The plywood desk in senior homeroom B let out a sharp creak when Maria tried to cross her knees.
The furniture had been built for five-foot-five teenagers weighing a hundred and ten pounds. At six-foot-three and packing the dense muscle of someone who hauled steel beams on her back, the girl looked like a statue chiseled into a shoebox. Her knees rammed against the underside of the chipped formica top, and her long legs had to stretch sideways, hogging half the classroom's center aisle.
Three desks ahead, propped against the windowed wall overlooking the public school's cracked concrete sports court, Dante gazed at the ceiling with his chin resting in his left palm.
He wore the standard school uniform's long-sleeved white shirt, but the loose cut concealed two subtle slits he had sliced over his shoulder blades so his skin could breathe without friction.
At the front of the room, Mr. Rogério, a balding fifty-year-old teacher sporting the same brown sweater he had worn since the first term, dragged standard chalk across the green chalkboard, sketching basic thermodynamics equations in cramped, crooked handwriting.
"Your attendance rates this month are a bad joke," the teacher said without turning away from the board, the chalk tapping against the slate. "Seventy-two unexcused hours of absence, Miss Maria. And you, Dante, have shown up to my class on only three Thursdays all semester."
Dante didn't even blink. He had his retort ready before the teacher reached the end of the sentence.
"My grade point average on the midterm exams is a flat hundred, sir," Dante answered in a monotone, keeping his eyes on the moisture stain across the ceiling plaster. "And my practical assignments were turned into the front office two weeks ahead of deadline."
"Classroom attendance is mandated by federal education law, boy." Rogério smacked the felt eraser against the wooden ledge to dislodge white dust. "I don't care if you finish the test in ten minutes. If your absences hit twenty-five percent, you're heading straight for December makeup exams."
"There won't be any makeup exams," Maria spoke up from the back, her deep voice cutting clean through the students' idle murmurs. "The principal signed my physical activity waiver last week after I helped the janitors haul away the scrap dumpster blocking the cafeteria gate. And Dante balanced the school meal cost ledger the district office had been owing the state since last year. We're square with administration."
Two students in the middle row turned to look back at Maria, but jerked their necks straight ahead the moment the girl planted her heavy elbow onto the wooden desktop, making the entire frame groan under the pressure.
Nobody in the school messed with the pair. They had no circle of friends, joined no group projects, and never sat on the bleachers during lunch. They were known solely as the giant girl who cracked the cafeteria's plastic stools and the pale kid in the corner who never scored below ninety-five on an exam.
Dante let out a faint breath through his nose, closed his eyes, and pulled up the menu's first tab with his mind.
[Internal Communication Interface activated.]
[Binding Channel: Private (Distance: 4 meters).]
A translucent box opened strictly within the lower corner of their peripheral vision.
[Dante: You accepted a thirty-day timed quest with a planar bounty penalty while I was out cold?]
Maria looked into the empty air above Mr. Rogério's head, mentally typing as fast as thought itself.
[Maria: The guy in the white jacket showed up on my bench press at eleven-thirty. What did you expect me to do? Ask him to come back at lunchtime with notarized paperwork?]
[Dante: Did he mention the wings?]
[Maria: He did. Said your frail husk was built to hide your soul, but you shattered the lock early because you're stubborn. Said the scent of white plumage in the First Great Continent will draw the legion's sulfur hounds.]
[Dante: He isn't wrong about that. The resonance of the Winged Vestige is pure ether. It's like lighting a magnesium flare inside a dark room full of blind bats.]
[Maria: He wants an iron core from the Black Smelter. Said it can snuff out the light from the feathers.]
Dante adjusted the collar of his white school shirt, tugging the cloth forward with two fingers.
His mind, supercharged by thirty Intelligence, processed the cartographic data he had purchased from the Low Ember maps the day before.
[Dante: The Black Smelter isn't an ordinary smithy, Maria. It's an automated citadel seated in the heart of the Plain of Iron Souls. The legions abandoned it four centuries ago, but the automated systems are still running. The place is infested with Boiler Golems and Scrap Automata of Tier Two and Three. The average sentry level sits between twenty and twenty-five.]
[Maria: So what? I caved that level sixteen Burrower's skull in with three swings.]
[Dante: That was a stray runt lurking on the fringes! Smelter constructs run on superheated steam and dense cast-iron plating. If you try swinging at them without [Lead Impact] running, your bar will bend in your grip and the recoil will shatter both your wrists.]
Maria snorted from the back of the room. The sound was loud enough to bring Mr. Rogério's lecture on covalent bonds to a screeching halt.
"Something wrong with molecular density, Miss Maria?" the teacher asked, testily propping his glasses up on his nose.
"Not a thing, sir," she answered with absolute deadpan innocence. "Just thinking iron takes more pressure to set properly."
The teacher blinked twice, baffled by the remark, and resumed scraping chalk over the board.
The party channel flashed again in Dante's sight.
[Maria: See? Even the teacher agrees on the pressure. We've got thirty Earth days. If we don't bring back that core, the guy said the Sulfur Hounds will kick down the rift hatch and drag your soul to the Ninth Continent in a lead box. I'm not watching seven years of hard work get tossed to the wolves.]
[Dante: I need three days to prep the glyphs. I'll need that mineral limestone we bought from old Orom and at least two liters of distilled basilisk sap to temper the chalk. If I lay down containment circles with standard chalk, the boiler heat will flash-melt the lines in two seconds.]
[Maria: I'll handle the heavy lifting. I'm stopping by Agenor's machine shop this afternoon and having him weld two marine steel plates to the head of my bar. That'll bump it to thirty-three pounds.]
[Dante: Can you swing thirty-three pounds one-handed through an extended fight?]
[Maria: I have twenty-six Strength, bighead. Thirty-three pounds to me feels like a ten-pound sack of flour to you. Just focus on making your blue bolts puncture their boiler chambers, and I'll take care of snapping their limbs.]
The recess bell rang. The brass bell's shrill clatter echoed down the tiled hallways, followed immediately by the scraping of chair legs and the thrum of dozens of kids sprinting for the courtyard.
Maria stood up from her desk.
The maneuver required deliberate care. She had to shove the desktop forward with both hands to free her knees from the narrow gap without ripping the frame from the floorboards. She scooped up the blue backpack slung over the corner and swung it onto her back in one smooth motion.
Dante slid his blank notebook into his pack, got to his feet, and smoothed down the hem of his shirt.
They exited the classroom side by side.
In the hallway crowded with freshmen and sophomores, the sheer contrast in their builds parted the sea of students like a plow. Younger kids backed flat against the yellow-tiled walls to yield right of way to Maria's six-foot-three frame as she walked with heavy, purposeful strides, while Dante trailed half a pace behind, hands in his pockets, bearing the cool detachment of someone charting an invasion route a hundred miles away.
"Are we hitting the mall food court for lunch, or are you making that canned tuna and rice slop again?" she asked aloud as they reached the front iron gate.
"Mall food," Dante answered, kicking the gate open with his sneaker. "I need to hit the compounding pharmacy on the central avenue for pure magnesium sulfate before two."
"As long as you buy the double burger with the cash from those exchanged gray notes, you can buy whatever poison you like." She gave him an easy shoulder bump that sent him stumbling a couple of inches across the asphalt sidewalk.
Dante regained his balance with a quick wince, but made no complaint.
Behind them, the public high school carried on with basic algebra and rusty school bells. Ahead of them, thirty days away on their interface clocks, the boilers of the Black Smelter waited for their first living trespassers in over four hundred years.