Hoqalo: [Book 3] Chapter 134

“To find a ceiling, we push until you break.”— Kraftwerkhaus AD

Cecilia let her shoulders drop a half-inch. “You and I, Dash,” she said.

Alice had already drifted toward the nearest cooling cube, ember star bright, hand out; and then she caught herself between the rule she’d dodged and the drop she couldn’t leave on the floor, and the Vaultline plugin won. “I’m not collecting,” she announced, scooping it up. “This one’s a pull. There’s a difference.”

So the three of us swept the chamber, two of us officially and one of us under a technicality, and the cubes went into pouches that stayed light no matter how much I fed them. The king and queen dropped nice items, but technically we couldn’t keep them because Scavantis took everything.

There was no point in examining the loot, and I hated that.

“I hate this,” I said out loud. There were nice rings, but if I put one on, I might want to keep it and be even more sad that I couldn’t, so I begrudgingly ignored the loot.

“EXACTLY!” Alice threw a fireball at a wall. “Only corpos can drain the fun out of getting loot!”

My status still had the points stacked in it, earned and unspent, glowing at me until I closed the menu; later, a gym, a machine, a before-number and an after-number. The floor came up clean after that, and Cecilia turned a slow circle over it and found nothing left to argue about.

“That’s everything,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The sick green light pulled back into wherever the shard had been keeping it, and a panel chased us out the door of the world.

[Scenario complete: Kill the King][Difficulty: Level 15]

The room reassembled around the feeling: tiered chairs, the low platform, the containment tray, recycled air going thin and cool after hours of wet-terrarium thick. The twins’ outfits went out like a snuffed match, gold and white folding back down into ordinary clothes between one blink and the next.

The woman by the tray was already up and crossing to us with a reader in her hand, in no hurry about any of it. “Arms out, hold still.”

I held my arms out and tried to look like a person who had never smuggled a thing in his life, which was easy because I hadn’t. The reader passed over each of us and chimed clean three times.

“Nothing flagged.” She touched the reader to each pouch at my hip, and one by one they sealed, a thin line of light running along each seam shut.

And that was it; Alice was at the door before the woman had finished.

Resource Appraisal was back on 22-A, and we found it without a single wrong turn or a janitor taking pity on us.

The woman behind the counter wore the same Scavantis coat with the logo stitched over the heart, and she took her time looking up.

Alice slapped her sealed pouch down, slipped beside it, already vibrating. “All three of us.”

The woman took the pouches without a word, checked each seal against its runes, and set them on the platform one after another. They vanished, and the haul came down in a clattering slide that was mostly minerals, glowing pebbles, crystalline junk in a dozen grades, an afternoon of scooping cubes out of a hive.

She started sorting before the last of it settled, each piece onto a scanner, numbers ticking across her terminal.

Then her hand closed on something that wasn’t a rock.

She turned it under the light, a plain band, and one eyebrow went up a fraction. “Off the King.” She set it on a separate pad and let the scanner chew and checked her holopad. “You three were contracted for a ten. Green upgrade.”

“We were.” Cecilia said. “We cleared the early rooms clean, and the System offered to raise it. We took it to fifteen.”

The woman looked at her, then at the terminal, and let out a slow breath through her nose. “Fifteen. Then you understand you fought for free. The company doesn’t owe you any credit for it.”

“The items, though.” Alice was over the counter in an instant. “We keep the item value. Tell me we keep the item value.”

“You keep the item value. That’s the only thing the extra floors bought you.” She thumbed through the cube readings without looking down. “Minerals clear you at about two thousand a head. Your bar was a thousand.”

The ring’s pad chimed.

She picked the band back up and held it where the three of us could admire a thing none of us were allowed to keep. “Ring of Sound. Rare, and it runs more than one function, which is rarer. System prices it high, and the King’s drops never come dirty.” Her eyes ran over the rest of the pile and totaled it. “All of it together, after our handling, comes to eleven thousand.”

She pulled up a field and looked at the three of us. “So each of you takes—”

“Three.” Alice didn’t let her finish; she never let anyone finish. “Three’s plenty.”

“Same,” Cecilia said as if they’d rehearsed it.

The woman’s stylus hung over the field. She looked at me, the last seat at the table. “That leaves five thousand for you.”

“That’s—” I tried. “Split it evenly. Three ways. I didn’t do more than—”

“You held the middle.” Cecilia was already turning her gray license over, finished with the topic. “Both monarchs were standing on a buff you took off the board alone. We don’t reach either of them without it. It’s yours.”

