The warm lights of the restaurant left the smoky, gloomy Solasgard air behind the door. As the smell of meat sizzling in the cast-iron pans in front of us rose, Elisa dove into her plate with the pride of the bet money she'd won. Elena, on the other hand, was still sitting in a silence full of guilt, occasionally looking at me and trying to smile.
"Relax already," I said, sticking my fork into the steak. "My nose healed, nobody died. It was just a survivable experience."
"But I really feel awful," said Elena, turning the glass in her hand. "I mean, I wanted to fight you because... I don't know, I see you every day leaning against that column, not talking to anyone. But in that fight just now, in those few minutes, it was as if I was facing a different person. Why don't you always act like that?"
Her question stopped me for a moment. Elisa put down her fork too and looked at me curiously, as if she wanted to ask the same question but had never dared. "Because there's no meaning in acting like that," I said in a flat voice. "What happened just now? I fought seriously for a few minutes; result: my nose broke, I lay in the infirmary, and now my sister is paying her debt by buying me steak. That's the price of seriousness."
"But you were winning," Elena said insistently. "You were predicting my route, reading my moves. How do you do that?"
"My Control stat is high," I said, shrugging. "I'm good at reading Chi flow, at understanding who's going to send Chi where. But that's a talent, not effort. I'm like this by birth." I had deliberately praised myself a little too.
"Even so," said Elena, her voice growing a little more serious. "Talent isn't enough, is it? My speed comes from birth too, but if I didn't train every day I couldn't even control that speed. You don't even use the talent you have."
Elisa cut in with a smile. "That's exactly what I'm always telling him, Elena. My brother is the very symbol of laziness."
"It isn't laziness," I said, going a bit on the defensive. "It's arithmetic."
"That's the same sentence with a better word in it."
I opened my mouth to answer and found that she was right, so I closed it again.
"And if you don't get there, or if it's too late?"
My sister had asked me that on Friday, in almost those words. I hadn't answered her either.
Instead of answering, I changed the subject. "Why do all of you think I'm going to die suddenly? Don't worry, I won't die. If there's one thing I hate more than pushing myself like an idiot, it's dying like an idiot. Anyway, this conversation has gotten very serious, come on, let's finish our meal."
While I stuck my fork into the steak and cut off a piece, I turned my gaze to Elisa, this time to change the subject completely.
"Elisa," I said, lowering my voice slightly. "I was thinking about what you said the other day while we were sitting with Master Ren... What do you think about the Master's confusing approach to this System?"
Elisa chewed and swallowed the bite in her mouth, then took a sip of water from her glass and fixed her eyes on me with a mocking smile on her face.
"What the Master says?" she said, waving her fork in the air. "Brother, for heaven's sake. Don't you know that irrational longing old people feel for the past and their strange attraction to conspiracy theories? The System has existed for five hundred years, and what would we do today without it?"
Elena was looking at us with curious eyes; she wasn't joining the conversation but she was listening. "I think so too," I said, fixing my eyes on the meat juices on my plate. "I also think there are sides the Master exaggerates or misinterprets. In the end the System makes our lives incredibly easier, and he's actually dependent on it too. Think about it; it guides you at the most critical moments. It presents to you, down to the millimeter, which training will be most useful for your body, how you personally should develop which stat. With such a tremendous support mechanism in place, calling the System bad is nonsense."
Elisa nodded quickly. "Exactly! Without the System we wouldn't know how to direct our potential."
"True," I murmured. "And the Master isn't separate from the System or against it anyway. He too is bound to this five-hundred-year-old System, he has a panel, he sees his stats. But what makes me think is something else... Sometimes the Master does things that go beyond those clear rules shown on the System panel, movements that strain my logic. Why does he constantly speak in old terms left over from before the System? Why does he sometimes vanish somewhere in the middle of the evening? When I ask where he's going, he brushes it off."
Elisa leaned forward curiously while mashing the potato on her plate with her fork. "What do you mean, movements that go beyond? What did he do?"
This question had apparently caught Elena's attention too; she stopped eating and focused on me.
"Last month while I was training at home," I said, lowering my voice a little further, "I was trying to control my Chi flow. My Control stat is 49, you know, far above the class. But the Master just put his hand on my shoulder. There was no stat change in the system, no warning, no panel notification. And yet, with that small touch that even the System couldn't measure, he completely locked my entire Chi flow for an instant. The System was telling me 'Your control is 49, you're safe' — but the Master seems to have a control, or strange powers, that don't fit inside its patterns even while he's inside the System."
Elena joined the conversation this time, her voice serious. "That really is strange. The System can always measure your Chi state, your stats, in short your instantaneous information — everyone knows that. If something the Master does isn't being detected by the System..."
"Maybe it's an old technique," Elisa cut in quickly, as if she didn't like where the conversation was going. "Brother, the Master is a very old warrior. The System has existed for five hundred years, but humanity's history with Chi goes back much further. Even if the Master is fully integrated into the System, he may be applying some instinctive techniques left over from those primitive periods before the System was established, ones the panels haven't been able to fully categorize yet. That doesn't mean the System is wrong. It only shows that the Master's experience is a little deeper than the System's data."
"Maybe..." I said, taking a deep breath. "But what if he's right? He doesn't say everything clearly, but what if there really are things in the System we don't know, and the Master is the only one who knows it?"
Elisa smiled and forked a large piece of meat off my plate onto her own, as if wanting to close the subject. "Of course you're right, the Master is a slightly mysterious man. But I think you should be looking at your own situation right now, instead of working out whether these conspiracy theories are true."
"That was my meat, I believe," I said, reaching out my fork while also trying to protect the meat on the plate from my sister's fork strikes.
The rest of the meal passed in a lighter mood — Elena asked me questions about how Speed is controlled, and to annoy her a little I gave half-right, half-wrong answers, and Elisa joined in making fun of both of us. But inside me, all that night, the subject Elisa and I had talked about stayed stuck in my mind; in a way I couldn't understand, my thoughts kept sliding toward it. I had been thinking about this subject for days.
When we left the restaurant, night had fully fallen; the streetlamps lit the sidewalks with their yellow light. Elena wanted to walk with us a little longer before going back to the academy; the three of us wandered aimlessly along the lit avenues of the city center.
"You know," Elena said suddenly, fixing her eyes on the sky — where, because of the city's lights, almost no stars could be seen. "Sometimes I wonder what's out there beyond the Barricades, inside the darkness. In classes they always tell us the same thing: mutated animals, danger, death. There are high-speed trains that go to the other cities, of course, but there too the safe lines have been chosen. We're at the center of the world anyway; we're like the city that stays in the middle, surrounded by eight cities. The dangers that pass between them aren't very strong. What I wonder about is beyond this giant circle. What is out there in the outside world, what kind of secrets are there that we don't know?"
I looked at Elena. "On the maps there's sea to the north and west of the continent, and mountainous terrain to the east. If you want to go, I suppose you can only go down to the forests in the south," I said.
Elena stopped and turned to me, a serious expression on her face. "Kai, do you think you'd ever consider going there? I mean, you know your ceiling is this high. Alex has signed up for the training group again, maybe you too—"
"No," I said, quickly and decisively. "Extra work isn't my area of interest. Let ambitious people like Alex go there and prove themselves. I prefer to stay here, on the comfortable side."
Elena looked at me for a moment, as though searching for something in my answer, then smiled. "Okay, okay, I understand. You go at your own pace."