Yan Ye stopped running at 6:14 AM because something on the public screen across the plaza made him stop.
The screen was mounted on the side of an information tower he'd passed without looking at every morning for two weeks. This morning it was showing a live feed from the Alliance of Khemetra, six time zones west, where it was still the middle of the night.
The number at the bottom of the screen read 45,000,000.
It was ticking.
He stood on the sidewalk, breath fogging in the morning cold, and watched the number go up.
The feed was drone footage. A battlefield stretched from horizon to horizon, lit by the orange glow of something burning and the cold white of awakener skills. Thousands of figures moving in the foreground, awakeners he couldn't identify by tier at this distance, cutting through a tide of shapes that did not move like anything he'd ever seen. Further back, beyond the human lines, the sky kept flashing. Someone's skill, some T6 or T7 throwing something at a target the drone couldn't capture, and the target answering back.
A voice on the broadcast was talking in the clipped cadence of someone who had been reading numbers for hours and had stopped feeling them.
Largest dungeon break since the start of the Awakening Era.
Horde pushed past the first line of defense at 03:00 local time.
Coalition forces still forty-eight hours from full deployment.
Forty-five million.
Twelve hours ago they were reporting thirty-one.
He tried to do the math and gave up. Fourteen million people in twelve hours was a number his brain could not turn into anything real. It was just a rate. An entire small country vanishing on a schedule.
On the screen, the orange glow brightened. The drone footage cut to a wider angle. For a half-second he saw the full scope of the front — the line of awakeners holding, buckling in places, the shapes pouring through the gaps, and further back, the cities. The cities still had lights on.
If I stood in that line for one minute I'd be blessed.
And not to survive. Just to die on my feet instead of running.
Last year my biggest problem was my thesis advisor. This year I'm watching a war on a street corner before class.
Somehow the thesis feels less real.
He kept watching. The number kept going up.
A small group of people had gathered to watch with him. Someone in business clothes let out a small sound and covered her mouth. The delivery worker next to Yan Ye shifted his bag higher on his shoulder. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved on yet. This was not the first dungeon break these people had lived through — the city had seen them, the world had seen them — but live footage of this one had the quality of something that still deserved a pause.
Yan Ye turned his attention back to his own legs.
I'm running ten kilometers a day. I'm on day fifteen. The people in that drone shot were training from birth and half of them are already dead.
He didn't feel motivated in the usual sense. Motivation was too small a word for what he felt. He felt small. And when he felt small, his body moved.
He started running again. Past the screen. Past the crowd. He didn't check the distance on his system. He'd know when the quest updated.
By the time he got home to shower, he had added another ten kilometers to the morning.
The school day passed the way school days pass when your brain is elsewhere. He took notes. He answered when called on. Somewhere between fourth and fifth period the death toll updated again and he didn't look.
By the time the afternoon bell rang, he had a duffel bag on his shoulder and a destination.
Iron Gate's back lot was not a back lot. It was a range.
Yan Ye had taken the elevator down to what the directory called Section D, walked through a corridor that felt long enough to count as cardio, and come out into a long open space with a ceiling high enough to lose your voice in. The far wall was marked with distances, each painted number farther than the last, all the way back to five hundred meters, which looked less like a distance and more like a suggestion.
She was standing near the hundred-meter line, checking the fletching on an arrow.
He recognized her before he was close enough to see her face. The profile photo had used a good angle. The photo had also, he realized, been conservative.
The photo did not oversell.
It significantly undersold.
Focus.
She looked up, saw him, and her whole expression shifted into something that welcomed him with more warmth than strangers usually welcomed each other.
"Yan Ye?"
"Yes."
"Shen Lanxin. Come here, let's not waste your time."
He walked over. She closed the distance the rest of the way, which turned out to be a strategic choice. By the time he'd finished his second step she had linked her arm through his and was steering him toward the equipment rack on the wall, talking the whole time.
Her arm pressed against his. So did other things.
"You've never held a bow, right? Good. Bad habits are harder to fix than no habits. We'll start at one hundred meters because it's far enough to make you think and close enough that you won't hate yourself."
"Sounds reasonable."
"I'm always reasonable."
This woman is a weapon system.
He kept his voice level and his face polite. Internally, his brain was running three processes at once: registering that he was being touched, registering that he should not react to being touched, and registering that the second process was losing ground to the first.
She pulled a bow off the rack and handed it to him. Composite, recurve, matched to his approximate draw weight. He took it in both hands and felt the balance of it. Good weight. Responsive grip. His body, which had not held a bow in two lifetimes, had no idea what to do with it.
"Big Sister will show you the draw first," she said, stepping around to his right. "Watch my form, not my hands."
The chill hit him between one heartbeat and the next.
It wasn't the room. It was internal, the specific flat cold that traveled up his spine and settled at the base of his skull with the precision of an instinct he'd learned to trust. The same sensation he'd felt once in the Ruins of Zarathen.
