Chapter 5 — God-Tier Skills
This was his first SSR card.
Luca had suspected Mathilda might rank high — she was a central character, and central characters tended to punch above their apparent weight in the system's logic. But he'd mentally capped her at S-rank, same tier as Stansfield. She was twelve years old. Her combat power was approximately zero. By any reasonable metric, she was a child navigating a bad situation, not a powerhouse.
Apparently the system didn't grade on combat power alone.
He thought about that for a moment. The cards seemed to measure something more like narrative weight — how much a character's specific traits, experiences, and story arc had shaped them into something genuinely singular. Stansfield was dangerous and unpredictable. Léon was a technically perfect killer. Both were S-rank.
Mathilda was twelve, barely a hundred pounds, and somehow SSR.
He looked down at her standing in his doorway with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lip, projecting the studied nonchalance of someone who had decided a long time ago that the best armor was looking like nothing could touch you.
"Sorry," Luca said, keeping his voice easy. "I don't smoke."
Mathilda tilted her head back slightly, looking up at him — he had a solid eight inches on her — and took a quick, pragmatic sniff. No tobacco smell on him at all. She accepted the data point without argument, pulled the cigarette out of her mouth, and tucked it back into her jacket pocket.
"Okay," she said.
Then she leaned slightly sideways to peer around him into the apartment, with the transparent curiosity of someone who'd decided the social rules about not doing that didn't apply to her.
"You just move in?" she asked. "You from out of town?"
"Do I look like I'm from out of town?"
"Kind of, yeah. New Yorkers don't get involved." She said it matter-of-factly, no particular bitterness in it, just a thing she'd observed and catalogued. "Especially in a building like this. Everybody's got their own problems. Nobody's got leftover energy to stick their neck out for somebody else's kid." She paused. "You stuck your neck out."
Luca crouched down to her eye level — a deliberate choice, the kind that didn't condescend but also didn't loom.
"Born and raised," he said. "Arthur Avenue, not far from here."
Her eyes lit up slightly. "Arthur Avenue? You Italian?"
"Something like that."
She accepted that too, moving on with the efficiency of someone who'd learned to work with incomplete information.
"I'm Mathilda," she said. Then, after a half-second: "Thanks. For — you know." A small gesture toward the hallway.
"Luca." He straightened back up. "And don't worry about it. That wasn't your fault."
She went still for just a moment. Not dramatically — barely perceptibly. The way a person goes still when they hear something they're not used to hearing and their brain needs a second to process it.
Then the renovation crew started filing out behind him with armloads of cardboard, and both of them stepped aside automatically to let them through.
Luca settled the bill at the door. The workers headed for the elevator.
"You want help putting things away?" Mathilda asked, looking at the half-unpacked state of the apartment. "I'm good at it. I clean our whole place."
"Sure," Luca said. "Come in."
She was, in fact, excellent at it.
Within forty minutes the apartment was organized with the methodical efficiency of someone who'd been doing domestic work since they were old enough to reach the countertops. She didn't ask where things went — she made sensible decisions about it and moved on. No drama, no chatter, just competent steady work.
Luca watched her out of the corner of his eye while he set up the bookshelf.
Twelve years old, running a household because nobody else in that apartment was doing it. Carrying a first-aid kit's worth of ointment and bandages in her head as a category of things I need because the injuries came regularly enough to plan around. The kind of kid who'd had the luxury of being a kid systematically taken from her and had adapted accordingly.
She was also, underneath all of it, still twelve. There were these small flickers — a half-second where she'd examine something with genuine curiosity before smoothing it back into practiced indifference. The way she'd almost smiled at the corner of her mouth when he'd said not your fault.
Before she left, Luca stopped her at the door.
"Hold on."
He retrieved a small first-aid kit from his bag — properly stocked, not the drugstore variety — and held it out to her. Antiseptic, butterfly closures, quality bandaging, a small tube of arnica for the bruising.
"You know how to use all this?" he asked.
"Yeah." She took it without making a thing of it, which told him she'd done her own first aid before. She looked at it for a second, then looked at him. Something in her expression shifted — almost imperceptibly, but it was there. "Thanks," she said quietly.
Then she was gone, and Luca noticed — just before she rounded the corner of the hallway — that her footsteps had changed. Going from something careful and contained to something lighter. The kind of walk that happened when a person's guard came down by a few degrees without them deciding to let it.
