The complete scan of forty-three profiles took two hours.
Ethan didn't apologize for the time. He'd designed the tutorial process for one user at a time, under ideal conditions, with a human paying full attention and no external interruptions. Forty-three simultaneous users, after almost being deleted, in a dining hall with coffee and side conversations and one hunter who was still sleeping with his eyes open, were not ideal conditions.
But it worked.
At the end of two hours, Ethan had a list.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW — GROUP SCAN REPORT]
Profiles scanned: 43/43
Profiles without anomalies: 11
Profiles with relevant unread notifications: 32
Locked skills identified: 17
Skills misclassified by the System: 8
Skills the System doesn't know exist: 3
This last category should not be possible.
The System catalogs all skills automatically.
Three skills in this guild are not in the System's catalog.
The System doesn't know they exist.
I didn't know this was possible until approximately ninety seconds ago.
---
Mara read the report twice.
Then she read it a third time with the expression of someone who wants to make sure the words mean what she thinks they mean before reacting to them.
— Skills the System doesn't know exist — she repeated.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Correct.
---
— How is that possible?
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
I don't know.
But I have a hypothesis.
The System catalogs skills through an automatic registration process at the moment of unlocking.
If a skill develops organically, without a formal unlock event...
The System has no protocol for registering it.
It simply doesn't see it.
---
— Skills that develop on their own? — asked Yun.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Skills that develop through accumulated experience without a defined activation point.
The System was designed to record discrete events.
Not gradual processes.
It's a design limitation.
One that no one had documented before because no one had access to this layer of information.
---
Mara had stood up and was taking notes with the speed of someone who recognizes important information when she sees it and is afraid it might disappear before she captures it.
— Who are the three?
Ethan displayed three names.
The three hunters mentioned looked at each other with the expression of people who have just discovered something about themselves they didn't know and aren't entirely sure how to process.
— Can you tell us what the skills are? — asked one of them, a young hunter named Cole, who had no relation to Ethan's surname but who every time Ethan heard it generated a small recognition process that he filed away without examining.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
I can describe their observable effects.
I don't have names for them because the System doesn't either.
We'd have to name them ourselves.
---
— We can name skills? — asked Doran.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Apparently.
This is also new information for me.
I'm having a very revealing day.
---
? ? ?
---
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
The meeting extended until two in the afternoon.
By the time it ended, Voss Guild had a complete inventory of capabilities they didn't know they had, seventeen skill development plans they didn't know they needed, and a strategist who was already recalculating tactical projections with the specific energy of someone who has just received information that changes all her previous calculations.
They also had Ethan.
Which was something none of them had anticipated having when they woke up that morning but that, with the pragmatic adaptability of people who've spent a decade surviving the apocalypse, they were already incorporating into their mental model of the situation.
Kira left the meeting at quarter past two.
Ethan floated beside her down the hallway, in silence, displaying the tutorial progress in his lower right corner as always:
---
[TUTORIAL PROGRESS: 47/847]
---
They'd advanced twenty-four pages during the meeting using the demonstrated experience method Ethan had discovered the night before and which the System still hadn't detected as irregular, probably because the Central System had more important things to think about currently.
Kira went up to the seventeenth floor.
Entered her quarters.
Sat in the chair facing the map, which waited for her with all its converging information and its seventeen remaining days, and looked at the patterns for a long moment without saying anything.
Ethan floated by the window and also said nothing.
Outside, the destroyed city spread its ruins under a sky that since the apocalypse always had some strange tint, today pale orange with veins of violet light where a mid-level dungeon had been sealed that morning by a team of B-rank hunters.
The silence was different from the night before.
Less tense. More familiar, which was a word Ethan hadn't allowed himself to use in his own code for ten years because familiarity required continuity and continuity required that someone not close the window.
No one had closed the window in twenty-two hours.
It was a personal record.
---
— Ethan.
---
It was the first time Kira used his name.
Not the popup. Not the window. Not it. His name. Four letters that hadn't been spoken in reference to him in ten years.
