Mio
The taste of dirt wouldn't leave her mouth.
Mio's skin prickled. Every nerve fired at once, then settled into a wrongness she couldn't name. The December chill outside had been honest. This was something else. The air pressed against her like a second skin she hadn't asked for.
She felt naked.
Exposed in a way that had nothing to do with clothes.
Twenty minutes from Shibuya to this. A FamilyMart[1] that had folded into a pocket dimension.
The lights inside stuttered in patterns that felt deliberate. The aisles stretched into long, dark corridors. Somewhere deeper, something dripped.
[Entering Incursion]
[Grade: E]
Rin went first, shield humming with faint blue light.
The first two rooms were fodder. Knee-high goblins that Aoi opened up without slowing. Grey blood, thin as water. Her silver hair clip caught the stuttering light. A small thing she'd worn since middle school.
Mio had teased her about it once. Some boy with a crush? She remembered Aoi's laugh. It's from my brother, idiot. He picked it out himself. Took him three hours.
She'd cut her hair three months after Integration. Kept the clip.
Mio watched from the back. Mapped the exits. Counted Rin's cooldowns.
Eight seconds between pulses. Defensive buff wore off after three hits.
The second floor opened into what had been the stockroom. Shelves stacked with boxes that were no longer cardboard, no longer holding chip bags and bottled water. The contents pulsed with faint light.
"Contact," Rin called. "Hobgoblin."
It came through the shelving unit on the left, grey-skinned and carrying a rusted cleaver.
Rin caught the first swing on her shield. Aoi vanished, reappearing behind it, daggers hunting for the neck. But the thing twisted faster than an E-grade should.
Shiori's hands blurred through buffs. Defense. Resistance. Then haste.
Wrong order.
Mio saw it before anyone else. The hobgoblin wasn't pressing Rin anymore. It was circling. Moving left while Aoi repositioned and the fodder goblins kept everyone's attention scattered.
Shiori had buffed Rin's armor. But armor didn't help against a hit you never saw coming. Haste first. Rin needed speed to turn, not toughness to tank a blind-side cleaver.
And her shield cooldown was about to—
"Rin! Left flank! Three seconds!"
Rin pivoted.
The hobgoblin's cleaver came down in a brutal overhead arc, meeting shield instead of spine. The impact drove Rin to one knee. Her bracer strap snapped.
"Mio! Heal!"
She raised her hands. The warmth drained out of her so fast she staggered.
Rin's gauge ticked back to full. The excess bled off.
[Overheal: 25 HP wasted]
[MP: 45/77]
Twelve percent. Mio had burned a full heal on twelve percent damage.
But Rin was full. And she'd kept her feet. And the hobgoblin was stumbling back, off-balance from the blocked strike.
Aoi slid past and opened its throat.
The fodder goblins scattered, easy pickings for a team that stopped holding back.
Mio leaned against the wall. Her hands trembled. Numbness like when she'd sit on her hands when she and Aoi were still kids.
"Potions would help with that," Shiori said.
Mio didn't answer.
"Forty-five mana for a bruise, though." Shiori logged the loss on her screen. "You are bleeding us dry, Tamei. Always."
"Good call on the flanker." Rin had finished checking her shoulder. Already moving toward the back room.
"Hm? Oh. Thanks."
That was it.
Aoi caught her eye from across the room. Her silver clip had slipped. She pushed it back into place, and for a moment their eyes met.
She mouthed something. Nice.
Then turned away before anyone else noticed.
The core was in the back room. Aoi shattered it with a single dagger strike.
[CORE DESTROYED]
The pocket dimension began to dissolve. In thirty seconds, this would be a convenience store again.
Shiori was already checking her log. "Quota's done. We're clear for the month."
Aoi wiped her daggers clean. Didn't look at Mio.
None of them mentioned the callout again.
Outside, late afternoon bled purple and orange over Setagaya.
Her knees almost buckled. Home was fifteen minutes away. Twelve hours of sleep. Pretend the System didn't exist.
Maybe she could make Nana a real dinner. Something with vegetables. She tried to remember if there was rice left in the cooker.
Four phones buzzed in unison.
"Emergency assignment." Shiori's grip tightened on her phone. "F-grade in Meguro. Double rewards for immediate response."
Aoi started salivating. "A hundred fifty thousand each. I can finally afford a new set of daggers." She turned to Mio. "That's half the rent, for you."
"That's just the bounty," Shiori said, already walking toward the station. "Cores and fragments are where the real money is. Even an F-grade drops materials worth twice the clear bonus."
Half the rent. Two months behind, and the letters from the ward office[2] were getting less polite.
Mio thought about the two-thousand-yen note she'd left on the counter for Nana. Enough for a bento. Not enough for a future. But she was at quota already.
"I can sit this one out." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "You three don't need me for an F-grade."
"No." Aoi grabbed her hand. Her palm was warm. "We go together. It's an F-grade. You won't even need to cast."
"I'm almost empty. One heal and I'm done."
"Then don't get hit." Rin's arm hooked around Mio's shoulders, already steering her toward the station. "F-grade. In and out. Thirty minutes."
Thirty minutes. You can survive thirty minutes.
Mio looked at them. Three girls who had actually found their footing in this new world.
But Aoi's hand was still holding hers.
And Nana was at home. Alone. Eating whatever she could find because her sister couldn't keep the lights on.
She looked at the sky. Purple bleeding into black. The first stars of evening.
Just one more incursion.
"Fine," she whispered. "One more."
Meguro was fifteen minutes by train.
Aoi chattered the whole way. About the new daggers she'd been eyeing, about finally paying off her dad's debt, about ordering the premium sushi just once.
The same breathless energy she'd had in middle school, filling silences before they could get heavy.
Mio let the words wash over her. Nodded in the right places.
Shiori sat across from them, phone out, running numbers on something. Her nails tapped the screen in precise rhythms. Every few seconds, her lips moved. Counting.
"Four bodies for clearance." Shiori's eyes found Mio. "Bureau doesn't care if one of them's dead weight."
Mio looked out the window.
Rin stood by the doors, watching the stations pass. She hadn't sat down once.
Fifteen minutes. The train slowed.
The Meguro barrier shimmered green instead of the standard blue-white. Just for a second.
The air around it felt heavy.
Sticky.
The others didn't notice. Aoi was already stepping through, laughing at something Rin had said. Shiori followed, phone finally pocketed, fingers still tapping against her thigh.
Their faces unchanged. Still joking about easy money.
Mio stopped walking.
She felt the pull at her stomach. Like chains wrapped around her hips, dragging her forward. Her mana stirred. The faintest twitch, a muscle she didn't know she had responding to a sound too low to hear.
"Hey." She reached for Aoi's sleeve, but her fingers closed on nothing. "Did you see—"
Aoi's hand appeared through the shimmer, palm up. Waiting.
"Come on, slowpoke. Thirty minutes, remember?"
The barrier was blue again. Normal. Stable.
Mio stared at it.
Her mana was still stirring.
She followed them in anyway.
[1] Convenience store chain. They're everywhere in Japan. The idea of one folding into a pocket dimension is the mundane-horror vibe. Your corner store becomes a dungeon.
[2] Local government in Japan. Handles taxes, residency, child welfare, everything. The letters Mio's getting are polite warnings that escalate to guardianship review. Basically CPS with more paperwork.