Ch.22
The walk from the Dungeon entrance to the Guild took about ten minutes on a good day and I did it in twenty with a limp and Lili holding my elbow like I'd fall over if she let go. She might have been right. The chest wound had bled through the cloth she'd pressed to it on Floor 9, soaking into my shirt in a wide dark stain that pulled the fabric against my skin when I moved. My forearm had stopped bleeding but the cut was deep enough that my right hand kept going numb for seconds at a time. My jaw was swollen on the left side and throbbing with my pulse.
The magic stone was in my pocket. Heavy. Warm through the cloth.
People stared. I was used to being invisible in Orario, a white-haired nobody in a ruined shirt that nobody looked at twice. Today they looked. A woman pulling laundry off a line above a baker's shop stopped with a bedsheet in her hands and just watched me pass. Two adventurers in Soma Familia colors stepped off the sidewalk to give us room, and one of them said "damn" under his breath when he saw the blood.
Lili didn't say anything. She kept her hand on my elbow and her eyes forward and her backpack rattled with every step and she was walking at exactly the pace I could manage without her ever looking down at my legs to check.
The Guild's main hall was busy. Afternoon traffic, clerks behind the counter, adventurers in lines exchanging stones for valis. The noise hit me after the quiet of the street, all those voices overlapping, and for a second I wanted to sit down. The marble floor was cool through my boots and the overhead lights were too bright and the adrenaline from the fight had been gone for twenty minutes and my body was starting to send the invoice.
I went to the exchange counter. The clerk was a young woman I didn't recognize, human, mousy brown hair pulled back in a tail.
"Exchange," I said, and put the stone on the counter.
She looked at it. Then she looked at me. Then she looked at the stone again.
It sat between us on the polished wood, violet-black, the size of my fist, pulsing with inner light. The other stones around the exchange window were grape-sized, pale, the kind of thing you got from goblins and Kobolds on Floors 1 through 5. Mine was a different animal entirely.
"This is..." She picked it up with both hands. Turned it. Her eyes went wider. "Sir, this is a Floor 17 drop. At minimum."
"I know."
"Your registration is..." She was already pulling up records, flipping through a ledger. "Level 1. Solo registration plus one supporter. Sir, the protocol for irregular drops requires-"
A chair scraped behind the counter. Footsteps. Fast ones.
Eina came around the end of the counter row at a pace that was too quick for the Guild hall and not quite running. Her brown hair was half out of its tuck behind her ear and her glasses were slightly crooked and she was holding a clipboard she'd forgotten to put down. She stopped in front of me. Her green eyes went to my face first, then down the blood on my shirt, the bandaged forearm, the swollen jaw. Back to my face.
"What happened."
She didn't make it a question. It came out flat and sharp and controlled, the kind of voice people use when they're keeping their hands steady by force.
"I'll tell you. Can we go somewhere?"
She grabbed my arm above the elbow and pulled. Lili's hand fell away and Eina was already walking me toward the back hallway, past the advising alcoves, past the break room, into one of the small offices with a desk and two chairs and a door that closed. She kicked the door shut with her heel, let go of my arm, and turned around.
"Sit down."
I sat. The chair was hard and the impact made my ribs light up and I sucked air through my teeth. She watched me do it.
"Talk."
"I was on Floor 9 with Lili. A Minotaur showed up. Enhanced. Trained. Carrying a greatsword."
"A Minotaur with a weapon on Floor 9."
"Yeah."
"That's impossible. Minotaurs don't carry weapons and they don't appear above Floor 15."
"This one did."
Her jaw worked. She was standing between me and the door with her clipboard pressed against her chest, both arms wrapped around it, knuckles white on the edges. She had that same posture from the advising alcove a week ago, but everything about it was tighter. Rawer. Her green eyes were bright behind her glasses and her mouth was a line.
"You fought it."
"I told Lili to run. Then I fought it."
"Alone."
"Yeah."
"A Level 1 adventurer fought an enhanced Minotaur with a weapon, alone, on Floor 9."
She said each word separately, like she was giving me a chance to hear how it sounded and take it back. I didn't take it back.