True, technically, in the sense that twenty minutes of missing a small mouth inside a wind tunnel and one dead battery had technically been load-bearing.

I opened my mouth to say so, and Alice was already three feet down the counter going, “ooh is that the ring? Can I hold the ring? I won’t drop the ring,” and the moment closed over like a seam healing shut.

[Received: ¢5,000]

Fine.

The woman had already moved on; the money was never the interesting part of her day. “Licenses.”

We dug them out, three gray cards across the counter. She swapped them for three slips of warm printer paper. “You cleared a green exam. You’re green now. Cards dispense at the lobby machine. Don’t lose them; they don’t replace.”

The dispenser downstairs was the same dated orange-screened relic. I fed it the slip; it ground and chewed and dropped a card in the tray, and I tilted it under the light.

NAME: DASH KALLUMSTATUS: SYSTEM LICENSE HOLDERTIER: UP TO GREEN

It didn’t feel like much standing next to two people who’d taken a level-fifteen as a warm-up, but the card thought it was a big day, and I pocketed it.

Alice got her own, held it to the light to watch the holo crawl, pronounced it nova, and turned on me. She’d been patient for upwards of four whole minutes and was visibly done with it. “Okay. We earned food.”

“Floor 72?” I said. “The synth-pork place, you remember, best in the—”

“No,” Cecilia said it fast, and we both turned. Her composure had slipped, actual brightness coming up through it, none of it embarrassed. “Not 72. We found somewhere better.”

She was already pulling something up on her band, lit up. “Trust me. It’s an ideal place to eat for you.”

Whatever ideal for you was supposed to mean, I didn’t get to ask, because Alice had my wrist again and the doors of SMB11 spat the three of us back out into the East Corporate District.

The permacrete steamed ahead, the gutters still running, the orange Scavantis stripe up the corner of the tower smeared across every puddle for a block. Alice headed for the stairs to the transit line, towing me, and I clocked the absence of a car, a driver, a single broad-shouldered man in a dark coat pretending not to watch us.

“No bodyguards,” I said, because the street was missing the one constant of every outing I’d ever had with these two.

“Feral today,” Alice agreed, delighted, taking the stairs two at a time and dragging me into the warm, machine-smell of the platform. “I begged Mom and Mom caved, so now we ride the train like the proletariat. It’s so authentic. Did you know you have to pay every single time?”

The gate read my band and proved her point without ceremony.

[Paid: ¢2]

Alice spent all three stops with her face near the window, narrating. Cecilia stood with one hand on the rail, and the other commuters gave her a half-meter she hadn’t asked for. I kept the coilgun against my shoulder and tried to occupy less room than an armed man occupies on a packed train.

We came up the far stairs into a cleaner stretch of the district, glass and pale stone, the towers spaced as if they could afford the gaps between them.

The place Alice was dragging to was behind two stories of that glass with its name set in thin brass over the door: Kraftwerkhaus. I didn’t know how you said it out loud; places I could pronounce had never cost this much.

Inside was mostly air.

A double-height room full of daylight, pale stone underfoot, plants in stone troughs taller than I was, and the whole back of it open to a floor where people in good clothes moved between machines I half-recognized and machines I didn’t.

There was no wall between the restaurant and the gym. You could sit at a table with a glass of something cold and watch a stranger forty feet away fail a deadlift, and apparently that was the entire idea.

Rich people paid extra to stand around inside that much nothing, and yeah, in a crowded city like Tago, the emptiness was the flex.

A host in a restaurant black met us with a smile and a biometric rack, and I surrendered the coilgun and, after a short negotiation with my own paranoia, the sword as well. The revolver stayed. Also, the rack was not free. Ugh.

[Paid: ¢10]

They sat us by the glass with the gym floor laid out past it like a show. Cecilia took the chair with its back to the wall, and Alice dropped into hers sideways, one leg over the arm.

I looked from the gym floor to the menu icon glowing on the table’s surface to the two of them. “You planned this,” I said. “The dive, the upgrade, hauling me here armed for a dinner, you planned the gym.”

Alice raised one hand without a flicker of shame. “Guilty. Entirely. A hundred percent my idea, and I want that on the record before Ceci tries to take it.” She pointed across the table. “She’s going to tell you she planned it. She just booked it.”

“I made it happen,” Cecilia said, unbothered, turning her water glass. “Which is most of what planning is. But the idea of it was hers, yes.”

“The idea of it,” I repeated. “Explain the idea, please.”