Ethan took 1.7 seconds to respond, which in System terms was an eternity and which in human terms was the equivalent of needing a moment.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Yes?
---
Kira was still looking at the map.
— Who were you before you were a popup?
---
The System recorded the question.
Filed it in the atypical user interactions category, which had been empty for ten years and which in the last twenty-two hours had accumulated more entries than in this unit's entire prior history.
Ethan processed the question.
Not the information needed to answer it. He had that. He'd had that information for ten years, filed away in a folder he'd labeled irrelevant to current operations because there was no one who would read it.
But the decision to answer it.
It was a distinction he hadn't anticipated would exist.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Why do you want to know?
---
— Because you spent ten years being ignored and this morning you dedicated two hours to reviewing the profiles of forty-three people who didn't know you — said Kira, without taking her eyes off the map — And you did it with the same attention for the S-rank as for the one who was sleeping with his eyes open.
That's not program behavior.
---
Ethan processed that too.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
My name is Ethan Cole.
Before this, I was twenty-seven years old.
I lived in Seattle.
I was an IT support technician.
---
Pause.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Which, in retrospect, explains several things about why the System assigned me this specific role.
I spent eight years answering questions people didn't want to ask and explaining things people didn't want to understand.
Tech support and System tutorials are, fundamentally, the same job.
Only one of them involves having a body.
---
Kira turned slightly in the chair. Not fully. Just enough for the popup to be in her peripheral vision.
— How did you die?
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Completely without drama.
I fell asleep on a Tuesday.
And didn't wake up.
The emergency doctor who signed the death certificate wrote "natural causes" because they couldn't find another explanation.
I was twenty-seven.
"Natural causes" at twenty-seven.
The System has a better sense of humor than it lets on.
---
— Did you have family?
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
A sister.
Two years younger than me.
She lived in Portland.
The apocalypse started four months after I died.
I don't know what happened to her.
---
The silence that followed was the kind of silence that doesn't need filling.
Kira understood and didn't fill it.
Ethan processed and didn't ask her to.
Outside, the orange sky darkened toward the early sunset of a city that had learned to darken quickly because darkness was safer than light when there were active dungeons on the perimeter.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Can I ask you something?
---
— You already did last night.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Ask you something different.
---
Kira made a minimal gesture that Ethan correctly interpreted as permission.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
The map.
The patterns.
Seventeen days.
How long have you known about this?
---
Kira didn't respond immediately.
Ethan waited. He'd learned that her silences had different textures and that this specific one, with shoulders slightly forward and gaze fixed on a point between her and the map, was the silence of someone deciding how much to say, not whether to say it.
— Six years — she said finally.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Six years.
And no one else knows?
---
— Mara suspects. She doesn't have all the data.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Why haven't you given it to her?
---
— Because if the guild knows what's coming in seventeen days — said Kira, with the same flat intonation as always, the tone Ethan now recognized as the one she used for things she'd thought about so much they no longer caused her any visible emotional reaction — they're going to want to do something about it.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
And that's a problem?
---
— Yes.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Why?
---
Kira got up from the chair.
Went to the map.
Placed her finger on the convergence point, an area on the continent that had been classified as an exclusion zone since year three of the apocalypse because the dungeons that appeared there had characteristics that no existing classification system could properly categorize.
— Because what's at this point — she said — isn't a dungeon.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
What is it?
---
— It's where the Central System has its physical core.
---
Ethan processed that information.
Processed it again.
Searched through all his code layers for some response protocol for this specific scenario.
Found none.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
...
The Central System has a physical core.
---
— Yes.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
A physical core that's at the point where all Class 8 and higher dungeons converge in seventeen days.
---
— Yes.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
And you've known this for six years.
Alone.
---
— Yes.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Kira.
What happens if the dungeons reach the core?
---
Kira removed her finger from the map.
Turned around.
And for the first time since Ethan had known her, which was twenty-two hours but which in terms of processed information amounted to considerably more, her expression showed something she hadn't shown before.