"That magic stone on the counter is what's left of it."
Silence. Her breathing was audible. Fast through her nose, controlled, like she'd learned a long time ago how to keep her composure in this building in front of adventurers who came back from floors they shouldn't have been on.
"You could have died." Her voice cracked on the last word. A small fracture in the middle of a sentence, like a pane of glass that held together but showed the break. Her chin dipped. She was looking at the floor between my boots. "You could have died, Bell."
"Didn't."
I put my hand on top of her head.
Her hair was soft under my palm. Brown and straight and a little warm from the afternoon. She went still. The clipboard slid down from her chest and hit the floor, but she didn't pick it up. Her breathing hitched once and then she was pressing forward, her forehead against my collarbone, her hands on the front of my bloody shirt, and her shoulders were shaking.
She wasn't making any sound. Her fingers tightened in the fabric and her glasses pressed crooked against my chest and she cried the way someone cries who has practiced doing it quietly in a building full of people. Small, held, deliberate. The tears soaked into my shirt above the wound and the wet warmth mixed with the blood that was already there and her breath hit my skin through the torn collar.
I left my hand on her head. My other hand couldn't do much because the forearm was cut, so I rested it on the armrest and let her stay where she was.
She stayed longer than she should have.
Her body was warm against my chest. Slim, taller than Hestia but still fitting under my chin, and through the Guild uniform the shape of her pressed against me. Her hair smelled clean. Soap, maybe a faint floral, underneath the dusty paper smell that lived in the Guild's back offices. Her pointed ears were red from root to tip, visible through the strands of brown hair that had fallen out of the tuck.
Her breathing slowed down against my chest. Her grip loosened on my shirt. She pulled back by degrees, one hand releasing, then the other, her forehead leaving my chest last. She stood up straight and pushed her glasses up with the heel of her hand and her eyes were red-rimmed and wet and she wasn't looking at me.
"I apologize. That was-"
"Eina."
"That was unprofessional and I-"
"Eina."
She looked at me. Her cheeks were flushed and her lashes were wet and the tip of her nose was pink and her glasses were sitting crooked on her face.
"Thank you," I said.
Her mouth opened. Closed. She picked up the clipboard from the floor and held it in front of her like a shield. Her ears were practically glowing.
"You need a healer," she said.
"I know."
"And you need to file an irregularity report for the Minotaur. The Guild will need to investigate how an enhanced monster reached Floor 9. It's a security concern."
"I know."
"And I need to-" She paused. Swallowed hard. "I need to update your advisor file."
"Okay."
She turned toward the door. Stopped. Turned back. "Bell."
"Yeah?"
"Don't do that again."
Her green eyes behind her crooked glasses were steady. Whatever she'd just done, pressing her face into my bloody shirt and crying in the back office of her workplace, she wasn't going to take it back. She wasn't going to pretend it hadn't happened. She was just going to walk out of this room and go back to work and carry it.
"I'll try," I said.
She left the room fast. Her footsteps were brisk in the hall, the professional pace returning, and she said something sharp to someone as she passed.
I sat there. The chair was uncomfortable and my ribs hurt and my shirt was wet with blood and tears and the imprint of her glasses was pressed into the fabric on my chest.
Pink hair in the doorway.
Misha was leaning against the frame with one shoulder, arms crossed, her pink eyes wide. She had the expression of someone who had just seen something she was going to tell absolutely everyone about.
"Hi," she said.
"Misha."
"You look terrible."
"Thanks."
She glanced down the hall where Eina had gone. Then back at me. Her mouth pulled sideways into a grin that had too many teeth in it.
"Interesting," she said, and disappeared.
The gossip was already leaving the building.
Hestia was asleep on the couch when I got home.
Curled up with a pillow hugged to her chest and her black hair spilling off the cushion onto the floor. The church basement was dim, the only light from a candle on the low table that had burned down to a stub. She was wearing the white dress. Barefoot. The blue ribbon was untied, loose across her stomach.
