A year ago, the action figures sold out of the Vaelport flagship store in eleven minutes.
Eli was seven. His older sister Mira was eleven. Their mother had stood in the line at four in the morning to get the figures, because Eli had to have the Cassiel Vane figure with the working flame-fist articulation and Mira had to have the Lira Osei figure with the changeable Mana-shield accessories, and the line had been a kilometer and a half long. Their mother had brought a folding chair and a thermos. She had been the third person in line by the time the doors opened. She had thought, holding both boxes against her coat as she walked back to the car, that this was the kind of thing she would remember when the kids were older.
The kids wore the figures' costumes for Halloween. Half the children in their school did. Eli was Cassiel Vane. Mira was Lira Osei. The boy across the street was the Architect. Nobody knew who that actually was. Just a rumor about an L4 Explorer who had supposedly orchestrated the Marvel Raid response from a coordinator's chair, and the rumor was enough. The boy had a tactical headset and a long coat. He won the school costume contest.
Eli watched the Explorer feeds every day. He had a wall in his bedroom of cards he had collected, alphabetized by tier, with the L1s on the bottom-left and the L8s on the upper-right where there were only three names. He did not have all the L8s. Nobody had all the L8s. Two of them did not allow their photographs to be circulated. But Eli had Sevren Calden, and Sevren Calden had the foil-edge variant, and Sevren Calden was the one Eli watched on the talk shows.
His friends argued about builds.
Bren was going to be a Chakra user. Theo was going to be a Cursed Energy user. Anis was going to be a Mana user, like her mother had been before the Vaelport Incursion took her mother's right leg and her posting both. Eli was going to be a Nen user.
He had decided this when he was five, because Nen had six types, which meant you could be six different things, and Eli had not yet decided what kind of thing he wanted to be. Mira had told him his choice was unserious because Nen took longer to mature and the high-tier Nen builds had a hexagon problem that nobody in their school could fully explain. Eli had not changed his mind. Mira was eleven. Mira was wrong about a lot of things.
The kids talked about guilds.
Guilds were the new thing. They had been the new thing for two years, since the first one had registered itself as a public collective in the Bazaar Hub and started running joint training cycles outside the IEC framework. Groups of like-minded Explorers had moved into the Hub, formed clubs, given themselves names. They had logos. They had theme songs. They had follower counts on the public feeds and merch lines and reels that posted three times a day. The government had not yet decided how to handle them and was, for now, letting them be. Most of the kids' parents thought the guilds were a fad. The kids did not think the guilds were a fad. The kids had picked their favorites the way kids in a different generation had picked bands. Eli followed the Whitespire Order. Bren followed the Dawn Compact. Theo followed The Verge.
The Houses were a different conversation. The Houses were what the kids' parents talked about. The Kessler Foundation and the Delacroix family had been around for generations, were government-aligned, recruited through bloodline and academy referral, and did not have logos or theme songs. None of the kids' friends were going to be invited to a House. A few of them, quietly and without saying it, wanted to be.
A year ago, none of the kids in Eli's school had known anybody who had died.
That was not unusual. The casualty figures were public but not mentioned to the kids. It was too early for them to feel that, and governments needed more explorers. The kids did not metabolize the numbers. The kids saw the costumes, the talk shows, action figures, and the kids dreamed.
A year ago, the dream had been a clean dream.
Sevren Calden was on the late show on a Thursday in spring.
The host was a man named Karl, who had been hosting the late show for nineteen years and had interviewed every L7 and L8 Explorer who would sit for an interview, which was not all of them. Calden was the most cooperative of the level eight. Calden enjoyed the interviews. He had said, in a previous interview, that he enjoyed them because they were the only place on the planet he was allowed to brag, and the bragging was the part he had not gotten over yet.
He came out in a dark gray suit with a frost-pattern lining visible at the collar. The audience clapped for a long count. He grinned and waved and sat down on the chair across from Karl.
"Sevren," Karl said.
"Karl."
"You look good."
"I keep telling people. Cold air. Cold air does it. You should try it."
The audience laughed. Karl let them.
"Tell me about the new training facility."
"The new facility is not new. The old one ran out of room. The Hub doesn't run out of room. You don't dig in the Hub, Karl. You ask the dimension for more space and the dimension gives you more space. That's how the Hub works."
"You asked the dimension for more space."
"I did. The dimension was very polite about it. It also cost me an arm and a leg, Karl. Not literally. The Hub does not run on goodwill. The dimension takes NP, and the new facility took most of a decade's earnings, and I am, in the technical financial sense, recovering."
The audience laughed.
"How big is it now."
"Big enough that I could freeze a continent inside it without inconveniencing my neighbors. Smaller than I would like. The dimension and I are negotiating."
The audience laughed again. Calden leaned back.
"For the people watching at home who don't know," Karl said. "You live in the Bazaar Hub."
"I do."
"Walk us through that."
"Sure. There's a shared pocket dimension the Bazaar maintains. Most of the L6 and up Explorers move there at some point. We have residential blocks. We have a market district. We have training facilities the size of small countries that are not, in fact, small countries. The dimension does not have weather. There is light and there is night and the cycle is comfortable, but the physics down there are negotiable in a way the physics up here are not."
"Why move."
"Practical reasons. I can train at full power down there without the side-effects. If I run a full-output drill on Earth Prime, the side-effects include — well. The last time was a snow event over a quarter of the western continent. The IEC sent me a polite letter. I was younger then." He smiled. "Down in the Hub, I can run the same drill and the only consequence is that the drill gets done."
"The other reasons."
"The other reasons are that I'm allowed to relax there. Up here, on the planet, I can't go to a coffee shop without a kid asking me for an autograph. I love the kids. The kids are why we do this. But I'm a hundred and seventy-three years old by my own clock, Karl. By yours, I'm closer to forty. The Bazaar's worlds run faster than this one, and most of an L8's career is spent inside them, so the lived years stack up while the calendar back home doesn't keep pace. I would like, at a hundred and seventy-three, to drink a cup of coffee without somebody filming it."
The audience laughed.
"Most of the L6-and-up move there. Why is that."
"Two reasons. First, the powers get to a point where you can't relax around regular human structures without breaking them. You can't raise your voice in a kitchen without freezing the wallpaper. You can't sneeze in a city without insurance claims. The Hub was built to take what we put out. Second, the Hub costs. A residency in the central districts is not cheap. The dimension takes its rent in NP and the rent is real. An L4 or an L5 could in theory put a deposit down. Almost none of them do. The math doesn't favor it until your output starts threatening the planet you're standing on, and that's roughly L6, which is roughly when the bank account also starts to make it possible. So that's roughly when people move. Some of us like the planet too much to leave. Most of us, after a while, find that we can come back when we want to and that we don't need to live here anymore."
