The main concourse of the District 3 Rifters Association Hall was built like a cathedral for people who got paid to kill monsters.
White-granite pillars rose fifty feet to a vaulted ceiling inlaid with glowing blue Qi-channels, washing the whole marble floor in bright, even light. Enormous holographic boards floated above the crowd, scrolling through bounties, core exchange rates, and regional guild rankings. Thousands of mercenaries and scouts and hunters moved beneath them in a tide of leather and steel, and the air smelled of gun oil, sweat, and somebody's expensive incense.
I'd only made it as far as the plaza steps before turning back. Rifts meant contracts, and the contracts were on the boards inside. So I crossed the concourse again, past the registration counters, Chen's boots thudding steadily on the polished floor, my new badge cold in my hand. FREELANCER-88492-D3. It wasn't fancy, but it was the first thing I'd ever owned that said I was allowed to be somewhere.
I tucked it into my jacket and looked up at the boards.
A quiet contract, I thought. Something to test my techniques on. A few thousand points.
"Hey! Watch where you drag those filthy boots, beggar!"
The voice cut across the murmur of the hall, sharp and ringing, from right in front of me.
I stopped and lowered my eyes from the boards.
Three teenagers had planted themselves in the wide marble walkway that led to the contract desks. They were about my age, and that was the only thing we had in common. All three wore matching dark-green silk tunics with a silver serpent crest over silver-threaded trousers, and ornate short-swords with ivory hilts in gold-filigree sheaths. The one in the middle was a stocky, broad-shouldered kid with slicked-back black hair and a sneer folded into the corner of his mouth.
He was glaring at my boots.
"I'm talking to you, trash." He took two steps forward and jabbed a finger at the faint grey trail of dried sewer mud my heels had left across the spotless marble. "You're tracking lower-sector sludge across the concourse. Who let a homeless vagrant into the Hall without an escort?"
I looked down at my boots. Then at his face.
Oh, I thought, with a strange, weary clarity. There you are. I wondered when you'd show up.
It wasn't Jax. The hair was different, the voice was different, and the silk was more expensive than anything Jax's father had ever bought. But it was the same sneer. The same hunger to feel big at someone else's expense. I'd seen it on forty different faces in forty different ways, and I'd always known what it meant: I am afraid of being the one on the floor.
"The floor was dirty before I walked on it," I said evenly, and tried to step around him. "Excuse me. I'm headed for the board."
His face darkened. He slid sideways to block me again, and his two friends fanned out to flank him, arms crossed, grinning.
"Did I say you could move?" he barked, loud enough to turn a dozen nearby heads. "Do you know who I am? Julian Verrin, of the Verrin Family, a vassal martial house under the District 3 Regional Council! My father owns three spirit-stone mines in the upper valley!"
I blinked once.
I let a thread of Soul Sight wash over all three of them and flicked Inspect open.
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: JULIAN VERRIN]
Race: Human
Spirit Cultivation: Qi Condensation Realm — Level 3
Body Cultivation: None (Minor Medicinal Saturation)
Mind Cultivation: None
Soul Cultivation: None
The other two were worse. Weak, gassy clouds of Qi in their bellies, capped at Level 2. Soft muscles. Stiff postures. Bloodlines that reeked of expensive spirit-nourishing pills, the kind parents bought by the case to push their kids through academy entrance exams. Three spirit-stone mines' worth of pills, and this was the result.
The third boy, thin, with an ink stain on his cuff, wasn't smirking. He kept glancing from the growing crowd to Julian and back, with the face of someone who'd stopped enjoying the party an hour ago and didn't know how to leave.
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To an unawakened orphan in District 9, a Level 3 kid from a noble house would have been terrifying. To someone with seven levels of Spirit, a Primordial Core, and Ironhide in his skin, Julian looked like Jax in a nicer shirt.
"Congratulations on the mines," I said. My voice had no inflection at all. "Can I pass now?"
Julian's sneer froze.
In a hub like District 3, noble kids were used to commoners stammering and bowing and stepping off the walkway when they raised their voices. My flat, tired indifference hit his pride like an open hand.
"You arrogant little rat." His face flushed a deep, ugly red. He dug into his tunic and brandished a shiny silver E-Rank Rifter badge two inches from my nose. "I'm an official E-Rank, bound for the Academy! You're wearing a cheap grey iron token! An F-rank wanderer doesn't talk to an E-rank noble without bowing!"
"Right," I said, looking past his shoulder at the board. "E-rank. Very impressive. Have a good day, Julian."
