Then, just before it went, the blue line tried to square itself, like a box testing its corners in the dark.
It held, faint and exact; the corners tightened—a bracket completing itself around nothing.
[Class Interface: Bound]
Jace didn't breathe. The characters were not on the wall or the bench; they were wherever his eyes landed, hovering at the point of his focus with the precision of a heads-up display. He blinked. The bracket stayed.
[Class Panel: Unlocked][Reading host capabilities for evaluation…][Evaluation complete.]
The bracket widened into a pane. Text populated like frost racing across glass.
[Current Mastery Detected][lv1 Basic Combat Arts → Base Profession Eligible: Brawler][lv3 Basic Firearms Mastery → Base Profession Eligible: Gunsmith][lv4 Basic Mechanical Repair → Base Profession Eligible: Mechanic][Please select your profession.]
His heart kicked, then slowed like it had been told to. He pushed himself upright on the cot, boots whispering against fabric. The bench was a rectangle of darker dark; the gooseneck lamp leaned as if listening.
"Alright," he said, voice thin. "What exactly do you do—and what happens if I pick one?"
The blue refreshed, polite as paper.
[This system assists the host in improving profession-related skills and attaining maximum class potential.][After job selection, the host gains profession XP from daily work and life, increasing class level and skill levels.][Leveling skills increases work efficiency.][Leveling the class unlocks core abilities and higher-tier job-change permissions.][After reaching the max level of a base profession and meeting certain conditions, you may change jobs to a Tier-1 profession.][Example: Mechanic (primary) + Gunsmith + Unknown Condition = Tier-1: Battle Mechanic.]
A weightless heat climbed his spine. Tier-1. A path forward that wasn't just not dying.
One more line slid in, smaller.
[Each class level grants a physical attribute increase. The effect depends on the profession.]
He felt the decision move toward him like a train in a tunnel. Brawler meant durability—more body to spend against the world. Gunsmith meant better firepower and the kind of respect that came with it. Both implied leaving the vault more often. Both implied offering his not-quite-right arm to the wastes as a bet.
Mechanic meant staying exactly where he was and doing what he already did—only faster, cleaner, stronger, with a system behind him that turned survival into numbers.
"I need XP I can actually earn," he said, more to the air than to the pane. "If I go outside now, I die before I ding."
He wet his lips, which tasted of metal and old air. "If I pick a base class, can I pick another later?"
[After your current base profession reaches max level, you may select another base profession.][Base profession level cap: 10.]
Ten levels felt like a reachable wall.
He didn't ask what the "unknown condition" was for Battle Mechanic. He would find out by getting there.
"Mechanic," he said.
The pane answered with a soft chime that did not touch his ears so much as it found his bones.
[Mechanic selected.][Mechanic (lv1: 0/1000)][Core Ability unlocked: Machine Affinity (lv1).][Effect: You perceive mechanical constructs more clearly and learn mech-related knowledge faster.]
Jace's skin prickled like cold wind had found a door into him and chosen to stay. The shop sharpened in increments: the line where oil met dust; the faint, different gray where the bench had been wiped cleaner than the rest; the exact angle the lamp sagged to when left alone. Under the new clarity, memory sorted itself with a librarian's hands—old lessons filed where he could find them without reaching, missing pieces labeled with neat tags that read need part, need torque spec, need time.
His right arm ached. He peeled the tape back with his teeth and checked by touch more than sight. The purple edge felt less raised. He didn't trust that, but he didn't argue with it either.
He stood, slow to keep from toppling the afterimage. It tracked with him. He crossed to the bench and turned the lamp on; its weak circle fell across the pile of guns under the canvas cover. He pulled the canvas aside and let the cold of the metal meet the cold in his chest.
"Let's see if you really pay out."
He chose a rifle that would be safe to start with—no hairline cracks around the chamber, no warped barrel, a trigger group that someone had already half-stripped and then chickened out on. He set it down and, without looking at the pane, said, "Log work?"
The pane needed no invitation.
[Task Registered: Routine Repair — Bolt-Action Rifle.][Difficulty Rating: Easy.]
He didn't smile. He tore it down to assemblies: stock off; bolt out; trigger pack out; pins lined in a cheap dish that had once held candy the winter the mess ran sugar. He cleaned without wasting solvent, brushed grid and grit from the rails, stoned a burr that had felt wrong under a thumbnail a moment ago and now felt obvious. Machine Affinity didn't hand him new hands; it made the hands he had tell the truth louder.