"You don't deploy to incursions much."
"I don't, no. The incursions have not yet required me. The IEC has a strict policy about not pulling tier-eight personnel to events that lower-tier personnel can handle. They are saving us, sensibly. The math is straightforward. There are eight of us in the world. If we deploy and die, there are no replacements waiting in line. So we sit on the bench until the bench is the last option. I am, on a list somewhere, the answer to a question the IEC hopes never to be asked."
"And if the question gets asked."
"Then the answer gets given. That is what we are for."
The audience clapped for a long count.
"Last question. People are saying you could freeze the whole earth if you wanted. Is that real, or is that the kind of thing people say."
"It's the kind of thing people say." Calden waited a beat. "Probably I could. I haven't tried. I'd ruin a lot of tomatoes."
The audience laughed for a long time. Calden waved. He looked into the camera and grinned, and a kid named Eli watched him from a couch in Vaelport and decided, for the seventh time that year, that he was going to be Sevren Calden when he grew up.
It was not a single moment.
It was an op-ed in the Astren Standard about a new staffing model for incursion response. It was a panel at the IEC summit where a Khovari general said, calmly and on the record, that within five years every able adult would be expected to deploy at least once. It was a televised debate between two L6 Explorers who disagreed about whether the human side would ever return to a peace footing. The first L6 said yes. The second L6 said no, not in our lifetimes. The second L6 did not soften anything she said. People who watched the debate went to bed and did not sleep well.
Six months later, the panel got worse.
A Shenluo statistician at the IEC summit presented incursion frequency curves over the last fifteen years. The curves were not new. The curves were also not flat. She showed the room what the slope had been doing for the last six quarters. She showed the room the projection. She did not soften the projection. By the end of her presentation, the room understood that under any reasonable extrapolation the response infrastructure would be overrun within five years and possibly sooner. She closed by saying that the infrastructure was being expanded. She did not say by what. She did not say by whom.
A Valdros general, not a Delacroix, not a famous one, wrote a long-form essay for an academic journal that the public would not normally have read. The essay was titled The Reciprocal. The essay was a question, not a plan. The general's question went like this: if we are being invaded, by definition there is a place on the other end of the invasion, and by definition that place can be reached. Invasion is a road. Roads run in both directions. The general did not propose a route. He observed that the math was symmetric and wondered, on paper, whether humanity might eventually need to think about that. The essay was reposted three million times in two weeks. The general gave a single follow-up interview. He said he was not advocating. He was wondering out loud. He said somebody else, a few years from now, was going to be doing the advocating.
A Whitespire Order council member, quiet, retiring, gave a single quote to a reporter who had asked the wrong question on the wrong day. He said the children we are training now are not going to live the lives their parents lived. The quote ran on the front page of every paper in Astren the following morning. The council member resigned the morning after that. The Order issued no comment.
The predictions piled up.
The predictions had, until that year, been edge cases. The kind of thing fringe theorists posted on forums and then deleted at three in the morning when they couldn't sleep. Now the predictions were on the front page. Now the predictions were quoted on the talk shows. Now the talk shows had stopped joking about them.
Sevren Calden stopped doing the late show. He gave a brief statement explaining that he was reorganizing his training schedule. He did not return.
The dream had stopped being a clean dream a few weeks before that. Most of the kids did not notice. A few of them did.
Eli noticed.
Eli was eight by then. He still had the cards. He kept them. He stopped buying new ones.
Three days ago, in the eastern district of the Solan capital, the lockdown order came over the federal frequency at four in the morning. The order said barricade in place. Do not attempt evacuation. The order said it once. It did not repeat.
Lockdowns were the bad order. Evacuations were the good order. The IEC issued evacuations when there was time and corridors and a credible road out, and lockdowns when one or more of those things was missing. People in the eastern district had grown up understanding that distinction the way people in older countries had grown up understanding tornado sirens. The federal frequency saying barricade in place. Do not attempt evacuation meant the math on the other side had run and the math on the other side had said the road out was worse than the room you were standing in.
The woman's name was Halia. She had a four-year-old daughter named Vinn. Her apartment was on the fourth floor of a residential building two blocks from the harbor, and the lockdown had caught her there with a daughter and no time to leave.
She had moved the heavy bookshelf in front of the apartment door before the sun came up. She had moved the kitchen table. She had moved every chair she owned. She had thrown the latch on every window and checked the latches eight times. She had done what the federal frequency had told her to do, because the federal frequency had not given her any other instructions, and there was nothing else to do.
The clicks had started two hours after the order.
She did not know what made the clicks. She had heard them through the walls and through the floor and once, twenty minutes ago, in the corridor outside her door, and she knew what they meant the way an animal knew what a thing meant when the thing wanted to eat it.
Vinn was asleep in the bedroom.
Halia was at the door of the apartment, sitting on the floor with her back against the bookshelf she had pushed there. The peephole was above her head. She had stopped looking through it an hour ago because looking through it had stopped helping. The corridor was dark. The corridor had been dark since the clicks started. The light had flickered for ten minutes before it went out and had not come back.
Outside, the city was loud.
The city had been loud since the lockdown order. It was loud in the way a city was loud when the response was happening — distant booms shaking the windows in their frames, the high crack of guided rounds going down the boulevard, sirens stacking into each other in two-minute waves, something that might have been an Explorer on flight punching the air four blocks over and might have been an explosion. The IEC was in the district. The IEC had been in the district since the order had gone out. They had not gotten this far inland yet.
She listened.
There was no sound now. Not in the apartment. The city was still happening at the edges, but the apartment had gone quiet.
She had learned, in the last few hours, that no sound was worse than sound. When there was sound, the thing was somewhere. When there was no sound, the thing was also somewhere, and the somewhere was closer.
She heard a click.
It was not in the corridor.
It was in the kitchen.
Her body went still. Not by choice. The body chose for her, the way a deer's body chose, the way a thing that did not want to be seen learned what stillness was for. Her body was lake water. Her heart was not. Her heart accelerated, and she felt it in her teeth and in the skin of her chest and along the line of her jaw, and then the cold sweat came, running down between her shoulder blades and out of her hairline and along the small of her back. The cold sweat was a thing the body did when the body was about to be eaten. Halia, sitting on the floor of her own hallway, understood what the body was for.
The click came again. The kitchen counter, between the sink and the window. The window that had been latched eight times.
