Infinite Game - Start With SSS Rank Class

Chapter 246: THE PRICE OF AN OWNER

Forty-one people.

By noon the next day, that number hadn’t dropped any further, but it was no longer a number either. It had split apart into forty-one faces, and all forty-one of those faces were thinking about Room 2705.

Rover knew this, because he could read it on the chat panel.

Not the lines of text. The lines of text had gone silent since last night, after Hudson left and the name [Mirror] sank beneath three hundred curses. What Rover read was the silence.

Before the battle, the twenty-seventh floor’s chat had always been noisy, someone hawking items, someone begging for an alliance, someone cursing. Now it was empty.

No one dared type a single word, for fear that typing the wrong word would let Room 2705 read it.

’They’re afraid of me.’ Rover sat at the table, slowly spinning a silver coin on the tip of his finger. ’Not afraid that I’ll kill them. Afraid that I could have killed them, and didn’t.’

It was a different kind of fear.

A strong person, you can still calculate. Whatever the strong person wants, you give it to him, you live. But fearing a strong person who needs nothing from you, that is a bottomless pit. Because you have nothing to bargain with. All you can do is hope he keeps not paying attention to you.

Morie set a cup of tea down in front of him.

"Sunako just got back." She said. "She made a round of the floors."

"How many rooms still have their doors locked?"

"All of them."

Rover nodded.

Just as he’d thought.

________________________________________

Sunako walked in, her face gone pale, and dropped down into a chair.

"No one opened their door for me." She said, her voice still short of breath. "I knocked on eleven rooms. I said I came from 2705, that I wanted to check on the wounded. Nine rooms stayed dead silent. Two rooms... two rooms shouted out through the door, told me to get lost."

She lifted her head to look at Rover, her eyes rimmed red.

"We saved them. That monster would have eaten the whole floor. It was us who held the door until the last minute. And yet now they look at us like they’re looking at—"

"Like they’re looking at the thing that killed a hundred and twenty-seven people." Rover said.

Sunako froze.

"But we didn’t kill—"

"In their heads, we did." Rover set the silver coin down on the table. "Sunako, try thinking about it this way. Before the battle, a hundred and sixty-eight people walked into that courtyard. They thought they were many, they were strong, they could lay siege to Room 2705. After the battle, forty-one people walked out, and those forty-one people had seen something with their own eyes."

He looked at her.

"They saw that the fate of those other hundred and twenty-seven people, whether they lived or died, was never in their hands. It was in mine. I chose to hold the door, so forty-one people lived. If I’d chosen not to, they all die. From beginning to end, not one of them had the slightest say over their own lives."

Rover picked up the teacup.

"No one forgives the one who held their life in his hands. Not even when that one lets them go."

The living room was silent.

Selina sat by the window, one leg propped on the sill, listening without saying anything. But the corner of her mouth curved up slightly, not out of amusement, but out of agreement. She was a sword. She had understood this logic long before Rover put it into words.

"So what do we do?" Sunako asked quietly. "Just let them hate us?"

Rover hadn’t yet had time to answer.

There was a knock at the door.

________________________________________

Not the panicked pounding of a door. Not the frantic knocking of someone coming to pick a fight.

Three knocks. Slow. Even. Of someone who had stood outside the door a very long time before working up the courage to raise their hand.

Selina stood, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Elith opened her eyes. Rilia peeled away from the wall.

Rover raised a hand, signaling everyone to stay still.

"Morie."

Morie glanced at the control panel, where the image outside the door was displayed.

"One person. Female. Unarmed." She paused. "Level 2. She’s... trembling."

Rover stood up and went to open the door himself.

Outside was a woman of about forty, her hair hastily tied back, wearing a threadbare wool sweater. Her eyes were swollen, rimmed red, the kind of eyes belonging to someone who had cried continuously for hours until the tears ran dry. In her arms she cradled something, wrapped in a cloth.

She looked at Rover.

Rover looked back.

And in that moment, he recognized her.

In the courtyard, before the Zombie Angel woke, there had been a boy of about sixteen standing in the front row of the attacking mob. He’d held a wooden spear, his hands trembling, his eyes blazing. He had shouted the loudest. He believed Room 2705 was nothing but juicy prey.

He was one of the hundred and twenty-seven.

This woman had the same face as him. The same eyes. The same small mole at the corner of the mouth.

His mother.

Rover stood up straight, bracing himself to receive a slap, a scream, a curse. He would take it. He owed her that much, if not a life then at least a chance to vent her grief.

The woman opened her mouth.

But what came out was not a curse.

"Let me into your room."

Rover stood still.

"I beg you." Her voice broke. "I know... I know my son was in that mob. I know he came to rob your room. I know he was wrong. I told him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen, he said your room had good gear, he said we’d be rich..."

She choked.

"He’s dead. I didn’t come to demand a life. I know it wasn’t you who killed him. You even held the door so the others could run out." She hugged the bundle in the cloth tighter. "I’m all alone now. I’m Level 2. I won’t survive the next round. And your room... your room is the safest place in this building."

She knelt down.

