---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!
Chapter 145 - Agreement has just released on RR with no major changes.
For the Fixers, this chapter has seen no changes.
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I know that many of y'all probably want to see ALL the stuff at once, but there's too much to cover. And Sera's VERY hurt, so we'll have to cut it into several smaller pieces.
The Perk choices will be coming pretty soon, fret not!
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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/
I hope you will enjoy it!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the link to the chapter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14vTxuQom85tjqG1r-sFdFbnI3eXFerdy-obGqSnCVr8/edit?usp=sharing
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Chapter 190 - System Online
Right after the System re-initializing itself, finally came the big money shot.
All the experience that had been stacking up since effectively before meeting Higgins came rushing in all at once.
[System]: The following Attributes have gained experience: Body (+ Bonus XP), Reflex (+ Bonus XP), Intellect, Intuition, Edge, Tech (+ Bonus XP), Ego, Anima (+ Bonus XP)
[System]: Attribute gain Highlights:[System]: 400xp (+200xp Bonus) gained for Tech Attribute.[System]: Tech Attribute has reached Rank 4. Upgrade delayed until User confirmation.[System]: 400xp (+200xp Bonus) gained for Anima Attribute.[System]: Anima Attribute has reached Rank 3. Upgrade delayed until User confirmation.[System]: INFO: Additional Anima Attribute experience will be applied once Rank-Up has been completed.
[System]: The following Skills have gained significant experience: [First-Aid], [Throwing], [Netrunning], [Deception], [Murder], [CQC], [Athletics], [Negotiation], [{Anima Razor}] (+ Bonus XP)
[System]: The following Skills have gained experience: [Programming], [Manifestation], [Slicing], [Appraise], [Quick-Hacks], [Jury-Rigging], [Contortion], [Martial-Arts], [Stealth], [Acrobatics], [Cooking], [Lip-Reading]
[System]: Skill gain Highlights:[System]: 1,700xp gained for [First Aid] Skill.[System]: 1,100xp gained for [Netrunning] Skill.[System]: 300xp gained for [Slicing] Skill.[System]: 300xp gained for [Slicing] Skill.[System]: 300xp gained for [Programming] Skill.[System]: [Programming] Skill is 200xp away from reaching Level 5.[System]: 600xp gained for [Athletics] Skill.[System]: [Athletics] Skill is 200xp away from reaching Level 5.[System]: 300xp gained for [Acrobatics] Skill.[System]: [Acrobatics] Skill has reached Level 4. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available.[System]: INFO: Additional [Acrobatics] Skill experience will be applied once Level-Up process has been fully completed.[System]: 300xp gained for [Deception] Skill.[System]: [Deception] Skill has reached Level 4. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available.[System]: INFO: Additional [Deception] Skill experience will be applied once Level-Up process has been fully completed.
[System]: 200xp gained for [Appraise] Skill.[System]: [Appraise] Skill is 300xp away from reaching Level 3.
[System]: 300xp gained for [Quick-Hacks] Skill.[System]: [Quick-Hack] Skill has reached Level 5. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available.[System]: ERROR: Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download would exceed current Anima Network’s capabilities. Skill Level-Up process disabled until repairs have been completed.[System]: INFO: Additional [Quick-Hack] Skill experience will be applied once Level-Up process has been fully completed.[System]: 200xp gained for [Jury-Rigging] Skill.[System]: [Jury-Rigging] Skill has reached Level 1. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available.
[System]: 1,700xp gained for [Murder] Skill.[System]: [Murder] Skill is 300xp away from reaching Level 3.[System]: 100xp gained for [Lip-Reading] Skill.[System]: [Lip-Reading] Skill is 200xp away from reaching Level 1.[System]: 900xp (+400xp Bonus) gained for [{Anima Razor}] Skill.[System]: [{Anima Razor}] Skill has reached Level 3. Knowledge and Muscle-Memory download available. [{Anima Razor}] Perk Point obtained.[System]: INFO: Additional [{Anima Razor}] Skill experience will be applied once Level-Up process has been fully completed.
[System]: Remaining Bonus XP Available: 0.