He reassembled and ran the bolt. Clean. He checked headspace with a gauge he'd made from a spent casing and a known-good base. Okay.
The pane chimed.
[Repair completed.][Gain: Mechanic XP +5][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +10]
The numbers were small and exactly what he could afford. He set the rifle on the cart and pulled the next.
The next needed more love: firing pin scarred enough to drag, chamber pitted. He replaced the pin with a salvage match after filing the tip to spec, then went at the chamber with a gentle polish, slow because corners wanted to round and the world punished the impatient. He didn't think about how much faster this would go at level three or five or ten. He thought about not getting someone killed.
[Repair completed.][Gain: Mechanic XP +5][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +10]
He established a rhythm he could ride without burning out the arm: tear, clean, check, replace, reassemble, function test, log. The pane didn't fill the room with noise. It chimed and went quiet like a partner who knew when to hand you a wrench and when to shut up.
Between pieces he noticed the thread of difference Machine Affinity made in learning itself. The old man's voice—the way he'd said let the part tell you what it wants to do—didn't fade at the edges anymore. The parts spoke in a register he could hear: not words, but rightness and wrongness, the weight of a spring that wanted one more millimeter of preload, the faint protest of a pin that didn't like the angle of approach and asked to be reversed and tried again.
He made himself drink water. He made himself stretch the bad arm to keep blood moving—even though flexing it lit up a strip of pain. He kept every completed gun on a separate section of the cart, muzzle flags obvious, actions locked open. He stole a look at the pane and caught the progress bar low but alive, a blue worm nibbling at a horizon.
Nothing about this felt like salvation. It felt like now there's a metric.
After the tenth gun, he stopped and rubbed the heel of his hand against his sternum where the chime settled each time. Not painful—just present. The bad arm had stopped trembling for long stretches. He tested grip strength against the bench edge and logged the gain into a mental notebook he trusted more than the real ones left on shelves to mold.
He reached for the eleventh, then paused, hand over the canvas that still hid the bottom shelf. Under there lay his mentor's "someday projects." One was a dual-range shotgun with a choke adjuster that had felt like cheating when it worked—years ago, before the core module turned to flake. The other was a chainsaw longblade, a hybrid the old man had called either genius or stupidity depending on how much cough he had that morning.
He lifted the canvas and looked. Both projects were exactly the wrong thing to touch when you were trying to stack safe XP and avoid burning hours. Both were exactly the right thing for reminding a body that fixes mattered.
"Not yet," he told them, and returned to the queue that paid.
The pane found his discipline acceptable. It paid in small coins. It wasn't stingy. +5, +10, +5, +10—a rhythm of light steps across a very long bridge.
He hit a rifle that had been cleaned with something that had etched the bore: harsh chemical, bad idea. He set it aside. He didn't have the barrel to replace it. Later, when the number next to Mechanic meant pull & fit in an evening instead of a week.
On a pistol with a cracked grip frame, he made himself stop before trying to stitch metal that wanted to stay broken. He braced the crack and wrote unsafe on a tag with a marker that stank like old licorice. The pane did not award or deduct for restraint. It wrote [Task Abandoned: Safety] in small letters and did nothing else.
He re-learned motions he'd taught himself with the old man: how to breathe so the file tracked true; how to use noise as a gauge; how to stop before the good edge vanished. He talked to the room sometimes, low, to keep the shoulders from tensing. He made a joke about the lamp. The lamp refused to be improved by humor.
By the time his stomach reminded him he'd paid it in plant mush and lies, the blue bar had crawled farther than he expected. He blinked grit out and focused.
[Mechanic (lv1: 385/1000)][Basic Mechanical Repair (lv4 → 5)][Skill Up.][Additional memory paths opened; error-detection sensitivity increased.]
The skill-up felt like someone had pulled a tarp off a shelf in his head and left the inventory labeled. Torque sequences that had been fuzzy sharpened; failure modes he'd met once three winters ago came back with timestamps and smells.
He put his hands on the bench and let that settle, then turned his head—a slow, careful movement he had taught himself not to compromise—and squinted at the purple line along his arm. The edge hadn't rolled back much, but the burn under it had gone from needle to wire. He could work through wire.
