Victor stopped watching Kai like entertainnt sowhere between the early dungeon footage and the air-step clip, which most people had scrolled past without noticing.
He had noticed.
He sat alone in the strategy room with the footage running on the main screen and no sound playing. And in every single one, Kai moved differently from the clip before it. He evolved fight by fight, dungeon by dungeon, and the rate of it was wrong.
Kai’s body was continuously finding the safest place to be, and it was doing it without any of the hesitation that should have co with thinking that fast.
The footage looped again.
Victor still wasn’t satisfied with the explanation.
"Pull up his scaling chart," he said.
The screens are rearranged.
Level progression, dungeon clear tis, and combat adaptation across all the footage they had.
"When did the acceleration start?" Victor said.
One of the analysts pushed his glasses up. "It spiked after his public exposure went up." A second overlay appeared beside the first. "The more attention he gets, the faster he develops. It’s been consistent the whole ti."
Nobody said anything after that.
Victor looked at the overlay and said nothing.
He had seen enough patterns in his career to know the difference between a coincidence and a chanism. This was a chanism. Every ti the city’s attention toward Kai spiked, his capabilities spiked with it. The data had been sitting in front of him for weeks, and he had been reading it wrong.
Kai grew stronger when people watched him.
Which ant the Ironpact operation had not slowed Kai down. It had put him in front of the entire city at once. Victor had built the stage, handed him the spotlight, and called it containnt.
He let that sit for a mont, then set it aside as he got up to leave.
...
The apartnt slled like sothing good on the stove. The television was on. Leo was on the floor with his phone, and Mina was on the couch, and when Kai ca through the door, nobody looked up right away, and for a mont, it was just ho.
No rankings.
No dungeon alerts.
Just dinner.
He sat down on the floor next to Leo.
Leo glanced at him with a grin. "People at school won’t stop talking about you," Leo said.
"Talking how?"
"A lot of questions." He scratched the back of his neck. "They ask if you’re actually my brother. What are you like at ho? One guy asked if you eat normal food."
"What did you tell him?"
"I said yes." Leo looked at his phone. "He seed disappointed."
On the television, a panel of five people was debating ranking projections. In the corner of the screen, dungeon footage was looping as background. Kai recognized the crystal cavern.
"They keep asking how it feels," Leo said. His voice had dropped a little.
"How does it feel?"
Leo didn’t answer right away. He turned his phone over in his hands without looking at it.
"Having soone like you," he said. "In the family."
"Sotis it feels cool," Leo admitted. "Sotis it feels like the whole city knows you better than I do."
Neither of them said anything after that.
Mina was folding laundry on the other end of the couch. "People at work ask about you, too. So of them are supportive. So of them are just curious." She smoothed a shirt along its fold lines. "So of them look at differently now."
Kai looked at her. "Differently how?"
She set the shirt down. "Like I’m connected to sothing that matters." She picked up another one and kept folding, eyes on the fabric. "It’s not bad. It’s just strange."
Kai watched the footage.
Leo’s blue eyes were on him. "Does it feel weird?" he said. "Being that visible?"
Kai thought about the graffiti in the alley.
The shirt that said All Knowing and the seven-volu fan compilation. The boy outside the dungeon barrier who had shouted don’t lose, like saying it was the thing that would keep it true.
"Yeah," he said.
Leo nodded and looked back at his phone without reading anything. "Hana thinks you’re cool now," he said. Casually, like he had been holding onto it all day and had finally found the right mont.
Kai looked at him. "Now?"
Leo’s expression did several things at once, none of them hiding that he had just handed over exactly the word he hadn’t ant to.
Mina covered her mouth, and the laugh ca out anyway.
"You walked straight into that," she said.
"I was not aware it was a trap," Kai said.
"It was obviously a trap."
"It was not obvious from where I was standing."
Mina laughed hard enough that she had to put the laundry basket down before she dropped it.
Leo started explaining, which made it worse. His voice climbed the way it did when he was building a case he didn’t quite believe in. Kai let him keep digging the hole, and the explanation collapsed halfway through itself.
"Done?" Kai said.
"Yes," Leo said.
Kai reached over and rubbed his black hair once. Leo made the sound he always made, the one that ant stop but never quite ant it.
The room settled. They ate with the television on, and the city outside was doing what the city did, and none of it needed anything from them tonight.
At so point, Kai looked over at Leo. No reason. Just because he was there. Leo was in the middle of explaining sothing about school, sothing he clearly thought mattered, his fork moving around to help make the point.
Mina had told him not to do that at the table more tis than either of them could count. His voice was a little different from what it had been a few months ago. Not a lot. Just enough that you could catch it if you were listening. The kind of change that happened at twelve ca with other changes.
He was going to be tall.
One day he was going to awaken, and the world he woke up into would be different from the one it was now. Kai was going to make sure different ant sothing Leo could walk into, not sothing he had to get through.
That was what all of it was for. It wasn’t about being number one anymore but it was about giving Leo a world he didn’t have to fear.
Later, when the plates were cleared, Mina had stepped into the kitchen to take a call from the coordination office.