[System]: Scavenger (Low-Tier) defeated. [x16][System]: 800xp gained for defeating Scavenger (Low-Tier) [x16]. [System]: Scavenger Leader (Low-Tier) defeated. [x2][System]: 600xp (+300xp) gained for defeating Scavenger (Low-Tier) [x2]. [First-Kill Bonus Experience (x1)][System]: Scavenger (Low-Tier) drops 1x (Common) Data-Shard.[System]: You have obtained 1x (Common) Data-Shard.[System]: Scavenger (Low-Tier) drops 1x (Common) Data-Shard. (Timed Out)[System]: Scavenger (Low-Tier) drops 1x (Uncommon) Data-Shard. (Timed Out)Seeing the veritable deluge of experience drops and System Notifications had me feeling genuinely dizzy—the sheer volume of it scrolling past my vision like someone had uncorked a bottle that had been building pressure for days—which, it very much had, so… fair.
A slightly manic giggle escaped my throat before I could do anything about it.
"{You okay?}" Mr. Shori asked immediately, concern cutting through his usual composure.
I nodded fast, pulling the towel out of my mouth and letting out a long, shaky sigh of relief. "{Yes. Very okay. Thank you, Mr. Shori… I can't thank you enough for helping me with this—I know you don't want to hear it. But still: Thank you.}"
He scratched his scruffy, grey chin-beard and waved me off, muttering something unintelligible under his breath that sounded very much like "unruly child" but could have been anything, really.
I chose to hear what I wanted to hear.
I didn't bother hiding the toothy grin that had taken up what felt like permanent residence on my face, my eyes darting back to the System notifications still hovering half inside my field of view, demanding attention like an overexcited puppy.
'Two Attribute Rank Ups, five Skill Level-ups, one of which is [{Anima Razor}] and it even comes with a Perk…!'
That was by far the biggest single drop I had ever gotten—which made a lot of sense, considering the System had been effectively offline for several days now.
Everything that should have been trickling in as it happened had instead been dammed up, waiting, and now it was all arriving at once. And the gig itself, as much of an unmitigated disaster as it had turned out to be, had clearly been bound to pay out massively in experience precisely because of how much of a shit-show it had been.
The System apparently didn't care whether your performance was graceful or desperate—it only cared that you'd survived something worth surviving.
'Hell, in a way, it wants you to struggle first and foremost. The more risk, the more experience… As this massive drop very much shows, once again.'
My eyes drifted toward the bottom of the list, landing on the General Experience total, then lower—to the drop notifications sitting underneath.
'So two of the Scavs back in the foyer dropped loot, huh? Unfortunate that I couldn't stick around to collect…'
It still felt strange, looking at an accurate, itemized list of exactly how many people I had killed in the past few days and feeling absolutely nothing about it.
But there was a different quality to that nothing now.
Something had shifted, subtly, in the way I was sitting with it—and I was fairly sure I had Takeda's whole Bushido rundown to thank for that.
It wasn't that the emptiness had been replaced by something healthier necessarily—if there even was such a thing as unhealthy or healthy in this regard.
Just… More that it had been given a frame. A context, of sorts.
Something to hold it so it wasn't just floating around loose in my head, bumping into things.
"Tsk." I clicked my tongue quietly, mildly annoyed at the realization that more than two decades of trained professionals in my old life had collectively failed to accomplish what a brain-damaged psychopath with a sword and a philosophy degree from the school of “might makes right” had managed in a single conversation—which was, unflattering as it sounded, effectively what Takeda was at the moment.
"{I… think I’m going to need to head out,}" I said, pushing myself carefully up from the chair and immediately regretting the speed at which I'd done so as the room tilted slightly to the left. "{Feeling a bit woozy from the shot. Need to rest up before I've got somewhere to be later.}"
Mr. Shori straightened from where he'd been leaning against the counter, eyes doing their usual rapid assessment. "{Do you need help getting to the elevator?}"
I waved him off. "{I'm fine. Mostly fine… Well, fine enough.}"
He didn't look entirely convinced, but he also didn't push it—just gave me a short nod and a look with his eyebrows that communicated, without any ambiguity, that if I collapsed in the hallway outside his shop it was going to be my own fault and he was going to be very annoyed about it.
‘Those are some very talkative eyebrows, old man.’
