Mio
The room was small. A desk and two chairs, filing cabinets lining the wall. A space heater hummed in the corner, pointed at the man behind the desk. He wore a sweater under his lab coat. A mug of something steaming sat untouched by his elbow.
Still cold.
"I have a meeting," Segawa said from the doorway. "One hour. Ishida will handle orientation from here."
Mio looked at the man. Gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, pale in the way basement offices made people. His left hand rested on the desk.
Three fingers missing. The pinky, ring finger, and middle. Clean stumps, long healed.
Segawa was already gone.
Ishida gestured to the empty chair. "Sit."
She did. The room smelled like old paper and recycled air.
He opened a folder. Flipped through pages. Didn't look up.
"Tamei Mio. Seventeen. F-grade Healer, pre-mark. Gaian-Marked four days ago." He turned a page. "Solo cleared a C-grade swarm incursion. Claimed a Chimera. Baseline metrics consistent with mid-C." Another page. "Impressive. For someone who should be dead."
"Thanks."
He looked up. First time.
"That wasn't a compliment."
Silence. The space heater hummed.
"What happened to your fingers?"
Ishida glanced at his hand. Back to the folder.
"A Champion got angry."
"Oh."
"It happens." He pulled out a fresh sheet. Uncapped a pen with his remaining fingers. "Let's start with your allocation."
"My what?"
"When you level up, what stats are you putting points into?"
Mio blinked. "Come again?"
"You gain roughly five points per level. The Engine lets you distribute them across your attributes." He looked at her over his glasses. "How are you building yourself?"
She thought about Shinjuku. The notification that had appeared after the slimes, after the Mother Slime, after the knight. A window asking her something. She'd dismissed it without reading.
Auto allocation.
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"It was in the way. I dismissed it."
"And?"
"And it auto-allocated. I think."
Ishida set down his pen. Stared at her.
"You think."
"I was busy not dying."
He picked the pen back up. Wrote something. The scratch of it filled the silence. His handwriting was cramped, tilted left—compensating for the missing fingers.
"Pull up your status. Allocation settings."
Mio stared at him.
"I don't know how."
"Think about wanting to see it."
She did. The window appeared.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
[Auto-Allocate: ON] [Switch to Manual?] [Yes / No]
"It's on auto," she said. "There's an option to switch."
"Switch it."
[Yes]
[Auto-Allocate: OFF] [Point Distribution: Manual]
[Status] Level: 10
VIT: 67 STR: 11 AGI: 12 INT: 12 SPR: 16
[Unallocated Points: 0]
"Read them out," Ishida said. Pen ready.
"VIT sixty-seven. STR eleven. AGI twelve. INT twelve. SPR sixteen."
His pen stopped.
"Sixty-seven VIT."
"Is that bad?"
"That's forty-five points into one stat." He wrote it down. Underlined it. "The Engine really wants you alive."
"What does VIT even do?"
Ishida leaned back. The chair creaked.
"Vitality. For most delvers, it's just health pool and stamina. For you?" He tapped his pen against the folder. "Main source of your power. Sustainability. Damage scaling. Everything your kit does runs off your habitual physicochemicalness."
Mio's brain stalled.
"My what?"
"Your habitual physicochemicalness. The rate at which your biological systems maintain equilibrium under—"
"I don't—"
"HP. Your HP."
"Oh." She slumped back in the chair. "Why didn't you just say that?"
"I did say that." He was already writing again. "STR is physical strength. Baseline humans sit around two or three. Olympic lifters peak at six, maybe seven. Eleven means you're stronger than any unintegrated human alive, but you're not breaking walls."
"Useless, then."
"Not quite. You could wrestle a bear. And probably win." He kept writing. "AGI is speed, flexibility, reaction time. Humans average three or four. Your fastest sprinters cap around eight. Twelve is decent—for a delver."
"I'm fast?"
"Faster than a civilian. Slower than anything you'll fight." He flipped to a new page. "INT is cognitive processing. Pattern recognition, adaptability, learning speed. Baseline humans sit around three. Twelve is decent—for a delver."
Mio thought about the stat screen calling her a twelve. Nana would never let her live it down.
"Decent..." Mio trailed off. Dusty gears connecting. She beamed. "So I'm not stupid."
"Combat smart. Ability smart. Not book smart."
She sank again.
"And SPR?"
"Spirit. Influences magical output—refinement, precision, efficiency. The higher it is, the cleaner your abilities. The lower..." He shrugged. "Messy. Wasteful. Yours is sixteen."
"Is that good?"
"It's fine. Your damage scales off VIT anyway. SPR just keeps it from leaking everywhere."
VIT for damage, STR for lifting, AGI for speed, INT for thinking, SPR for not exploding. She rubbed her temples. Her eyes had glazed over somewhere around physicochemicalness and never recovered.
"This is worse than school."
Ishida almost smiled. Almost.
"What about new abilities?" she asked. "How do I learn those?"
"That depends on your Vestige." He pulled out another sheet from the folder. "Each Engine has different unlock conditions. Some are level-gated. Some require specific actions. Some just... happen."
"I won't know when I'll get stronger."
"You don't know how, either. The mark decides." He wrote something else down. "Gaian's Champions have historically unlocked abilities through consumption. Killing. Absorbing. The more you feed, the more she gives you."
The hunger stirred. Mio pressed it down.
The space heater clicked. Cycled off, then back on.
"Can I change it?" Mio asked. "The allocation?"
"Now that it's manual, yes. Next level, you choose where the points go."
"What should I pick?"
"That's not my department." He stood. Gathered the folder. "Your mark, your build. The Vestiges designed each Engine differently. What works for Stasis won't work for Gaian."
"I just... guess?"
"You experiment. You learn. You survive long enough to figure it out." He walked to the door. His hand rested on the frame. "One more thing." He didn't turn around. "The stronger you get, the less we can do if you slip. Keep that in mind."
Mio nodded.
Sixty-seven VIT. Forty-five points the Engine had chosen for her. Every level, it had looked at her options and picked the same thing. More health. More durability. More fuel for the hunger.
It wanted her alive.
She wasn't sure that was comforting.
"You can go now."
"Oh."
"Further down the hall, main training room. You'll meet your assessor there."
"Is it Homura?"
"No."
Mio stood. The chair scraped against the floor. She walked to the door, paused beside Ishida.
"Thanks. For explaining."
He didn't look at her.
"Don't. Your kind always means more paperwork."
The hallway was colder than the room. She followed it down, past unmarked doors and humming lights, toward whatever was waiting.
The hunger settled. Waiting.
The cold got worse with every step.
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