Mio
The Shinjuku incursion was three train stops and a ten-minute walk from the apartment.
Mio found it through the Bureau app. A list of active incursions, sortable by rank and distance. The C-grade was marked in amber. Dangerous. The kind of content that required full parties, coordination, hazard pay.
The Engine didn't care.
[ENGINE: OBJECTIVE]
Clear C-grade Incursion: 0/1
Time Remaining: 6:42:03
Failure: Reservoir locked 48h
Six hours. Solo. C-grade.
The old Mio would have called this suicide.
The entrance was in an alley behind a convenience store. A shimmer in the air, like heat rising off summer pavement, except it was December and the temperature had dropped to single digits.
Two delvers waited by the shimmer. Geared up. Checking weapons.
One of them looked up as she approached. His eyes swept over her. Faded hoodie. Worn sneakers. The F-grade badge she hadn't bothered to remove.
"Wrong incursion, kid. This is C-grade."
She didn't stop.
"Hey—"
"Let her go." The second delver was already turning back to his gear. "Crazy bitch wants to die, that's her problem."
She walked past them. The shimmer swallowed her whole.
Inside, the incursion was a parking garage. Three levels. Concrete pillars. Buzzing lights casting everything in sickly yellow.
Water dripped somewhere in the distance.
[ENTERING INCURSION]
[Shinjuku-7 — Grade: C]
[Type: Swarm]
[Hostiles: 347]
Three hundred and forty-seven.
The display was new. Before the mark, incursions had shown two lines. Entering notification and the grade. Now there was a name, a type, a kill count ticking down in real time.
Information she could use.
The first slime dropped from the ceiling.
It landed in front of her. Translucent green, wobbling, the size of a basketball. Eyeless. Mouthless. A membrane holding acidic gel together.
[Acid Slime — F-grade]
[HP: 56]
F-grade. Fodder.
But three hundred of them made a C-grade swarm, and somewhere deeper, the mothers that spawned them.
She raised her hand. Green-white lightning arced from her fingertip and hit the slime dead center.
The membrane blackened where the bolt struck. Then the black spread. Veins of rot racing through the gel like cracks in ice. The slime shuddered, tried to pull away from itself, and burst.
A bloom manifested where the corpse had been.
She stopped breathing.
It was bigger than the succulent's. That tiny spark she'd crushed from Nana's dying plant had been three HP, barely visible, a firefly in the dark.
This was a lantern.
Faint green light pulsing over the puddle like a heartbeat made visible. Bigger than the plant. Bigger than the Vitalize drip. Bigger than the math that had buried her for a year.
One year. One year of being the broken healer who couldn't keep up. One year of watching her mana drain for nothing. Of dead weight whispered behind her back and screamed in her own head.
She reached out. The bloom dissolved into her palm.
And something rushed in.
[Life Bloom Absorbed: +56 Reservoir]
[Reservoir: 4,632/12,500]
Something cleaner than Vitalize. Flowing into the hollow space in her chest, filling the void, feeding the ache she'd carried since the cathedral.
The hunger sighed.
More.
Fifty-six Reservoir from a slime. One Spark cost fifty. Net positive.
This is what I was supposed to be.
The second slime dropped from the ceiling. She raised her hand.
It spat.
Acid sludge arced through the air. She twisted sideways, felt heat sizzle past her ear, heard concrete hiss behind her.
Lightning left her fingertip. The slime popped.
She spun and fired again. The second one burst mid-lunge.
Two blooms. She absorbed them walking forward.
More.
The second floor was carpeted in them.
Slimes. Dozens. Clustered in pools of standing water, clinging to pillars, hanging from pipes. Bodies wall to wall, translucent membranes catching the dim light.
[Hostiles: 312]
They noticed her at the same time.
The carpet rippled and started moving. A tide of gel rolling toward her. Three of them reared back and spat in unison.
She dove left.
Acid splashed across the pillar where she'd been standing, eating into concrete. She came up firing. Hit the nearest, and it popped. The burst caught the slime beside it, and that one popped too.
Chain reaction through the cluster. Three. Four. Five.
[+15 XP]
[+15 XP]
[+15 XP]
[+15 XP]
[+15 XP]
She rolled under another acid stream and sent two more bolts into two more clusters. Eight dead. Twelve.
[Hostiles: 289]
Blooms everywhere. She pulled them in without stopping.
A slime dropped from a pipe overhead. She sidestepped, let it splatter on the floor, fired point-blank into the membrane before it could reform.
Another lunged from the right. She kicked it, sneaker melting on contact, and put a bolt through its core while it tumbled.
The swarm pressed in. Acid flying from six directions.
She stopped dodging.
Acid caught her arm, but she fired twice more before the burn registered. Both shots landed. She pulled in the blooms, felt the Reservoir climb, and healed before the pain could settle.
The damage closed like it had never happened.
She could tank the hits. As long as she kept killing, the blooms kept coming. As long as the blooms kept coming, the Reservoir stayed full. As long as the Reservoir stayed full, she could heal through anything.
She walked forward.
Same pace she'd use on a sidewalk. Same rhythm she'd carry through a convenience store.
They spat from every direction. She let them hit, absorbing blooms faster than the acid could eat through her. The Reservoir climbed with each kill, and she converted it back into health without thinking.
The cycle kept her standing.
The swarm began to thin. She wasn't thinking anymore. The rhythm had taken over until slimes stopped coming and the second floor went quiet.
[Hostiles: 178]
[LEVEL UP: 2]
[Reservoir Cap: 25,000]
She dismissed the notification. Auto-allocate. Whatever.
Something larger blocked the ramp ahead.
Not a slime. A mass. Translucent green membrane stretched over a body the size of a car, smaller slimes budding off its surface like blisters. Eyeless. Pulsing.
[Mother Slime — D-grade]
[HP: 890]
The fodder scattered as she approached. Making room.
The mother didn't move. Just sat there, spawning, its bulk blocking the path forward.
Mio raised her hand. Lightning left her fingertip.
The bolt hit center mass and blackened a patch the size of her palm. Then the black spread. Veins of rot racing through the membrane, branching, multiplying. The mother shuddered, tried to move, couldn't. The Blight had reached its base, anchoring it to the concrete.
She watched it die.
The membrane split first. Then the gel inside began to curdle. Green turning grey turning black. The smaller slimes budding off its surface dropped away half-formed, already rotting before they hit the ground.
It burst.
Gel flooded the ramp in a wave of acid that hissed against concrete, ate through paint on abandoned cars, dissolved fodder too slow to flee.
Mio stood in the tide. Felt it eat through her sneakers, her socks, the skin underneath.
She didn't flinch.
The bloom that rose from the mother's corpse was the size of her head.
[Greater Bloom Absorbed: +1,200 Reservoir]
[Reservoir: 9,400/12,500]
There it was.
The hunger purred.
The lights above her flickered, died, came back weaker. In the dark between, her eyes held their own glow. Faint green. Her father's eyes lit from somewhere deeper.
The slimes in her path had stopped moving. Still. Waiting.
Two more mothers on the upper levels. Each one a thousand-plus bloom. Each one feeding the hollow in her chest.
[LEVEL UP: 3]
[LEVEL UP: 4]
[Reservoir Cap: 50,000]
[HP: 700/700]
[Reservoir: 18,128/50,000]
The survivors fled deeper into the garage, flowing toward the ramp to the third floor like water finding a drain.
She'd seen this behavior before. In Meguro. The way the corrupted shelves had pulsed with faint light, the way the incursion had a center that everything orbited.
Something was calling them.
[Hostiles: 94]
Something was calling her too.