Ch.8
"Lie down."
"I just fought a Silverback."
"I know. Lie down."
We'd walked home from the park in silence, her arm hooked through mine, her head against my bicep. She'd stopped crying before we reached the main avenue but she hadn't let go. The festival was still running around us, music and laughter and people who hadn't been in a park watching a Level 1 fight an ape monster, and we'd walked through it like we were in a different city. A vendor tried to sell us candied apples. A girl my age bumped my shoulder and didn't apologize. The crowd noise faded as we turned onto the side streets, and by the time we reached the church courtyard it was just the two of us and the sound of her sandals on the stone steps.
The Knife was in my belt. It was warm against my hip the whole walk, a low constant heat like a banked coal. The blade Hephaestus had forged with Hestia's blood and hair, the weapon that cost more than most Familias would earn in their lifetimes. It sat against my body and it was warm and it was alive and my goddess had put herself in debt for decades to put it in my hand.
The church basement was the same as always. The couch, the table, the shelves with their sparse supplies. The smell of candle wax and her. She let go of my arm at the bottom of the stairs and went straight to the kitchen. Water first. She brought me a cup and stood over me while I drank it, checking the bruises on my shoulder and chest with her eyes, cataloging damage without touching it. Her lower lip was still raw where she'd been biting it in the park. When I finished the water she took the cup, refilled it, brought it back. I drank that too.
Then she said "Falna update" and her voice had the same edge as "lie down." The goddess who'd been sobbing in my arms was gone. The goddess running a one-member Familia was here, and she was going to read my stats whether or not my body was done being beaten up.
I set the cup down. "Okay."
"Shirt off. Face down."
I pulled the shirt over my head. The fabric caught on the shoulder bruise and I hissed through my teeth. She didn't say anything, but her mouth tightened when she saw the bruise. Dark purple shading to black at the center, running from my shoulder down to my mid-back where the fountain had caught me. My chest had its own bruise, the Silverback's forearm printed across my ribs in yellowing purple.
I unbuckled the Knife from my belt and set it on the table beside the candle. Even separated from my body, the blade kept its warmth. The white mithril caught the candlelight and threw it back brighter.
I dropped the shirt and lay face-down on the couch. The cushion smelled like her. It always did. Floral warmth underneath candle wax. The fabric was rough against my bare chest where the bruise was, but the warmth of the cushion eased it.
She climbed on. Her knees settled on either side of my hips, the same position as the first update. Her weight barely registered. She pricked her finger. The small catch of her breath, and then her fingertip touched the center of my back.
Warmth. The Falna activating. The hieroglyphs responding to her ichor, the writing on my skin coming alive. She began tracing.
The warmth was different from the first update. Deeper. The first time she'd traced the Falna, the heat had been faint, a surface warmth like sunlight through a window. This time it sank into the muscle and kept going, spreading through my chest and my arms and down my spine. The stats had jumped. The Falna had more to report, more excelia processed, more to write into the divine script, and the heat of the update reflected that.
Her finger followed the lines one character at a time. Each trail of heat sank deeper. The ache in my shoulder eased as the warmth spread. My arms unknotted. The tension in my lower back that had been locked since the fight finally let go, and for a few seconds I just lay there and breathed and let the Falna do its work. Her breathing was slow above me, controlled. Professional.
A moth had gotten into the basement and was circling the candle on the table, throwing a jerky shadow on the wall. I watched it while she traced. It tapped against the flame, pulled back, circled, tapped again.
Her finger stopped.
Her breathing changed. A catch. Then her finger pressed harder against my skin, re-tracing a character, checking it.
"Bell."
"Yeah?"
"Your Agility." Her voice was thin. "It's at E."
I kept my face in the cushion. "E as in E-rank?"
"E-403." She re-traced the number. Her finger shook on the second pass. "From I-0. In weeks, Bell. Weeks."
I let that sit. E-403 in Agility. From zero. The training with Ais, the Dungeon farming, the Silverback fight. Liaris Freese eating all of it and converting at a rate that shouldn't exist. I'd known the skill was doing its work. Known from the anime that Bell's growth was legendary, that the numbers eventually got so absurd that gods across Orario would turn their heads. But feeling it confirmed in real numbers on my own back while the goddess who'd made it possible was shaking above me was different from watching statistics scroll on a screen. These numbers were mine. This body, this growth, this impossible acceleration. Mine.
"Your Strength is at F-321," she said. Her voice was getting tighter with each stat. "Endurance G-207. Dexterity F-302. Magic I-12."
"So everything but Magic."
