Chương 36: Sorry

"Hey. Hello. Can you hear us?" The finger tapping his shoulder belonged to Liam, and behind Liam stood the rest of them, and Alex had absolutely no idea how long they'd been there. The rune had eaten his whole attention again. He'd noticed that about the work already, the way the strokes pulled him down into a narrow bright tunnel where time stopped reporting in, and apparently four people had walked the length of the wall, climbed the steps, and assembled around him inside that tunnel without registering at all.

"Sorry." He straightened up off the page.

"Lost track."

"Of us. Physically approaching you. In armor." Liam had already stopped caring about the answer, because his eyes had found the light. The little sphere hung obediently over the inscription, pale and steady, and Liam circled the paper with the exact expression he'd worn over the first Blazing Core, the kettle-adjacent one.

"What is that. Is that a written spell? Did you write light?"

"Rune. New profession." Alex fed the sheet a trickle of mana to keep it going, and the paper underneath the strokes went visibly grayer, drying out toward that dead brittle look the used sheets all had. That was the flaw he'd found over the last hour, cheap paper couldn't survive its own instructions, every activation cooked the page a little more until the rune sat on something the texture of a pressed leaf, and he had a small graveyard of spent sheets weighted under his knee to prove it.

"The paper doesn't last. I'm going through it like tissue."

"You wrote light," Liam said again, to himself this time, filing it into whatever internal museum he kept.

"Okay. We're coming back to this. We are absolutely coming back to this." They weren't, though. Not yet. Because behind Liam, Jeremy stood with his arms crossed and the patient, spent look of a man who had fought a dungeon all day and then been summoned by twin messengers, and Ace beside him had her head tilted in that way that meant she'd already guessed why they were here, and Mia hovered at the group's edge with her bow. Alex looked at the four of them, tired and present because he'd asked, and set the pen down.

"That's not why I called you up here." He stood, and made himself do it plainly, no easing in.

"I wanted to say sorry. Properly. To all of you at once." The wall got quiet around them.

"I've been thinking about the fortress. About the G rank." The words had spent two days assembling and they still came out heavier than he'd rehearsed.

"I made bad decisions. Not unlucky ones, bad ones. I told Ace to get behind me and I planted myself in front of something I wasn't prepared to deal with, and in my head that was me protecting everyone, and it took Jeremy laying it out in a field for me to see what it actually was. I gambled myself without asking anyone who'd have to pay if I lost. You'd all have carried it. That was never mine to put on you, and I'm sorry." Silence held for a beat. Then Ace broke it, because of course she did.

"So what I'm hearing," she said, "is that I've now saved your life enough times that you've been forced to hold a ceremony about it."

"One time."

"The wave. The field. That thing with the boar in week one."

"The boar did not count."

"I'm keeping a list, is my point. It has volumes." She was smiling as she said it, the old smile, the one from when he was eight and she'd already won, and Alex threw the jab back on principle even though every entry on her imaginary list was, internally, a matter of settled record. She had saved his life. More than once. Both of them knew it, and both of them knew the teasing was her way of accepting the apology before the serious part, because that was how she'd always worked, sugar first.

Then her face changed, and the serious part arrived.

"Honestly, Alex, I don't know what to do with you." No smile now. The doctor voice, the big sister voice, the two of them fused.

"You need to stop putting your life on the table like it's yours alone. Or if you can't stop, then at minimum you tell us first, before, not after, so we're set up to pull you out when it goes wrong. Because it will keep going wrong. That's what risk means." She exhaled.

"And you want to know the worst part? I can't even tell you don't do it, because I've known you your whole life, and telling you not to do something is how you decide to do it. I watched you get told not to climb the water tower." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"That was high school."

"You climbed it that night, Alex. That night." She let that sit on him, and it sat with weight, because it was true, all of it was true, the water tower and a dozen stories like it, an entire adolescence spent doing things specifically because someone had drawn a line in front of them. Hardheaded wasn't an insult in this family, it was a diagnosis, and she'd just read his chart out loud in front of everyone.

