Akira’s POV It happened at three in the morning, which was the system’s preferred hour for delivering information it wanted me to sit with before the day started.
I was asleep before I suddenly jolted awake.
I sat up in the dark with my heart running fast and my hands flat on the mattress and the system screen already open in front of me without my asking for it.
[Internal Rank Advancement: D → Low C.] [External Classification: Unchanged.
D Rank.] [Mana Pool: Opened] [Mana Gathering: Activated] [Mana Point: 0/0000] [Note: External display will not reflect internal advancement.
Guild records remain static.] I stared at it for a moment.
Then I became aware of what was different.
It wasn’t painful.
I want to be precise about that, because the word shift implies something dramatic and what I was actually experiencing was quieter than that.
My mana pool had opened up in a way I could feel as a distinct internal pressure, a fullness that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep.
My hands, when I flexed them, responded with a speed that was marginally but perceptibly faster than the night before.
I got up and went to the balcony.
The city was doing its three-in-the-morning thing, which was minimal.
I stood at the railing and breathed and tried to take an accurate inventory of what had changed.
I had read about mana but I was yet to find out how much I couldn’t quantify precisely yet and the passive reinforcement that ran underneath everything.
The baseline that kept my speed and physical resilience above where my body would be without it.
I might be dreaming but I could feel my strength had incrementally improved.
Defence would still be the same, which was consistent with the pattern.
Defence was always my lagging edge, the system seemed to be building everything else first and leaving that one for later, as if it was waiting for me to address the deeper issue underneath the stat.
I knew what the deeper issue was.
Kael had named it in the training room without knowing the full context.
I had been trained by my life to take damage rather than avoid it.
The stat reflected the habit.
I stayed on the balcony until I was sure I understood the new parameters, or at least understood them well enough to work with them.
Then went back inside and laid down and looked at the ceiling and thought about the more immediate problem, which was not the advancement itself but what to do with it.
The advancement was internal.
External display: D rank, static, unchanging.
Which meant nobody looking at my guild record was going to see anything different today than they had seen yesterday.
That part was straightforward.
The part that wasn’t straightforward was the gap between D rank and low C rank in practice.
In a dungeon, that gap was visible if you knew what to look for.
In a training room, it was visible if you were paying attention.
And the person I had been spending Thursday afternoons with was, whatever else was true about him, paying attention.
Sena was also paying attention but she was a separate problem.
I needed to calibrate.
Not dumb myself down to the point of uselessness.
That approach had a ceiling and I had already found it.
But manage the information.
Show enough that I wasn’t performing incompetence, which was its own kind of suspicious, and hold back enough that the questions I couldn’t answer didn’t get asked.
The question was what that looked like in practice.
I got up before dawn and went out.
The guilds fourth floor in mind.
*** The space was empty at that hour, which I had come to rely on.
The main guild’s public training areas opened at six and were busy by six-fifteen.
The fourth floor, with its restricted access, ran quieter.
I had used it four times now and encountered two other hunters total, both of them A-rank seniors who came and went with the focused efficiency of people who treated the space as a resource rather than a destination.
I started with the footwork sequence.
Same as always, same starting point, because to me, my consistency was the foothold, running the same sequence at different stages of development lets me measure the change against a fixed reference point.
The first pass told me what I needed to know.
I was becoming faster.
Cleaner.
The movement initiating from a deeper reservoir of passive reinforcement, the mana doing more of the stabilization work and leaving more of my conscious attention free for the actual mechanics.
That was the problem in miniature.
At D rank, maintaining the suppression of my actual output had required active effort, a constant low-level monitoring process running alongside everything else.
At low C rank, the output was higher to begin with.
Which meant the suppression needed to be proportionally stronger.
It was like learning to whisper when your resting volume had just gone up.
I spent the first hour working out the new baseline for what restrained looked like.
Not D rank.
I had already accepted that D rank as a performance was no longer something I could sustain without it reading as deliberate, and deliberate was worse than slightly-above-classification because deliberate implied awareness and awareness implied there was something to be aware of.
What I needed was a natural ceiling that sat somewhere in the acceptable range for an overperforming D ranker.
Plausible.
Something a sharp observer could attribute to good instincts and consistent training rather than a gap the system wasn’t reflecting.
Sena had already clocked something.
Her conclusion, so far, was that I was an unusually capable D ranker with an A-rank weapon and insufficient explanation for either.
That was a conclusion I could work with, if I was careful.
Kael was a different consideration.
Kael had watched me for nearly an hour on Thursday and said one word, which was better, and sat against the fence for an hour and left without explaining himself and told me he’d be back next week without asking whether that was something I wanted.
He had also, I had established this the day after his visit, arranged my access to the fourth floor without mentioning it, which meant he had done it before he came, which meant he had always been planning to come back, which meant the entire question of whether he was coming back had been settled in his head before I had started asking it in mine.
I found this irritating in a way I couldn’t fully account for.
Not because the access was unwelcome.
The fourth floor was significantly better than the alternatives.
Not because he had done it without asking.
I had already conceded his point that I would have argued.
The irritation was in something more specific, the fact that he had known, and not said so, and that the not-saying-so had been its own kind of statement about how he expected the next week to go.
He had been right.
I did not enjoy that he had been right.
I ran the sequence again and paid attention to my strategy rather than my thought process, because the strategy was what needed calibrating and the thought process about Kael Vixar was not something I was going to be productive with at five in the morning on four hours of sleep.
By the time the sixth floor access chime indicated the building was opening for the morning, I had a working range.
I needed an excuse if there was a disparity of power noticed.
It had to be plausible.
Consistent.
Defensible if Sena pressed it.
High D, low C, the kind of performance profile that belonged to someone advancing faster than the classification system tracked, which was, conveniently, the true story, just with several significant details omitted.
I rolled the shoulder that had taken the clawing from the wolf, which had healed cleanly but remembered itself in cold weather.
The new baseline was sitting in my body like something that had always been there and had only recently been acknowledged.
I was low C rank now in everything that mattered and D rank on every piece of paper that existed and the gap between those two things was mine to manage.
I had managed harder gaps.
So I picked up the dagger and started the sequence from the top.
Slowly, with the same precision that Kael had shown me.
I closed my eyes tightly as I imagined myself at the back of my home.
His stature, steady behind me as he slowly held me in his arms.
And with it, I let the steps master me.
Thrust, withdraw, slide and dodge.
These were the basic steps I had learnt .
I paused at a point.
Thoughts of Kale slammed into me.
An action I had not prepared for or allowed myself to think of.
I glanced at the door as I subtly remembered his words; ‘Same time next week?’ I was not going to meet him next week.
At least that was the lie, I consoled myself with.