I made it out the back door without incident, which I counted as a massive win.
The real reason I wanted to get back wasn't rest, though—or at least not only rest.
I wanted to “consolidate my gains,” as the Xianxia and Wuxia enthusiasts from my past life would've called it, and the fact that I was unironically using cultivation novel terminology to describe my actual real life was something I'd long since stopped finding weird and had moved firmly into finding hilarious.
But the principle was still sound.
I had a stack of Level Ups waiting, Knowledge and Muscle Memory downloads queued behind them, and a meeting with Kenzie in a few hours.
Not that any of the Skills were going to dramatically reshape how that meeting went, but I genuinely did not love the idea of leaving downloads sitting around unprocessed for even longer than I already had.
Several days of backlog was already more than I'd ever let accumulate before, and the itch to clear it was very real—not to mention that the System would force my hand at some point anyway.
'And I'd very much like to know what [{Anima Razor}] has for Perk options too… Haven't seen the [Blade]-line of Perks ever since I combined them into the Skill. Every time I tried, the System just told me it was still in the process of recalibrating the changes. But with the Point now unlocked, it should give me what I need once I finish the downloads…!'
The walk back to the elevator was steady enough, if slow, and I made it to the apartment without any dramatic incidents—Valeria long gone, of course.
She'd left well before I'd even woken up this morning, which was standard.
I changed into comfortable in-house clothes, kicked off my shoes, and settled onto the edge of my bed with the System interface hovering in front of me.
'Alright. Let's not go crazy on this.'
The Anima Network was functional again, but functional and healed were two very different things, and Mr. Shori had been extremely clear about what the difference meant in practical terms.
I couldn't even do the Level Up for [Quick-Hacks]—anything that drew heavily on the Network was locked out, which meant I was capped at Level 4 maximum for anything in that category right now.
That should fix itself over time, same as everything else if Mr. Shori was to be trusted—and he was. The injection had done a lot, but it wasn't a fix-all.
Several weeks, maybe longer, until things were fully back to where they should be.
I sighed and looked down at my hands, resting in my lap.
They were better. Noticeably so—the constant, low-grade tremor that had been there since the foyer had dialed back to something barely perceptible, and the deep ache across the joints had faded to a dull background hum instead of the sharp, insistent thing it had been yesterday.
"Guess that's the best warning I can get, eh?" I muttered.
There really wasn't a better teacher than actually fucking something up—but then getting absurdly lucky and fucking it up in the least bad way possible. A way that turned out to be fixable, with a clear path back to normal, and a very specific list of things to never do again burned permanently into my memory.
'Just can't use [Anima Razor] again until everything's healed up. And even then, only as far as the Skill downloads have actually taught me how to go… Unless it's life-or-death.' I flexed my fingers slowly, watching the joints move without the sharp bite of pain that had accompanied the motion yesterday. 'But if it is life-or-death, then I deal with the consequences after. Same as last time. Just—hopefully with less broken hands.'
I opened the [Skill] screen and marked [Jury-Rigging] first.
“Let’s ease myself into this, then…”
I confirmed the selection and let the download begin.
The hit was gentle—or at least gentle by download standards, which meant it only felt like someone had crammed a semester's worth of lectures into my skull in about four seconds flat.
The knowledge arrived starting with the fundamentals: Material identification, structural assessment, load-bearing principles applied to things that were never designed to bear loads.
I now understood why certain adhesives failed under heat and which ones didn't, how to identify stress fractures in composite materials by sound alone—a specific, dull pitch that meant hold was different from the slightly sharper one that meant about to give.
My hands twitched with new muscle memory as techniques for field-splinting cracked panels, rerouting damaged wiring through salvaged conduit, and improvising seals from mismatched gasket material slotted into place alongside the theory.
The instinct for which scrap was actually useful and which was just garbage got sharper too—I could already feel a new filter layering over how I looked at junk piles and debris, my brain automatically cataloguing things by tensile strength, conductivity and flexibility rather than just is this trash or not.
Basic tool improvisation rounded it out—how to turn a bent piece of rebar into a passable prying lever, how to fashion a cutting edge from a shattered ceramic plate, how to strip wire with your teeth in a way that didn't cost you a filling.