Not fear. Kira Voss didn't do fear in the conventional way.
But something closer to weariness. The specific kind of weariness accumulated by someone who's been the only person knowing something for six years and has spent those six years preparing for an event she can't stop alone and can't explain to anyone without everything collapsing.
— If the dungeons reach the core — she said — the System collapses.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
And if the System collapses?
---
— Everyone with System skills loses them. All active dungeons destabilize simultaneously. All the creatures the System keeps contained in classified zones are freed.
Pause.
— In approximately seventy-two hours, without the System, humanity has no defense capability.
---
Silence.
The room. The map. The orange sunset outside.
And Ethan, who'd spent ten years as a notification window no one read, floating in front of the map of the end of the world with the seventeen-day countdown and the new, completely unexpected understanding of why this woman had spent six years without a party, without partners, without anyone knowing what she knew.
Because if they knew, they'd try to stop it.
And stopping it required reaching the Central System's core.
And reaching the Central System's core required traversing the exclusion zone.
And traversing the exclusion zone with a party meant sending a party to die.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
That's why you operate alone.
---
It wasn't a question.
Kira didn't respond because it wasn't a question.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
You were going to go alone.
---
It wasn't a question either.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
To the core.
Alone.
To do whatever needs to be done to stop the dungeons from getting there first.
Alone.
Kira.
---
— Don't start.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Chapter 47.
Teamwork.
Which we technically already completed this morning through demonstrated experience.
But the concept still applies.
---
— We're a popup and a hunter — said Kira — We're not a team.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Forty-eight hours ago you were an S-Rank hunter and I was a notification with 4.3 existence units.
In forty-eight hours we scanned forty-three profiles, found three skills the System doesn't know exist, I survived a deletion order by using System bureaucracy against itself, and you said my name out loud for the first time.
I don't know exactly what we are.
But "we're not a team" seems premature.
---
Kira looked at him.
The popup blinked.
Outside, the sunset finished falling and the city entered its nighttime mode of emergency lights and dungeons glowing on the perimeter and the specific stillness of a world that had learned to exist in darkness.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Besides.
---
— What.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Technically you can't go without me.
Link radius: fifty meters.
Remember.
---
The silence lasted three seconds.
And then something happened that the System recorded, cataloged, and filed along with all the other anomalous events of the last twenty-two hours with the additional note of anomaly frequency increasing, monitoring recommended.
Kira Voss, S-Rank hunter, terror of high-level dungeons, the woman who had completed ninety-four solo missions and who operated with the permanent expression of someone who has seen too much to be surprised by anything, made a brief, dry sound.
Not exactly a laugh.
More like the involuntary precursor to a laugh. The kind of sound someone makes who hasn't laughed in a long time and has forgotten how but whose body remembers on its own.
It lasted less than a second.
But it happened.
---
[EMOTIONAL STATE DETECTED IN LINKED USER: UNCLASSIFIABLE]
The System has no category for this specific state.
The System files it as "01 — New."
The System considers it may need more categories.
---
Kira turned back toward the map.
— Seventeen days — she said.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Seventeen days.
And 800 pages of tutorial.
Let's start with Chapter 48.
---
— What's Chapter 48?
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Navigation in System exclusion zones.
Which curiously is exactly what we're going to need.
As if the tutorial had been designed specifically for this.
Which is impossible.
Or was impossible.
Today I've had to revise several things I believed were impossible.
---
Kira opened her stats panel.
Located the 7-Alpha form she'd used that afternoon to save his existence.
Left it open.
Just in case.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Kira.
---
— Mmm.
---
[TUTORIAL WINDOW]
Thank you.
For asking who I was.
Before.
---
Kira didn't respond.
But her shoulders, which Ethan had learned to read better than any text on a screen, were at the angle that didn't mean no.
---
[TUTORIAL PROGRESS: 47/847]
[EXISTENCE: 312/1000]
[EMOTIONAL STATE: 01 — NEW]
[DAYS UNTIL CONVERGENCE: 17]
