He had been in serious rooms for most of the day. Braveheart's office, the mission review room, the war room, the barracks with its subsonic vibrations and Nyx's voice in the system. Serious rooms with significant weight in them.
Celeste, waiting in the corridor with the patience of someone who had nowhere particular to be and had decided this was where she was going to be, produced the involuntary lift in his mood that specific people produced simply by existing in the space. He recognised the quality from the Cedar Grove estate: the ease that came from proximity to someone who was looking out for you without requiring you to perform the recognition of that fact.
"Dinner," he said. "My treat. Best restaurant you know in the city."
She considered this with the expression of someone who was reassessing whether she had correctly understood what kind of person she was dealing with. "Contribution centre first," she said. "Then food."
He had, genuinely, forgotten about the mission rewards.
The contribution centre had a queue that extended down the block, the natural accumulation of a thousand participants in a large operation, all completing their accounting simultaneously. Celeste walked past it with the practiced ease of someone whose rank came with certain administrative privileges, and the counter staff saw her coming and opened the private processing chamber before she reached the door.
The digital terminal had the institutional comprehensiveness of military systems that had been built with the assumption that they would be used regularly by large numbers of people and would need to be accurate. He worked through the registration process — personal details, next of kin (Sloane Blackwell, fire lord, tier 7; Isolde Aurelian Blackwell, wind sovereign, tier 7, listed as grandparents on the intake form, which produced a brief visible response from the administrator running the authentication), security clauses, digital signatures. Four minutes, all of it careful, all of it necessary.
When the registration was completed, an alert appeared in the top right of the display.
"General Braveheart sent something through the system," Celeste said, navigating to it.
He looked at the item entry.
[Void Repulsor — One-Handed Sword. Weight: 7kg. Durability: 1,000/1,000. Bonus: +15 Strength, +15 Agility. Requirements: Level 41, Tier 4, 100 Strength, 100 Agility.]
He read it twice. The turquoise blade in the display image was not the colour of standard military issue, which meant it was either the General's personal commission or something recovered from a significant encounter and held in reserve for a specific purpose. The weight and balance specifications, at 7kg, were calibrated for someone whose strength was in the range the requirement described — lighter than the Black Steel Blade, which had been running against the limits of his upper body since the Tier 4 body refinement.
He reached into his inventory and placed the Black Steel Blade on the desk.
"Could the blacksmiths here repair this? If so, someone else should have it." He ran a hand along the blade briefly. It had done everything he had asked of it. The spatial law cracks in the metal had been accumulating since the Naga Priestess domain fight, the sword having served as a medium for techniques it was not designed to conduct. "Its durability is low but the metallurgy is still sound."
Celeste looked at the blade. "Repairing durability is cheap. This is good steel — someone at tier 2 or 3 will be glad of it." She picked it up with the ease of someone who knew how to handle a weapon, and set it to the side. "I'll make sure it gets to someone who needs it."
She looked at him with a quality he had noticed developing over the past several hours — not quite the assessment she used professionally, something adjacent to it. "You know," she said, "watching you operate today — you forget yourself, sometimes."
He looked at her.
"You're ten years old," she said. "You've been awake for three months. And you've been in situations this week that veterans twice your age would have found difficult to walk out of." She was quiet for a moment, choosing the words with the specific care of someone who has thought about this and decided it needs to be said directly. "The beasts — I understand what you've been doing, and why, and the situation required it. But don't let the doing of it become too easy. The line between necessary force and desensitisation is not a bright one. Once you stop feeling the weight of it, you start losing something that matters."
He was quiet.
"There have been practitioners," she said, "who had everything you have — the potential, the capability — and lost themselves to it. They stopped being people who used power and became people who were used by it. The empire has spent significant resources hunting a few of them." She met his eyes steadily. "I'm not saying this because I think you're there. I'm saying it because you're nowhere near it, and the best time to hear it is when you're nowhere near it."
He absorbed this without deflection. It was accurate. It was also the kind of thing that adults said to children they were genuinely worried about, which was a category he did not often find himself placed in.
"Thank you," he said. He meant it simply.
She nodded. "Now look at the catalogue before I change my mind about dinner."
He scrolled through the military contribution catalogue with the indexed attention he used for mission boards, moving through the listings systematically and identifying the items whose specifications aligned with where his capability was and where he needed it to go.
[Remorse — One-Handed Sword. 8kg. Durability 1,200. +21 Strength, +21 Constitution. Req: Level 48, Tier 4, 130 Str/Con. — 500 CP]
[Ventor's Wager — Ring. +15 Agility, +5 Perception. Passive: On critical strike, gain Agility Blessing (bonus crit chance and attack speed). Req: Level 45, 150 Agility, 15 Perception. — 700 CP]
[Shroud of Delusions — Cloak. +5 Perception, +20 Agility. Passive: Shrouds presence with illusory effect. Req: Level 50, Tier 5, 15 Perception, 180 Agility. — 900 CP]
He made the selections without deliberating, because the deliberation had already happened in the half-second it had taken his spatial sense to read each item's construction and confirm the specifications. The Void Repulsor from Braveheart he already had. The Remorse and the Ventor's Wager and the Shroud addressed three distinct capability gaps simultaneously: constitution foundation, critical strike mechanics, and the Perception-enhanced concealment that his Nagini-assisted spatial domain could now complement rather than replace.