Three months of coursework in someone's engineering fundamentals class, compressed into a few seconds of mild headache and a strange new appreciation for duct tape.
I blinked a few times as the download settled, then rolled my shoulders experimentally.
"Huh. That wasn't so bad."
It barely even registered compared to some of the downloads I'd sat through recently.
No migraine coiling at the base of my skull, no phantom muscle spasms, no urge to lie facedown on the nearest horizontal surface and question my life choices.
Just a mild headache that was already fading and a faint tingle running through my arms and fingers, like the ghost of a static charge.
The tingle, though—that was definitely new.
Or rather, it had never been part of a [Jury-Rigging] download before, because I'd never had a [Jury-Rigging] download before, but the point was that it felt like it wasn't coming from the Skill itself.
It was the Anima Network. The download had brushed up against it, or rather, through it in a way that it didn’t entirely enjoy.
'Sore, but functional,' I noted. 'Could be a lot worse. Let’s continue taking things slow then, and call it a day when it starts hurting for real. Can’t risk messing up what the injector did…’
I opened the [Attribute] screen back up and marked Anima next.
‘Hmm… This is quite literally as Anima as it gets, so it’s probably quite a bit more intensive than just about any other Skill or Attribute I could choose… But it’s also the lowest-level one, so it should have the least amount of content, in theory. The System is at least not blocking it, so it should be fine… Right?’
I considered it for another few seconds, before—somewhat hesitantly—confirming the selection and letting the download begin.
It immediately hit quite a bit differently than the first two Ranks had.
Where Rank 1 had slammed me to the floor with vertigo and sensory overload, and Rank 2 had been more of a controlled flood of raw data, this one crept in—settling into the space behind my eyes like a pressure change before a storm.
The tingle from the Anima Network flared up immediately, jumping from background hum to a sharp, insistent heat that ran the full length of both arms and spread across my chest, and for about three very unpleasant seconds I genuinely thought I'd miscalculated and was about to undo everything Mr. Shori's injection had just fixed.
Not long after, however, it thankfully leveled off.
Still hot and very much present, but holding steady rather than climbing indefinitely.
'Okay! Okay. We're fine… Probably.'
The Sprites came first, same as they always did—but this time they didn't just pop in and out of my vision like excited fireflies. They lingered, then drifted closer and further away again.
They settled into patterns I hadn't seen before, orbiting each other in slow, layered configurations that my brain desperately wanted to make sense of and couldn't quite manage yet.
Then the meat of the knowledge started truly arriving, and it became clear very quickly why this was considered a year's worth of information instead of “merely” six months like with the Rank 2 upgrade.
Where the previous Ranks had taught me what sprites were and how to nudge them around, Rank 3 pulled the camera back and showed me the infrastructure underneath.
The Sprites weren't just floating around randomly—they never had been.
They moved through channels. Currents. Flows of ambient Anima that ran through everything in this world the same way electrical wiring ran through a building's walls—invisible unless you knew where, when and how to look, but absolutely fundamental to how anything worked.
The air had them. The floor had them. The walls of my bedroom had them, faint and thin but undeniably present, carrying trace amounts of energy along paths that had existed long before the Megabuilding had been built on top of them.
The System called them ley-streams, which was a term that hit my brain with the full weight of every fantasy novel I'd ever read in my past life, and I had to take a moment to process the fact that something like ley lines were a real, actual, measurable thing in this world and that I was currently sitting on a bed that was sitting on a floor that was sitting on top of a network of them.
The ley-streams, however, also explained something that had been bugging me since the first Rank—why sprites were denser in some places than others. Like with Miss K’s dojo.
Sure, she had said that she had trapped them there, but even getting that many Sprites into the same area to begin with was… A lot, considering that just walking around with my Anima Sight active showed maybe a handful of green Sprites every few meters or so.
Miss K, however, had tens of thousands of them.
But now I knew: It wasn't random and it wasn't based on anything as simple as population density or technology concentration. It was about flow.
Places where ley-streams intersected or ran parallel had more ambient Anima, which meant more Sprites, which meant Anima-related work was easier there. Places where the streams were thin or obstructed had less, and working with Anima in those spots cost more effort for less result, like trying to run a program on hardware that could barely handle it.
