Day 29, continued. 1:24 p.m.
It took us twenty-six minutes to get out and I remember almost none of it.
What I've got is the slope, and Tom's hand on my back at the two places where it got steep, and Ren coming down to meet us at the second level with her jacket off and already rolled up into something to press against my neck.
And the door.
Sixty-one degrees for five and a half hours, and then a half second of being in neither place, and then a hundred and thirteen.
It went through me like a shout. I got about four steps into that gravel lot and sat straight down where I was, in the middle of the open, in the sun, with the heat coming up off the rocks into both hands, and I have never in my life been so glad to be somewhere that was actively trying to kill me.
Colby was on the fence with his forehead against it. He'd been out for eighteen minutes. He'd hit the reader four times because he wasn't sure it took.
* * *
The Association got there at 2:41.
Two trucks, five people, and a woman in her forties named Okafor who listened to Tom for ninety seconds, said "stop," walked twenty feet away, made a call, came back, and then listened to the rest of it with a recorder on the tailgate.
She asked me for the count and I gave it to her.
"Six on one. Eighteen on two. Forty-one I could resolve in the junction and more I couldn't. Second-level room count is thirteen, the map says eleven. The fourth tunnel isn't on the map. The floor goes dry about a hundred and fifty feet down the third ramp and the wall temperature comes up before that."
Okafor stopped writing about halfway through.
"Who are you," she said. Not unkindly.
"Miles North. Unranked."
"Unranked."
"F-Class."
And she looked at me for a second, sitting on the gravel with Ren's jacket held against my neck and my right sleeve cut off, and then she wrote F-Class down on her form in the box for it, and underlined it, which I don't think she meant me to see.
They fenced the lot at 3:10. There is a second fence around that portal now and a different sign on it and the phone number is bigger.
* * *
The rest of it isn't dramatic, and all of it mattered.
Ren drove me to an urgent care on 59th because I could not have done it and did not want an ambulance, and sat in the waiting room for two hours and ten minutes on a Saturday afternoon, and did not once suggest that she had somewhere else to be. She sat one chair over with her phone in her lap, not looking at it, and every time my left hand drifted up toward my neck she said "Don't," without turning her head, and it went back down.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were."
Second-degree chemical burn across the right side of the neck and ear, first-degree on the forearm, irrigation and a dressing and a tube of something. Three hundred and forty dollars.
Colby texted the group at nine that night: is everyone ok. sorry i hit it 4 times.
Tom put my broken shield in the back of his truck and took it home and I did not see it again for two weeks.
* * *
I didn't look at my status until nearly six o'clock, sitting on the end of my own bed with the dressing on and the AC running, because the truth is I'd forgotten about it.
I had a burn and a headache and I had watched a light go out from the inside of something, and the screen was not in my head at all. It came back to me while I was trying to get a shirt off one-handed.
─────────────────────────────
Name: Miles North
Level: 2
Strength: 13.9
Stamina: 12.8
Agility: 11.7
Intelligence: 11.7
Trait: Exercise (F-Class)
─────────────────────────────
A point. A full point, in all four, at once.
That is five days of work. That is five days of getting up at four fifteen and mopping a floor and going to failure twice in four separate things and going to bed at ten, and I got it for ninety seconds of being bad at a fight I nearly lost.
I sat there and had a very ugly feeling about that for about a minute, which I think was fair, and then the second screen came up.
─────────────────────────────
Trait limitation updated.
Maximum daily increase per stat: 0.4 points.
─────────────────────────────
* * *
I read it four times and then I got up and walked into the kitchen and stood there with the refrigerator door open, because it was cold and I didn't know what else to do with myself.
The cap scales with level.
Twenty-nine days of my life have been built on one sentence, and the sentence is two tenths a day, days are the currency, a missed day is a theft and it is permanent. I wrote it on a legal pad on Day 2. I underlined it. The job comes off it. The schedule. The shield instead of six hundred dollars of runway. The three rest days I fought Coach about.
And it was never a ceiling. It was a ceiling at level one.
Level two didn't just hand me four points. It doubled what tomorrow is worth, and the day after that, and every one after it for as long as I can keep paying for them. Diving is what makes the grinding worth more.
I shut the fridge. The motor kicked on behind it, loud in a house with one person in it, and I stood there with my good hand flat on the door and listened to it run.
* * *
The legal pad was on the table under the electric bill, where I'd left it Friday night. I pulled the cap off the pen with my teeth, because the right hand was the one with the burn on it and I didn't want to close it around anything I didn't have to, and I ran it standing up, and I got a number so stupid that I knew immediately I'd done something wrong.
Nine thousand two hundred and sixty dollars. Eleven hundred a month. Call it eight and a half months, call it two hundred and fifty-five days.
Two hundred and fifty-five days at four tenths a day is a hundred and two points.
In one stat. Coach Reyes at the top of six years in a mid-tier guild was a 31.
I put the pen down.
That is not a real number. The useful thing about a number that ridiculous is that it tells you exactly where your model is broken, and it took me until about eleven o'clock that night to find it.
Most of that was not thinking. I made a peanut butter sandwich and ate half of it over the sink. I put the other half in a bag in the fridge, which was stupid, because nobody eats half a sandwich the next day. Colby's text came in at nine and I read it twice. I didn't answer it yet. I didn't know how to tell him that four was the right number of times.
Then I sat down and flipped back through the pad.
It goes a long way back now. Columns, mostly, and times, and little arrows. Day 13 is easy to find, because the handwriting on that page goes downhill. The lines slope off to the right like the paper was tilted, and there's a number near the bottom I went over three times because it kept coming out looking like a different number. Eight sessions, five hours of sleep, hands shaking on the coffee pot, an Intelligence session that wouldn't register because I couldn't hold two numbers. I hit that wall at a 10 in Strength, doing four stats, at twenty minutes a session.
I sat and looked at that page with my neck pulling under the dressing every time I tipped my head down.
A session has to go to failure. That's the only rule. And a session that takes twenty minutes to reach failure at a 12 does not take twenty minutes at a 25. The stronger I get, the further away the edge is, and the more of my day it costs to walk out to it.
The cap is 0.4 now and it'll be 0.6 and someday 1.0, and none of that matters much, because the cap was never what ran out first. Hours did. Sleep did. How fast I can get to the edge of myself and back.
Which is a question about technique, and recovery, and someone who knows more about it than I do.
Which is the boring part.
* * *
I sat down at the kitchen table at about half past eleven, with a dressing on my neck and a trait that had just been upgraded for what I have to assume is the first time in human history, and wrote four words on the legal pad.
Get to failure faster.
Then I went to bed, because I had one, and because Monday I had to go tell a woman with a bad knee that she'd been right about everything again.