[Contribution Points remaining: 2,170. Items confirmed. Total: 2,100. Balance: 70.]
He scanned his badge and signed and the order completed.
[Net worth in equipment: comparable to several established Tier 4 veterans.] He noted this without particular feeling about it, stored the acquisition box in his inventory, and stood up.
"Dinner," he said.
Pizza Central turned out to be a market district rather than a restaurant — a long pedestrian arcade lined with storefronts, each one representing a distinct regional tradition within the format, the competition between them expressed in the quality of what came out of the ovens rather than in any promotional material. The smell of it reached the street half a block away: yeast and char and high-moisture cheese at the specific temperature where it had passed through melted and was approaching something more complex.
They were seated by the window, which gave them the city street and the late-evening medical response units still moving through the pollen aftermath. Illinois City was managing the terraforming's secondary effects with the efficiency of a city that had been adjacent to the Forbidden Forest long enough to have plans for most things.
Celeste ordered across three establishments simultaneously, with the decisive efficiency of someone who had an opinion and had decided to apply it. The first delivery arrived within minutes.
"Pequod's," she said. "Deep dish. The crust is the point — the cheese bakes into the rim of the cast-iron pan, fries against the edge, then the filling goes in: high-moisture mozzarella, tomato above it rather than below, beef pepperoni."
The thing that arrived on the table was circular, eight inches high at the edge, and required a knife and fork in the specific way that things requiring a knife and fork were sometimes called pizza despite being primarily architecture.
He looked at it. He looked at Celeste. "This is a pie," he said.
"It's a pizza."
"This is a very tall pie with pepperoni in it."
"Chicago would disagree with you."
"I'm sure Chicago had strong feelings about many things." He cut into it. The cheese came away in the specific way of high-moisture mozzarella at the correct temperature, stretching rather than breaking. The tomato layer above it was slightly sweet and chunky, the pepperoni distributed with the generosity of something that had been measured by the handful rather than by the ounce.
It was, if he was being honest with himself and setting aside the structural complaint, extremely good. He ate half of it before he remembered that he had decided to have an opinion about its classification.
"Still a pie," he said.
Celeste was already signalling the second arrival.
Futuro's representative came to the table with the specific pride of someone who knew what they had. "Detroit style," he said. "Rectangular pan, steel — the cheese is built up to the edge and bakes into a wall. Frico. The lacy burnt edge is the signature. House red, ricotta dollops, Mike's Hot Honey."
The corners were the obvious first move. He took one.
The sound it made when his teeth went through it was not the sound that food usually made, which was a full-spectrum textural event — the exterior shatteringly crisp, then a compressed layer of caramelised cheese, then the bread beneath it, then the cushion of the aerated interior crumb. The sauce had the bright acidity of tomatoes that had been cooked down carefully rather than quickly. The honey's heat arrived after everything else, extending the finish in a direction that was unexpected and then obviously correct.
He took all four corners.
"Now," he said, "this is pizza."
Celeste looked at him with the expression of someone who had correctly predicted this response and found it satisfying.
"The corners are the best part," she agreed. "They always go first. I ordered two pies so you wouldn't have to negotiate."
The third pizza was Loui's — also Detroit style, also rectangular, but the cheese was Wisconsin brick rather than the mozzarella-ricotta combination, and the bacon had been incorporated differently, distributed under the sauce so that the fat rendered into the bread during baking. A different application of the same structural principle producing a different final expression of it.
He ate through the comparison with the focused attention he brought to anything worth understanding, noting the specific differences in the textural profile, the fat content's effect on the bread's absorption, the way the toppings interacted with the heat during the bake versus after.
"You're analysing it," Celeste said.
"I'm eating it," he said.
"You're also analysing it."
"My grandmother is an alchemist. I've been thinking about the relationship between heat and molecular change since I was six."
She laughed — the genuine version, the one that arrived without being performed. "You are a very strange child," she said. "I mean that as a compliment."
He ordered two complete sets of all three to go. The staff boxed them with the efficiency of an operation that had been doing takeout for decades, and the boxes went into his inventory where they would maintain temperature through the spatial preservation properties of the dimensional storage field.
"Tell the girls I said hello," Celeste said, as he was completing the payment.
He looked at her.
"You've mentioned Rosanne three times in the past six hours," she said. "At different levels of indirection. I'm a major. I notice things."
"She's going to like the deep dish corners," he said.
"She's also going to like the bracelet you bought for her this morning," Celeste said. "Which you've been carrying in your left jacket pocket all day and touching approximately once every forty minutes."
He said nothing for a moment.
"Thank you for dinner," he said. "And for everything today."
She shook her head, the way people did when they were dismissing a thing that they were not actually dismissing. "Train safely. Go win your tournament." She paused. "And Markus — what I said earlier. Remember it."
"I will," he said.
He meant it.