Alice swung her leg back under the table and leaned in, all business now. “Okay. So. You had attributes this morning,” she said. “I know how boring is to sit in class when you unlock attributes. That’s why the dive. That’s why we power-leveled you. Then you spend them somewhere that can tell you exactly what each one bought you.”

She sat back, pleased with the whole construction. “That’s here.”

“There are cheaper places,” she went on before I could fit a word in. “I read it last night. Random gym chains.”

“You said you read for the test,” Ceci narrowed her eyes.

“They work,” Alice said instead, ignoring her, but I could see a slight coloring of her cheeks. They’re also sold to anyone. Kraftwerkhaus has the option of doing it privately.” Her nose wrinkled. “I do mine at Aurelia. Better machines than these, even. But the Aurelia floor wants a student ID at the door, and I can’t print you one of those.” She spread her hands at the room, presenting it like a prize. “So. Second best. For you.”

There it was again. For you. They’d built an entire day around the problem of making me stronger and routed it through a dive and a fake-casual dinner.

I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out. “I—you can’t just—” Articulate. “I need to do something. For you two. This is a lot, and I don’t—I really don’t want to be the guy who only takes it. Tell me what I owe.”

Alice tipped her head, weighing it with theatrical gravity, the grin building underneath. “Hm. Something equivalent. Big. Life-altering.” She snapped her fingers. “You could marry us. Both of us. Instead of the Jeup heir! He smells like a vending machine, and frankly, you’d be an upgrade. You own a sword —”

“Alice,” Cecilia didn’t look up from the menu she was already pulling into the air.

“—I’m just saying it resolves several problems at once and the catering would basically run itself—”

I laughed, because the only alternative was answering, and felt the heat climb my neck anyway, which Alice caught.

“Forget that. We’ll figure something else out,” Ceci said and tapped the stone, and the menu bloomed up out of the table.

I pressed two fingers to my own side and got mine, a panel of light standing off the surface and scrolling under my hand.

The food was first, in a language that was mostly French, small plates, large numbers, half of it tagged with little mana-leaf icons. Something called a marrow-and-saffron consommé promised a sustained regen profile and cost almost as much as we got for the King’s ring.

“Scroll past the food,” Cecilia said, not glancing up from hers. “Down to assay. The measuring.”

I scrolled past the food and found it.

[Attribute Assay — Open]Price: ¢100Description: Full-spectrum reading, you agree to sharing your data with PSAN (Palistra-Scavantis Attribute Network).

[Attribute Assay — Private]Price: ¢700Description: Offline reading. Data written to a personal shard.

[Restorative Potion Shake]Price: ¢400Description: Can be bought separately for each assay.

“The shake isn’t a suggestion, by the way, whatever the price tag implies.” Cecilia dismissed her menu. “An assay runs you to failure on every axis. That’s how it reads a ceiling; it pushes until you can’t. You come off the floor wrung dry. The restorative puts your body up.” Her eyes lifted, and the teacher was behind them. “One is fine. Two if you’ve split your testing across the day. People who do six in an afternoon to chase a number finish the afternoon in an Aurelia ward.”

“Oookay,” I drawled. “Got it.”

So I’d test once, walk out wrung dry, drink the one shake Cecilia’s rule allowed, and then dump every point at once and test again.

I tapped Private Assay, added one Restorative Potion Shake, and confirmed before I could feel the money leave.

[Paid: ¢1,100]

Across the table Alice was ordering like she had a grudge to settle with the kitchen, consommé similar I read earlier, two other things, a bottle of something pale and sparkling, and Cecilia added a short, exact list of her own and a pot of tea, and the table chimed it all down.

“Any tips on which attributes I should pick?” I asked them and leaned back.

Alice waved her hand and swung her feet over the chair again. “Doesn’t matter, you’ll fill to the max eventually. Ask me when you are clueless about increasing max,” she grinned. “I know it better than Ceci does.”

Cecilia let out a pained groan and slumped in her seat. “Alice, I got a B+. I know the subject.”

Alice turned to her with a satisfied smile. “I got A+, see? Better!”

As lovely as their bickering was, I needed more info, so I raised my hand and asked, “How do I change the description, or rather bug-translation?”

“The straightforward is to ask the system to put it next to the closest equivalent in the generic one,” Ceci said first, probably to preserve her test honor. Alice shot her a magnanimous smile and nodded at me to signal agreement.

A man in the same restaurant black came for me before the drinks did. “Mr. Kallum? Whenever you’re ready.” He had a holo-tablet under one arm.