Below the click, she heard a sound she did not have a word for. A small wet tssss. Like a hot pan touching water. She did not know what it was. She would learn, later, if there was a later, that it was the saliva-acid the thing produced when it was hunting, sliding off its mouthplates onto the tile.
The acid sizzled against the tile floor. Very softly. The sizzling was the sound of a steak in a pan very far away. It was not far away.
She thought of Vinn.
She thought of Vinn at three, opening the cupboard under the sink and taking out the entire shelf of saucepans and stacking them in a tower in the middle of the kitchen floor, the proudest engineer in the eastern district. She thought of Vinn at four learning to write the letter V, which Vinn had been doing for two weeks before she had decided she would only sign her own name from now on with an upside-down V because the V should point up. She thought of Vinn five minutes ago in the bedroom, breathing the slow even breath of a four-year-old who had been told mama would handle it.
Halia could not handle it.
Halia got up anyway.
The floor under her registered her weight. The thing on the kitchen tile did not click. It did not need to click anymore. It had heard her.
She went into the bedroom. She closed the bedroom door behind her. She turned the latch. She put her body against the door, which was a wooden door and would not stop anything that had ever wanted to get past it for long.
Vinn was still asleep.
Halia listened.
The thing was in the corridor.
She heard it the way a person heard a thing that did not breathe doing the equivalent of breathing. A small dry rhythm at the back of an unseen throat that she did not have a word for. The acid sizzled along the corridor floor. Small tiles cooked under it. The carpet smoked faintly. The sizzling was the only sound the corridor made.
Her heart was a hammer behind her ribs. She felt it in her wrists and in the soft place at the base of her skull. She felt the cold sweat at her temples. She felt her body trying to scream and her body refusing to let it.
She put her hand over Vinn's mouth, gently.
Vinn's eyes opened.
Halia put her finger to her own lips. Vinn's eyes moved from Halia's face to Halia's hand to the door behind Halia. Vinn was four. Vinn understood.
The thing was outside the bedroom door.
Halia held her daughter, and did not breathe, and did not move, and did not speak. The cold sweat ran. The heart hammered. The body was lake water around a drum.
The door split down the middle.
The night before Adam came back, an L8 Explorer died.
Her name was Eilen Trent. She had been an explorer for twenty-three years and was much older than that. She had been on her third L8 deployment, which was the kind of deployment the IEC did not announce in advance and did not name afterward. Three L8 missions completed cleanly was a threshold the program had been chasing for as long as the program had existed. Nobody, in twenty-eight years of the Bazaar, had reached it. Eilen Trent reached it a little before midnight. She did not survive the reaching.
The morning broadcasts went out at six.
The first announcement was the death. The second was the cause of death — the IEC released two sentences and no detail. The third was the fact that the death had cleared the threshold. The fourth was the part nobody on Earth Prime had heard before.
The Bazaar acknowledges the threshold. New tier unlocked: L9. Reciprocal protocol activated. Two routes have been opened in the Hub Common Space.
The Bazaar Hub had a central plaza where the foot traffic of the high-tier residential districts converged. The plaza had, that morning, two new structures in it that had not been there the night before.
They were gates. Each was the height of a building. Each was made of something the eye registered as architecture and felt as a doorway between places. The first had a frame the color of fired bone. The second had a frame banded with veins of glassy crystal that moved when nobody was watching them.
The Hub residents felt them register before they saw them.
The first gate opened on what the IEC was calling, by ten in the morning, the Yautja home world — their planet of origin, the place they had come from when they had come for Earth Prime. The second opened on a world that was half magma and half standing crystal, a place where the Thassari and the Korrath had both, somehow, originated. The surface of it was a war between two ecologies and the war was old.
The Bazaar's announcement was clean. It did not editorialize.
Earth Prime now has the option to deploy outward. Earth Prime now has the option to hold ground in target worlds. Earth Prime now has, in effect, two fronts.
The escalation curve flattened that morning. The next batch of new species the Bazaar had been preparing to introduce did not arrive. Whatever rules the Bazaar had been running, the rules treated a third L8 completion as a threshold, and the threshold reciprocated. The general from Valdros who had asked, quietly in an academic journal eight months ago, whether the road of invasion ran in both directions, was about to be asked, less quietly, what he had meant.
Most people on Earth Prime had been asleep when Eilen Trent died. They were not asleep at six. They watched the announcement and the gates and the words L9 and Yautja home world and two fronts, and they did not know yet what to do with any of it. Most of them did not know yet that they would have to, eventually, do something.
Somewhere in Vaelport, an eight-year-old kid named Eli watched the announcement on his tablet at breakfast and did not finish his cereal. He had thought a year ago that the dream had stopped being a clean dream. He had not understood, yet, that the dream had also stopped being a defensive dream.
He understood that morning.
The world Adam came back to was a different world than the one he had left.
Three weeks before he extracted from Rusukaina, by Earth Prime's clock, the global incursion rate had jumped a third for the first time in the program's history. Two weeks before, the first Yautja-class incursion had landed in an industrial park outside Vaelport and taken seventeen lives in the eight minutes before a response team got there. One week before, a Xenomorph-class infestation had been confirmed in a port city in the Solan Confederacy, and the whole northern half of the city had been on fire by the time the perimeter held. The civilian feeds were calling it Wave Two, after Kassel. The international ones were calling it worse things.
Then, the morning of Adam's extraction, the rate had flattened. Overnight. Without warning. The curve that had been climbing for three months had cracked clean across the top and gone level, and the news stations had spent the next twelve hours catching up to the fact that something had happened in the Bazaar Hub before sunrise that had broken the slope.
The rate had stabilized at double the pre-Wave baseline. The numbers had stopped climbing for the first time since the wave started, and the news stations had spent the morning arguing about whether stabilization at twice the old normal counted as good news or as the world admitting where the new normal was going to live.
The enhanced versions had appeared in the same window. Vethrak with adaptive chitin that flexed thicker against whatever was hitting it. Thassari that ran in fives instead of threes and shared a tactical layer of intent across the team. Korrath with thermal capacity nearly double the original baseline, walking furnaces now instead of walking ovens. Dreth, weirdly, had been the species the enhancement had touched the least; the original Dreth had been a pathogen carrier whose corpse remained hazardous for seventy-two hours after death, and the enhanced version was the same with marginal differences. The other five had been redrawn. Dreth had not needed redrawing. Dreth had always mattered.
The two new ones were the part nobody had a script for yet.
