Chapter 7: I’m Poor
[Achievement Unlocked: Mana Heart Created.]
[Ink +10.]
[Current Ink: 15.]
I opened the shop again, mostly to see what fifteen bought me.
Not much.
Basic skills sat at two hundred.
Ice Spear, Wind Blade, Basic Fireball. Starter kit material. Intermediate started somewhere past a thousand.
High-grade sat at ten thousand, the number doing most of the gatekeeping on its own.
Divine sat at the top, a hundred thousand, in a font that felt almost pleased with itself.
Fifteen, against a letter that gave me ten days to look like a different person.
One line near the bottom stopped me anyway.
Bloodline.
I looked at it longer than it deserved, couldn’t afford it, and kept scrolling mostly to prove I could stop looking at things I couldn’t have.
***
I found the diary that evening, going through the drawer beside the bed for something else entirely.
The cover read: Happy Birthday, Brother.
Spine still stiff. Pages untouched. Whatever Itsuki had meant to do with it, he hadn’t gotten around to it.
I started writing in it anyway. Not feelings but plot.
Names half-remembered off a wiki page I’d skimmed once for a character I never thought would matter this much. Dates that might be wrong.
Prevent Aria from becoming the instrument of House Amagi’s end.
Four months on that clock. Ten days on the other one, the Duke’s, which didn’t care about Aria at all and would happily end things for me first if I let it.
I caught myself doing the math—counting days.
I closed the diary.
***
Day one in the garden went about as well as it had any right to.
First burpee put me flat on my back. Second got slightly further before my arms quit mid-plank and took the rest of me down with them.
By the fourth my face had gone past red into something with no good name, and the shirt had stopped being damp and started just being wet, everywhere, permanently.
I kept the breathing going through all of it anyway. In, draw, hold, circulate. Feeding whatever the bronze nothing in my chest was supposed to be doing with the mana I kept aiming at it.
Sebastian watched from past the hedge. I caught him at it twice. Both times he’d already looked elsewhere before I turned my head.
[Ink +1.]
Sixteen. I had a feeling sweating through a yard at dawn wasn’t going to get me anywhere near a hundred before the Duke’s coach showed up.
The next several mornings ran together into roughly the same shape, fail, get up, fail slightly less, get up again.
Dumbbells appeared by the hedge sometime in there, small ones, left by no one I asked about. By the end of the week I could finish a lap of the yard without stopping, which felt less like progress and more like the bar had simply been that low to start with.
What changed wasn’t the training. It was the morning the training stopped mattering.
***
I was three meter through a lap, breathing.
I stopped running. Sebastian was already moving before I had, closing the distance from the hedge faster than I’d seen him cross a room, one hand landing flat on my chest hard enough that I felt it through the shirt.
"Don’t breathe it in," he said.
Not Young Master. Not anything close to the voice he usually used. Flat, fast, already past the point of pretending this was a normal morning.
Past the garden wall, low over the treeline, something moved that had too many joints for any animal I knew the shape of, dragging a kind of shadow that didn’t match the angle of the sun. It didn’t come closer. It didn’t need to.
[Ink +5.]
[Reason: Host correctly identified threat grade mana without prior training.]
Five Ink, for standing still and being right to be afraid.
Sebastian’s hand stayed on my chest until the shape passed beyond the ridge and the air went back to feeling like nothing again.
Then he took it back, smoothed his sleeve like nothing had happened to it, and said,
"You should go inside, Young Master."
"What was that."
"Nothing that concerns the house."
"Sebastian."
"Go inside," he said again, and this time it wasn’t a suggestion.
I went. I didn’t stop thinking about the hand on my chest, or the half-second before it landed, when his face had shown something a butler’s face has no business showing about a threat a butler’s job has no business recognizing on sight.
Twenty Ink.
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