"Take me as one of your people. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll do the laundry. I’ll do anything. I don’t need a reward, I don’t need points, I only need to be behind your door when the next monster comes."

________________________________________

No one in the room said anything.

Rover looked down at the woman kneeling before his door, and for a very brief moment, he saw again his own self of two hundred and forty-three days ago, someone with nothing, standing in a strange hallway, counting every silver coin, not knowing whether he’d live through the night.

He understood this feeling.

That was exactly why he couldn’t let it govern him.

’If I take her in out of pity,’ Rover thought, and the line of his thinking was cold and clear, ’then tomorrow there will be ten people kneeling at the door. Then fifty. Then all the weakest people in this building will come flooding in, not out of loyalty to me, but out of fear of death. And a room full of people who stay out of fear of death will be the first room to betray me the moment someone stronger shows up.’

’But if I refuse her right in front of forty-one people watching through the System’s cameras... then the last shred of reputation I’ve managed to keep, that Room 2705 is a doorkeeper, not a predator, dies right here.’

Both choices were traps.

This was the first time Rover understood that being an Owner was not a matter of how much strength you had.

Strength, he had in abundance.

Being an Owner was a matter of standing between two traps, and finding a third path that neither trap saw coming.

Rover crouched down, level with the woman’s eyes.

"What’s your name?"

"...Hana."

"Hana." Rover said. "I don’t take people in out of pity. If I did, I’d be harming you, and harming myself."

Hana’s eyes went dark. She bowed her head, her shoulders beginning to shake.

"But I’m not driving you away either." Rover went on.

Her head shot up.

"I’ll give you a job." Rover stood, folded his arms. "Not washing dishes. Not laundry. In my room I already have enough people to do those things, and they do them far better than you."

"You stay on your own floor. You keep your door open. And you tell everyone on the floor one thing: Room 2705 hunts no one. Whoever doesn’t touch my door, I don’t touch theirs. Whoever gets cornered by a monster and knocks on my door, I’ll consider it. That’s the law. That law doesn’t change."

Hana was bewildered. "You... want me to go spread word for you?"

"I want you to tell them the truth that they won’t believe if it comes out of my mouth." Rover looked straight into her eyes. "I’m the one who held their lives in my hands. No one believes what I say. But you, you’re the mother of a child who came to rob my room and died. If even you say Room 2705 is not the enemy, then they’ll believe it."

The silence in the room changed in character.

Selina turned her head to look at Rover, and this time the corner of her mouth curved up distinctly.

Because he had just done something it took her a moment to fully grasp: he had just turned a burden into a bridge. He didn’t take Hana in as a servant. He appointed her as his voice for the rest of the building, a voice a hundred times more trustworthy than himself, because it was paid for with her son’s blood.

And he did it without giving her a single silver coin.

Hana knelt there a long time.

Then she wiped her face, stood up, hugged the bundle in the cloth to her chest.

"I’ll tell them." She said quietly. "I’ll tell all of them."

She turned to go. Halfway down the hallway, she stopped, turned her head back.

"This..." She opened the cloth a little. Inside was an old child’s wool cap, worn and frayed, perhaps her son’s from when he was little, in some world before this apartment building. "I have nothing left to thank you with. I know it’s useless to you."

"But it’s the most precious thing I have."

She set the cap down in front of the door of Room 2705, bowed her head, then disappeared into the fog at the end of the hallway.

Rover looked at the wool cap for a long time.

Then he bent down and picked it up.

________________________________________

That night, Nanoe opened the leather-bound notebook.

She did not write on the first pages, where the income and expenditure of Omni Points was recorded, the cold numbers of an accountant. She turned to a new page, toward the back, set apart, as though it were a different notebook nested within the same leather cover. A notebook not meant for numbers.

Rover sat beside her, watching her write.

On the page, under the yellow lamplight, appeared a line of slanted, sharp, neat handwriting:

Day 244. Room 2705 has its first person who is not a Tenant, not combat power, takes no points. Name: Hana. Function: voice.

Price paid: one wool cap.

Nanoe closed the notebook.

"Cheap." She said quietly.

Rover did not answer.

He was looking at the wool cap set on top of the cabinet, beside the door, in the spot where every time he stepped out of the room he would see it.

’Not cheap.’ He thought.

’I’ve just traded a wool cap for a son who died believing my room was juicy prey. If I weren’t this strong, he would never have risked his life.’

’This cap isn’t a reward.’

’It’s an invoice.’

Selina found him on the rooftop.

It was the only place in Room 2705 where Rover could be alone, a small patch of concrete he had bought with Omni Points back in the second round, just to have a place to sit and look at the gray, sunless sky of the dead zone. No one came up here unless he allowed it.

Selina didn’t ask permission. She never asked permission.

She sat down beside him, one leg stretched out, one leg drawn up, her sword laid across her thighs. The fog below drifted slowly past the foot of the building, so thick it swallowed the ground whole.

"You’re blaming yourself." She said. Not a question.

"No."

"You’re a terrible liar, Rover." Selina looked off into the distance. "With other people you’re good at it. With me you’re terrible."