Yautja-class hostiles arrived in small units, four to twelve, with stealth fields that defeated optical sensors at every wavelength the Bazaar tier civilizations had thought to test. They carried weapons humans could not reverse-engineer because the materials in those weapons did not exist in stable form on Earth Prime. They were stealth hunters and they were good at it, in the way that something which had been doing this for a long time was good at it. Their first incursion had killed seventeen civilians before the fourth one was put down. The fourteenth incursion had killed two hundred and thirty.
Xenomorph-class were the part the briefings had stopped pretending to control. They arrived in pods of two or three. The two or three turned into ten in the first day. The ten turned into a town in the second day. The IEC had quarantined three sites already. One of those quarantines had failed. The response had been to glass the perimeter and pray the wind held. Their adaptability was the part the operations briefs underlined. Their physiology rewrote itself between generations to match whatever had killed the previous generation. The current generations could shrug off the projectile that had put down the first ones. The next generations would shrug off whatever put these down.
Astren had a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Shenluo had mobilized its mass-doctrine response to a level not seen since Jianhui. Kessho's coastal cities were running daily drills. Half of the smaller countries had quietly handed their incursion response over to whichever neighbor would take it. The IEC had cut its response-time target from ninety seconds to forty.
The IEC had also pushed through emergency legislation in the second week of Wave Two. Sixteen-year-olds no longer had a choice about Bazaar acceptance; the offer-and-decline window had been replaced with a mandatory connection. Those who refused to deploy on schedule were conscripted into regular army roles in the same week the deadline lapsed. The frame around Explorer service had been "your civic duty" for fifteen years. The new frame was that the response infrastructure owned the body that had been given a Bazaar. There were lawsuits. There were going to be more lawsuits. None of the lawsuits were going to win.
The legacy families had moved faster than the IEC. The Kessler Foundation, the Delacroix family, and other houses had banded together two days after the first Yautja landing and released a series of lower-tier build paths into the open market. The paths were boring. The paths were also reliable, with predictable scaling and known failure modes, capped around L5 with no growth runway above that. The release was not generosity. It was triage. A reliable L5 was better than half the experimental L4s out there, and the houses had decided that the people who were going to survive the next decade were the ones who would not be allowed to fail at building.
People were dying anyway.
Adam read the summaries on the floor of his apartment at three in the morning because the bed felt too soft after a year of jungle. He read them until five. He slept for four more hours. He woke up to find that his apartment, with its skyline windows and its furniture he had not chosen, was the same as it had been when he left. That was the part that felt strange.
The phone call to Greyhill happened at noon.
Henrik picked up on the second ring. Adam knew within three seconds of the older man's voice that the family was alive, because Henrik had a particular way of saying his name when something was wrong and a different way when it wasn't, and the second was the one Adam heard.
"You're back."
"This morning."
A pause on the line. Henrik did not do pauses easily. The pause meant he had been about to ask three different questions and had to pick one.
"Your aunt's going to want to see you."
"I'll come down end of week. I have to finish a couple of things here first."
"Take the train. Don't —" Henrik stopped himself. "Don't fly. The flying is —"
"I won't fly. Same as last time."
"Same as last time."
There was a beat where Adam could hear his uncle exhale through his teeth, the way Henrik exhaled through his teeth when he had been worried for a long time and the worry had not quite finished getting out of him yet.
"Sophie's all right," Henrik said. "She did her first deployment three weeks ago. Capital L1. A-rank. Came back without a scratch on her, and she's been quieter than usual, and your aunt won't stop reading the report." A clatter on the other end. "Lena. Lena, I'm — yes. I'm giving her the phone. I am giving her the phone, woman, hold on."
The phone changed hands.
"Adam."
"Hi, Lena."
"Adam, are you —"
She didn't finish it. He heard her catch the word she had been about to say and put it down somewhere safer.
"I'm okay," he said. "I'm — actually, I'm okay. I came back fine."
"You don't sound fine. You sound like someone."
"Like who."
"Like someone different. Adam, what — what did they do to you out there."
"It wasn't bad. The training was good. I came back stronger. I came back stronger than I expected to."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
She took a breath. He could hear it. He could also hear her decide not to push it.
"You're coming home."
"End of the week."
"Sooner."
"All right. Sooner."
"Adam, listen. I want to tell you about Sophie before you come, because she won't tell us, and I don't want you to be surprised when you get here."
"Tell me."
"She's quiet. She came back from the L1 quiet. She does her chores and she goes to her dorm and she eats her dinner and she doesn't — she's not crying. She's not breaking. She's just — I think something happened in there that she hasn't put down yet, and I think she's been waiting for you to get back so she has somebody to put it down to. Henrik agrees with me. We didn't push."
"You did right."
"I know we did right. I'm telling you because I want you to know what you're walking into."
"I know what I'm walking into."
"All right." Another breath, and then in a different voice, the voice she had used in the doorway every time he had come home from a deployment that nearly killed him: "Just come back to the kitchen, Adam. Whatever version of you walked off that transport. We don't care which. Just come back."
"I will."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She didn't say goodbye. The line clicked off. Lena had never been good at goodbyes.
He set the phone down and stood at the window for a long minute, letting the apartment settle around him again. Sophie had done a Capital L1 and come back quiet. The Bazaar had stopped being a choice for sixteen-year-olds the same week she crossed the threshold; she had not been allowed the year of preparation he had been allowed before his own first deployment. He was going to have to sit her down. He had a framework she would be able to use. She was the right size for what he wanted to build.
He went to the kitchen to make a second pot of coffee, because that was the next thing.
She came through the door at two in the afternoon.
Adam was at the counter when his Haki picked her up at three blocks. He registered her the way you registered a song you had not heard for a long time. The shape was the same. The volume was higher. The specific frequencies were not what he remembered. By the time she came up the stairwell to his floor he had set a second mug on the counter.
She let herself in. He had given her the door code three years ago and had never asked her to give it back.
She stopped in the entryway and looked at him.
He looked back.
It was the first time in four months. He had practiced what to say in a hundred quiet hours on Rusukaina and had landed, against his own preference, on saying nothing at first. He kept to the plan. He did not say anything.
She had cut her hair shorter, the same length she had worn at fourteen and grown out of, and the cut suited her in a way the longer version had not. The way she stood was different. Not just-trained-for-four-more-months different. Something had happened to her in those four months that had taken her another year past where the first three had put her.
Adam noticed and filed and went back to the counter, because the counter was a thing he could go back to. He had been on a jungle island for a year. Certain channels of attention were going to take a few days to remember they were channels.
The scar ran the length of her left arm, shoulder to wrist.
