement equipment was sensitive but not S-rank sensitive, it could not read the suppression itself, it could only record the output I allowed through.

At D-rank output the reading landed exactly where it was supposed to land. The equipment confirmed: D-rank, within expected parameters, consistent with classification.

The system noted in my peripheral vision: three adjustments held, all within acceptable variance.

I came off the floor to the kind of acknowledgment D-rank performances received, attentive and unremarkable. The professional appreciation of an audience that was waiting for the higher divisions without being impolite about it.

I returned to the waiting area and stood with the other D-rank hunters and watched the remaining four demonstrations with the focused attention of someone who had nothing left to do but observe.

The showcase ran through the morning.

B-rank was impressive, the mana outputs visible to the naked eye at the peak of the demonstrations, the combat simulations running at a speed that the demonstration floor’s boundary lines were clearly designed to contain. A-rank was something else.

Three A-rank hunters in the division, each demonstration producing the quality of attention from the audience that came with watching something that existed at the edge of what people had previously understood as possible.

I watched the A-rank demonstrations and thought about the gap and the encrypted mission and thought about Kael in the third tier and decided none of those things were going to help me right now.

After the showcase the hall filtered showing that an event had concluded, the sponsor area emptying into the main floor, the administrative staff dispersing, the hunters moving in the directions of the rest of their days. I collected my equipment bag from the waiting area and went toward the exit.

He fell into step beside me.

We walked to the corridor outside the hall without speaking. The corridor was quieter than the hall, the post-showcase traffic moving past us in both directions, nobody with a reason to stop.

He said nothing about the showcase.

"Your left shoulder was dropping," he said.

I had known about the dull ache on my left shoulder. The third internal adjustment had been managing a compensation drift in the shoulder that developed when I pushed the suppression hard and long.

My body defaulting to the old D-rank posture patterns when the output was down in that range. I had caught it on the third segment and corrected it but the correction had come four seconds later than it should have.

"I know," I said.

"Fix it," he stated.

"I will," I said.

He walked beside me in the corridor and the guild moved around us in its post-showcase rhythm and he had not said anything about the three hours of deliberate underperformance or the audience or the sponsor representatives or any of it, only the left shoulder, and the left shoulder was the thing that needed addressing so that was what he had addressed.

This was one of the things about him that I did not have adequate language for.

Most people, seeing someone they knew perform significantly below their actual capability for three hours in front of the guild’s full community, would have something to say about the performance.

The logistics of it, the risk, the judgment call, the specifics of what had been held back and why. He had watched for three hours with the full weight of his attention and come out of it with one technical observation about the left shoulder because the left shoulder was the only thing in the performance that needed correcting.

Everything else had been correct.

He knew that and was communicating it through the absence of comment on it, which was its own kind of precision.

"The shoulder has been drifting in extended suppression," I said. "When the output is held at the D-range for longer than two hours the compensation pattern starts."

"I’ve seen it building," he said. "We can address the root pattern rather than the symptom. The compensation is coming from the breath hold during sustained suppression." He glanced at me sideways. "You stopped breathing correctly when you’re concentrating hard on the ceiling. Then the shoulder follows."

I thought about that. "I hadn’t traced it back to my breathing pattern."

"That’s because you can’t see your own breathing," he said. "I can." He looked ahead. "Thursday. We’ll run the suppression with breath monitoring."

"Breath monitoring," I said. "You’re going to monitor my breathing."

"Someone has to," he said. "You’ve been doing it wrong for months."

I looked at him.

He looked back with the almost-smile, the one that lived in the set of his expression rather than the movement of his lips, and the corridor was busy around us and the showcase was done and the D-rank performance was logged in the guild records at exactly D-rank and the left shoulder was going to be addressed on Thursday.

The warmth was present.

I was done trying to put it somewhere else.

"Your mother is being discharged tomorrow," he said.

"I know. I’m picking her up at nine."

"I’ll be there," he said.

I looked at him confused. "You’ll be there?"

"To carry the stuff she used," he said. "She’ll argue about carrying the things and she’ll lose."

He must have a lot of things to do but he had decided to accompany me to take my mother home. That made me recall the things I had heard through Sena, the old money and the older enemies and the restructured leadership of three guild factions and the Vixar name in the documents that closed questions.

And he was going to be at the hospital at nine in the morning to carry my mother’s things because she would argue about it and lose.

"Okay," I smiled.

"Okay," he said.

We reached the building’s main exit and separated, him toward the east and me toward the ramen shop, and the morning was ordinary around both of us. I walked toward the ramen shop.

The left shoulder was fine for now. Everything else was getting there.