Chapter 14: Are you stalking me

Anger, as it turned out, was excellent fuel. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Yuto moved through the forest with a focus he hadn’t had the day before, cleaner and sharper, Teki’s face sitting somewhere in the back of his head like a coal that refused to stop burning. Every time a beast came out of the undergrowth he went at it with an efficiency that surprised even him. The hunts were brisk. There was no hesitation, no internal debate about technique. He just moved.

Four hours. Countless beasts.

There was a problem, though.

He’d noticed it on the third kill — the soul core notification had come in at 0.5 instead of the full one he’d been getting the day before, and he’d stood over the dead beast frowning at the panel for a moment before the logic clicked into place.

He was a Menace now. Which meant killing a Disciple-rank Threat — the kind of beast that had been the bulk of the hunting — was no longer an achievement. The system had apparently decided it didn’t need to reward him for doing something easy. He’d get half a core from Threats, full cores from Menaces, and presumably better rewards from anything higher.

He had tested this theory over the next two hours, and the theory had held up.

The Menace kills he’d gotten — four of them, after a lot of searching — had each given him one core apiece. And the bonus he’d received the day before for punching above his soul rank, the fat 10-core windfall, was gone. He was a Menace himself now. Killing a Menace was expected of him.

To get the bonuses back, he was going to have to kill things above his soul rank. Things that would actually mean something to kill.

He sat down on a tree stump and let this settle over him.

His profile read:

Name: Yuto

Rank: Disciple

Soul Rank: Menace

Soul Cores: 30/300

Thirty out of three hundred. He stared at it.

Yesterday, thirty cores had been the whole threshold. Today it was ten percent of the way to the next rank.

He was sweating through his new shirt and his legs ached and the forest had the particular late-afternoon quality of light that meant they’d been at this longer than was comfortable, and he sat on the stump and breathed and thought about Teki Masaru standing in the doorway this morning making that gesture at the room.

"Shiny."

Shiny looked at him. "Yes master."

"The stupid guy," Yuto said. "This morning. With the — " he waved a hand. "The clothes, and the family crest on the collar, and the standing in our doorway like it belonged to him."

Shiny waited.

"He’s noble-born," Yuto said. "That’s the whole thing. That’s all it is. He was born into a family with money and a name and he has spent his entire life confusing that for a personality." He picked up a stick and snapped it. "He walks into other people’s homes and says whatever he wants because what are they going to do? His family owns half the enforcement apparatus in this district. You push back and suddenly you’ve committed some infraction that didn’t exist yesterday."

He threw the two pieces of stick in separate directions.

"I want to hit him," he said. "I want to hit him very much. I thought about hitting him this morning. I was approximately this close to hitting him." He held up two fingers. "And you know why I didn’t?"

Shiny’s expression, as ever, offered no guesses. He shrugged.

"Gina," Yuto said. He looked down at his hands. "Not me — I’d take whatever they threw at me, honestly. But her. If I act rashly and they decide to make an example, she suffers for it. They’d find something to charge her with. They always find something." He was quiet for a moment. "I can’t do that to her."

He sat with this for a few more seconds. Then he stood up, brushed off his trousers, and rolled his neck until it cracked.

"Anyway," he said. "Time to leave, no point yelling in the woods like a mad man"

As he said this a part of his mind scoffed. ’You’re already a mad man.’

Yuto ignored it.

They were better prepared today.

Yesterday had been improvised — heads only, twelve of them, because they’d run out of bags. Today they had come with the proper equipment, and the haul showed it. Twenty-one beast crystals and twenty-one full carcasses packed and accounted for. Yuto looked at the bags with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose math was working out for once and started moving.

They were picking their way back through the trees toward the gate when he saw two figures on the path ahead.

He slowed.

One of them was large and brown and moving with the particular deliberate grace of a bird that had decided walking was beneath it but was doing it anyway.

The other was a girl in leather armor, hair packed into a tight bun at the back of her head, moving through the dappled light of the late-afternoon forest like the forest had been arranged around her on purpose.

Yuto’s heart did something quick and involuntary.

Mayu.

Yesterday she had been fighting wolves in a nightgown with her hair down, which he had filed under things he didn’t fully understand but had decided not to question. Today she looked dressed for actual combat, the armor fitted and practical — and she still somehow managed to look like she had no business being in a forest.

Damn how could someone be so beautiful?

He walked toward her.

Her gaze found him before he’d closed half the distance. It settled on him with the unhurried assessment of someone who recognised something and was deciding what to do about it. Then it settled, and her face remained — as it always seemed to — entirely, serenely, unreachably blank.

He stopped in front of her.

"Twice now," he said.

She looked at him.

"Twice we’ve run into each other." He tilted his head slightly. "In a very large forest." He smirked. "Are you stalking me?"