She was wearing a sleeveless shirt, which was not the kind of shirt she would have worn before. The scar was not the kind that came from a fight you walked away from happy about. It came from something with a bigger blade than a sword trying to bisect her on the long axis. The healing was clean. Whoever had done the work had been a good surgeon. The ridge of it was a straight line, raised, pale against her skin.
She saw him see it. She did not move her arm.
"Later," she said. "Don't ask now."
He didn't ask. He nodded once. He picked up the second mug he had already set out and held it across the counter to her, because he didn't trust the first thing he was going to say not to be the wrong thing.
She took the mug.
She did not drink yet. She held it in both hands for a beat the way a person held a thing that had a known shape when nothing else around them did.
"You knew I was coming."
"Three blocks out."
"Three months ago you'd have caught me at one."
"I know."
A breath. She drank.
She studied him over the rim. Her own sensing touched his the way two people's Haki sometimes did when they had been training next to each other for years. She took her time about it. What she said when she set the cup down was simple.
"You feel different."
"I am different."
She did not push. The new Ren, like the old Ren, was a person who knew when to leave a thread alone.
She looked at the window. She looked back at him.
"We have to talk," she said. "And I want to spar."
"All right."
"Today. Both. The talk first. The talk on the roof tonight. The spar tomorrow when I can see you in daylight. I'm not — I don't want to do it in this room."
"All right."
She picked up the mug again. Her left arm came up with it. She didn't hide the scar this time. She also didn't show it. She just let it be where it was.
"Twenty minutes," she said. "I'll be on the roof."
The door to the corridor opened before either of them had moved.
Tomás had not knocked. Tomás never knocked when his hand was on the comm. Hana was behind him, already in field kit, tablet alive in her hand.
"Sit-rep coming in," Tomás said. "Yautja-class. Four miles north. Twelve confirmed, civilian district, the killing started 20 seconds ago. Vane wants Sigma-4 first on the line."
Ren set her cup down without looking at it.
"Twelve."
"Eleven plus an Elder. The Elder's the one we don't have a body count for yet."
Adam moved. The Haki pulled in around him. He read the room in a single sweep. Three teammates, two coffee cups, one window, four miles of city between this apartment and what they were about to walk into. The integrated suit under his clothes registered the change in posture. The small constant feeding it had been doing all morning sharpened into something that felt like attention.
"Spar later," Ren said.
"Later," Adam said.
They went.
Tomás's eyes flicked over Adam in the corridor outside the apartment. "You're already kitted."
"Yes."
"Where's the kit."
"It's part of me. Talk later."
Tomás filed it without comment. There were people he asked twice, and people he didn't, and Adam had been in the second category since the day Sera had introduced them.
The transport got them to the staging point in eleven minutes.
The staging point was a substation parking lot at the southern edge of the Holvik district, which was a residential belt of three- and four-story apartment buildings, a school, two markets, a small park, and the kind of streets where children rode bicycles in the afternoon. The last good sentence Adam could write about Holvik in the present tense was the last one.
Hana had the map up on her tablet before the rear ramp dropped. She read the positions in a clipped voice that Adam recognized as the one she had developed in the months after Sera. Her domain echo was already extended; he could feel the sensing pulse going out around her in a four-block radius and coming back with an overlay that mapped every living thing inside it. Eleven Yautja in active hunt patterns. One Elder anchored at the intersection of Holvik 9th and the park. Civilians moving in the panic of people who had not yet found the corridor that did not have a Yautja in it. Body count rising at a rate the tablet was displaying as a number in the corner that was incrementing in real time.
Thirty-one when Adam read it.
Thirty-three when Hana said the word go.
Adam was off the deck of the transport before her boots had cleared the ramp. The lift came up under him without effort; his telekinesis since the seal had broken had taken on the same density as his aura, and a body Adam had previously been able to lift with strain was now a body Adam could lift the way a person picked up a coat. He could feel the ceiling of it as he went off the deck. Roughly a ton and a half before the strain started. He had moved closer to twice that on Rusukaina against a stone the size of a trawler, and had not yet bothered to test the upper end because he had not, until now, needed it.
His flight cleared the four blocks in the time it took the rest of the team to step off the ramp. A hundred and ten miles an hour. The morning he left for L3-7012 he had still been writing the number on briefing forms as twenty-eight. The new number was not going on a form yet.
His Haki extended.
Eleven Yautja. He could feel them in the way a Haki user felt living intent under a layer of optical concealment. The bio-masks did nothing to hide the will of the things inside them. They were spread through three blocks of Holvik in a pattern Adam recognized from the original timeline he had walked through three years ago: stalk, herd, cull. The pattern had been refined since then. The herd was tighter now. The cull was more efficient. They had had time to study.
A child was screaming somewhere in the third block.
Adam went off the roof.
The first one was on a fire escape three buildings over, lining up a plasma shot at a woman dragging two children toward an alley. Adam was on the fire escape with him before the plasma cell had finished charging. The Yautja's head turned. Adam's right palm met the back of its neck, and the Haki Adam pushed through the back of its neck did not break the skin. The thing's eyes went unfocused. It dropped. The plasma caster fell, charge unfired, off the fire escape and into the street.
Internal destruction was a quiet technique. Adam was glad about that. The street did not need more sound right now.
The woman with the two children registered nothing of what had just happened above her and kept running. That was the part Adam wanted.
The second one was in the alley she was running into.
Adam's TK pulled the Yautja off the wall it had been clinging to and put it through the brick face of the building opposite, which was four meters of structural masonry and not a wall designed to absorb a thrown four-meter humanoid. The Yautja's optical cloak failed on impact. The bio-mask broke. Adam was already past the alley before the woman's eyes had caught up to where the body had hit.
Three and four came together. They had been working as a pair, herding a group of seven civilians toward a sealed loading dock at the back of a market. Adam landed in front of the group and put both Yautja through the brick of the loading dock with TK lifts so heavy the dock collapsed inward. The cloaks failed on impact. The wrist blades came out anyway. Adam used external destruction on the closer one and watched a four-meter armored hunter sit down hard against the loading dock with a hole punched through the front of its torso plate from the air the strike had cleared. The other one took a Dodon Beam through the bio-mask.
Four down. Twelve to seven.
He did not slow.
To the south, a block and a half away, his Haki picked up Ren's signature touching a Yautja's. He didn't have to look. He had been reading the shape of her CE for three years, and the shape of it now was different in a way he already knew was going to be terminal for whatever was on the other end of it.
The Yautja's head came off.