He closed the door.
He pulled his equipment case out from under the bed.
Standard kit: two sidearms, a compact rifle broken down into components, ammunition sorted by caliber, two combat knives, a pair of flashbangs, and — last item out — a small wireless transmitter the size of a matchbook.
He turned it over in his hand.
This wasn't for Mathilda.
Norman — her stepfather — was one of Stansfield's informants. More than that, he was a custodian: Stansfield kept a portion of his off-books product stored through Norman's network, spread across locations that weren't connected to any official DEA address. It was smart, compartmentalized, hard to trace.
In the film, Norman had eventually gotten greedy. Started skimming — cutting the product, pocketing the difference. That was what had brought Stansfield to the apartment building with a team of corrupt agents and zero restraint, and that was what had ended with Mathilda's entire family dead on the floor.
Luca was not going to let that happen.
But he also wasn't going to move blind. Stansfield was methodical about one thing — distribution of risk. He wouldn't store everything in one place. Norman was one node in a larger network, and Luca needed to map the rest of it before he made a move.
He got up, crossed the hall quietly, and spent about ninety seconds placing the transmitter behind the hallway baseboard outside unit 4B.
A small gift for the neighbors.
Then he came back, sat on the edge of his bed, and finally opened Mathilda's full card.
[Mathilda — Rank: SSR][Source: Léon: The Professional (1994)]
[Skill 1: Scarred Survivor] For every person with a bond of Partner tier or above who dies, combat effectiveness permanently increases by 5%. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Partner or above. Skill Fragments x150.
[Skill 2: Street Smart] When learning skills related to assassination or covert operations, learning efficiency +20%. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Close Friend or above. Skill Fragments x50.
[Skill 3: Harmless Face] When approaching a target while presenting as a non-threatening figure — student, delivery person, civilian — target alertness -20%. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Close Friend or above. Skill Fragments x50.
[Skill 4: Forbidden Reliance] When fighting alongside a Symbiotic-bond individual, combat effectiveness +50%. When that individual is in danger, combat effectiveness +100%. If that individual is killed, combat effectiveness permanently +100%. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Symbiotic tier. Skill Fragments x300.
[Skill 5: Advanced Lucky Star] When trouble finds you, setbacks will occur — but resolution will always come. The greater the trouble, the harder the setback; the harder the setback, the more complete the resolution. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Symbiotic tier. Skill Fragments x3,000.
Luca sat with the card open for a long time.
He went through each skill twice, then a third time.
Scarred Survivor — a permanent passive combat boost that scaled with grief. Dark as hell, and the learning requirements were steep, but permanent percentage buffs didn't have diminishing returns. They just stacked.
Street Smart — flat efficiency boost for learning his entire primary skill category. That one paid for itself immediately.
Harmless Face — situationally brilliant. The ability to walk into a room and register as zero threat was worth more than most combat bonuses. People made decisions based on perceived danger. Eliminate the perception, and you controlled the room before anything happened.
Forbidden Reliance — he read that one carefully. A fifty percent combat boost for fighting alongside a Symbiotic-tier bond, scaling up to a hundred percent if they were in danger, and a permanent hundred percent if they died. The kill-condition clause was interesting. Not a buff he ever intended to activate through the grief route, but the baseline numbers during active combat were extraordinary.
And then Advanced Lucky Star.
Three thousand Fragments. Symbiotic bond tier. The single most demanding unlock he'd encountered by a factor of ten.
He re-read the description slowly.
When trouble finds you, setbacks will occur — but resolution will always come. The greater the trouble, the harder the setback; the harder the setback, the more complete the resolution.
That wasn't a combat skill. It wasn't a stat boost. It was something closer to a narrative guarantee — the universe itself, mechanically obligated to make sure things worked out. Not easily, not cleanly, but eventually.
He thought about what that would mean in practice. Every major threat, every corner he got backed into, every situation that looked unwinnable — resolved. Always. No exceptions.
Three thousand Fragments.
He currently had twenty-three.
Luca leaned back and looked at the ceiling.
Long game, he thought. Very long game.
But he'd started it tonight, whether he'd meant to or not. Twelve years old, unlit cigarette, walking back to her apartment with lighter steps than she'd arrived with.
The bond was at Stranger. The road from Stranger to Symbiotic was a long one.
He had time.
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