"Everything but Magic is growing at a rate I've never seen." She re-traced the Agility number again. Her hands were shaking. The tremor ran through her fingertips into my skin. "Bell, I need you to understand what this means. Level 1 adventurers with normal growth take a year to reach E in any stat. The fastest in Guild records are four months. You've done it in weeks. The growth curve isn't linear. It's accelerating."
"The Silverback fight."
"The Silverback generated enormous excelia. Life-or-death combat against a monster significantly above your level. But the curve was already steep before that. From the daily farming. From training with Ais. From..." She stopped. Swallowed. "The emotional intensity matters. Liaris Freese scales with how much you want it. With how much you feel. And whatever you've been feeling, Bell, it's feeding this growth rate like nothing I've ever documented."
She said that last part quietly. Like she wanted to ask what I'd been feeling, and couldn't. "If the other deities found out about these numbers, they would come for you."
She said it flat. Just fact.
Her hands pressed against my back. Both palms flat. The tremble in them was warm. She wasn't reading anymore. She was just touching me.
"I'm hiding the skill," she said. "Every update, I conceal Liaris Freese. But the growth rate itself is visible to any god who reads your Falna, and if you convert to another Familia, or if a god forces an update, or if anyone at the Guild notices how fast you're ranking up on the exchange floors-"
"Hestia."
She went quiet.
"I know. I'm not leaving your Familia."
A small sound from her. A breath that might have been relief. Her palms pressed warmer against my skin, and for a second the tremble in them stopped. It came back. But for that one second, steady.
She leaned closer. Her breath hit my spine, warm and uneven, and her chest pressed against my upper back as she reached for the lower hieroglyphs. Her ribcage against my shoulder blade. Through her dress and my bare skin, her heartbeat. Fast. Hard.
She was trying to be professional. Reading the Falna. Recording the stats. Being a goddess doing her job. Her heart was going too fast for professional and her hands were shaking and she was pressed flat against my back and the candle threw both our shadows onto the wall as one shape.
Her finger traced the lowest line of hieroglyphs at the small of my back, where the Falna script ended. Her touch was lighter there, careful. Each fingertip distinct as she read the final characters. The warmth pooled at the base of my spine and spread through my hips.
"Bell... these numbers..." Her voice cracked. Close enough that the vibration of her words traveled through her chest into my back. "You're going to be... I've never..."
She pressed her forehead between my shoulder blades. Went still. Her breathing fast and shallow against my skin, her hands flat on my back, one at the center, one at the small. Her heartbeat counting itself through my spine.
The basement was quiet around us. The moth was still circling the candle. Her hair had come loose and the ends of it brushed my lower back where her hand was, silk and warmth and the faint smell of whatever soap she used. She was pressed against me from forehead to hip and she was shaking and she was quiet and the only sound was her breathing and mine and the moth tapping the flame.
I rolled over.
She was straddling my waist. Her knees on either side of my hips, her hands flat on my chest where they'd landed when I turned. Her hair was loose, the twin-tails half undone from the festival, black strands hanging around her face. Her blue eyes were wide and wet, inches from mine.
Neither of us had planned this. She'd been leaning down to read the lower Falna. I'd turned. And now she was sitting on me with her hands on my bare chest and her face was right there and the candlelight was catching the tears in her eyelashes. My hands were at my sides. Her knees were warm against my ribs.
She didn't move. Her fingers curled against my chest, pressing into the skin. The tremble was still in her shoulders. Different from the park. Closer to a cliff she wanted to jump from.
The weight of her on my hips. The warmth of her hands on my skin. The blue ribbon pulled tight across her chest with every quick breath. Her thighs tensed against my sides and her weight shifted forward, gravity and want pulling the same direction.
I looked up at her. Blue eyes. Wet lashes. Lower lip caught between her teeth. She was a goddess who'd lived for millennia in a place where no one surprised her, and she was shaking because a Level 1 had rolled over underneath her.
I reached up. Slowly. Tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. My fingers brushed the shell of her ear and she stopped breathing. Her lips parted. The tears slipped free, one from each eye, tracking down her cheeks.
"Thank you," I said. "For the knife. For everything."
She made a sound. It was supposed to be a word. It came out as a breath with a shape, a half-formed syllable that broke before it reached the air. Her chin trembled. Her hands pressed harder against my chest.
"I-" she tried. "Bell, I-"
She leaned down.
Slowly. Her hair fell around both our faces. The candlelight went gold through the black strands. Her breath was warm on my mouth. Every eyelash visible. The wet tracks on her cheeks. The blue of her irises going dark at the center.
I put my hand on the back of her neck. Her skin was hot. Her pulse hammered against my palm.
I pulled her the rest of the way.