The interface didn't disappear when he blinked.
He'd tried three times in the first thirty seconds — slow blinks, hard blinks, the aggressive scrub of both fists against his eyes that accomplished nothing except making his vision swim briefly before the text snapped back into focus, clean and white and utterly indifferent to whether he wanted it there. He stood in the emptied shopping district with his hands at his sides and the amber late-afternoon light touching everything, and read the overlay for the fourth time with the specific resignation of someone who has been told bad news and is checking whether it gets worse on reread.
[RESURRECTION PROTOCOL: DEATH ATTRIBUTION SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[DEATH LEDGER — ENTRY 001] [KILLER: SLUDGE VILLAIN | METHOD: SUFFOCATION/ORGANIC SUBMERSION] [PAIN INDEX: 7/10 | KILLER TIER: D-CLASS | CYCLE DAY: 001]
[REWARD CALCULATION — FRAGMENT DROP: NONE (NULL ROLL)] [STAT POINTS AWARDED: 1 | SKILL POINTS AWARDED: 1]
He walked east.
The fragment drop field said none. Null roll — the system had apparently decided that his first death against a D-class villain in a situation he'd run into deliberately was worth exactly one of each currency and precisely zero of the thing that would give him any actual ability. He turned this over as he walked, navigating the early evening foot traffic of Musutafu by muscle memory of a city he'd spent three weeks learning, and concluded that he was not particularly surprised and also that it was objectively funny in the way that things became funny when the alternative was sitting on the ground.
He'd died in agony. He'd spent twenty-four hours in nothing — not sleep, not dark, not anywhere — and had been rebuilt from whatever blueprint the system kept on file, and the payout was one stat point and one skill point and the privilege of being alive again.
The skill point was useless. He checked the tree as he crossed the intersection heading toward the residential streets — the interface obliged, spreading a faint branching structure across the lower half of his vision like the ghost of a flowchart — and every node was locked behind a grey icon that read SYSTEM LEVEL 2 REQUIRED. He was System Level 1. He had no idea how to get to Level 2. The interface offered no explanation, no progress bar, no helpful tooltip.
"Of course," he thought.
The stat point was at least immediately usable.
He stopped under a streetlight on a quieter block and looked at the allocation panel. Seven stats, all at 10. STR, END, AGI, DUR, PER, WIL, ADP — strength, endurance, agility, durability, perception, willpower, adaptability. He'd been the kind of office worker who read optimization guides for games he never quite had time to play, and some part of his brain wanted to agonize over this. He overrode that part.
PER. Perception covered sensory acuity, threat detection, spatial awareness. At this stage, with no combat ability, no fragment, no skills — the most valuable thing he could do with a single point was see things coming slightly faster.
[STAT POINT ALLOCATED: PER — 10 → 11]
The change was immediate and subtle enough that he almost missed it. The streetlight's bulb was slightly sharper. He could hear two distinct conversations from the open window above — a mother and a child, overlapping, previously just a blur of noise. He turned his head and picked out a loose poster flapping on a wall thirty meters away that he wouldn't have been able to resolve into text from this distance two minutes ago.
Not dramatic. Not heroic. Marginally less likely to get killed from behind.
He kept walking.
There was a vendor cart near the park entrance — a squat man in a quilted jacket selling meat buns off a gas grill, the steam visible from half a block away. Yami bought one with the change from the coin pocket of the school bag, found a bench, and ate it with both hands because his hands were cold.
The first bite hit somewhere between the taste buds and memory and something cracked open very briefly.
His mouth had been full of sludge twenty-four hours ago. Then it hadn't been full of anything. Now it was full of salt-glazed pork and thin bread, the specific cheap comfort of a convenience-format food that existed in the gap between hunger and actual cooking, and the contrast between those three states was so large and immediate that he sat on the bench in the park for a full minute just eating and not thinking.
The people walking past had no idea. That was the strangest part. The woman with the stroller, the businessmen heading toward the station, the two kids racing each other on bicycles — none of them had any indication that the teenager eating a meat bun on the park bench had been dead and in nothing for an entire rotation of the Earth. The city had absorbed the Sludge Villain incident and moved on. The heroes had cleaned it up. The news ticker would have run something about a narrow escape, property damage, a minor miraculous intervention from the Symbol of Peace.
He tried to feel something about that and mostly came up with tired.
He checked the fragment inventory again on the walk home. Still zero. The capacity display read 0/5 with the patient blankness of an empty vessel. The system had explained, in its terse functional way, that fragments were partial copies of abilities extracted from the killer at the moment of death — a sliver of the Sludge Villain's organic submersion method, theoretically, if the RNG had not decided against him. With a fragment, he could have one limited, Level-1, probably-unreliable version of a D-class villain's power. A small amount of organic fluid manipulation, maybe. Enough to make a mess. Enough to make someone uncomfortable.
He didn't have it. He had marginally better peripheral vision.
The apartment building came into sight. He climbed the stairs, reached the second-floor hallway, and stopped.
There was a note tucked under the door. Plain white paper, folded once. No envelope.
He picked it up and opened it on the spot, because waiting would not make the contents less alarming.
No letterhead. No signature. An address and a time — the address meaning nothing to him immediately, though the district was familiar, and the time was tomorrow at six PM. Written in small, slightly cramped characters with the pressure of someone who didn't write by hand often.
He turned the paper over. Nothing on the back.
His elevated perception counted a creak from the stairwell — a building settling, or wasn't. He looked at the address again and cross-referenced it against the mental map of Musutafu he'd built over three weeks of deliberate walking. The district was coastal. Low-density residential along the waterfront. Dagobah Beach was in that direction.
He stood in the hallway with the note and thought about who had seen the Sludge Villain incident. The crowd. The heroes. One very particular skeletal man in an oversized jacket who had arrived on scene and then the scene had ended and the villain had been recaptured, and who had also, based on the angle and timing, been standing within twenty meters of the spot where a dead teenager woke up on concrete.
He saw it. He was already in the area — he came from the sewer system, he was tracking the villain. He saw the whole thing.
He went inside and pinned the note to the wall next to the newspaper.
The apartment smelled like old rice and dried flowers. The condolence chrysanthemums on the counter were past being white. He looked at them for a moment, then threw them out — dried stems and petals and the ribbon that had attached the card, all of it into the bin — and filled the vase with water and put it on the windowsill empty.
He ate the rest of the rice cold, standing at the counter.
Outside, the city ran its usual evening noise — distant traffic, someone's television from the adjacent unit, a train on the elevated line two streets over. He listened to it with his marginally sharper perception and thought about what he was going to say to the Symbol of Peace tomorrow.
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