The market buzzed in that market kind of way; people hawking their wares, cartwheels on irregularly shaped stones, some dude shouting about the price of salt three stands away as if the future of the entire city depended on it.

I didn’t have any plans for myself right now. Which was peculiar.

No dungeon to descend into until tomorrow, no flagged interactions to respond to via counter-architecture, no wiki notifications hovering in the corner of my vision insisting on being noticed. UI quiet in a way it rarely was; passively reading through, all stable and non-urgent.

I had a cup from the Crown, and somewhere between that and not really knowing where to go, I found myself standing in front of the market district watching the people move around me.

Conclusion: I sucked at it.

I measured them at forty feet before identifying who they were. Habitual – the relationship meters came up before the UI identifiers, relationship meters automatically calculating while my mind processed that they were the same people based on the hair and gait of Daren, whose walking pace seemed unhurried but willing to speed up if the situation demanded it, and Lyra at his side with her hand resting in the crook of his arm.

PASSIVE MONITORING — DAREN / LYRA

Relationship / each other: 907 — rising

Lyra corruption: 0/100

Vorn contact: CLEARED

Active flags: NONE

Mood: Settled / Present

Nine hundred and seven.

That’s what I double checked because my mind tended to do that out of habit even though there wasn’t any reason to worry about the UI doing math wrong. Nine hundred and seven, which had exceeded the threshold number I’d watched for after the restart, beyond anything I’d seen displayed on their meter before.

They paused at a stall for produce. Daren pointed at something. Whatever he said must have made Lyra say something funny, actually funny, because he laughed, the real laugh and not the polite fake-laugh that you have before you’ve decided if the thing is funny enough to laugh at. She smiled, happy, in that particular smile that always meant she had hit her joke right on the head. He picked up the thing he had pointed at and handed it to her and she examined it with serious eyes and said something and he laughed again.

I finished my cup and watched them be anything but a tragedy.

It’s funny, the things you learn from the endings of stories. It’s like you have a relationship with the ending that exists even before you start reading. I read the Wiki page for Shattered Vows Online the way that someone reads spoilers, not to ruin it but to understand its shape, the balance of its weight. I knew how Lyra’s Corruption Arc would play out with ninety-one percent certainty. I understood what Vorn Flag 1 would be when allowed to run uninterrupted through the end of the timeline. But I knew what Daren looked like at the end of that tale, and it was not a kind of Daren that I wanted to see.

What you fail to calculate when you know the conclusion is how you’ll feel when things don’t add up to it.

They left the stand where they bought the fruits and vegetables. Lyra still held whatever he gave her in his hands. Daren’s hands had transferred from holding hers to resting against her back, casually and without thought, as the hands of someone who no longer needed to be conscious of where they placed them on a particular person.

Nine hundred and seven.

I had used — and I did not keep an exact tally, but many — many days of my life in playing the opposite architecture of the game system built specifically to decrease that number. I had earned ranks and mapped out the floors and burned resources in the cheat system that could never be reclaimed. I had spoken to Vorn by the canal twice, which was two times more often than I really wanted. I had unloaded a few difficult truths on Daren and observed the way he handled it all with a grace that left me feeling somewhat embarrassed in retrospect.

This, by way of indication. Two people in the market, having ceased to be an incident and become simply two people.

I was well aware that this was the point when a specific type of main character would experience something fairly simple. It might be satisfaction or perhaps the feeling of accomplishment that comes from completing an ordeal.

The actual thing I felt wasn’t quite so easy to categorize.

It lifted? Yes. But because it had been with me for so long, I didn’t even realize how much weight I had been carrying until the act of unburdening myself became oddly alien before it got weirdly pleasant.

Daren glanced in my general direction; just a look out into the crowd while passing through a busy area. He timed me, processed, and one side of his mouth moved in just the exact manner that meant he knew something and wasn’t going to interrupt whatever he was really paying attention to. Lyra had said something. He looked back over toward her.

I finished my cup.

What I didn’t figure out, while running counter-architecture, cheating resources, and arguing on benches with Vorn, was why I was even doing all of that. There was a surface level reason, obviously. Daren was the only person in the city who had treated me as if I was anyone worth talking to, and I didn’t want to watch the game break him down the way it was intended to do. That was true. That was the real reason.

There was more to it than that, however, and that particular layer I avoided looking into for the simple reason that it could slow me down.

I loved that NTR in the wiki, in case there was any confusion. I had already read the official storyline for Shattered Vows Online, and it made me believe that the corruption arc was interesting, the mechanics were captivating, and there was real drama in it, like there was supposed to be in dark fiction. This is what I thought I would be reading here.

What I got instead was Daren purchasing fruits from some random vendor while making Lyra laugh from forty feet away, and their relationship meter hovering just shy of a thousand, at nine hundred and seven.

I wasn’t sure how to take the notion that this one is better.

It’s not better in any moral context; it wasn’t really worth thinking about, but it is better in the sense that this particular story had weight in an unexpected direction for me. It needed to be saved for the sake of Daren. I was staring at proof that it worked out, and that proof came in the form of two strangers who didn’t realize that they were the focus of months of counter-operation activity buying fruit.

They went further into the market. I could no longer see them due to being blocked by a cart full of bolts of cloth.

PASSIVE MONITORING — DAREN / LYRA

Relationship / each other: 907 — climbing

Corruption: 0/100

Active flags: NONE

Mood: Settled / Present

System note: Canonical NTR progression — PERMANENTLY CLOSED

Permanently closed.

I considered the comment for a while. It was generated automatically by the wiki, just as all other comments were now generated, from actual event data in real time, not any canonical scripts or any pre-loaded game data. This was the game itself documenting its own failure to function properly through field notes.

I placed my empty cup on the closest available surface, a vendor’s stall, presumably annoying the vendor in question, and determined that I was going to do something for the remainder of the day. Tomorrow would be Floor 7. Mira had detected a geometry discrepancy at the junction of the third corridor that needed resolving. Rin had some ideas regarding the correct path of the branch.

We had been granted entry to the Floor 7 unit’s markings. There was a whole list of things that needed to be done, but none of them was urgent, which was another type of problem that I would seemingly need to deal with.

Daren and Lyra were somewhere at the marketplace shopping.

Nine hundred and seven.

I went back towards the Crown.