The second day in the cell was quieter than the first.
Not because anything had changed — the smell was the same, the light through the gap in the ceiling was the same, the sounds from the other cells were the same. But I'd stopped fighting the stillness. I sat with my back against the wall and let the hours move past me and tried to think about nothing, which meant I thought about everything.
Max's voice.
*I'm asking you to carry that.*
I was carrying it. I didn't have a choice.
The icon in the corner of my vision had stayed faint all night — not opening, not responding, just present, like a light left on in a room nobody was using. I'd tried to activate it a few times in the early hours and given up. Whatever RedEngine was doing, it was doing it on its own schedule.
The cell door opened mid-morning.
I expected the guard. The silhouette in the doorway was wrong for a guard — too composed, too still. The person who stepped inside ducked slightly under the low frame and looked at me with an expression that gave nothing away.
Rosie.
I sat up straighter without meaning to.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I've been in a cell for two days."
"I know." She stayed near the door, like she hadn't fully decided to commit to the visit yet. "I've been speaking with the tribunal. They've moved your execution to end of week."
The words landed without drama. She'd said them the way you say a fact.
"End of week," I repeated.
"Which gives us approximately four days." She looked at me carefully. "I need to understand what happened in that pyramid, Arthur. Not the version you gave the tribunal — what actually happened. Because a seventeen-year-old with no rank and no guild registration survived the sixth floor of the Death Pyramid, and that doesn't have an ordinary explanation."
I looked at her for a moment.
She'd pulled me out of the Meadow of Demise when she had no reason to. She'd visited me in a cell when she had nothing to gain from it. And she was here now, four days before my scheduled execution, asking me to trust her with the one thing I didn't understand myself.
I told her everything.
The floating panel. The HP bar. The modify function and the number I'd spoken while I was dying. The way ATK had spiked to 4000 on floor five and then the warning had appeared — *structural instability at 34%* — and the panel had gone dark. The icon in the corner that I still couldn't open.
I didn't mention RedEngine by name. I wasn't sure why. Something about saying it out loud to someone else felt like crossing a line I wasn't ready to cross.
Rosie listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"A status screen," she said finally. "Self-modifying values."
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like a Miracle attribute." She said it without the skepticism I expected. "They're rare — genuinely rare, maybe one in several million — but they're documented. People born with abilities that interact with the world's underlying systems in ways that shouldn't be possible." She paused. "The tribunal doesn't know about Miracles. Most people don't. But I've seen one before."
"Will they believe it?"
"No," she said. "Not from your testimony. But there's something that might make them." She straightened. "The Sila Device. It's the most accurate power measurement tool in Avalon — it reads everything, down to the structural level. If you have a Miracle attribute, Sila will show it."
"And if it doesn't?"
She looked at me steadily. "Then we're out of options."
---
The tribunal reconvened the next morning.
The hall was just as full as before. I stood in the same spot on the floor, under the same vaulted ceiling, with the same weight of attention from the tiered seats above.
Rosie stood to my left. The man beside her — one of her team, I gathered, from the quality of his armor and the way he held himself — stood to her left. Neither of them spoke. Their presence was the argument.
The judge acknowledged Rosie with the neutrality of someone who respected her enough not to show it openly.
"The SIla Device will be used," he said. "The results will be entered into the tribunal record. If a Miracle attribute is confirmed, the sentence will be reviewed. If it is not—" He looked at me. "The original sentence stands."
A pedestal had been set up near the center of the floor. The device on top of it was smaller than I'd expected — a column of dark stone about the height of my chest, with a smooth flat surface on top and a display screen facing the room. It looked almost plain.
"Place your dominant hand on the surface," Rosie said quietly.
I stepped forward.
The hall was completely silent.
I put my hand on the device.
The Sila Device lit up — a deep blue that spread from the contact point outward across the stone in slow pulses, like something waking up. The display screen activated. Numbers began moving across it, cycling through values too fast to read individually.
I stood very still.
*Come on,* I thought, not sure what I was asking. *Show them something.*
The numbers slowed.
Stopped.
*[Total Power Assessment: 216]*
*[Rank Classification: Sub-Soldier]*
Silence.
Then — starting somewhere in the upper tiers and spreading downward — laughter.
Not mean laughter, exactly. More the laughter of genuine surprise, of an expectation so thoroughly inverted that the body doesn't know how else to respond. A seventeen-year-old who'd survived floor six of the Death Pyramid had just registered as the weakest possible combat classification.
I stood there and let it happen.
Rosie's expression hadn't changed. The man beside her had gone very still.
"Again," Rosie said. Her voice cut through the noise without effort.
The hall quieted.
"The first result was taken under stress," she said to the judge. "The device registers what's present, not what's accessible. Give him a moment."
