Chapter Nine: Uninvited Help
The first drone showed up on a Tuesday.
I didn't notice it right away. I was three floors into a low-tier public dungeon on the edge of the city, one of the unranked, first-come-first-served rifts the guilds didn't bother sending sponsored teams to anymore, working through a room full of husk-things that moved like they'd forgotten how joints were supposed to bend. It had been eleven days since the extraction footage went viral without my name attached to it. I'd spent most of them exactly like this alone, underground, letting the hammer do the thinking my own mind wasn't ready to do yet.
It was on the walk back out that I clocked the small, matte-black shape hovering at rooftop height above the dungeon entrance, camera lens angled down at exactly the spot I'd have to pass through to reach the street.
I stopped. Stared at it. It didn't move.
"If you're guild surveillance," I said, mostly to see if it would react, "you're doing a bad job of being subtle."
The drone tilted, almost sheepishly, and a small speaker crackled to life somewhere inside it.
"Not guild," said a voice young, female, a little too fast, like the words had been rehearsed and then abandoned halfway through the rehearsal out of nerves. "Sorry. I should've this is weird, I know this is weird, I just wanted to see if the footage was actually real before I "
"Before you what?"
A pause. Long enough that I almost walked away from it.
"Before I asked if I could help you."
Her name was Wren. She told me over instant noodles in my apartment three days later, after she'd spent those three days proving something to me without once asking permission to better camera angles on the low-quality clips I hadn't even known were being tracked, a corrected caption quietly seeded onto two of the larger reposts (this is not the same as the party's official account, worth noting), and, on the second day, an anonymous package left outside my door containing a functioning micro-drone kit and a note that just said for when you're ready, no pressure.
I hadn't been ready. I opened the box anyway.
"You used to run with a party," I said, watching her eat noodles across my kitchen counter, the first person besides a guild medic to be inside my apartment since the dungeon. "Denny mentioned something once. Before all this."
Something flickered across her face quick, practiced-over, the kind of expression you learn to smooth out after you've had a lot of time to get used to hiding it. "Ironclad Vanguard. Support and logistics. Drone recon, real-time data feeds, the stuff that makes a stream actually watchable instead of just shaky helmet-cam footage." She stirred her noodles like they needed more attention than they did. "We were good. Landed a sponsorship with one of the bigger brands right before I got cut."
"Cut for what?"
"For not fitting the image." She said it flat, no self-pity in it, just fact, the kind of fact you say so many times it stops hurting to say out loud and starts just being weather. "The brand wanted a certain look for the party. I didn't have it. They kept the ones who did." She glanced up. "It's fine. It was two years ago."
I recognized the sentence structure. It's fine. It was two years ago. I'd used almost the same words about a bowl of cold noodles more times than I wanted to count.
"Why me?" I asked, because it was the only question that actually mattered. "You could've offered this to literally anyone. Established climbers. Anyone with a following already."
Wren set her chopsticks down. Looked at me really looked, the way almost nobody had since I'd walked out of that gate with two-toned hair and a hammer and a class the System had never had a name for.
"Because everyone's calling you a monster," she said, "and I watched the footage like eleven times, and you're not doing anything monstrous. You're just surviving something nobody helped you survive, and then getting punished by everyone watching for looking different while you did it." She shrugged, like the sentence had cost her more than she wanted to admit. "I know what that's like. Not the same thing. Not close. But I know the shape of it."
I didn't say anything for a while. The apartment was quiet except for the hum of a refrigerator I still hadn't fixed and the distant sound of the city outside, indifferent to both of us.
"I don't have money," I said finally. "For a real setup. Editing, streaming gear, any of it."
"I didn't ask for money."
"I don't do guilds. I don't do parties. I go in alone."
"I know. I watched." Something almost like a smile. "I'm not asking to fight next to you. I'm asking to make sure someone's actually telling your story instead of letting it get written by somebody who ran."
I thought about Grayson's face on that broadcast, the practiced tremor, the blanket he hadn't needed. I thought about my name my actual name sitting unused under a viral clip that a hundred thousand strangers had already decided belonged to something inhuman.
"Okay," I said, and something in my chest loosened for the first time in eleven days. "Okay. Yeah."
Wren's whole face changed relief so total it looked almost like she'd been holding her breath since the drone first hovered outside that dungeon entrance.
"I'll bring the rest of the gear tomorrow," she said. "And, um. I haven't eaten a real meal that wasn't instant noodles in like four days, so if it's okay, I might just stay. Tonight. If that's fine."
I looked at my empty apartment. The unpaid bills stacked on the counter. The hammer leaning in the corner where I'd left it, patient, the way it always was.
"Yeah," I said again, quieter this time. "That's fine."
It was the first time since the dungeon that anything in that apartment had felt like it belonged to more than one person.