Adam saw the after-image of her motion through his Future Sight. Left arm, the scarred one, swung casually as if she were brushing a curtain aside, fingers closing around the bio-mask, the wrist torquing the way her family had probably taught her to torque a wrist. The neck was thicker than a human neck. It did not matter. The head and the spine separated about halfway down the trapezius. The body fell, the head bounced once on the asphalt, and Ren did not stop walking.
The second Yautja in her sector tried to backpedal.
She was on it before its boots had moved. He could feel her CE flow now, the way it had been flowing in the old days plus an axis of physical reinforcement that her family had clearly poured into her bones for the last four months. Her strikes carried mass behind them in a way they had not before. The second Yautja's chest plate cracked. The second hit took the head clean.
Two for her.
To the east, an empty patch of street.
Adam's eyes registered nothing in the patch. His Future Sight did. A column of intent was moving through the street faster than his retinas could pin it to a body. He pulsed Haki at it.
Tomás reappeared on the far side of two Yautja with their throats opened, blade flicking, eyes calm. He had been a blur for less than a second and a half. Adam clocked the Haki signature: Chakra, layered with a kekkei genkai Adam had not seen Tomás use before. The release was a compression-and-eject pattern, the way a thrown stone moved through the gap between throw and impact, except Tomás's whole body had been the thrown stone.
Swift Release.
The kekkei genkai Tomás had been saving for since L3 advancement. It was here. It was online. It was the difference between Tomás being a strong L3 striker and Tomás being a man who could split the gap between two enemies in less time than the second one had to know there was a first.
Adam filed it.
Two for Tomás. Eight down. Three Yautja and the Elder remaining.
Hana was on a rooftop two blocks away, tablet in one hand, comm in the other, voice level. Her domain echo was running wide, and the map of every living thing in a four-block radius was layered on her field of view. Adam's Haki picked up the way her sensing pulse went out and came back. She was not engaging hostiles directly. She was pushing civilians along corridors that the Yautja's positions did not cover. Every twenty seconds she sent a vector to the Kerenth response substation and a streetlight switched to red, herding traffic away from the kill zones. Three buses had already been routed empty out of the district before the team's transport arrived. The drivers did not know they had been moved by a captain with a tablet.
Hana flagged a Yautja in the third block trying to break west to chase a group of children Hana had already vectored out. She marked it for Adam.
Adam took it from a hundred meters out with a Guided Volley. Nine.
Two left, plus the Elder.
The eleventh died in the sequence Adam was learning to call his ordinary work since the cliff. He closed the gap of fifteen meters in a single TK pull, set his palm against the chest plate, and pushed. The Haki he pushed through the plate did not break the plate. The damage happened inside. The Yautja sat down. It did not get up.
The Elder did not bother with the cloak.
It was bigger than the standard Yautja, almost human-bull in size, with the chest piece of an officer and a pair of wrist blades that telescoped to a length that should not have fit in the wrist mounts. It snapped them out in one motion. The bio-mask was set to red. The skull behind it had three trophies hung from the dreads. Two human, one Yautja. Adam catalogued the detail and decided he would think about it later.
It addressed Adam in something that wasn't language.
Adam pulled internal Armament into his right arm to the elbow. He added external destruction on top of it. He did not bother with Kamehameha. The Elder was not a mountain.
The Elder closed.
Their first exchange lasted half a second. Adam took a wrist-blade strike on his Armament-coated forearm and felt the shock travel up to his shoulder and stop there. The Elder felt the recoil come back through its blade the way a man felt a punch to a wall and registered, for the first time in its life, that the small humanoid in front of it was a problem of a different category than the small humanoids it had been hunting all morning.
It tried to disengage.
Adam did not let it.
He stepped past the second strike, set his palm against the Elder's chest plate, and pushed. The Haki he pushed through the chest plate did not break the chest plate. The damage happened where the lungs had been. The Elder's eyes went unfocused the way the first one's had gone unfocused, except this one's were trained eyes, and Adam saw the moment they registered what had happened to the inside of its body and decided, in something that approximated speech, to take it like a soldier.
The Elder dropped.
Adam let it.
He looked up.
To the south, the last Yautja was running. Not stalking. Running. It had cracked its bio-mask off and was sprinting north toward an open boulevard with the unmistakable posture of a thing that had decided survival was the project. Tomás appeared next to it for a half second and did not bother to engage. The Yautja was a hundred meters from the substation perimeter when Hana flagged it for Ren.
Ren took it from the rooftop she had moved to. She didn't use her hands this time. She dropped her CE field on the running Yautja in a single contracting envelope. The Yautja's stride broke as if every joint had been clamped at the same instant. It went down hard into the asphalt and didn't get up.
Twelve.
The street was quiet.
The body count on Hana's tablet had stopped at thirty-one.
Sigma-4 stood in four positions across three blocks of a residential district that had stopped being a residential district about twenty minutes earlier. The silence that followed was the silence of a city that had nearly become a different kind of city, and had decided, by the work of four people and a tablet, to be itself again.
Adam stood at the intersection. The Elder's body was at his feet. He counted his reserves. Twelve hundred units expended out of a pool he was learning to call a hundred and fifty thousand. He had not made a dent.
He looked at his right hand.
Aldermere had been the same kind of bodies. Sera's funeral had been three days after that. That had been two years ago, and the team had been four. The team was four again now, and the math felt different.
He let the thought through and let it go.
Tomás appeared next to him without warning. "Eleven and the Elder. Nobody on our side hurt."
"Civilian count."
"Thirty-one. Could have been worse."
"It will be worse next time."
Tomás nodded once. He sat down on the curb with his elbows on his knees and closed his eyes the way men closed their eyes when they were shedding the heat of a kekkei genkai they had used at full pull. Adam noted the posture and did not bother him.
Hana came down off the rooftop. Ren walked over from her sector with Yautja blood on her left forearm, the scar running through it. Nobody said anything. The cleanup teams were already arriving at the perimeter. The substation comms were lit up with after-action chatter. Twenty minutes from now they would be on the transport home.
Ren stopped beside Adam.
"You used something I haven't felt before," she said.
"On the Elder."
"On the Elder. Different from the rest. Different even from what you've changed into. Newer."
"Internal destruction Armament."
"Where did you learn it."
"From an expert."
"Of course you did."
She did not say it angry. She said it the way a person said it when she had already known the answer before she asked the question, and was confirming for the file. She walked past Adam toward the transport. Adam stood at the intersection one more beat. He looked at the dead Elder. He looked at the buildings. He looked at the corner of the park that was still on fire.
He went to the transport.
