Chapter 9: Fate: [UNSTABLE]
The days started running together in a way that almost passed for peace.
Magic in the mornings, until my mana ran dry enough that even the breathing couldn’t keep pace with what I was burning through it.
Sword work after that, because my arms had stopped being any good for delicate things by then, and a blade rising and falling didn’t ask for delicacy.
Mana breathing again on the walk back to the house.
Weeks gone.
I’d debugged enough systems to know better. Quiet usually just means nobody’s found the bug yet. Not that there isn’t one.
A few weeks of finding new ways to be insufferable about my own situation had apparently added up to something. Two hundred and change, last I’d checked. Not a fortune. Enough to be dangerous.
"System. Open the shop."
[...]
A market unfolded in front of me. I scrolled past the basics. Ice Spear. Wind Blade. Cooking, for some reason. Healing, locked behind a level requirement I didn’t meet yet.
Then I saw it.
Inventory. A hundred Ink.
I read the description twice. No catch I could find in the wording. No conditions hiding in a footnote.
A hundred Ink, in an economy where the basics started at two hundred.
That wasn’t a price. That was a jackpot.
Cheap usually meant one of two things in a system like this. Useless, or broken. I’d shipped enough underpriced items myself, in builds nobody thought anyone would notice, to know which one I was betting on.
"Let’s find out."
[Skill Acquired: Inventory.]
[Available Slots: 20.]
I picked my sword up off the floor.
"Store."
It vanished, clean, like it had never been resting there at all.
Twenty slots. A hundred Ink. Somebody on the other end of this system had badly mispriced their own product, and I had no intention of telling them.
"Open the Premium Spin."
[Premium Spin: 100 Ink.]
I clicked it before I’d finished deciding to.
Luna arrived a second after the chime did, already mid sentence, already sounding like she hated every word of it.
"I am contractually obligated to inform you," she said, flat as a read receipt, "that you have triggered a Premium Spin promotional event."
"You don’t sound thrilled about it."
"I am not thrilled about it. I would like that noted somewhere."
"Noted."
The wheel spun. Stopped.
"Pain Resistance," she announced, in the tone of someone confirming a parking ticket.
"Congratulations, I suppose."
I exhaled.
"That’s genuinely great, actually."
I meant it.
If I have Pain Resistance now... the penalties would be way more tolerable. I could basically say whatever I want.
Apparently my face gave it away.
Luna’s eyes narrowed.
"By the way," she said, completely casually. "From now on, all skills will be deactivated during penalty time."
"Wh— wait. Wait." I held up a hand. "Why? That’s not fair!"
"It’s exactly fair," she said, and was gone before I finished the sentence
I sighed and sat back down.
Somehow losing to a twelve year old girl was the most humiliating thing that had happened to me since waking up in this body.
"Can the shop show me other people’s status," I asked the ceiling. "Profiles. Stats."
[Affirmative. But it will cost you.]
"How much."
[Ten Ink per query.]
"What the fuck, are you trying to loot a poor man?"
[First query: ninety percent introductory discount, new customers only.]
I almost laughed.
...That’s literally just a scam to get me hooked."
[Feedback noted.]
Huh!?
I closed the shop.
Sebastian left that evening.
There was no announcement or formal goodbye. Only a letter from my father stating that Sebastian’s presence was required elsewhere.
He packed in under an hour, appeared at my door one final time, said
"I will take my leave, Young Master," and was gone before I could think of anything worth saying back.
I stood at the window and watched the carriage disappear through the gate.
Sebastian Crowe. I knew the surname now, finally, off the seal on a letter.
I ran the rest of it back the way you review a log once you already know where the crash happened.
A steward learns to be quiet. He doesn’t learn to be silent. Those aren’t the same skill, and I’d spent a week mistaking one for the other because the coat fit so well.
Which meant Sebastian hadn’t been staff so much as a posting. My father’s eyes, set down inside his own house, watching the one piece of it he trusted least.
And now those eyes were gone.
Either my father had stopped caring what I did with my evenings. Or he’d already decided he knew, and didn’t need the reports anymore.
I wasn’t sure which version I wanted to be true.
The house felt different after that,
So this was what it felt like, not being watched.
I went back to training anyway. Habits don’t check who’s logging them.
Two more weeks went by under that particular kind of quiet. Cave at dawn. Magic until the mana ran out, sword until the arms followed it.
Nights belonged to the diary plot, names half remembered off a wiki page for a character who was never supposed to matter this much, details I kept revising because the world kept handing me new ones.
I was making progress. Real progress.
But the main quest remained untouched.
After an intense training session I went for a bath.
I got up. Crossed to the mirror.
The face looking back had stopped being a surprise weeks ago.
My jaw had sharpened, and my shoulders finally filled the frame properly.
I looked for another moment.
Then I turned away and went to work.
There was no point staring at what I was becoming when I could be accelerating it.
***
The air in the room changed.
The lamp flame bent sideways. The tea in the cup tilted the same direction.
Then the sound came.
The sound was low, barely audible. It settled in my chest rather than my ears.
The center of the room darkened, becoming something deeper than shadow—a point of absolute nothing hanging in the air at eye level.
I was already on my feet.
The pull started small. A draft that came from no direction. The loose pages lifted and flew inward, hitting the dark point and vanishing into it without sound.
The rift was maybe a meter across now.
The pull increased.
The chair went. Straight into it and gone. The desk dragged across the stone floor with a sound like grinding teeth, legs leaving deep scratches, and then it too was swallowed.
I grabbed the wall.
The window shattered inward. Every piece of glass pulled toward the rift in a stream of glittering fragments. The rift was two meters across now. Nearly doorway sized. The darkness inside it had no depth I could measure.
The pull doubled.
My fingers found the edge of the stone doorframe. My feet left the ground.
I held on.
The room was emptying around me.
I pushed mana into my grip. Into the stone itself. Tried to anchor.
The stone cracked beneath my fingers.
A second later, the entire frame tore free.
"You’ve got to be kidding me."
The rift took me whole.
***
[The Contract regrets to inform you that your current designated narrative has been interrupted.]
[Rewrite Task 01: SUSPENDED.]
[Cause: Subject relocated outside all recorded narrative parameters.]
tsuki Amagi
Fate: [UNSTABLE]
Threat Level: [INCREASING]
Narrative Position: Main Character
Observed By: ■■■■■■
Current Condition: Alive
Warning: The original plot no longer exists.
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