His instinct was telling him that something in his immediate vicinity had just become dangerous.
His instinct was also, very quietly, telling him where the danger was coming from.
Big Sis.
Are you fucking serious right now.
No response. Not even a notification. Just the chill, hanging in the air like an unsigned letter.
Shen Lanxin's arm tightened slightly against his. She shivered.
"That's odd," she said, blinking. "Did you feel that? My whole arm just went cold."
"Yeah." He kept his voice mild. "Draft from the corridor, maybe."
"Must be."
He stepped half a pace to his right, disengaging the arm contact in a way that looked like he was adjusting for a shot and not avoiding an international incident.
"Let's start with the draw," he said. "Elder Sister."
Her eyebrow moved, just slightly. Registering. Not hurt.
"Elder Sister, then."
The chill receded.
Big Sis. Can we discuss this.
No response. But the silence had a quality to it now. Satisfied silence. The silence of someone who had not started a problem because their point had been taken.
I'm keeping a list of things to ask you about someday.
This is on it.
His first shot missed by three meters.
His second missed by more than that.
His third hit the outer ring of the target, which did not count as hitting.
Shen Lanxin watched with the patience of someone who had been paid to watch people embarrass themselves with arrows before.
"Yan Ye."
"Yes?"
"Have you ever held a bow before?"
"No."
"Doesn't Tianmu First have an archery instructor?"
"Only in self-study period, third year onwards."
"Hm." She considered him. "And the high school evaluation? Bow component is mandatory. You've done it."
He felt his ears warm slightly. The answer involved Big Ye, and every time he had to explain Big Ye to someone in this world it was like introducing a stranger he was contractually obligated to defend.
"I've done it." He drew another arrow. "My scores are usually among the last. That's why I'm here."
She didn't make a face. Didn't soften. She just nodded.
"Good. Last is a position you can leave. Again."
He drew. Released. Missed.
Fourteen years of Big Ye's muscle memory and not one useful reflex in any of it. Every time I think I've catalogued the ways this body failed itself, it finds a new one.
"Stop thinking about it," Shen Lanxin said, without looking at him. "The bow knows where to go. Your hands are getting in the way."
She stepped behind him.
Then her hands were on his.
"Here. The anchor point is under your jaw, not beside your cheek. Your elbow drops half a centimeter. Your shoulder stays down."
Her body pressed against his back. Her chin was almost on his shoulder. Her hands moved his into the correct positions with a grip that was professional in its mechanics and not professional in any of its other qualities.
Posture. Hold posture. She is correcting your form and you are learning to shoot a bow and these are the only two things that are happening.
The third thing that is happening is a separate matter.
"Release on the exhale," she said in his ear. "Don't hold your breath."
He released. The arrow struck the inner ring of the target.
"There."
She stepped back. He exhaled for real.
"Again."
He nocked another arrow. Drew. The corrected posture felt different. His spine was aligned. His elbow was right. He exhaled and released.
Inner ring.
Again.
Inner ring.
Again.
Center.
She made a small sound, pleased, and he felt his face warm for reasons unrelated to the sound.
"You pick up fast."
"You teach well."
"We'll see if it sticks."
It stuck.
Three hours later, he'd put almost six hundred arrows downrange and his shoulders had developed a political position on the situation. His right forearm had a line of bruising from the string. His fingers were numb.
Shen Lanxin had been on him physically throughout the session. Correcting his stance. Adjusting his draw. Tapping his lower back to remind him to keep his core engaged. The corrections had been technically flawless and delivered closer to his ear than form required.
He held his posture every time. Polite. Focused. Externally.
Internally he had compiled a catalogue of reactions he was not going to express, and had decided that the safest response to everything Shen Lanxin said and did was to return to the target.
Around the four-hundredth arrow, the notification appeared.
[Skill Acquired: Novice Archer — Lv.1] [Rarity: Common (max Lv.5)] [Type: Passive | Category: Combat / Ranged] [Lv.1: Accuracy +5%, Tremor Reduction -5%]
He kept his expression flat. He'd hit the hundred-meter target a hundred times over the course of the session, and the system had been counting.
By the time he lowered the bow for the last time, proficiency on Novice Archer had climbed to 41%.
Shen Lanxin stood beside him, arms crossed, studying the target downrange. Three arrows grouped in the center ring. A small, tight cluster that three hours ago he would not have believed he could produce.
"You learned fast," she said. "You have talent for this."
"You taught me well. That's the only reason I progressed this much."
She laughed, nodding with a kind of agreeable precision, the way someone agrees with a compliment they knew they deserved.
"True." She looked at him, still smiling. "How about you pay me dinner to say thank you?"
Abort.
"I would love to but I actually have a thing tonight," he heard himself say, in the voice of someone who was already three steps toward the exit. "Maybe next time. Thanks for the session, Elder Sister, same time next week if it's open."