The transport was quiet on the way back.
Ren was wiping Yautja blood off her left forearm with a torn piece of bio-mask cloth. Tomás was sitting with his eyes closed, breathing in the rhythm of a man who had used his kekkei genkai four times in twelve minutes and was paying for each one. Hana was on the comm with operations, signing off her after-action report in real time, voice level, hand steady on the tablet.
Adam was sitting against the bulkhead, facing the rear ramp, with his eyes on his own hands.
He had used twelve hundred units of Nen in the engagement. About one percent of what he had walked into the city carrying. The new reserves had not noticed. He had not tested most of what he had come back with. The Elder had taken less than ninety seconds. The civilians had taken longer than that, and the math of which one mattered was the math he was not going to run on the transport.
He had too much in his head.
Hana broke the quiet from her seat across the deck. She did not look up from her tablet.
"They still haven't issued anything."
Adam looked at her.
"The gates," she said. "The L9. I've been checking on the way back. Nothing from the IEC. Nothing from Astren. Nothing from Shenluo. Kessho put out a statement that's three sentences long and says nothing. Most of the planet found out about it at six in the morning and the governments are still in their first round of internal meetings."
"They don't know what to do with it."
"They don't know what to do with it. Astren wants a coalition. Shenluo wants the IEC to handle it. The IEC wants six months. Whatever they want, they're going to get nothing first, because there is nothing to give yet."
"And in the meantime."
"In the meantime, the gates are open and most of the L6-and-up are sitting in the Hub with one of those gates a five-minute walk from their front door. Three of the bigger guilds have already announced exploratory parties. The Whitespire posted a recruiting reel an hour ago. Whatever's coming next, it's not going to wait for the policy."
Tomás opened his eyes without lifting his head. "How long until somebody on a guild squad does something stupid in there."
"Twenty-four hours," Hana said. "Maybe forty-eight. The IEC will spend a week pretending it didn't happen."
"And then."
"And then everyone reacts and nobody has a plan."
Adam thought about that for a long count. Two fronts open.
The world was about to get more complicated.
The uncertanty was at its highest. That was the part he could fix.
He opened the Bazaar.
The L4 store rendered in the airless space behind his eyes. He had not bought from it before. He had been thinking on the way out of Rusukaina about a healing factor or maybe the Fa Jin he had filed as a sleeper buy a long time ago. He scrolled to take a first look at what he could now see.
The standard L4 listings rendered in the order he expected them to render. Reactive durability lines. Healing factors at three different price tiers. Mid-tier kekkei genkai. The Fa Jin he had been thinking about, three thousand NP, no surprises.
He scrolled past the expected and stopped.
There was a listing he had never seen before.
It sat at the top of a sub-category that had not existed in the L4 store the last time he had checked. The sub-category was labeled Unique Skills. The listing under it was labeled Great Sage.
Adam stared at it.
He inspected.
Great Sage
Class: Unique Skill (Analytical / Cognitive)
Tier: L4
Cost: 51,000 NP
Description: Autonomous analytical entity bonded to user cognition. High-throughput analysis, parallel processing, accelerated calculation, predictive modeling, knowledge index, technique diagnostic, enemy ability assessment. Personality and capability envelope expand with use.
Evolution path: dormant; criteria undisclosed.
Unlock status: AVAILABLE — Efficiency Index threshold (95.0) crossed.
The threshold line was the part that took him a second.
Ninety-five point zero. He had been at 90.1 after the HxH return. He had not seen an update to the number since. He had assumed the metric was static or that the Bazaar had stopped tracking it on his account, and he had stopped checking. The Index had not been static. The Index had been compounding, the way everything else in his build compounded, for two years. Somewhere on Rusukaina or in the morning on Earth Prime when the One Piece ratings had finally posted, he had crossed ninety-five.
And the Bazaar had unlocked something for him.
He pulled up his pending notifications. The Legendary Index reward from yesterday's mission assessment was still sitting in the corner of his vision: PENDING REVIEW. Additional notification to follow. That was the offer that had been waiting for him to look at it. The Great Sage listing was a standing exclusive the Index had triggered on the moment of threshold-cross. The Legendary Index reward was a discrete one-shot the system had cooked specifically for him.
He opened it.
LEGENDARY INDEX REWARD — INDIVIDUATED
Issued: post-extraction L3-7012,
Efficiency Index ≥ 95.0
Type: Bloodline acquisition voucher, single-use, non-transferable
Subject: Perfected Viltrumite Bloodline
Standard catalog cost: 300,000 NP (locked behind L7 advancement)
Voucher-discounted cost: 100,000 NP
Voucher restrictions:
• Must be redeemed within 365 days of issuance.
• No additional discounts may be applied (Catalysts, store sales, Index thresholds).
• Voucher expires unredeemed; bloodline returns to standard catalog at L7 cost.
• Tier-locking is waived for the holder.
He read it twice.
He read it a third time and made himself stop.
He pulled up the standard Bazaar entry for Viltrumite, because the standard listing was the comparison his head needed in order to understand what the voucher was actually worth.
Viltrumite Bloodline (standard)
Cost: 230,000 NP
Tier: L6
Description: Hereditary alien physiology. Defining feature: smart-atom cellular substrate. Body matter responsive at the atomic level — self-repairing under damage, self-optimizing under sustained load, capable of reconfiguring tissue toward use. Strength, durability, flight, healing factor, near-immortality. Trainable. No resource cost in maintenance. No corruption risk.
The standard entry was at L6 and a seventy thousand NP cheaper than the voucher's source price, which meant the L7 Perfected upgrade was a straight stat improvement on the L6 baseline that Adam, even at his current tier, could not yet have walked into the store and bought. The voucher was a key that opened a door three rooms ahead of him. The voucher was also a clock.
He had been planning, for three years, on something else.
A Saiyan baseline at the L7 store. The listing was the one he had been opening with breakfast for two years, the way a man opened the housing market with breakfast when he was thinking about a house. He pulled it up now and looked at it for the first time in months.
Saiyan Bloodline (low-class warrior baseline)
Cost: 400,000 NP
Tier: L7
Description: Hereditary humanoid alien physiology. Combat-bred body. Zenkai mechanic — significant strength increase upon recovery from near-fatal injury. Trainable to extreme tiers. Transformation tree available for sustained use under emotional conditions.
Four hundred thousand. He had known the number. He had not let himself argue with the number until tonight.
