Infinite Game - Start With SSS Rank Class

Chapter 245:

"Then put the spear away."

"I didn’t come here to die again." Hudson said, and he did not put the spear away. "I only have one question. Once it’s answered, I’ll go."

Rover said nothing.

Hudson stepped forward one pace.

"What is Mirror?"

The entire hallway fell dead silent.

Thirty pairs of eyes all turned toward Rover. On the walls, the System’s cameras quietly turned. Rover knew perfectly well that, right at this moment, at least two hundred people were sitting in their own rooms, eyes glued to their surveillance screens.

And he also knew that, farther out still, in the fog, there were other things watching too.

Rover stood still for two seconds.

Then he sighed, raised a hand, rubbed the back of his neck, his manner exactly like that of someone annoyed at being bothered in the morning.

"That thing?" He said. "It’s my starting skill. Rank D."

Hudson narrowed his eyes.

"You’re lying."

"Then don’t ask."

"Rank D isn’t worth some nobody typing it into the shared chat at three in the morning."

"Yeah." Rover nodded. "I think so too. Which is why I’m rather curious who’s got that much free time on their hands."

He looked straight into Hudson’s eyes.

"Was it you?"

Hudson was silent.

Rover stepped out of the doorway, one pace.

Just one pace.

But the whole hallway drew back half a meter.

"I’ll show you." Rover said.

He held out his left hand.

On his palm, darkness coiled up, condensed, formed a soft, flabby mass of black, trembling, so weak it dissolved the moment it took shape.

[Ability: Shadow (D – Fake)]

It was the first Rank D ability he had ever restored, a very long time ago, on the seventh floor, back when he still had to count every silver coin.

He hadn’t used it in nearly two hundred days.

It was useless.

It was weak.

And it was perfect.

The crowd in the hallway watched the tiny mass of darkness dissolve on Rover’s palm, and something in their eyes sagged.

It was the feeling of someone who had stood before a door locked for ten years, finally managed to open it, and discovered that inside there was only an old broom.

"Copies another person’s ability." Rover said, his voice lazy. "Get fifty percent of the strength. Rank D."

He brushed off his hand, letting the last strands of darkness fall to the hallway floor and fade away.

"You’re asking me why my room is strong?" Rover shrugged. "I’d like to know too. I upgrade the door, some days it gives me blood spikes, some days it gives me a rusty iron bolt. I upgrade the tower, the first twelve times it gave me garbage, the thirteenth time it gave me a baby dragon."

"All random."

He lifted his head, looked straight into Hudson’s eyes, and smiled.

"You lived to Level 6 and still don’t understand what this game runs on, old man? It runs on luck. I’m just an unlucky bastard who got thrown into a room with lucky numbers."

The hallway was silent.

Then someone in the back let slip a very quiet curse.

Because that was exactly what every single one of them had told themselves over the past two hundred and forty-three days, every time they upgraded their door for the twelfth time and got back a rusty iron bolt.

Random.

Luck.

Not because they were inferior.

They were just unlucky.

Rover looked at the crowd before him, and inwardly he thought:

’People will believe anything, as long as it proves they’re not at fault.’

Hudson stared at his hand.

Then he looked at Rover’s face.

Then he drew his spear back.

"...And here I’d thought." Hudson said, his voice sounding neither like disappointment nor relief. "I apologize for the disturbance."

He turned and walked away.

Thirty people followed him.

No one saw what happened in the palm of Rover’s left hand, in the spot where the mass of black had just dissolved.

No one saw his two fingers curl slightly.

________________________________________

The door of Room 2705 closed.

Rover took three steps into the living room, then he dropped to one knee.

Selina let go of her sword.

Nanoe was at his side before the blade even hit the floor.

"It’s fine." Rover said at once, his voice still steady. "I’m fine."

But he couldn’t get up.

Before his eyes, an information panel was appearing, and no one else could see it.

________________________________________

[Ding! Restoration of ability [Shadow] successful.]

[Ding! This is the 4th restoration.]

[Integrity: 97% → 96%.]

[Cracks: 3 → 4.]

[Note: Cracks cannot be repaired.]

________________________________________

One percent.

One percent of something he didn’t know the nature of, didn’t know how much of it was left, didn’t know when it would run out.

That was the price of a lie that lasted thirty seconds in front of Hudson.

And it was something he would not tell a single soul.

Rover closed the information panel, the panel only he could see, the metric that even the System didn’t dare explain. Cracks. Integrity. A secret lying deep in the nature of his Class, so deep that he himself didn’t fully understand it. He had decided from the moment he first saw it: this thing was his alone. Not because he didn’t trust anyone. But because a burden, when shared, doesn’t get lighter, it just doubles the number of people who have to carry it.

Rover lowered his head, looked down at the floor, and began to laugh.

Very softly.

