My Class is Null, But I Always Get the Best Outcome

Chapter 149: More Than Rank

The room was quiet after the projections faded.

The projections were gone but the images stayed. The food shortage resolved by one routing decision that someone made before the shortage arrived. The declining settlement that reversed over decades because someone kept investing when it was easier to stop.

The frontier city that survived a gate event because someone had looked ahead far enough to stockpile and build and prepare before anything went wrong.

Nobody in those cities knew the name of the person who made those decisions. The people eating the food did not know. The families in the settlement did not know. The hunters who came back from the frontier gate did not know.

They just lived. They lived because someone had decided, years earlier, that they should. That was what was staying with him.

Small decisions.

Years of work.

One city changing little by little.

The Candidate was watching him. "You’ve been thinking," the man said.

"Yes," Kai said.

"About what."

He did not answer immediately.

He wasn’t thinking about Authority anymore but of Mythal. Every city in the projection reminded him of home.

Hunters entering gates that nobody had cleared before and not returning. Families like his waiting for the hunter return or the news they didn’t make it. He thought about Mayor Ko making deployment decisions with incomplete information about what was inside each gate. Or Lily doing her best to create the best plan for everyone to survive.

He imagined a city that was ready before the next disaster came. A city that didn’t have to panic every time something appeared.

The Candidate said, "What is it."

Kai looked at him. "Everything I’ve done has been a response to something."

The room was quiet.

"A gate appears and I get stronger. Someone causes a problem and I deal with it. A stronger threat appears and I get stronger again." He looked at the dark console. "I haven’t been building toward anything. I’ve been surviving."

Sera said, "That’s not unreasonable."

He looked at her.

"The world keeps trying to kill everyone," she said. "Reacting to that is not a character flaw."

"It isn’t," he said.

"Glad we agree."

He almost smiled.

Sera noticed but said nothing.

"Why did you become stronger," the Candidate said.

Kai found the honest answer immediately, which surprised him a little. He had expected to have to look for it.

"Because the world changed and I needed to be strong enough that Leo and Mina would not become someone else’s stepping stones." The room absorbed this.

Sera’s posture shifted. Small change. She did not look away.

The Candidate studied him for a moment with the quality that appeared when he was looking past the surface of something.

"Those two are?"

"My brother and sister," Kai said.

A pause.

"You became stronger," the man said, "not for yourself."

"Not primarily," Kai said.

"What about now?"

"Now too," Kai said.

The man nodded once. "That’s a better reason than most."

"Most?" Kai said.

The man looked at the photograph on the console. At the faces in it that had been losing detail to time.

"Most candidates wanted Authority for what it could give them," he said. "Position. Recognition. The feeling of being the strongest person in a room. They framed it as what they deserved because of what they had accomplished." He was quiet for a moment. "They did not last long in the program."

"Why," Sera said.

"Because Authority requires giving more than it returns," the man said. "The people who came to it as a reward could not sustain that. When the cost became visible and the return was still twenty years away, they made a different calculation."

"And the ones who didn’t," Sera said.

The man looked at the ceiling. At stone that had been holding this room together for a very long time.

"They wanted something else," he said.

"What?" she said.

He said."A future."

He blinked. It was such a simple answer. Yet he couldn’t argue with it.

Kai pictured Leo laughing at the dinner table.

Mina leaving for work before sunrise.

Dorn shouting in rooms that didn’t need shouting.

Rin pretending she wasn’t listening.

Lina quietly keeping everyone together.

Sera standing beside him before every difficult fight.

He wanted all of them to live in a city that didn’t always feel one step behind.

The image stayed.

He hadn’t built it.

It had simply appeared.

"You see it," the man said.

Kai looked at him.

The man nodded toward the dark console. "That’s why the program exists. Not to create stronger hunters or people with more influence. To find people who can see that image and pursue it."

Kai said, "Most people want a better future."

"Most people start with good intentions," the man said. "Then the hard choices come. The benefits won’t appear for years. The cost is immediate. That’s where most people give up."

Sera said, "How do you sustain it."

The man looked at her. "By making sure the thing you’re trying to protect is specific," he said. "Not civilization in the abstract. Not some general concept of the future." He looked at the photograph. "Specific people. Specific faces. Specific reasons." A pause. "The abstract future is too easy to trade away when the immediate problem is pressing. Specific people are not."

Kai thought about Leo arguing that the refrigerator had feelings. About Mina handing him a packed lunch at the door without mentioning the debt. About the photograph in the apartment that was also losing detail to time, that would eventually reach what the man’s photograph had reached.

Specific.

The Candidate leaned forward slightly. The most purposeful posture he had taken since they arrived.

"What would you change?" he said.

It sounded like an easy question.

It wasn’t because there were too many answers.

Leo.

Mina.

The hunters.

His friends.

The city.

The future.

For the first time since entering the Archive, Kai stopped thinking about Authority. He started thinking about the people waiting for him above.

If he could change the future—

Where would he even begin?