The Zenkai mechanic was the line that had been sitting in his head for months as a question he had not finished answering. The whole appeal of Saiyan was the trainable ceiling. There were Saiyans in the source material who broke the laws of the world they lived in. The whole risk was the path you walked to get there. Zenkai required near-death. Specifically the kind he had brushed against at Marineford, on Rusukaina, and twice in the L3 sweep before that. The math of repeating that on purpose for two decades to grow was not math he had wanted to look at directly. Saiyan was the bloodline you bought if you were willing to die a little every Tuesday.
Viltrumite was not.
Viltrumite gave you the body and let you keep it. The Perfected line gave you the body and made it permanent at a level the L7 store hadn't even meant to release yet.
He kept scrolling. Two listings he had earmarked over the last two years sat where he had left them.
Devil Bloodline (lesser)
Cost: 280,000 NP
Tier: L5
Description: Demonic infusion at the cellular level. Defining feature: native compatibility with infernal energy systems and accelerated tissue regeneration scaled by dark-energy intake. Pain receptors muted at the neurological level — high pain tolerance is a side effect, not the goal. Lifespan extended; aging slowed to a crawl. Trainable to higher tiers via demonic pacts, each of which carries a binding clause negotiated separately at the time of pact. Transformation tree available: partial-form and full-demon configurations, both with combat amplification. Carries low-grade corruption risk over decades; soul-erosion management is the user's problem.
Super-Soldier Serum (Erskine variant)
Cost: 10,000 NP
Tier: L4
Description: One-time cellular-level enhancement.
Defining feature: peak-human scaling across every physical attribute — strength, speed, endurance, reflex, pain tolerance, recovery — capped at the absolute ceiling unaugmented biology can support. Predictable. No transformation tree. No mechanic for advancement past the ceiling. Soul-amplifier component noted in the original research: the serum amplifies the user's existing character at the moment of application. A good man becomes a great man. A bad man becomes worse. Training improves use of the ceiling, not the ceiling itself. No corruption risk. Foundational layer for stacked builds; cheapest entry in the L4 bloodline tier.
He scrolled past those without dwelling. They were each a step up from where he was. They were each a step short of the voucher.
He scrolled to the L6 store. He stopped.
Asgardian (Bloodline)
Cost: 300,000 NP
Tier: L6
Description: Divine-class physiology.
Defining feature: scaling potential bound to a domain-aspect chosen at acquisition — storm, frost, fire, war, healing, deceit, song, others by negotiation with the bloodline at intake. The chosen aspect functions as a personal energy specialty that compounds with the body across millennia of training. Very high baseline durability and strength. Lifespan measured in millennia rather than centuries. Trainable to extreme tiers; the ceiling has not been mapped because nobody has lived long enough at the bloodline to find it. Personal weapon affinity available: at sufficient mastery, the bloodline allows the user to anchor a personal artifact that scales alongside the user across the lifespan. No corruption risk.
He had never seen the Asgardian listing as anything but a hypothetical before. Three hundred thousand. He had thirty-six thousand. The L6 store was a window he was looking at through glass that was thicker than him.
For the first time in three years, he was not paralyzed by lack of options. He was paralyzed by too many.
He could lock in Viltrumite tonight by skipping Great Sage and saving the next year's earnings for the voucher, which left him without the analytical second mind and which left him fighting a worse Earth Prime at his own raw cognitive ceiling. He could buy Great Sage tonight and grind for the voucher within the year. He could ignore the voucher altogether, let it expire, and save longer toward the Asgardian line at three hundred thousand or some other ceiling he hadn't yet identified, on the theory that divinity-scaled durability might age better than baseline viltrumite strength against a world that was getting weirder every quarter.
His thumb did not move on the listing. He had never sat in front of the Bazaar and not known what to buy.
He had to make himself sit with it. He ran the math the way Sage would run it later, when he had Sage. Great Sage at 35,700 with the Catalyst left him at three hundred and seventy NP and uncovered overwhelming analytical ceiling. The voucher's hundred-thousand price was reachable in twelve months at his post-Wave-Two earning rate, three or four L4 expeditions plus an L5, plus framework consulting fees if the framework went public on schedule. The voucher's clock did not extend. The voucher would not be there after 12 months no matter how hard he ran.
The optimal play was Great Sage now and the voucher in eleven months. The optimal play was also the play that locked him into a path the Bazaar had handed him, in an order the Bazaar had chosen, with a clock the Bazaar had set.
He thought about that for a long count.
The Bazaar was not sentient. The Bazaar did not pick people. The Bazaar did, however, run on rules he could not see all of, and the rules had produced a sequence in the last forty-eight hours that pointed in a single direction. Index threshold cross. Great Sage unlocked at ninety-five. Legendary Index reward issued as a Viltrumite voucher with a year-long fuse. Standard Viltrumite still locked behind L6. Asgardian still locked behind a wall he could see but not climb. The path the Bazaar had laid out was a path. He could refuse to walk it. He could not pretend it had not been laid.
He filed that question. He filed it the way he filed Combat Instinct, the autonomous signal in his arm, and the bathroom question. There was an answer somewhere. The answer was not for tonight.
For tonight he had a decision.
He closed the alternatives one by one. The standard Viltrumite. The Saiyan. The Devil. Erskine. Asgardian. The L4 healing factor. The Fa Jin. Everything else he had been carrying for the last six months. He left two windows open. The Great Sage listing. The Legendary Index reward block.
He would buy Great Sage. He would grind for the voucher. If he made the hundred thousand inside the year, he would lock in Viltrumite and walk into the next decade of his life with a body that did not have to die in order to grow. If he did not make it, the voucher would lapse and the math would be different and he would solve the new math then.
He did not buy yet.
He looked at the listings for one more long count. He told himself he was being thorough. He was not being thorough. He was sitting in the moment of looking at his own future as a thing the Bazaar had spent two years pointing him toward.
He closed the windows.
Across the transport, Ren had stopped wiping the blood off her arm and was watching him.
"You're in there," she said.
"Yes."
"For a long time."
"I had a lot to read."
"You'll tell me."
"Maybe I will."
She smiled to that.
The transport touched down at the substation. The team disembarked. Hana walked straight to the debrief room. Tomás peeled off toward the medical bay to check what the kekkei genkai had cost him today. Ren walked beside Adam toward the corridor that led out toward the residential block. Twenty minutes from now they would be on the roof of his building. The conversation that costs would happen there. He had something else to do first, in the morning, when he could sit with the buy and not rush it.
He had a Sage to install.
He kept walking.
AN: Big chapter today, I hope you enjoy. As Always if we get to 500 power stones, an extra chapter will be released. For extra content, visit [email protected]/skeri123.