He was moving before he finished the sentence. He set the bow on the rack with precision he did not remember executing. He was out of the range by the time she started to answer. He was through the corridor, up the elevator, out the front doors, down the block.
He did not look back.
He stopped when he was a full block away and a pedestrian crossing had the decency to force him to.
Behind him, faint enough that he might have imagined it, something drifted on the breeze. It might have been his own pulse. It might have been Shen Lanxin's voice, from where she was presumably still standing in the range, saying something to herself in a tone too amused to be a complaint.
A phrase that sounded like "cute little rabbit."
He did not turn around.
He pulled out his phone and requested an ETT.
Three minutes, the estimate said.
He leaned against the wall of a closed storefront and tried to breathe normally. His heart rate was higher than it had been during the training.
That kind of woman is too much for me.
One slip and I get eaten alive.
Literally. Metaphorically. Both.
He exhaled and looked up at the sky, which was starting to turn toward evening.
I prefer my Jiayi.
The thought arrived uninvited and immediately took over.
Pretty, calm, quiet, smart, funny, cute, just perfect.
...Should I invite her somewhere this weekend?
No. It's too much. We're friends right now. I can't invite her out every weekend, she'll think I'm—
Think I'm what? It's been one time at my apartment in two weeks. One time is not every weekend.
But two times would feel like every weekend if it was two weekends in a row—
Stop.
I've heard people say distance creates closeness. Give space. Let the person miss you. But how the fuck am I supposed to—
Should I at least text her? After last night? Something small. Just "hey." No. "Hey" is what you send when you don't have anything to say. I have something to say. I just don't know what it is.
Am I going to send her a text that says "thanks for coming over"? What am I, her uncle?
What if I just—
He realized his breathing had gotten faster and forced it back down.
Fuck.
This is not going anywhere. Thinking about this is not going anywhere. I'm going in circles.
Better to exercise. Get stronger. Figure out what to say when my head is quiet.
He canceled the ETT. The app charged him a fee for cancellation. He paid it without reading.
Then he started walking.
He walked for a while.
He walked fast sometimes and slow sometimes. He sped up when his brain was on nothing in particular and slowed down when the thoughts caught up. His brain kept going back to Jiayi. The way she'd paused at the door last night. The mouth opening and closing. The thing she hadn't said.
What was she going to say.
He did not have an answer. He generated answers and rejected them. She was going to say something kind. She was going to say more than kind. She was going to say she'd had a good time. She was going to say a thing that changed things.
None of them felt right. Because he didn't know. He wasn't going to know. He couldn't text her to ask because the question would be too big for a text and too small to deserve a visit.
He kept walking.
The street names changed. He didn't notice. The sky changed color. He noticed only because the light shifted across his phone.
His phone buzzed. He fumbled for it, heart doing a stupid thing, because part of him thought for a full second that it was her.
It wasn't. It was the system.
[Daily Quest — Status Update] [Run: 25,320 / 10,000] [Push-ups: 200 / 100] [Sit-ups: 200 / 100] [Squats: 200 / 100] [Attribute Gains on Completion: STR +0.30, AGI +0.30, PHY +0.30, DEF +0.25]
He stared at the run distance.
Twenty-five thousand.
He blinked. Checked the map on his phone.
He'd been walking for two hours.
How did I walk for two hours without noticing.
The answer was Jiayi. His brain had decided the only way to stop thinking about her was to keep moving long enough that the thinking couldn't catch up.
His eye caught on the attribute line.
Shit.
Novice Runner was ahead again. Zero point zero five percent. A proficiency gap that would take him two extra sessions on the other three Daily Quest skills to close.
Didn't I just equalize this two days ago.
Apparently equalizing lasts exactly two days in my life.
He did the math on the remaining distance. Fourteen kilometers still between him and his apartment. Walking the rest added nothing to Runner and kept the gap at 0.05%. Running the rest at pace would widen the gap further, but he was going to have to run twenty kilometers today anyway to hit the doubled quest. The other reps he'd catch up on during the evening.
The body recovery from last night's completion had left him completely rested. The only fatigue was going to be whatever he earned in the next hour.
Fuck it.
Run it.
He started running.
The sky went darker. The streetlights came on in sequence along the avenue, two hundred meters ahead of him and passing behind him in rhythm. His footsteps found their pace. His breathing found its rhythm. His brain, for the first time in two hours, stopped cycling Jiayi thoughts long enough to focus on the next streetlight and then the next one.
By the time he hit his neighborhood, sweat had soaked through his shirt and the sky had gone fully dark. His lungs were complaining. His legs were complaining louder. But his head was quiet, and quiet was what he'd come out here for.
He took the stairs up to his floor instead of the elevator. Because of course he did.
He closed the door behind him. The silence of the apartment was different without Jiayi in it.
He walked to the window. Stood there.
Just keep trying. Give everything I've got.
Jiayi. Power. My fucking life, all of it.
In the end it works out.
It has to.