Akira's POV
This ceiling was familiar.
White, flat, unremarkable. I had spent enough time staring at hospital ceilings in the past month that I was beginning to develop opinions about them.
This one had a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the far left corner that the previous ceiling hadn't had which meant I was in a different room than last time, which was the first useful piece of information the morning provided.
The second was that my shoulder had been dressed while I was unconscious, clean bandaging, tight enough to be professional, which meant someone had found me at the guild gate and made decisions on my behalf while I wasn't in a position to make them myself.
The third was Vanessa LaRoy sitting in the chair beside the bed, reading something on her tablet with the focused patience of someone who had been there long enough to find things to do.
She looked up when I moved.
"Good morning," she said, in the tone of someone for whom good was doing significant heavy lifting in that sentence.
I pushed myself upright slowly, cataloguing damage as I went. Shoulder, already established. Ribs on the left side, a deep specific ache that sharpened when I breathed too fully. A bruise along my jaw I didn't remember earning, probably the first wall impact. Nothing that felt structural. Nothing that felt like three weeks of unconsciousness.
Heavens mercies if you ask me.
"How long this time?" I said.
"Fourteen hours." She set the tablet down. "One of the night handlers found you at the gate around five in the morning. You were conscious enough to give your name and address, which was useful. Your mother…"
"Is she here?"
"She was. I sent her home two hours ago. She hadn't slept." A pause. "She argued."
"She always argues."
"I noticed." Something in Vanessa's expression acknowledged this without quite becoming warmth.
"She'll be back by noon. You have until then."
Until then for what went unasked because the answer was already visible in the way she had positioned herself, not at the edge of the visit but at the center of it, her chair pulled close, her posture the specific quality of someone with things to say and time allocated to say them.
I simply waited.
She looked at me for a moment in the assessing way she had, the way that moved across a situation and found its edges before committing to a direction. Then she reached into the bag beside her chair and set something on the bed beside me.
A folder. Printed sheets, not digital, which meant she had wanted this conversation to have physical evidence in it.
"Your quest log from last night," she said. "The guild receives a copy of all active missions when a registered hunter is brought in for medical treatment. Standard protocol."
I looked at the folder without making even a single move towards opening it.
"You want to tell me what you think happened last night," she said. Not a question. The tone of someone who already had the answer and was giving me the opportunity to arrive at it myself before she supplied it.
I thought about the dungeon. The weight of the creature on my chest. The dagger connecting. The system's clean congratulatory text.
"I cleared the dungeon," I said. "Killed the dungeon head."
Vanessa was quiet for a moment.
"Open the folder," she said.
Finally I opened it.
The quest log was laid out in the guild's format, which was more detailed than the system's version and organized differently, cross-referenced against the gate's own activity record and the hunter's physical condition on recovery.
I read through it in the order it was presented.
'Gate classification at entry: D rank. Standard.
Gate classification at collapse: D rank. No upgrade event recorded.
Dungeon head status at collapse: Eliminated.'
I got to the line below that and stopped.
'Dungeon head classification: Demon Wolf. Sub-rank: Low tier D. Final confirmed member of an otherwise cleared dungeon.'
I read it again.
Then I set the folder down on the bed and looked at Vanessa.
"The dungeon was already mostly cleared," I said.
"The gate had been flagged for three days," she said.
"A B rank team went through it Tuesday evening, cleared six of the seven demons inside, and logged the head as eliminated. They were wrong about that last part. The wolf they logged as a standard kill had actually retreated to the lower passage."
She said it without editorializing, the flat delivery of someone presenting facts that were going to do their own work without assistance.
"By last night it had technically re-established dominance over an empty dungeon, which was enough to keep the gate active. Which was what triggered the upgrade countdown."
"You didn't walk into an active D rank dungeon and kill the head," she said.
"You walked into a mostly empty dungeon and killed the last wolf standing, which happened to be occupying the head position by default because everything else in there was already dead." She paused.
"That's what collapsed the gate."
I looked at the ceiling briefly. The hairline crack ran patient and indifferent from the light fixture to the corner.
The system had told me I had killed the dungeon head. The system had been technically accurate, in the way that things can be technically accurate and still completely misleading.
"The S rank warning," I said.
"What about it?"
I caught myself. Vanessa didn't know about the system. Nobody knew about the system, and that was the way it was going to stay, because the list of complications that would follow from the system becoming general knowledge was tedious.
"Nothing. I thought I read the gate classification wrong on the way in."
She gazed at me in a way that screamed out the fact she didn't believe a word I was saying but I was too tired and apparently not stupid to risk a thing.
"Your condition on arrival was consistent with someone who had sustained significant injury fighting a low rank demon at close quarters," she said instead.
"Which is its own kind of information."
There it was. I had known it was coming. Had felt it building from the moment I opened the folder, the gap between what last night had felt like from the inside and what it had actually been.
I had gone into a mostly empty dungeon at D rank, fought one wolf that was low tier even by D rank standards, and collapsed at the guild gate from the injuries sustained doing it.
"Show me my stats," Vanessa said.