Alice flashed me a thumbs-up with too many teeth in the grin behind it. “Go break the machine. I want an embarrassing before-number; it makes the after look incredible.”

“Don’t push past where it tells you to stop,” Cecilia said, which was a different send-off entirely. “The failure point is the data. You don’t have to fight it.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I gave them a weak smile and followed him out onto the floor, past the deadlifters and a woman sprinting in place inside a ring of sensors, to a row of frosted booths along the back wall. He keyed one and held the door.

“First, the part everyone wants to hear.” He set the holo in a cradle that woke to a soft amber light. “Private assay. This booth is off the net. We pull your readings to local storage, run them in here, and write the result to a shard you carry out. We are connected to nothing while you’re inside; the one exception is if your vitals cross a hard line and the system has to call medical. The moment you leave with your shard, every copy on our side wipes.”

After that fiasco with Sentinel cell and a corrupted registry, being offline felt enticing.

The booth opened into a bare cell with a single rig at its center; padded arms and plates and a cradle for the head, ringed in amber sensors that weren’t pretending to be anything but what they were.

He gave a second to change my clothes into what looked to be spotless exercise ones, but it had one con: a Palistra logo.

“Ugh, fine,” I muttered and put it on.

The man walked back and pointed at the machine. “Hands flat on the plate. We’ll start with strength. Push when it pushes. Don’t pace yourself.”

The plate pushed back.

I pushed. It pushed harder. There is a particular humiliation in a machine that is politely stronger than you and willing to prove it by degrees, climbing past where I was sure my arms ended and dragging me up with it, shaking, until the whole room narrowed to the plate and the line in my back about to go; and then it went, and the plate eased off, and a chime somewhere decided it had what it needed.

That was the easy one.

The next test wanted me to move.

The rig folded itself away, and the floor lit up in a shifting pattern of pads, and the attendant’s voice told me to hit the lit one and only the lit one, faster, and the lit one kept moving before I’d finished thinking about the last one, and for ninety seconds I was a man falling forward in eight directions at once, trying to make his feet agree with his eyes.

By the time it put a weighted bar across my shoulders, dropped me into a half-crouch, and said Hold, just hold, until you can’t, my legs had burned.

I was steadily losing, one second at a time, and when my knee finally folded, the chime managed to sound almost kind about it. Then it sat me in the cradle, and the whole thing went quiet and strange. Patterns to hit before they completed themselves, fast, faster.

And more and more tests, while my mind was focused on just surviving.

The amber lights dimmed to standby. I came off the rig and stayed upright through what I would tell Alice was a tactical lean against the wall. Every part of me had been driven to its own private failure, and then I was shoved to test the next one.

The attendant was already there with a tall glass of something pale gold and faintly luminous, the shake looked far too pretty to cost four hundred credits. “Five minutes,” he said, fitting it into a hand that barely answered the request. “Small sips. It’s mana-dense, let it work. Then you invest points and retake the test.”

I drank. It was sweet, almost too sweet, and the first swallow hit the empty reservoir and spread out from there, warm.

By the second sip, the shaking in my hands had stepped back a bit.

By the third, my legs remembered they were supposed not to shake.

I sat on the bench by the door and took it slow and let it do the work, and every second cost the exhaustion a little ground; the fog thinning, the ache draining off, the empty columns filling back in until I could make a fist.

“Okay, system, can you please translate the manual written for something with three of everything to something more… readable?” I murmured and braced for an insult.

[Lower IQ discovered.]

Of course.

[Analyzing…][Conflict detected! No single attribute covers current spread, get more attributes to specialize.][Applying approximate translation…]

“Not so easy!” I smirked, but didn’t provoke the all-knwoing system by being smartass and instead I pulled my status into the air.

[Attributes] Progress: 31% [SELECTED]LP: 8

[CARAPACE]Strength + Power (Wallop): 0/2Agility + Dexterity (Scuttle): 0/2Constitution + Endurance (Stubbornness): 0/2

[THE CHORUS]Intelligence + Acuity (Snap): 0/2Awareness + Focus (Lock): 0/2Perception + Memory (Churn): 0/2

[ICHOR]Quality + Density (Stuff): 2/4Control + Resonance (Steering): 2/4Efficiency + Regeneration (Stamina): 4/4

I hovered my thumb over the first stat and got ready to find out what the morning had actually bought.

Author note: Okay guys, which attributes should Dash increase?

Also, we have art for Eddy! What do you think? Glowing sign or not? I lean more to not.