"I’m fine." He said again, and this time his voice was steady. "Just out of breath."

Nanoe knelt down in front of him.

She did not ask what had happened. She did not ask why did you collapse. She did not ask any of the dozens of questions crowding in her chest, because that very thin, very strong thread was still there, still cutting across the space between her and the door he had just quietly closed.

She only raised both hands and cupped his face.

Rover lifted his head.

He looked into her eyes, and in them, he saw no interrogation. He saw no reproach. He only saw a woman trying to read him, and failing to.

Good.

’If she can’t see it, then she’s safe.’

"I just burned four hundred and fifty thousand points." Rover said, changing direction, handing her the thing she was allowed to know. "Three repairs for Monica. All three failed. The System still deducted the points."

Nanoe’s hand on his cheek went still.

This was her territory. Before becoming a Tenant of Room 2705, Nanoe had been an accountant, someone for whom numbers were a mother tongue. Rover had put her in charge of the Omni Points not out of simple trust, but for a very practical reason: he hated counting, and she counted better than anyone he had ever met.

And right now, that number, four hundred and fifty thousand, made her eyes sharpen.

"Four hundred and fifty thousand points in ten seconds." She said slowly. "To repair something the System stated clearly cannot be restored with Omni Points. You read that line. I know you read it. And yet you gave the order three times."

Rover did not answer.

Because he couldn’t tell her the real reason. Couldn’t tell her that he’d burned four hundred and fifty thousand points not out of hope of saving Monica, but because in that moment he needed something, anything, that his Omni Points could buy, so that he wouldn’t have to face the truth that there was another kind of currency, one he was spending with no way to ever refill it.

"There won’t be a next time." Was all he said.

Nanoe looked at him for a long time.

Then she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, her voice had returned to its usual gentleness, but beneath it was steel.

"From today, I manage the points." She said. Not asking permission. A declaration. "Every time you want to spend more than a hundred thousand points on something that isn’t combat or defense, you ask me first. You’re the Owner, you can veto me. But you’ll have to veto me out in the open, not burn it in secret while collapsed on your knees on the floor."

"I’m an accountant, Rover. I’ve watched too many people go bankrupt spending money in a panic."

Rover looked at her.

Then, for the first time all evening, he smiled for real.

"Fine." He said. "You manage the points."

[Ding! Tenant Nanoe has been authorized by the Owner to manage the Omni Points.]

[Ding! Loyalty: 100 (Cannot increase further).]

Nanoe let out a soft breath, and in that breath was something very much like relief, not because she had just won a right, but because she had just found a place to stand, a concrete task to do, a way to be useful to him without needing him to open the door he had closed.

She stood up, opened her palm, revealing a small leather-bound notebook she had carried since the first round, the thing Rover had always assumed she only used to jot down supermarket prices.

She opened to the first page. Slanted, sharp, neat handwriting.

Day 243. Spent: 450,000 points. Purpose: repair (failed). Note: do not repeat.

She closed the notebook.

"Expensive." Nanoe said quietly.

Rover did not answer.

In his mind, another number was quietly drifting, a number that Nanoe’s notebook would never be able to record, because she didn’t know it existed.

Ninety-six.

________________________________________

In the corner of the room, Monica sat hugging her doll, looking at the two of them, smiling gently.

No one noticed that at the exact moment Rover’s information panel jumped from 97% down to 96%, the crack on the porcelain face of the doll in her lap had lengthened a little.

Now it ran from the corner of the eye, down to the chin, and cut through one side of the lips.

Making the doll’s face look as though it were smiling.

________________________________________

About ninety thousand kilometers from the apartment building, in a place where the System’s map recorded only three words, Event Horizon, it was raining.

Raining from the ground up.

The drops of water left the arid earth, flew backward up into the copper-colored sky, and vanished into a layer of clouds turning slowly counterclockwise. Far off, three skyscrapers drifted suspended, upside down, their concrete foundations jutting up at the sky like teeth.

On the crest of a hill stripped bare, a man stood looking toward the horizon.

He wore a white cloak, its collar standing high. His hair was silver, not from age. Behind his back, six thin streaks of light like bone spread out like wings, not touching the air, not touching anything at all.

In the palm of his hand, a small hexagonal piece of metal was heating up.

It was heating up because, very far away, in a dead zone he had long been unable to reach, someone had just spoken a name.

The man lowered his head, looked at that piece of metal.

Then he raised it, and across his face appeared an expression that anyone who saw it would misunderstand as relief.

"At last, someone is carrying it."

He clenched his hand.

The piece of metal shattered.

And from where it shattered, a door began to open in the air.

"Two hundred years now." Adriel said quietly, stepping toward the door. "Your father wouldn’t open it."

"I hope you’re more obedient than he was."

The door closed.

On the barren hill, the rain still fell upward into the sky.