I took one step to the right and kept walking.
That broke him.
"Don't you turn your back on me!"
He lunged. His right hand shot out like a claw, a thread of sloppy yellow Fire Qi sparking around his fingers, grabbing for my collar. He meant to yank me off my feet and drive me to my knees in front of the whole concourse.
I didn't draw on my core. I didn't use a technique. Hyper-Cognition ticked up one notch, the world going thick and slow, and I simply shifted my weight two inches to the left.
SWISH.
His hand closed on empty air.
He'd thrown everything into the lunge, expecting me to fold under the pull. Now there was nothing to catch. His momentum carried him past my shoulder in a long, awkward stumble, boots skidding on the marble, arms windmilling. He crashed chest-first into a brass-framed bulletin stand, sent a snowstorm of paper contracts into the air, and tumbled sideways into a decorative marble planter.
CLATTER!
A ripple of snickers ran through the crowd.
"Nice form, kid!" called a grizzled guild hunter lounging against a pillar, pewter mug in hand. "The planter never saw it coming!"
Someone else laughed outright. Julian scrambled up out of the dirt, his green silk dusted with potting soil, his slicked hair hanging in his eyes, his face looking as if it might burst. "You," he gasped. "You bastard."
He tore the short-sword out of its sheath with a ringing SCHWING.
The blade flared a bright, erratic orange as he dumped every drop of his Level 3 Qi into it. His friends drew too, shuffling into a rough triangle to block my exit. The thin boy drew last and held his sword like it was a snake that might turn on him.
"I'll carve those dirty eyes out of your face!"
Gasps rippled through the crowd. Nobody moved. In the Association Hall, scuffles between arrogant nobles and wanderers were a daily fixture, as long as nobody died on the main floor. Across the concourse, a pair of guards at the far door had started drifting this way, hands on their batons, with the unhurried air of men who'd seen this a hundred times.
Julian charged, the flaming blade raised overhead.
I watched it come toward my ribs, and the cold, quiet part of my mind laid out the costs.
If I hit him, he dies, it said. A Tyrant Shattering Strike to a Level 3 chest will collapse it. The guards will lock down the Hall. They'll want a name. They'll want a municipal token. They'll want to know where I'm from.
You can't afford to be interesting. Leave.
I breathed in and let a single thread of spatial Essence run down into my heels.
[TECHNIQUE ACTIVATED: VOID-SHIFTING PHANTOM STEPS (BASIC)]
ZIP.
Julian's sword came down with everything his Level 3 pool could muster, straight through the image of my chest.
SLASH!
There was no resistance. No blood. No tearing cloth. The blade passed through my torso as if I were smoke.
For half a second, my body stood there in front of him, a dark, silver-black afterimage wearing my calm, unbothered expression, before it burst into fading specks of light.
"What the..." Julian stammered. His blade struck the marble with a bright spray of sparks.
He whirled, eyes wide, turning a full circle. His two friends stared at the empty space where I'd been, mouths hanging open. The thin boy took a step back from all of them.
Thirty feet away, beneath the grand arch that led toward the public rift terminals, I stepped out of a soft silver blur. My bag was on my shoulder. My clothes were exactly as ragged as they'd been a second before, and no worse. Chen's boots rested firmly on the stone.
I turned my head and looked back across the marble at Julian, who still stood beside the wreckage of the planter with a smoking sword in his hand.
I could have left it there. I wanted to. But something in his face, the stunned, sweating, furious face of a kid who'd just discovered the floor wasn't solid, tugged at me.
"Keep practicing the sword, Julian," I called, not unkindly. "The planter almost got away."
The whole lobby exploded into laughter. Hunters slapped their knees. Merchants chuckled behind their hands. A couple of the Association guards shook their heads with dry grins and turned back to their posts.
Julian's face went from red to a deep, violent purple. He opened his mouth, and what came out was an incoherent roar.
I didn't wait to hear the rest.
I walked through the arch and out of sight, and only there, in the cool shade of the corridor, did I let the smile drop.
That was stupid, said the cold voice. You've made an enemy in a city where you can't afford one.
I knew. I'd known the moment the last sentence left my mouth.
But there was something else under it too, a small, uncomfortable ache. I thought of Jax's hand clenching and unclenching at his side on the morning of the ceremony. I thought of how I'd told him You'll be fine, Jax, and meant it, and how much harder it had been to hate him after that.
I should have left the planter out of it, I thought. I'm getting careless.
I shook it off, rolled my shoulders, and went to find a job.