"Okay," he said, quieter than before. "Okay."
He reset the queue, found one with a seized extractor, and did the dance with heat that freed it without tempering the part into uselessness. The pane rewarded the patience with the same +5 / +10 duet and no confetti.
A noise in the corridor made him freeze—boots, then voices, then a laugh that did not belong to anyone who fixed things for a living. He set the rifle down and covered the muzzle flags with his palm as if that could hide the volume of the room. The voices moved on. He stood very still until his pulse slid back under his breastbone, then breathed out so slow the bench took the weight of it.
He sipped water; it tasted like the pipe wanted to teach him about iron.
Work resumed.
When the cart's second tier filled, he locked every action again and draped the canvas to make the guns look less like value and more like junk. He turned to the bottom shelf. He let himself look at the dual-range shotgun, at the longblade assembly lying in a cradle of rags. He told the longblade he saw it. He told the shotgun he would not shame it by trying it tired.
A thought arrived with the plainness of a tool laid ready.
Test Machine Affinity deliberately.
"Fine," he said. He closed his eyes, put one finger on the bench, and played what he had just done back in his head. The file on the extractor; the pressure he'd used to keep it from skating; the tiny burr left after the release. In the mental replay, the burr magnified and gave off a wrongness, like a note out of tune. He opened his eyes and checked. There it was—so small he'd have called it acceptable yesterday.
He didn't now. He removed it. The piece moved more like itself after that.
"Good trick," he said. "Stay."
The pane offered nothing for that besides quiet.
He fought the urge to rush the bar. Rushing was a tax you paid twice. He kept the pace that would still exist if he woke tomorrow with less arm. He kept the habit of tagging anything he couldn't fix safely with unsafe and writing why, because the worst day was the one where you had to read notes written by a version of yourself who had lied.
When he finally reached for the two projects again, it was because the room had become too much a machine and not enough a reason. He needed a reason. He cleared space in the middle of the bench and lifted the longblade assembly onto it. The teeth were dull and the chain had rusted to unity; the drive sprocket had been removed and then mislaid by a past Jace who had not had Machine Affinity to remind him that losing a sprocket was a kind of sin.
He found the sprocket in a bin two shelves down, under springs that wanted to be sorted. He set it where it belonged and didn't fit it yet, in the same way you write a name before you mean it. He laid out the dual-range shotgun beside it, and for a moment the bench looked like a promise.
The pane seemed to approve of intent, or perhaps only of organization.
[Work Registered.][Optional: Track Project Milestones?]
Jace paused. The words were the first he'd seen that asked for a preference instead of stating a fact.
"Yeah," he said. "Track. But don't nag."
[Tracking on. Notifications minimal.]
"Good." He touched the longblade's spine with two fingers, then the shotgun's rib, as if knighting them into his next set of hours. The motion was stupid and private and made him feel steadier.
The bar sat at [Mechanic (lv1: 615/1000)], slow but moving. He could taste what level two would be like: the same hands, a notch more sure; the same parts, a notch more willing.
His right arm had not gotten better by miracle. It had gotten possible. He could work inside possible.
He picked up a flat file and pulled the longblade closer, the teeth catching a sliver of lamp-light. The vault breathed. The duct above him sighed. He was so tired he could taste copper. He put the file down again.
"Tomorrow," he said to the projects, "I make you sing."
The pane, for once, answered with silence. Then, as if thinking better of it, it chimed one small, clean note.
[Milestone 0/4: Bench Prepared.][Next Suggested Step: Assess chain; source replacement links or reforge.]
He snorted a laugh he didn't feel like laughing.
"Congratulations," he told the invisible thing living in his field of view. "You've learned my language."
[Acknowledged.]
He flinched at that—at the way the pane's reply felt not only like a printed line but like a listener.
"Alright," he said, talking himself back to center. "Alright."
He covered the cart again. He stacked the completed guns cleanly and locked their straps. He checked the door latch twice. He felt the pull to lie down fight the pull to do one more repair and decided in favor of not ruining tomorrow with a boast today. He hated the decision and made it anyway.
On the bench, the two big pieces were a horizon he could walk toward. Above the bench, his world reduced to brackets and counts and tasks, the blue pane waited.
It waited the way a held breath waits—for an answer that is mostly action.
[Mechanic (lv1: 640/1000)]
The number posted and held.