I blinked. "What?"
She held out her own tablet, already open to a hunter profile page with my name at the top.
"Your registered stats. They update automatically on guild record whenever a hunter's physical assessment is completed in a medical facility. I've been looking at them for the past hour."
I looked at the tablet.
The numbers were laid out in the guild's clean formatting, categories and values side by side. I had known, abstractly, that the system tracked these things, had seen my own internal version of them since shortly after waking up on Dune for the first time.
But the internal version and the version displayed on a tablet held by Vanessa LaRoy in a hospital room were different experiences.
HP: 100 / 1000.
That was the first line and it was enough to make the rest of the reading feel like a formality. One hundred out of a possible thousand. I was currently at one hundred because fourteen hours of sleep and professional wound dressing had brought me up from whatever I had registered at when they'd found me at the gate, and one hundred was where I had landed after recovery, which meant one hundred was the ceiling.
Strength: 45 / 500. Rated: Below average.
Mana pool: 200 / 2000. Rated: Developing.
Speed: 60 / 500. Rated: Below average.
Defence: 30 / 500. Rated: Low.
I read through all of it.
Then I set the tablet down on the bed beside the folder and looked at my hands, which were the same hands I had been looking at since I first woke up in this body and which had not, in that time, done anything to suggest they were capable of the things I needed them to be capable of.
Vanessa was watching me with that assessing quality of hers, waiting to see what I was going to do with the information, whether I was going to perform something at her or simply sit with it.
The numbers were not a surprise, exactly. I had understood, intellectually, from everything the system had told me in the hospital about rank and capability, that F rank and D rank both sat at the bottom of a very long structure. I had understood that the gap between where I was and where I needed to be was significant. I had spent four days in a hospital bed building frameworks for that understanding and telling myself I was taking it seriously.
Forty-five strength out of five hundred.
I wasn't taking shit seriously enough.
The wolf last night had hit me twice and put me on the floor twice and opened my shoulder and cracked at least one rib and I had survived it by getting underneath it and stabbing upward while it was already committed to a downward strike.
That was not skill. That was geometry and luck and the wolf's own momentum working against it in the final second.
Against anything that didn't make that mistake, I was not going to last long enough to find a second option.
"You're not going to say anything," Vanessa said. Not in an accusing tone but rather in a observations kind.
"What would you like me to say?"
"Most hunters in your position say something defensive. Or something ambitious. Usually one immediately followed by the other." She picked up her tablet and looked at the stats again briefly before setting it face-down on her knee.
"You're not doing either."
"The numbers say what they say."
"They do." She was quiet for a moment. "You have a bonded Celestial Dragon and an A rank dagger and a stat sheet that belongs to someone who should be running courier missions between gate monitoring posts."
She said it without cruelty, which somehow made it land heavier than cruelty would have. "That's the actual situation. Not the version where last night was a dungeon clear and certainly not the version where the dragon bond means you're ready for what comes next. The actual one."
I looked at her. "I know."
"Oh do you now?"
"Forty-five strength," I said. "Thirty defence. Yes."
Something shifted in her expression. Slight. The quality of someone recalibrating again, the way she had in the beast hall when I had walked out of the enclosure.
"The gap between where you are and where that dagger requires you to be is not a small one," she said. "But it's a closeable one. If you're honest about it."
"I'm being honest about it."
"Then we'll see." She stood, picked up her bag, straightened in the efficient way she did everything.
"Base level missions when you're cleared. Nothing above your actual capability until your actual capability changes."
She looked at me once more, the full assessing pass. "Gleam will be transferred to a housing unit near the main guild building. You can visit during off-mission hours."
"Understood."
She moved toward the door, then stopped without turning around. "The wolf," she said. "Low tier D rank, mostly empty dungeon, and you still drove the dagger in and kept moving until it stopped." A pause. "That part wasn't nothing."
Then she left. And I was so sure I had seen the ghost of a smile on her face.
I sat in the room with the folder and the tablet she had deliberately left behind and the hairline crack in the ceiling and the numbers laid out in my head in the clean unadorned way that true things arrange themselves when there's nothing left to argue about them.
The system screen appeared at the edge of my vision, quiet and unbothered.
[Host current rank: D.]
[External classification: D.]
[Guild record: D.]
As if it knew what I was thinking. As if it wanted to be clear that the two columns; what I was on paper and what I was in actuality, were going to diverge, and it was going to be the only thing tracking both.
I looked at the HP line again in my head. One hundred out of a thousand. Then I looked at the strength line. Forty-five out of five hundred.
I thought about the wolf and the wall and the floor and the dagger going in, and about the fact that I was here to read about it afterward rather than not being anywhere at all.
I had a really long way to go.
I knew that now the way I hadn't known it yesterday, not in the part of me that actually believed things as opposed to the part that processed them as information.
The ceiling crack ran from the light to the corner and the morning light came through the window at the angle of something that had been doing this for a long time without requiring acknowledgment.
I lay back down and stared at it and started, quietly and without drama, rebuilding my understanding of where I actually was.