The judge looked uncertain. Then he nodded.
I put my hand back on the surface.
*Come on.*
The blue light pulsed again. The numbers moved again.
I closed my eyes and tried to find whatever it was inside me that RedEngine connected to — the thing that had spiked my ATK on floor five, the thing that had kept me alive in the Meadow of Demise — and felt nothing. No warmth. No current. The icon in the corner of my vision sat dim and unresponsive.
The numbers stopped.
*[Total Power Assessment: 214]*
Two points lower than before.
The laughter came back louder.
I felt something shift in my chest — not embarrassment, not yet, something rawer than that. The image of Rosie standing there having staked her credibility on me, having told the tribunal there was something worth examining, having brought her teammate here as a character witness — and the device reading me as less than a standard foot soldier. Twice.
I tried a third time.
And a fourth.
By the fifth attempt, my hand was shaking on the surface and my jaw was clenched and someone in the upper tiers was laughing hard enough that I could hear them clearly over everything else.
I pulled my hand back.
Went to my knees.
Not dramatically — my legs just stopped holding me the way they were supposed to, and I ended up on the floor with one hand braced against the stone. The hall was still making noise around me. I looked at the display screen, which had gone dark again, and felt very far away from everything.
*Max chose this,* I thought. *He chose this so I could be here, kneeling on a tribunal floor while people laugh.*
That thought was worse than anything else.
"Enough."
Rosie's voice.
The hall quieted faster than I expected. Something in her tone had changed — not louder, not sharper, just different, in a way that made the room pay attention.
She walked to the center of the floor and faced the judge directly.
"The Sila Device measures accessible power," she said. "It cannot measure potential, and it cannot measure attributes that are currently suppressed or inactive. What I witnessed in the Meadow of Demise — and what multiple adventurers witnessed inside the Death Pyramid — cannot be explained by a Sub-Soldier rating." She paused. "I am not asking you to take my word. I am asking you to consider that executing someone whose abilities you cannot explain or measure is a waste of a resource this kingdom may need."
The judge said nothing.
"There's also the question of origin," Rosie continued. "He appeared in the Meadow of Demise with no documentation, no affiliation, no record in any guild or kingdom registry. We don't know where he came from. Executing an unidentified person without establishing their origin first is a diplomatic risk this tribunal is not authorized to take unilaterally."
The judge looked at her for a long moment. Then at his colleagues on either side. A quiet exchange I couldn't hear.
Then:
"The execution sentence is suspended pending origin investigation." He said it like he was setting something heavy down. "Arthur Shozoria is to be expelled from the Kingdom of Avalon under escort and returned to the location where he was found. The Meadow of Demise."
The air went out of me.
I looked up at Rosie.
She wasn't looking at me. She was watching the judge with an expression I couldn't read.
"The Meadow of Demise," I said.
"You survived it once," she said quietly, still not looking at me.
"I barely survived it once."
She finally turned. Something in her face that might have been an apology, or might have been something else entirely. "I know. I'm sorry, Arthur. It was the only argument I had."
---
They gave me an hour.
Rosie used it to get me food — real food, not the cell rations — and a pack with basic supplies. Rope. A small knife. A waterskin. Dried provisions for a few days.
Her teammate said nothing through any of it. He stood near the door and watched me eat with an expression of careful neutrality.
"The Meadow isn't just monsters," Rosie said while I ate. "There are settlements on the outer edges. People who've built lives out there because they had no choice or no better option. If you can get past the first zone — the dense part, where the predator concentration is highest — there's territory that's livable. Survivable."
"How far is the first zone?"
"Depends on where you land." She looked at the pack. "I put a compass in there. Move toward the eastern edge. The terrain opens up."
I looked at the pack. Then at her.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Because you're not from here," she said. "And I don't know what that means yet. But I think it means something." She straightened. "Don't die out there, Arthur."
The guards came before I could answer.
---
The tribunal square was bright when they brought me out.
The escort was four soldiers — professional, efficient, not cruel. They walked me to the eastern gate without incident. A crowd had gathered, because of course it had. I didn't look at their faces.
At the gate, before they opened it, one of the soldiers handed me the pack.
I put it on.
The gate opened onto a road that ran east for a while before the terrain changed — the clean stone giving way to packed earth, the packed earth giving way to something denser and darker in the distance. The border of the Meadow of Demise was maybe two hours' walk.
I turned back once.
The soldier at the gate was already closing it.
In the upper level of the wall, I thought I saw a figure watching. The distance was too great to be certain.
I turned away.
Adjusted the pack.
Checked the compass.
East.
*Don't die out there,* Rosie had said.
I started walking.
[End of Chapter 7]