Lili had gone to her cot upstairs without a word. She'd walked me home, she'd checked my bandages once at the church door, and she'd gone upstairs. Her brown eyes had been clear and dry and she'd said "Lili will make breakfast in the morning, Bell-sama" and that was it. The white light on Floor 9, the Minotaur, all of it. Packed away. She'd deal with it when she was ready.
I knelt beside the couch and touched Hestia's shoulder.
"Hey."
She woke up fast. Blue eyes open, unfocused, blinking. She saw me and sat up and her hands went to my face and then to my shirt and then she was wide awake.
"Bell, you're covered in blood."
"I need a falna update."
She was already pulling my shirt off. Clinical, urgent, her small hands tugging the hem up and pulling it over my head and hissing when she saw the chest wound, the forearm cut, the bruises spreading across my shoulder.
"Lie down. On your stomach."
I lay down on the couch. The cushions were warm from where she'd been sleeping and the fabric smelled like her. She knelt beside me. Her finger touched the center of my back where the falna lived, and the hieroglyphs lit up under her touch, blue-white light flooding the dim basement.
Her breathing changed.
Neither of us spoke. Her finger traced the lines of divine script, moving from one symbol to the next, and the light pulsed with each pass. The candlelight mixed with the falna's glow and her finger trembled against my skin.
"Bell."
"Yeah."
"Your stats." Her voice was thin. "They're all S-rank. From Level 1. All of them. Strength S-999, Agility S-999, Endurance S-991, Dexterity S-996, Magic S-904."
"I know. You told me before."
"That's not what I'm-" She stopped. Her finger moved to a section of the falna she hadn't touched before. Lower, near the base of my spine. "There's a new skill."
I kept my breathing even. "Read it."
"Argonaut." She said the word slowly, tracing each character. "Active trigger. Charge type. Accumulates power over time and releases it in a single strike. Activation condition: heroic desire." Her finger paused on the last glyph. "Heroic desire. Bell, this is- I've never seen a skill like this. This isn't a combat enhancement. This is-"
She couldn't finish. Her hand was shaking on my back. Her knuckles vibrated against the skin beside the falna.
"And there's a Development Ability," she said. "You unlocked one. For leveling up."
"Which one?"
"Luck."
Everyone would think it was a waste. A throwaway pick when he could have taken something flashy. But I knew what Luck did in the long run. I knew the fights it would tip, the rolls it would nudge, the moments where "almost died" would become "barely survived."
"Take it," I said.
She pressed her thumb into the glyph and the falna shifted. A brief warmth, like a muscle loosening, then nothing. She moved back to the top of the falna.
"Bell."
"Yeah."
"You're Level 2."
The words hung in the candlelight. Her finger traced the numeral at the top of the falna, the marker that said what I was in the system's eyes. Level 2. High Class. Third Class adventurer. Ais reached this in a year. I did it in three weeks.
"Three weeks," Hestia said. Her voice was barely audible. "You reached Level 2 in three weeks. That's the fastest in history. Faster than anyone. Faster than the Sword Princess."
She leaned down and pressed her forehead against my back, between my shoulder blades, right above the falna. Her hair fell across my skin, black and cool. Her hands gripped my sides and her chest pressed against me and her heartbeat was fast through her dress.
"I'm so proud of you," she whispered. "And I'm so scared. And I don't know which one is bigger."
I turned over. She was right there, kneeling beside the couch with her blue eyes wide and her face lit by the falna's fading glow. Tears on her cheeks. Her blue ribbon was hanging loose and her hair was everywhere and she was tiny and fierce and she looked at me like I was a miracle she'd made with her own hands.
I pulled her onto the couch. She came without resistance, fitting against my side like she'd been shaped for it, her face in my neck, her legs curled up, her hand on my bare chest above the bandage. The falna's light dimmed to a faint pulse.
"It's just the beginning," I said.
Her hand pressed down over my heart. The bandage was rough under her palm and the wound underneath stung and her fingers were warm and small and steady.
"I know," she said. "That's what scares me."
The candle went out. The Dungeon hummed beneath us, a low vibration in the stone that never stopped. Hestia's breathing slowed against my chest.
I closed my eyes.