Sera messaged him.

You need food, and you need to not be recognized. I know a place. Meet me at the corner of Halen and Fifth in twenty minutes.

He had been sitting on his couch staring at the True Fan notification when the message arrived. He closed the system screen and grabbed his jacket.

The café was called Merry Log, and Kai knew immediately that it was expensive, not from the menu but from the doors. Heavy dark wood, no signage visible from the street, the kind of entrance that communicated that the people inside did not need to be advertised to.

Sera pushed them open, and Kai followed her in.

The light inside was warm and low, and the walls were dark wood that had been there long enough to mean something. People were talking at a normal volume, the kind that fills a room without crowding it. No one looked up when they came in.

Kai slowed down for a couple of seconds.

In a corner booth near the back, two members of the Vanta Collective were sitting with coffee. He recognized them immediately; they were a world-famous band that had played Mythal City a month ago.

Leo had three of their albums and played them loud enough to bother the neighbors. One of them was reading something on a tablet. The other had a hood up and was watching a video, laughing a little to himself. A woman at the next table glanced over at the laugh and then went back to her drink.

That was all.

No one came to bother them at all.

Kai looked around once more. "How do you know about this place?"

Sera was already walking toward the booth the hostess had indicated. "It’s a place my mother recommended to me. She said it’s a good place to relax."

"And how does she know about this place?"

"It’s a hobby of hers to always try out every cafe in the cities she visits."

The booth was tucked toward the back, a little apart from the rest of the room. A few people looked up when they sat down, the way people do, and then looked away again. No one reached for a phone.

Sera sank into her seat and let out a long breath. "Finally."

Kai sat across from her and picked up the menu. "You come here often?"

"After hard clears, sometimes." She stretched her arms up over her head. "Nobody bothers you."

The food came, and something in him started to unknot.

The dungeon they’d just cleared had been brutal, a flooded underground cathedral choked with poison mist, the monsters blind and tracking every sound they made. Three teams had gone in before them and had not finished.

They had.

Another blue light was gone from the skyline, and now he was here, in a warm booth, eating food, and nobody was watching him.

Sera poked at her plate for a moment. Then she picked up her phone with the look of someone who had been sitting on something.

Kai immediately narrowed his eyes. "That look worries me."

"It should," she said, and turned the screen toward him.

He went still.

Fanart. A lot of it. One piece had him standing on broken stone with cracks splitting through the air around him like shattered glass. Another had him and Sera back-to-back in a corridor mid-collapse, her light warm and gold, his blade dark. He scrolled to a third and sat up a little straighter without meaning to.

Sera noticed. "You look nervous."

"I am nervous."

"Why?"

He turned the phone toward her and pointed. "Why does this one give me glowing red eyes?"

"I don’t know. I think it looks cool."

"I don’t do that."

"Yet," she said casually, and took a sip of her coffee. "You look like someone who eventually would,"

Kai hated that he couldn’t immediately disagree.

He kept scrolling and saw edited clips, meme posts, and argument threads that had stopped being about anything. Then he saw a poster, and a custom shirt that read "All knowing" across the front in big block letters.

Kai looked at the screen for a second longer. "What does that mean?"

"Your fans invented it."

"They did all of this?"

Sera looked at him flatly. "Well, one of your multiple fan communities."

Just then, a waiter arrived quietly with fresh drinks and a dessert neither of them remembered ordering.

Sera looked at it for a second. "Did you do this?"

"No," Kai said.

They both looked toward the counter, where the older owner immediately pretended not to notice them looking.

"Haha, the owner really is funny." Sera smiled a bit more while Kai blinked.

Before he kept scrolling on the phone and found a thread that was mid-argument.

Mystery Hunter is going to clear the most dungeons! Just you wait!

Huh? Did you forget about Raze?! Lily!?

Those two had a head start! Kai will catch up soon.

Why are Kai fans so delusional?

At the next table, someone burst out laughing loudly enough that half the café glanced over. A second later, the music changed tracks.

The tension in Kai’s shoulders loosened slightly without him noticing.

"People argue this aggressively?" he said.

"All the time." Sera sighed and leaned back. "The arguments get exhausting to read." She was quiet for a moment, looking at the screen. "But I still think the rest of it is kind of nice."

Kai looked at her. "The fanart?"

"The fact that people still make things for each other." She turned the phone slightly. The illustration showed hunters standing under a dungeon light as it faded out, the blue catching across their faces. Someone had put real time into it. "The edits, the things people make. Someone did this for hours... Not just for money but because they wanted to."

Somewhere in the city, someone had spent hours drawing people surviving.

Sera set the phone down. "There’s something warm about that. Everything outside is falling apart, and people still find something to gather around."

Kai studied the illustration for a moment. The city had been scared for a long time, and scared people looked for things to hold onto.

Hunters had become that. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being part of it yet.

Sera picked her phone back up, and the small grin she got told him the best one was still coming.

"This one," she said, "is my favorite."

She turned the screen toward him.

A compiled clip titled: SERA SAVING KAI FOR 8 MINUTES STRAIGHT.

"I saved you, too," Kai said with a scoff.

Sera laughed hard enough that the couple at the nearest table glanced over. "The comments don’t care."

"That’s completely unfair."

"Welcome to being well-known." She was still laughing, and sounded amused by it in a way Kai still wasn’t used to. "The narrative has been decided. You are her reliable partner who helps her sweep through these dangerous dungeons~ That is the story."

Kai put his face in his hands briefly.

"The comments are very affectionate about it," Sera added, which did not help.

"Don’t remind me..."

Sera laughed before stealing one of his fries.

Kai stared at her hand. "You have your own."

"And now I also have one of yours."

For a while, they stayed in the booth, and the pressure of the city felt distant. The Vanta Collective left at some point, and nobody made a scene about it. Other people came and went with the same quiet.

The music shifted but stayed soft.

When they left, Kai walked home alone through streets that were quieter than the main routes, the city’s usual noise muffled by distance. His phone buzzed continuously in his pocket, notifications he was not looking at, and the damp pavement caught the street lights in long reflections that stretched ahead of him.

Then the system appeared at the edge of his vision.

[True Fan: 142.]

He slowed.

Usually, it was just a number but for a moment, faces of the people in the cafe came with it. Something shifted in him like a knot working itself loose. He thought of the first time it had happened, weeks ago, his foot finding something solid in open air where there had been nothing to stand on.

The alley ahead was empty. He checked both directions and then looked down at the ground in front of him.

He took a step and then another.

On the third step, he put his foot out over nothing and pushed down. For half a second, his body rose, just a few inches, the air holding him before it let go, and he came back down onto the pavement.

He stood there before pulling his hood lower and walked faster. It was just like before in the dungeon, but this one felt easier to do. He needed to be somewhere private before he tried it again.

He was nearly at the end of the alley when the wall stopped him.

Not tags but someone had actually painted it. A figure in careful dark strokes against the brick, holding a fractured blade, dungeon light breaking apart behind it in sharp angles. The shape of the armor was right.

The Spectral Warden Armor’s outline was accurate enough that someone had seen the footage closely.

Below it in large and clean letters:

KEEP CLIMBING.

Kai stood in the alley and looked at it for longer than he meant to. Someone had come out here at night with paint and a reference and spent hours getting the armor right. Nobody had asked them to.

For the first time, the notifications didn’t feel like numbers.

They felt like people.

With a smile on his face, he continued walking home. The city was still afraid, but now it was trying to believe in something anyway.