Three thick tracing paper maps were taped with clear adhesive directly onto the living room's hardwood floor.
Dante crouched over the sheets, holding a twenty-inch brass ruler and a drafting compass. His right collarbone no longer required the sling. The bone had fully knit overnight, leaving behind only a rigid ridge beneath the skin that popped faintly when he rolled his shoulder in slow circles.
Beside him, Maria lay flat on her stomach across the rug, propping her elbows on the floor with her chin cradled in her palms. She chewed a slice of buttered toast while watching the black graphite lines Dante drafted between the topographical markers on the map.
"Is the scale on this piece of junk even accurate?" she asked, shedding toast crumbs over the border of the parchment.
"The Low Ember cartographer uses the Legion ratio," Dante answered without raising his head, aligning the compass needle over a dark smudge marked as Rail Junction Nine. "One centimeter on this sheet equals twenty-five linear miles of level ground. From the perimeter where we enter to the gates of the Capital is exactly one hundred and six centimeters of drafted line."
Maria paused her chewing for five seconds, attempting the math.
"Twenty-six hundred miles..." She froze for a few more seconds trying to crunch the rest, then gave up. "and change...?"
"Twenty-six hundred and fifty," Dante corrected with his usual precision, a slight smirk playing on his lips as always. "If we try to cross that on foot, humping eighteen miles a day with full kit on our backs, it'll take five months just to hit the outer perimeter. That's without factoring in detours around herds of scrap lizards or stops to forage."
"On foot is out," she took another bite of toast. "My feet could take it, but your boot soles will melt within the first month of marching across that iron deck. What's the alternative?"
Dante tapped the metal point of the compass against a solid black line cutting across the center of the First Great Continent from east to west.
"The Legion Heavy Freight Line," he indicated the long line. "It's a triple-gauge industrial railway connecting the southern slag pits to the blast furnaces of the Capital. The trains are fifty-car armored freights driven by high-pressure mineral coal boilers. They roll through the Coal Depot Twelve depot every twelve days."
Maria leaned forward, peering at the name etched in tiny gothic script near the center of the map: Central Bastion of Iron Souls.
"That's the Capital?"
"It is," Dante pulled a loose page of notes transcribed from old Orom's route ledger. "The city spans thirty-five miles across. No stone brick walls. Protection comes from a continuous perimeter of welded steel armor plate sixty feet high. Roughly four million registered souls and native demons live inside. Legion garrisons sit on every corner, Tier Three and Four weapon forges operate openly, and the central command of the First Continent rules from the core."
"And how do we get onto that train without taking a rifle round to the teeth?"
"By purchasing cargo passes on the Low Ember black market," Dante circled Depot Twelve in pencil. "Runs about three thousand scrip a head. The train doesn't pull into the Capital's central terminal. It slows down at the scrap classification yard three miles outside the gates. We bail from the moving freight car along the oil river bend and walk in through the free laborer gate."
Maria scanned the figures scribbled in the margins.
"We've got a hundred and eighty days to pull this off," she reminded him. "Quest also demands Level 20 for both of us. You're at fifteen, and I'm at seventeen."
"That's the part that will take actual time," Dante stowed the brass ruler in its wooden case. "We can't grind levels culling weak vermin along the roadside. The interface experience curve throttles gains if the prey sits below our current bracket. For you to hit twenty, you'll need to drop at least fifteen beasts between Level 18 and 22. And I need even more experience to close my gap."
He pointed to a gorge lined with red dashed strokes on the map, halfway to the Coal Depot.
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"Piston Gorge. A graveyard for scrapped machinery where Tier Two Automata roam in small packs. We spend two weeks in there hunting steadily, no rushing, until we hit the level threshold before jumping that freight train."
Dante's phone, resting on the glass coffee table beside an empty plate, buzzed twice against the surface.
Maria extended her long arm, hooked the phone with two fingers, and tossed it toward him.
Dante caught the handset out of the air with his left hand, unlocked the screen with his thumb, and opened the push notification sent from the State Department of Education portal.
The digital document loaded across the bright display.
[Official School Report - Twelfth Grade.]
[Student: Dante Miller.]
[Overall Cumulative GPA: 9.9.]
[Status: Graduated by Advanced Academic Placement.]
Right below, on the same administrative circular, appeared the supplemental roster of students receiving formal waivers for the final term.
[Student: Maria das Dores.]
[Overall Cumulative GPA: 6.8.]
[Status: Passed by Grade Average and Community Service Credit.]
[Front Office Notice: Diploma pickup available starting December 15th.]
Dante stared at the black print on the phone screen for three full seconds, then looked up at Maria.
"We passed."
Maria froze with the crust of her toast in mid-air, blinking twice.
"Passed what?"
"High school," Dante turned the screen for her to see. "The chemistry exam scores posted this morning. You finished the term with a seventy-five. Factoring in the hours you logged fixing the cafeteria gate and your athletic waiver, your final average hit sixty-eight. Passing was sixty."
Maria plucked the phone from his hand, brought the screen inches from her eyes, and read her full name printed alongside the word Passed.
A broad, open, genuine grin spread across her face, deepening the dimple on her left cheek.
"I actually graduated?" She let out a booming laugh, tossing her head back against the living room rug. "No makeup exams in December? Never having to look at Mr. Rogério and that mothball sweater ever again?"
"No makeup exams," Dante sat back on the floor, resting his forearms on his knees. "We finished high school, Maria. We never have to set foot through those iron gates at seven in the morning again."
She tossed the phone onto the sofa, laced her arms behind her head, and gazed up at the timber ceiling with plain satisfaction.
"Seventeen and we have our diplomas," she remarked, her voice floating with unburdened relief. "My mother spent my whole life saying that if I dropped out of school I'd end up hauling cardboard carts through downtown traffic."
"Technically speaking, you hauled a wheelbarrow containing a bleeding kid through the alleys when you were nine," Dante reminded her with a dry smirk.
"That was venture capital, bighead," she gave a light kick to the rubber sole of his sneaker. "Paid out better than any piece of paper that principal will ever sign on yellow parchment."
Dante looked around the room.
The iron shelves of arcane tomes on the left, the weapons rack holding her forty-pound greatsword and cast-iron plates on the right, and the sprawling maps of an infernal landmass thousands of miles wide taped to the floorboards.
While most of their classmates in homeroom B were currently stressing over prom committees, panicking over college entrance tests, or applying for minimum-wage trainee slots at downtown department stores, the two of them were completely untethered from every bureaucratic obligation in the human world.
Nobody would knock on the door in the Acacias district asking why they weren't in homeroom. No child protective service would pursue minors who carried court-stamped emancipation decrees and bank accounts prepaid a year in advance.
Their hours belonged solely to the countdown still ticking inside their vision.
"One hundred and seventy-nine days," Dante pointed down at the map. "We have a full month to stockpile rations, secure the train passes through the black market, and grind out those levels inside Piston Gorge."
Maria sprang to her feet in a clean leap, dusting breadcrumbs off her workout shorts.
She walked over to the wall mount, seized the leather-wrapped hilt of her forty-pound greatsword, and drew the blade from its scabbard with a crisp hiss of steel that echoed through the open room.
She rested the broad flat of the greatsword across her right shoulder, squared her frame toward the map, and looked down at Dante with that keen spark in her brown eyes.
"Break time's over, Dante," she declared, her voice firm and resolved. "Grab your chalk kit and Mana stones. If we're hitting Level 20 before boarding that train, we start cracking iron first thing tomorrow morning.”