Then came the part that genuinely changed how I understood what I'd been doing up until now: Sigils.
They weren't just gestures or simple instructions, as I had thought up until now.
Kind of like a spell in most video games was simply “Fireball” to describe a ball of fire, but the actual usage thereof could vary wildly based on what the caster wanted to do with it.
Sigils, instead, were precise, structured commands that told the ambient Anima in your immediate environment how to behave—more like programming than esoteric intent.
Every stroke of a Sigil corresponded to a specific manipulation of the ley-stream flow around you—redirecting it, concentrating it, shaping it into a configuration that produced the desired effect.
The reason precision mattered so much and the reason Mr. Shori had hammered that point over and over, was because an imprecise Sigil didn't just weaken the effect.
It gave the wrong instructions entirely. It told the Anima Sprites to do something you hadn't intended, using energy you'd already committed, with results you couldn't possibly predict.
That realization alone retroactively terrified me about every single time I'd fumbled a Sigil sequence during practice.
'I've been sending garbled commands to an energy network I barely understand, using gestures I was still learning, and the only reason nothing catastrophic happened is because the amounts were small enough that the mistakes didn't matter. Yet.'
It also put into perspective why the backlash of the [Anima Razor] had been so bad: I had not actually performed the Sigils properly.
I had gotten them just right enough not to kill myself and everyone inside the room, but nowhere near close enough to actually simply produce the outcome I had envisioned.
The download, meanwhile, kept pushing.
My Network ached with it throughout—a dull, persistent burn that reminded me with every new piece of information that the pipeline this was all flowing through was freshly cauterized and not particularly happy about being used this aggressively this soon.
The final layer was, topically, about the Anima Network itself—my Network, specifically, and what it actually was in the context of everything I'd just learned.
It was my body's inherent connection to the ley-streams.
Every sufficiently advanced living thing in this world had one, the same way every one of those living things had a circulatory system or a nervous system.
Most people's Networks were vestigial—dormant, atrophied from generations of disuse, about as functional as an appendix. They existed, technically, but they didn't do much of anything.
The Sprites simply flowed through these people with no big interaction at all.
Mine, however, was active. Open, in a way that let me draw from the ambient ley-streams, channel that energy through my body, and direct it outward through Sigils.
That was what made Anima users different—not that they had something others didn't, but that the thing everyone had was actually turned on.
Which also meant that when I'd damaged it by forcing [Anima Razor] through a katana without proper training, I hadn't just hurt my physical self. I'd taken the one part of my body that connected me to the fundamental energy system of this entire world and put cracks in it.
Like taking a water main and hitting it with a hammer—the water was still there, the pipes were still there, but the connection between them was severely compromised.
Mr. Shori's injection had sealed the cracks, like a roll of duct tape—[Jury-Rigging] being very happy with the comparison. But sealed wasn't the same as repaired, and the download made that distinction with uncomfortable clarity.
The knowledge finally began to settle.
My head throbbed. My arms ached. The Anima Network burned with a low, sullen heat that told me it had opinions about what I'd just put it through and none of them were positive.
But underneath all of that—underneath the pain and the soreness and the mild terror of understanding exactly how badly I could have screwed myself—there was something new.
A sense of the world around me that hadn't been there before. Faint, half-formed, barely more than a suggestion at the edges of my awareness. But definitely present… Somewhere.
I could almost feel the currents of the largest nearby ley-stream. A whisper of movement, of flow, of something vast and old and constant running beneath everything.
'Effectively equivalent to a year of study,' I thought, staring at my shaking hands as the last of the download faded. 'And I still feel like I barely know anything at all.'
I let myself fall backward onto the bed, stretching out full-length in a desperate attempt to get the tingling under control and convince my muscles that the shaking was no longer necessary, thank you very much.
A few minutes passed.
It got slightly better. But only slightly.
"Alright," I muttered at the ceiling, making the painful decision I'd been trying to avoid.
"Gonna have to wait with the rest until after meeting with Kenzie, then…"
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!
Intermission 182 - Bushido has just released on RR with no major changes.
For the Fixers, this chapter has seen no changes.
-----