"You're right," he said, and meant it enough that she blinked.

"So here's what I can actually promise. Not that I'll never take a risk, we both know what that promise would be worth. But no more solo calculations. If I'm about to do something with a real chance of going bad, you hear about it first, all of you, and we talk it through, and you get the chance to call it stupid to my face before I do it instead of after."

"Before instead of after," Ace repeated, testing the weight of it.

"I'll take that. I'm writing it down somewhere you can't rebel against it." Mia, from the edge of the group, spoke for the first time, quiet and completely level.

"I'd also like advance notice. So I know which direction to already be aiming."

"I will be sure to do that" Jeremy's expression didn't change much, but he still posited something.

"Honestly, i we should talk in private later, I have some thinking to do about teh situation, but I'm happy you spoke up about the issue.

"Yeah," Alex said, a little worried about Jeremy's thought, but apologies didn't just fix issues.

"Okay," Liam said into the pause, with the air of a man who had been extraordinarily patient.

"Beautiful moment, genuinely, I felt things. Can we now please talk about the fact that he wrote light." So Alex paid the toll. He walked them through the whole two days, and watching it hit four exhausted faces woke him up more than the runes had. The class first, and he gave them the truth of it. Star-Touched Warrior, Rare, a tier the knowledge packages didn't even describe, and he watched Liam's mouth actually fall open.

The affinity he gave them by name, Star, and let the poetry of it land on people who'd known him his whole life, Ace's eyes going soft in a way that said Grandpa without anyone saying Grandpa. The rank of the affinity he stepped around, smooth, just a hair of a sentence, and felt the word Perfect sit silently in his chest where it was going to stay. Not because he didn't trust them.

Because a secret four more people carried was a secret with four more doors, and the packages had been clear about what came looking for high affinities. The people he loved were safer not holding it. Then the rest, stacking one reveal on the next. Star Forged Body, passive, his flesh sitting a grade off metal now, and he let Mia poke his forearm and watched her expression go though changes. Gravity manipulation, which stopped even Jeremy's tiredness for a second.

The pseudo-star project, delivered with the crater in the field as supporting evidence. And Rune Scribe, level three already, the light glowing over the page as its own witness, along with the thing he'd worked out about professions, that they leveled one to ten on their own track and would likely rank up right alongside everything else.

"Level ten," he finished, looking around at them.

"That's the message under all of it. When each of you hits it, this happens to you. Affinity, class list, profession. Whatever you've been through H rank as, the system's been watching, and it's going to hand you a mirror. So think now about what you want it to have seen." The four of them stood with that, and he could see it working differently in each face. Liam already composing wish lists. Mia gone somewhere internal and determined. Ace and Jeremy exchanging one of their silent married-people paragraphs.

"We should test the body skill," Alex added, because the tactician in him couldn't leave it alone.

"Properly, with real attacks, so we can build the next wave's plan around what I can actually absorb. If I can anchor a whole flank by just standing in it, that changes everyone's job."

"Tomorrow," Ace said, in the tone that had ended arguments since before the system existed. She was looking at Jeremy as she said it, at the gray under his eyes, at all of them.

"You've had a day, we've had a day. Tomorrow." Tomorrow it was. He released them into the dark, watched Ace hook her arm through Jeremy's on the stairs, watched Liam peel off still muttering about written spells, and then the relief shift arrived, a handful of faces from the newer groups nodding to him as they took the wall, and Alex's watch was over. He didn't sleep. Not yet.

He gave the night a few more hours instead, out behind his tent where the crater couldn't judge him, running the two manipulations together over and over, thermal and gravity, two wheels, one hand each, holding the double cast a second longer each attempt before it slid apart.

Between failures he ran polearm forms until his shoulders burned, and when his mana scraped bottom he sat down with the pen and the dying paper and wrote light into the dark, stroke after stroke, until his hand steadied and his head went quiet. He crawled into his tent very late, worn down to the good kind of empty, and his last thought before sleep took him was that tomorrow had a defense test, a wave coming behind it, and every sign of being completely hectic. He was looking forward to all of it.