Days blurred into a rhythm none of them tracked closely anymore, dimension after dimension, coin after coin, until the counting stopped feeling like counting and started feeling like breathing.
By the time anyone thought to add it all up properly, Almond and Lily had claimed eighteen coins between them. Rudra and Ainen had claimed seventeen more.
Thirty-five, out of a hundred.
"Thirty-five," Marcus would have said, if Marcus had been there to say it, and instead it was Ainen who said it out loud, turning the number over at a quiet table between fights. "That's more than a third. And we still don't know if it's enough."
It wasn't a guess born of nerves. Coins changed hands in this event in ways beyond simply finding them. Every X-ranker who died rather than withdrew left their coins behind for whoever claimed the ground they fell on, and more than once Regalon's own total had climbed on the back of someone else's ending rather than their own search.
