Twenty-five cores.

Yuto read the notifications twice. Then a third time, because the number hadn’t changed and he wanted to be sure. He had known that higher-ranked kills came with better rewards, that was obvious enough in theory, but he hadn’t expected the margin to be this large. Large enough to push his soul rank up in less than a day. Large enough that every other new Ethereal was still sitting at Threat while he was standing here with a rank-up prompt blinking patiently at the edge of his vision.

He thought about what he knew of the two systems.

The first was rank, earned through conquest — specifically through clearing floors of the Astral Tower. Six floors, seven ranks. Disciple at the bottom, then Paragon, Monarch, Exalted, Sovereign, Eternal, and at the theoretical top, Ascendant. No one had ever actually reached Ascendant. In practice, Exalted was the ceiling, and the handful of Ethereals who had reached it were less like people and more like geological features, permanent, vast, things you built your understanding of the world around.

The second system was soul rank. A measure of essence, of accumulated power. Seven ranks here as well: Threat, Menace, Calamity, Destroyer, Dominus, Oblivion, and at the top, Cataclysm. Most new Ethereals spent months as Threats. Becoming a Menace was a milestone that took time, patience, and a lot of grinding.

Yuto had been an Ethereal for less than a day.

He stared at the blue prompt, Rank up available. Proceed? and considered it carefully.

Then he selected no.

Two reasons.

The first was practical: he had no idea what the process actually felt like. No one had ever explained it to him. Whether it was instantaneous or gradual, painful or not, whether it left you momentarily vulnerable or distracted or unable to move properly, he didn’t know any of it. They were still in the forest, and the forest had recently demonstrated that it had opinions about them. If a rank-up left him unable to run or fight for even thirty seconds, those thirty seconds could matter.

The second reason was standing a few feet away, watching Shiny with a flat, unreadable expression. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

He didn’t want her to know.

Mayu was a stranger. The alliance between them had formed out of proximity and shared danger, which was the flimsiest possible foundation. There was no trust there, no history, nothing to build on. He didn’t want her to see how fast he was moving, that he had accumulated a second soul rank in a single afternoon. Who knew what she would do with that information, or what she was actually capable of, or who she might tell?

The last wolf had not moved while its packmates died. It had stood at the edge of the clearing watching with something in its eyes that looked, if you were feeling generous, like grief. Now it began to move, slow and deliberate, hatred visible in every step.

Shiny didn’t let it reach them. He crossed the clearing in a few easy strides, and his blade went through the wolf’s chest in one clean motion. It was dead before it finished falling.

[Wolfhound slain.]

[+1 Soul Core]

Shiny pulled his sword free and stepped back. He wiped the blade on the wolf’s fur with a calm, methodical air, the way you’d wipe a knife after cutting fruit.

Yuto watched him and and couldn’t help but admire ’he’s so cool!’

And then, half a second later, entirely without his permission, another thought arrived behind it, a question about whether Mayu was thinking the same thing.

He caught the thought and immediately wished he hadn’t, because catching it meant acknowledging it, and acknowledging it meant sitting with the fact that he had just felt a brief, specific, completely irrational pang of jealousy over the opinions of a girl he had met twelve minutes ago in the middle of a forest while being attacked by wolves.

He was mortified.

She was a stranger. She was irrelevant to him. Her thoughts about Shiny were none of his business and did not affect him in any way.

He glanced at her anyway.

She was looking at him. Same expression as always, present, patient, not particularly invested.

"Your summon is quite strong," she said.

"Yes," Yuto said. "It is."

He held her gaze for exactly one second, then looked away.

"Anyway," he said, reaching out and placing a hand on Shiny’s arm, "we’re leaving. Bye."

He walked away without waiting for a response, pulling Shiny with him