Chương 53: [B2] Chapter 11: Questions and Answers

Morning arrived without anything to eat. Zero had catalogued the shortfall before Viria woke, who then took inventory of what remained in her subspace: half a canteen of water, a handful of rations from the beginning of the leg, and nothing else. Her ankle had improved marginally overnight, swelling down, weight bearable if she favored it, but the parasite's three days of feeding had left a deficit that no amount of rest alone was going to close quickly. She would need food today.

Real food, not rationed strips stretched thinner than they should be.

"We are not going back to the river," she said, once she'd woken enough to follow his silence to its conclusion.

"I want that established clearly before we discuss food."

"Agreed. The river is the problem."

"Then what is the solution?" Zero looked at the undergrowth surrounding the hollow, dense and unfamiliar, none of it matching anything Miho had taught them to identify as safe by sight alone. Without her method, without the fruit stand, without a confirmed source, foraging here carried the same risk that had nearly cost Viria her hand two days ago.

"I do not currently have one," he admitted. Viria was quiet for a long moment, staring at a cluster of unripe, unfamiliar growth tangled along the base of a nearby trunk. Something in her jaw tightened the way it had the morning she'd picked up the bow, the specific stillness of when she was arriving at a decision she'd rather not be making.

"I might."

Viria knelt in front of the growth without further explanation, and Zero understood, watching her hesitate with both hands hovering an inch above the soil, that whatever she was about to attempt was not something she was comfortable doing.

"You do not have to do this," he said.

"I know I don't have to." Her voice had gone tight.

"That's rather the point, isn't it? Nobody is making me. Nobody is watching. There is no scroll waiting to be unrolled the moment I'm finished." She let out a short, humorless breath.

"Which should make this easier, and somehow doesn't."

"What are you attempting?"

"Root-Waking." She said the name like it cost her to produce the syllables cleanly.

"It's one of the traditional arts my family actually valued in me, out of everything I could do. I have not used it since I left, on the same principle that kept me from ever touching a bow since I was fourteen."

"Defiance." Viria nodded. Zero considered this.

"You were desperate enough to break the principle for archery three days ago. You are choosing to break it again now." Viria nodded.

"Archery I broke for someone else's sake. This one I'm breaking because I don't see another option, and I would rather resent the plant than resent going hungry with a leg that already isn't healing on schedule." She pressed her palms flat to the soil, closed her eyes, and breathed in a rhythm Zero had never heard her fall into before; four in, six out. Viria stopped and turned to him, her cheeks flushed with shame.

"Please… don't watch me too closely. It's easier if I pretend it's just for me." He turned away because she'd asked, and it cost him nothing to grant it.

The change came slowly at first. The soil stirred, and Zero detected unnatural vibrations coming from the growth. Zero glanced at Viria as everything else came all at once. Warmth gathered around her hands, unhurried, patient, and the tangled growth beneath her palms began to shift, dormant buds swelling, a scattering of small green fruit thickening and darkening toward ripeness in the space of a few controlled minutes. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Zero ran Identify the moment the growth stilled. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Berry Cluster Classification: Non-hostile, edible Nutritional Value: Moderate to High Note: Accelerated growth via directed Nature Energy. Fruit quality unaffected by acceleration method. A second, quieter, window resolved beside Viria, the kind that arrived without fanfare because it was simply recording something that had always been true rather than announcing something new. [Skill Logged: Root-Waking, Lv. 4] Directed growth acceleration via Nature Energy transfer, requiring physical contact and stillness. Note: Mastery level inconsistent with recent activation history. System infers extensive prior practice, unlogged. Zero read the note twice. Marksmanship had entered her file at Level 1, likely as a result of not shooting a bow in years, while Root-Waking entered at Level 4, fully formed, as nearly two decades of thinly buried competence that the system simply never had cause to record until now.

Viria tossed him half of the cluster.

"Eat." Zero ate.

She sat back from her half of the berries, breathing a little unsteady, and did not immediately reach for the fruit she'd just produced.

"Why did you never use it?" Zero asked.

"Even privately. Even where, as you said this morning, no one would know." Viria was quiet for a moment, turning the question over.

"Because… using it, even if I was alone, meant admitting it was still mine to use. And if it was still mine, then some part of me was still the girl in that hall, good at the one thing her family actually wanted from her." She picked one of the berries at last, turning it in her fingers rather than eating it yet.

"It felt safer to let the talent starve alongside my refusal. As if starving proved something."

"Did it prove anything?"

"No," she said, and something in the admission sounded almost relieved to finally say it aloud.

"It just meant I went without a skill I actually have, just to spite people who were never going to know the difference either way." She looked at him, something more open in her expression than he'd seen from her in the last several days.

"You know, most people that I know, if I had told them that, would have already decided what to say long before I'd finished that sentence. They'd say something reassuring, something to make my story smaller so they could stop thinking about it."

"Did you expect that from me?"

"I don't anymore. That's what I mean." She turned the berry over once more.

"You ask questions like that because you actually want to know why." Zero considered the implication beneath her words, and found himself genuinely puzzled.

"Why else would someone ask a question," he said.

"If not to learn the answer?" Viria let out a short laugh, surprised out of her before she'd fully processed finding it funny.

"Oh, Zero." She shook her head, something fond underneath the disbelief.

"Most of the people around me asked questions because they wanted a specific answer, and they were just waiting to hear me say it back to them. They're not curious, they're checking whether I'll perform correctly." Her mouth twisted.

"My whole family, save for my brother, asks questions that way.

'Are you enjoying your lessons, Viria?' They don't want to know if I'm actually enjoying them. They just want to hear me say yes."

"That… seems like an inefficient use of a question."

"It's not about efficiency. It's about control." She held his gaze a moment longer.

"But… you don't do that. You ask because you don't know, and you actually want to." Viria paused, "I don't think I understood how much I needed someone like that until I'd had a month of you doing it." Zero didn't have a response for that, which he was beginning to understand was itself becoming a familiar feeling around her.

They ate in the growing light, the berries tart, dense and considerably better than the three days of dried strips had any right to prepare either of them for. Viria's color improved visibly within the hour, whatever the parasite had drained finally being replaced by real vitality.

"We still don't know which direction leads back," she said, once the meal had settled.

"No. But we are no longer deciding that on empty stomachs, which Miho would consider the more urgent problem solved first." Viria almost smiled at that, testing her ankle's weight and finding it held better than it had the day before.

"Where would you go, then? If you had to guess." Zero looked at the light filtering through the canopy, ran the calculation he'd failed to run cleanly the day before, and found it resolved slightly more confidently this time, now that hunger wasn't clouding the arithmetic.

"That direction," he said, pointing.

"It is not a certainty. It is a guess with slightly better inputs than yesterday's guess had."

"I'll take a better guess," Viria said, and rose to follow him, favoring the ankle, but moving under her own power, fed on something she'd spent nineteen years refusing to let herself be good at in front of anyone who mattered.