Karl almost made it out of the house clean.
The staircase split in two on the way down, and he took the left side because it was closer, and because the right side had a painting on it that had been looking at him since last night. His borrowed shirt had been washed and folded and returned to him at some point while he was sitting on a throne in his world.
He was four steps from the front door when a voice caught him in the back.
"So you’re the boy."
Karl turned.
A woman was standing in the archway to the sitting room with a cup in both hands, still in a robe, hair pinned up with something that looked expensive enough to be a weapon. She had Elsa’s eyes exactly. It was unsettling how quickly he noticed that.
"Ma’am."
"Ma’am." She repeated it, delighted, and came a few steps closer. "My husband said you were polite, good to know he wasn’t wrong."
"He did?"
"Meh, not important. Anyway..." She sipped her tea. "You’re Kazu."
"Yes, I am."
"Mm. Interesting, quite the name you got there." Her eyes moved over him without hurry, the split lip, the way he was standing with his weight off his left side. "You look worse than she described. She undersells things when she’s worried."
Karl didn’t have anything for that. He stood there holding a plastic bag with his own ruined jacket in it.
"Take care of my daughter," she said.
"I—"
"That wasn’t a request, and it also wasn’t a threat, so you can stop making that face." She smiled into the cup. "Elsa has been comfortable for two years. Comfortable is a lovely thing for a girl to be, and it is a terrible thing for her to stay. Then you turned up and she left a team, called her father crying, and spent all of last night reorganizing her entire contact list on the floor of the landing. I don’t know what you are yet. But she’s awake."
"She was going to leave that team anyway."
"She was going to talk about leaving that team for another six years." Mrs. Marinet set the cup down on a side table and folded her arms. "If you need help, come to me. Not to him. He’ll help you eventually, but he’ll make you earn it twice, and he’ll enjoy the second one."
"Why would you help me?"
"Because you asked why instead of saying thank you." She turned back toward the sitting room. "Go home, Karl. I am sure your parents are worried about you."
The door closed behind him and he stood on the drive for a second, blinking in the light.
’Should i be worried about this?’
[Charlotte notes that the Administrator is bad at accepting things.]
’Not now.’
...
The apartment was empty when he got in, which he knew before the door was fully open, because the air was cold and the kettle hadn’t been touched.
His phone had a message sitting on it from four hours ago.
{Mom- Picked up the Sunday shift at the depot. Home late. There’s soup, eat the soup, I will know if you didn’t. Was the teammate’s house nice? Was the teammate a girl}
{Mom- I’m going to assume yes to both}
Karl read it twice, typed three different replies, and sent none of them. He put the phone face down on the desk, dropped onto the edge of his bed, and looked at nothing for a while.
Eleven days. That was what was left of the two months, more or less, depending on whether the man with the toothpick counted the way normal people counted.
’Alright.’ He lay back with his arms behind his head. ’System. Show me everything I’m walking in with.’
The panels unfolded across his ceiling, pale and cold over the water stain.
[EXP balance: 700.]
[Skills: Clear Vision. Steel Nerve.]
[Bonded hero: Charlotte. Bond interaction: 100 percent.]
[Bonded hero: Raziel. Bond interaction: 0 percent.]
[Feature unlocked: Link.]
Karl stopped on the last one.
’That’s new.’
[Correct. Link becomes available at full synchronization. This unit will explain, as the Administrator will otherwise ask six questions in the wrong order.]
’Please.’
[Standard dive: the Administrator’s consciousness is placed inside the hero. The hero is a body. The Administrator is the one moving it.]
’Right. That’s what I’ve been doing.’
[Under Link, that arrangement ends. During a match, the Administrator will occupy the Personal Domain. He will be seated. He will not move.]
Karl sat up.
’Seated. You mean I’d be sitting on a chair in an empty hall while my team plays a tournament match.’
[Correct.]
’And Charlotte?’
[Charlotte will occupy the arena.]
’So she plays.’
[Incorrect. Both parties share input. Both parties share sensation. Neither party leads.]
The words came a fraction slower than usual.
[The Administrator will see through her eyes while remaining in his own body. He will feel the ground she stands on. Her decisions and his decisions will arrive at the same time, because under Link there is no meaningful distinction between them.]
Karl was quiet for a long moment.
’So two in one kind of thing? intresting.’
[Correct.]
’What happens if she dies?’
[Respawn timer. The Administrator remains seated. Steel Nerve will dull the sensation. It will not remove it.]
’And if the link breaks mid-match?’
[The Administrator returns to his pod. The hero remains standing in the arena, performing nothing, until he returns.]
A pause.
[This unit advises the Administrator not to be startled by doors.]
’That happened once.’
Karl dragged both hands down his face. Outside, a bus went past and rattled the window in its frame.
’Can anyone tell? From outside the pod.’
[Negative. The pod reads vitals and helmet contact. Both will be present. The Administrator will appear to be a diver having an ordinary match.]
Then, in the same brackets, in a voice that had stopped being the same for a while now:
[Charlotte would like to finish what she was saying when the door opened.]
’Go ahead.’
[She says that she has waited a long time to be on the same side of the wall.]
[She says she will not waste it.]
[She says the Administrator should sleep, because she can feel that he has not.]
Karl looked at the ceiling.
’Tell her thanks.’
[She heard you. That is the entire point of the wall being gone.]
He lay back down. Seven hundred EXP, and a watchtower cost four hundred, and a watchtower did nothing except generate a slow trickle of more EXP. It was the smallest possible move on the board. He wanted to make it just to see the empty hall have something in it.
’After the tournament,’ he decided. ’Whatever I earn in the bracket goes in at once. No point building a shed when I can wait a week and build a street.’
[Noted. This unit approves of patience it did not have to teach.]
His phone buzzed against the desk.
{Elsa- FOUND THEM}
{Elsa- Both of them. Fourth and fifth. Real players, before you ask, I checked their accounts, I watched VODs, I did not pick anyone’s cousin}
{You- Where did you find two players in three days}
{Elsa- I have my ways masked man}
{Elsa- We register them at the venue on the day, organizers allow roster submission until an hour before the opening bracket. Just show up and sign}
{You- You’re not going to tell me who they are.}
{Elsa- Nope}
{Elsa- Consider it interest on the wish}
Karl set the phone down, and did not go to sleep for a while, and when he finally did, he slept better than he had in a month.
...
The day came the way big days do, which is to say it was suddenly just there.
The venue was three stops past the registration hall, a real arena this time, with cameras on rigs and a queue that had been forming since before the sun cleared the buildings.
Banners hung down the whole face of the building. Somewhere inside, someone was testing the sound system, and the login theme kept starting over and cutting out.
Karl came up the steps with his hood forward and the mask already on. His ribs had stopped complaining. His hands were steady. He checked that on purpose now, every time.
He spotted Elsa immediately, because she was waving with her whole arm the way she waved at ships.
Sana stood beside her with her ponytail pulled tight and a bottle of water she wasn’t drinking.
And behind them, two more.
The first was a tall guy Karl didn’t know, hands in his pockets, looking at the banners.
The second was a girl standing slightly apart from the group, arms folded, wearing a smooth featureless full-face mask with nothing showing but her eyes.
Karl stopped walking.
She looked straight at him.