Chapter 34: An Act [2]
The silence that followed carried a strange weight. Lucas found himself staring at the wall, while Sylvia stood near the window, her gaze drifting outside.
Neither of them spoke.
Then, Sylvia moved.
Stood up, the mont closing behind her as naturally as a door. She moved toward the window with the unhurried ease, pausing at the ledge and looking back at him over her shoulder.
The night air ca in around her. Her hair moved slightly.
The faint smirk was back, small and certain.
"Start acting properly from tomorrow." She stepped up onto the ledge. "We can’t afford anyone doubting us."
She looked at him one more ti.
"Boyfriend."
And before he could react, she stepped onto the ledge and dropped out of sight into the dark.
He put his face in his hands.
’Just how in the world did I end up like this...?’ he thought.
He stayed like that for a mont. Then he dropped backward onto the bed, body hitting the mattress with a dull thud, and stared at the ceiling with the blank exhaustion of soone who has had significantly too much of a day.
After a while his hand ca up. He spread his fingers and looked at them, and his mind drifted without him deciding to let it back to the forest, to Kine’s fist hitting his crossed daggers, to the shockwave that had gone straight through the steel and into his chest, to the particular helplessness of knowing your numbers don’t match and feeling exactly what that ans in the middle of a fight.
His hand closed into a fist.
’Still too weak.’
’Level seventeen.’ He stared at his fist. ’I’ll be facing seniors in the upcoming tournant.’
His jaw tightened. ’Twenty-five minimum. I need to hit twenty-five before this tournant starts or I’m walking into it already behind.’
He let his hand drop.
’And those three.’ The thought arrived without being invited. ’There’s no way they’re just going to let this go. Not after what happened. Suspension or not... that won’t stop them. If anything, it’ll just make them more desperate.’ He turned his head slightly on the pillow.
’From what I rember... they were never the type to back down. Not until they got what they wanted. Not until they felt satisfied.’
Then he exhaled. Long and slow, the kind of exhale that releases sothing you’ve been carrying in your chest.
’Thinking about it tonight won’t change anything.’ He let it go. ’What changes things is what I do tomorrow. And the day after.’
He lay there in the quiet and let the ceiling be a ceiling.
Then sothing caught up to him, not a thought exactly, more like the full absurdity of the last several hours arriving all at once without the adrenaline to filter it — and a grin crept onto his face before he could stop it.
Then a quiet laugh. Then another, until he had one arm over his eyes and was shaking his head slowly at nothing.
"That was absolutely ridiculous," he said, to the ceiling, to the room, to nobody.
And his mind went, of its own accord, to the part of today he hadn’t fully processed yet.
Running through the forest. Towards the north, the trees going on forever and Sylvia nowhere. The frustration building with every wrong turn until finally, way later than it should have occurred to him, the obvious thing arrived.
He had stopped walking.
’Right. I have system.’
"System," he’d said, almost relieved. "Locate Sylvia."
What followed was not relief.
[Go straight. Then turn left.]
He went straight. He turned left.
[Proceed forward.]
He proceeded forward.
[Target nearby.]
He stopped.
He was standing in front of a bush. A completely unremarkable bush with nothing behind it, nothing beside it, and absolutely no Sylvia anywhere in the vicinity.
His eye had twitched. "You have got to be joking."
[Recalculating.]
"RECALCULATING?!" He had said it out loud to a forest. "You don’t recalculate after ’target nearby’ and a bush—"
[Turn right.]
"I literally just ca from the right—"
[Proceed forward.]
At so point, he couldn’t rember exactly when he had thrown both hands up, turned in a full circle, and said several things to the open air that he was glad nobody was around to hear.
Then he had put his hands on his knees, looked at the ground, and made a decision.
"I’m finding her myself."
And so, he did.
Back in the present, lying on his bed with the mory playing out behind his eyes, Lucas let out a long breath that was most of a laugh.
"Seriously," he said, to the air, his voice carrying the comfortable ease of soone talking to sothing that has been there the whole ti even when it’s been useless.
"Terrible at directions. Genuinely terrible." He raised one hand lazily toward the ceiling, gesturing vaguely.
"I an, at this point, instead of ’Player Leveling,’ maybe we should start working on ’System Leveling,’ yeah? I could teach you a thing or two. First lesson—basic navigation."
He let the hand drop. He was still smiling.
Then the screen appeared.
Lucas glanced at it the way he always did, expecting the usual blue, expecting sothing dry and cutting that he could roll his eyes at and go to sleep.
He stopped smiling.
The interface had changed color.
Not the familiar soft blue that had been there since the bench on day one. This was red. Deep and dark, the kind of red that doesn’t sit comfortably in a room, that feels like sothing that belongs to a different category of things entirely.
The text ford against it and the quality of it was different too, not the chanical flatness the system usually had, not the sarcasm he’d co to expect. This felt precise and cold.
Lucas pushed himself up slowly on one elbow. His fingers tightened against the sheets.
The text sat there in the red light.
The smile was completely gone now. His eyes moved across every word slowly, the way you re-read sothing that didn’t parse the first ti to check whether you read it right.
[Just shut your mouth and do your work, you lowly mortal vessel.]
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