Kai knocked on the fra of Leo’s open door.
Leo looked up from his desk. "You actually ant it. That text about wanting to talk to ?"
"I actually ant it." Kai sat on the edge of the bed.
For a mont, he did not know how to start, which was new. He had walked into his boss’s rooms with less hesitation. Boss rooms had started feeling easier than conversations like this.
"You found the Ironpact thing weeks ago. I knew you found it. I never said anything about it after."
Leo went very still, the way he had at the dinner table that night. "I wasn’t going to tell anyone."
"I know. That’s not why I’m bringing it up." Kai had been thinking about this the whole walk ho. Not telling Leo anything was the thing he had already done, and it had left a twelve-year-old carrying it alone. "You were right. It was . They were called Ironpact, and they were working for soone who wanted gone. They tried to hurt , and for a while, it was actually dangerous."
He had braced for fear. What he got was Leo nodding slowly, like a thing he had half-known had finally been confird.
"But you handled it," Leo said, as if the possibility that Kai might lose had never truly existed in his mind.
"I handled it."
"I knew you would." He said it with the flat certainty of a kid who had decided a long ti ago what his brother was. "I never thought you wouldn’t."
Kai laughed quietly.
Leo had never once doubted him.
"Here’s the part I ca to say," he went on. "I’ll tell you the truth when I can. But I won’t always be able to. So things are safer for you not to know. Not because I don’t trust you, but because knowing them puts sothing on you that you shouldn’t have to carry at twelve. Like that secret did, these last few weeks. I should have noticed what it cost you. I didn’t, and I’m sorry for that."
Leo looked down at his hands.
"And I need you to do sothing for . The threads, the digging, figuring out where I was and what I did. I need you to stop pulling on those for a while. Not forever. Just a while." He searched for the true way to say it. "I want you to stay a little longer. The kid who plays my clips too loud and argues with Hana about rankings. You’ll have the rest of it soon enough."
Leo was quiet.
Then he chuckled and pulled the exaggerated wounded face he used when he had already decided to agree and wanted to be difficult about it first. "So you want to be normal. On purpose."
"For a couple of years."
"That’s so unfair." But he was already up, and then his arms were around Kai, tight, his face in his shoulder in a way he was supposedly too old for. Kai held on.
"Fine," Leo said, muffled. He pulled back far enough to look at him, a grin under the pout. "But only for a couple of years. Once I hit eighteen and get my class, you don’t get to hide anything from . Anything. Deal?"
Kai smiled and nodded. "Deal."
And then he got up before heading to his next target.
Mina was at the kitchen table when he ca out, two mugs already poured, one pushed to the seat across from her like she had known he was coming.
She always seed to know.
He sat. He had walked into this one, aning to read her, to actually check whether his sister was carrying sothing he had been too busy to see.
Mina watched him try for about four seconds before she set her mug down. "You’re doing sothing with your face. What happened?"
So much for reading her.
He told her about the southern districts.
The kid at the F-rank gate with the rare class that did not matter anymore.
Yael’s team.
The man outside the closed guild.
And then the rooftop, and the thing he had realized up there, that he had stopped seeing the whole bottom half of the city because he had been too busy climbing to look. And how the thought had not stayed pointed at strangers.
How he had sat up there, wondering what he had stopped seeing right here, in the two people he was doing all of it for.
Mina listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was not like her.
When he finished, she laughed. Then she reached across the table and flicked him hard in the middle of the forehead.
"Ow."
"It’s about ti you noticed," she said, smiling. "Honestly. I was starting to think I’d have to spell it out." Mina sounded more relieved than annoyed as she picked her mug back up. "But don’t go beating yourself up about it. That’s not why we didn’t say anything."
"Then why?"
"Because we were worried about you. Leo and I both." She turned the mug in her hands. "We didn’t tell you things because we didn’t want to put more on you. You already carry everything."
Her voice stayed level but sothing under it didn’t. "Every single day, there’s a new video of so hunter dying in a C-rank dungeon. Experienced ones. Prepared ones. And then there’s you, walking into worse ones every week. We don’t want it to be you, Kai. And we really don’t want it to be you because you got distracted in a boss room thinking about sothing one of us dumped on you the night before."
It refrad the whole thing. They had not been hiding from him and had been protecting him.
He nodded slowly, and then he said, "I still want to know."
Mina looked at him.
"Whatever you’re carrying. I’d rather know it and handle it than find out later you’ve been managing it alone, so I could keep my head clear. That’s the part I don’t want anymore."
She was quiet for a mont.
Then she nodded, like she’d decided sothing. "Then here’s what we do. Sunday. One day a week, no dungeon, no clears, no rankings. We sit down, and we actually talk, all three of us. The real stuff, not the fork-at-the-table stuff." She pointed at him. "You don’t get to skip it for a gate."
Kai blinked. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Okay. Sunday."
One day a week, the city didn’t get to have him first.
"Good." The smile ca back, smaller and warr. "But it goes both ways. You’re going to tell us more about the dungeons. The real version, not the ’it went fine’ one you give Leo."
Kai chuckled. "Alright."
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