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

Chapter 153: A Day Off

Kai was halfway through a genuinely ordinary morning when Mira appeared.

One moment he was walking. The next a hand had his sleeve.

He looked down. Then up.

Mira.

"Good," she said. "You’re free."

"I noticed," he said.

"Excellent." She started walking and the sleeve came with her.

Kai did not immediately move. For approximately two seconds Mira succeeded in applying forward momentum to him by sheer commitment to the direction. Then he stopped.

Mira stopped too. Looked back at him.

"You’re resisting," she said.

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because you’re pulling me somewhere without explaining where."

"Team building," she said.

"No."

"Too late," she said, and resumed walking.

Kai considered his options and sighed. He figured Mira had already accounted for his responses before she tried this. She might look like the jolly type but she always tried her best when it came to bringing people together.

It also didn’t help she was dragging him as he was thinking.

"Where are we going," he said.

"I told you."

"You said team building. That’s not a location."

"It is today."

He sighed.

Mira did not slow down.

The destination was in the entertainment district, the part of the city that had grown significantly in the two months since the gate phase started, people apparently responding to a world that had gotten more dangerous by wanting more places to go and not think about that. Restaurants, arcades, shops. The midday crowd was already dense.

He saw the others before Mira had to explain further.

Sera was near the entrance. Lily beside her. Elden to the left. Raze standing slightly apart with the bearing of someone who had arrived early and wanted credit for it.

Kai looked at Sera.

She looked away but it was one second too late.

He pointed at her. "You knew."

"I knew," she said.

"You could have mentioned it."

"You wouldn’t have come."

She was correct. He did not tell her this.

Raze raised a hand in greeting. "You’re late."

"I was taken against my will," Kai said.

Mira said, "Only briefly."

Lily pressed her fingers against her forehead. "That’s not helping."

Raze did not look troubled by any of this. He had the expression of someone who had already decided the day was going to be good and was waiting for the rest of it to confirm this.

Mira looked around at all of them. "We cleared a Mythical gate," she said.

Everyone nodded.

"Multiple Mythical gates," Elden said.

"We survived things that should have killed us," Mira continued.

"Several times," Raze said, sounding pleased about this.

"We cleared the first B-rank territory. We cleared the Territory Commander." She looked at each of them in turn. "And I do not know most of your middle names."

Silence.

"I don’t have one," Raze said.

"I wasn’t asking specifically about middle names."

"Then why mention them."

"It was an example."

"Of what."

Lily looked at the ceiling briefly. Kai did not say anything. Mira folded her arms and looked around at the group with the expression she used when she had made a decision and was waiting for everyone else to arrive at the same place.

"We trust each other with our lives," she said. "We do not know each other." A pause. "This seems inefficient."

Nobody had an immediate response to this. Because she was not wrong. They had run dungeons together and fought alongside each other through the Mythical phase and stood in the same briefing room and made decisions that affected the whole city, and outside of those contexts most of them could not have listed what the others did on an ordinary day.

Elden laughed first before saying. "Fine. Not like you will stop trying if we refuse."

"Good you know."

After that the rest of them followed and the day started.

The racing games were Raze’s idea. This was clear in retrospect from how confidently he walked toward them and how immediately he sat down and how definitively he announced that he had natural aptitude for this category of activity.

Nobody had asked.

He announced it anyway.

Kai sat beside him mostly out of curiosity about how this would go.

It went immediately into a wall. Raze’s vehicle struck the left barrier, corrected, struck the right barrier, and then through some combination of physics and commitment struck the first barrier again.

"You hit the same wall twice," Kai said.

"Three times," Sera said from behind them. Her voice had the specific quality of someone working very hard to maintain a neutral expression.

Raze pointed at the screen. "The controls are counterintuitive."

"You were going in a straight line," Lily said.

"There was a curve."

"There was not a curve."

"There appeared to be."

Elden had finished his race and was watching Raze with the patient expression of someone taking in information without judgment. "The course is entirely straight," he said. "There are no curves."

Raze pointed at him. "Then it should have been easier."

"It should have been," Elden agreed.

Sera gave up on maintaining the neutral expression.

The second notable event involved Lily and a shooting game that occupied a corner of the arcade. The game was straightforward, targets appearing on a screen, points for accuracy and speed. Lily stepped up without particular ceremony and the machine’s scoring display did something nobody had seen it do before.

The three-digit score counter ran out of digits.

Mira stopped walking.

"Again," she said.

Lily looked at her. "I don’t need to go again."

"I do," Mira said.

They played.

But Lily won easily. Mira trembled before she quickly shouted for another round with a put and her hands clenched. But Lily won again and this time faster than before. The pattern continued for four more rounds.

Kai watched this from a nearby table. Elden sat across from him.

"Has she always been able to do that," Kai said.

"I don’t know," Elden said. "I didn’t know she could until today."

Lily, between rounds, sipped from a drink Sera had brought over. She looked entirely unbothered.

Mira lost again. She stood with her arms folded looking at the final score comparison. Then: "One more."

"You’ve said that five times," Lily said.

"This time I mean it."

"You meant it each time."

Mira did not dispute this.

Lily went again. The score counter ran out of digits again.

Mira nodded once, the nod of someone processing a result and updating their assessment. Then she walked away from the machine with the composure of someone who had not just lost seven consecutive rounds.

Raze appeared beside Kai. He watched Mira leave. "She’ll practice and come back."

"Probably," Kai said.

"I respect it," Raze said.

Elden ended up at a rhythm game. Nobody suggested it. He was simply in front of it at some point and then playing it. The game required tracking multiple simultaneous inputs, the complexity scaling with each level.

He reached the final stage on his first attempt.

Raze watched the score appear. Looked at Elden. Looked at the score. Looked at Elden again.

"Why," he said.

Elden looked at the screen as though he was also a little surprised. "I don’t know."

"How are you good at things."

"I’m not good at most things."

Raze pointed at the screen. The expression was not accusation exactly. More like genuine confusion.

Elden had no defense.

Kai found himself at a competitive accuracy game at some point in the afternoon. He did not entirely remember how this had happened. Mira was involved. The game had a scoring comparison function that displayed relative results.

He lost.

Not significantly. But the result was what it was.

Sera appeared beside him looking at the screen. "Good effort," she said.

"That sounded completely insincere," he said.

"It was," she said.

"Thank you for not pretending otherwise."

"You’re welcome."

Mira appeared from the other side and looked at the score with the expression she used when analyzing tactical outcomes. "You were distracted," she said.

"I was focused," Kai said.

"You were thinking about something else."

He did not have a response to this that was entirely accurate.

Mira nodded as though this confirmed something. "Noted," she said, and moved on.