Yuto reached for her shoulder and Gina shoved him away before his hand got there.

Not rudely. Just firmly, the flat of her palm against his arm, the universal gesture for I have this, stand down. He stepped back and watched her cough her way back to normal. It took a while. It was not graceful. When it finally finished she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and sat very straight, like posture could retroactively restore some dignity to the situation.

Her face was still completely red.

"Is something wrong with the food?" Yuto asked.

"No." Her voice came out rough at the edges. She picked her spoon back up with enormous purpose. "I wasn’t paying attention. I choked."

"Right," Yuto said.

He went back to his bowl.

Inwardly, though, he was looking at the food. The actual quality of it — real broth, real ingredients, not the stretched careful versions they’d been eating around the edges of for years. It was genuinely good. Better than anything they usually had.

Maybe that was it.

Maybe eating something properly rich after so long of making do had just caught her off guard. The stomach needing a moment to remember what this was.

Ah, poor Gina. Not used to good food.

He felt bad about this, nodded to himself sympathetically, and finished his soup.

xxxx

He was washing up after dinner — water warm, evening quiet outside, working through the plates in a comfortable and thoroughly untroubled state of mind — when two arms came around him from behind.

He stopped moving entirely.

Gina pressed her face between his shoulder blades. Her voice came out a little muffled. "Thank you. For the food. For the gifts."

Yuto stood there holding a soapy plate with absolutely nowhere to put it.

"It’s nothing," he said.

She shook her head. He felt it against his back. "It’s not nothing."

"It will be normal from here." He meant this plainly, as a statement of fact. "Now that I’m an Ethereal things will change. We’ll start with a house that doesn’t lean."

Gina was quiet for a moment.

Then she hugged him tighter.

And that was when several things occurred to Yuto in very quick succession. The warmth of her arms. The way her face was tucked between his shoulders. The soft press of her breasts against his back, which —

His brain latched onto this last detail with tremendous enthusiasm and refused to let it go regardless of how many times he told it to.

His face went hot.

He endured approximately three seconds of this and then suddenly remembered that the high shelf needed attending to, the one that required both arms and a slight step forward, and he attended to it, and the hug broke naturally.

Gina said nothing behind him but there was a quality to the silence that he recognised without wanting to. The one where she had noticed something and was deciding what to do with it. He kept his eyes on the shelf and did not turn around.

Eventually he heard her footsteps move away.

He exhaled, very quietly, into the cabinet door.

He really needed to do something about the little sister thing. It was clearly not working the way it used to.

xxx

Later that night, Gina was asleep.

Curled on her side facing the wall, breathing slow and even. Yuto lay on his back in the dark and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep.

The rank-up prompt was still sitting at the edge of his vision. Rank up available. Proceed? Blinking patiently, like it had all the time in the world. He had been ignoring it since the clearing — sensible reasons, forest not safe, Mayu watching, didn’t know what the process involved. All of that was still true except none of it applied anymore because he was lying in his own bed and the only danger in the immediate vicinity was his own brain, which the system definitely couldn’t help with.

He opened the panel.

Name: Yuto

Rank: Disciple

Soul Rank: Threat

Soul Cores: 39/30

He selected Proceed.

Nothing happened.

Then —

The pain hit his chest like something had closed a fist around it and squeezed. He folded before he could decide not to, knees up, jaw locked shut on the sound trying to come out, which was considerable. He felt something forming around his heart — not in it, around it, a ring of pressure, tightening and tightening like it was looking for the point where something would give.

Don’t wake Gina, he thought, and focused on that, because focusing on that was more useful than focusing on the fact that it felt like his ribcage was having a disagreement with his organs.

He did not make a sound.

The ring tightened. And tightened. And tightened —

Then it released.

Completely. All at once. Like a cord cut.

He uncurled slowly, breathing in increments, and settled back flat. His chest felt different. Not damaged — the opposite of damaged. Like a room he’d been living in for years that had always been slightly too small, and someone had quietly removed a wall while he wasn’t looking.

The panel updated.

[Soul Rank advancement complete.]

Name: Yuto

Rank: Disciple

Soul Rank: Menace

Soul Cores: 9/300

He read it twice.

The reserves. He could feel them — not just larger, different. The pool of essence he’d been drawing on since yesterday, the one he’d barely begun to understand the shape of, had simply become another thing entirely. Deeper. Wider. Like the difference between cupped hands and a full basin.

So this is what a Menace feels like.

He lay there for a moment and took stock of himself. Stronger. Not in a way he could see yet, but in a way he could feel, something settled and solid in his chest that hadn’t been there before. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

He thought about tomorrow. Hunting. The tower at some point.

The system had called him high potential, low status. That was the deal. He had one of those things and was working on the other.

He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow was going to be a long day.