Chapter 6 — Defending Peace with My Face
Luca read the Advanced Lucky Star description a fourth time.
He kept coming back to the same word: always.
Not usually. Not in most cases. Always. No exceptions written into the fine print, no conditions that could void it. Just — whatever trouble found him, however bad it got, however far sideways things went — it worked out. Every time.
That was a protagonist's guarantee dressed up as a skill description. A mechanical promise from the universe that the story ended with him standing.
Three thousand Fragments and a Symbiotic bond to unlock it.
He had twenty-three Fragments. He and Mathilda had spoken twice.
Long game, he reminded himself. Very long game. But you get it.
He made the decision firmly and moved on.
The more immediately achievable targets were Street Smart and Harmless Face — both required Close Friend tier and fifty Fragments each. Steep but reachable. Close Friend meant genuine trust, the kind built through repeated contact and actual reliability over time, not just a couple of hallway conversations.
Current bond status with Mathilda:
[Mathilda — Bond: Interested]
One step up from Stranger. She'd noticed him. She was curious about him. That was the foundation, nothing more.
The road from Interested to Close Friend ran through Familiar, then Friend, then Close Friend — three full tiers. With a kid who'd learned through hard experience that adults were either useless or dangerous, that road wasn't going to be short.
He thought about what he knew of her situation. Blended family, badly blended. Her biological father was somewhere in the picture but largely absent in the way that addicts were absent — physically present, functionally gone. Her stepmother. Her older half-sister, who enforced the household pecking order through the time-honored method of being bigger and meaner. And at the center of it, Mathilda — twelve years old, doing the housework, treating her own injuries, and filling the gap left by everyone else's failures with a performance of adult toughness that was convincing enough that most people probably never looked past it.
Poor kid, he thought simply, and meant it.
He set the card aside and went to sleep.
The next two days were quiet.
Luca kept his routine: collections in the morning, a loop through the neighborhood to check on the businesses the Family had interests in, an hour in the early afternoon at a Korean grocery in Koreatown where the owner — a compact, watchful man named Mr. Park — made excellent tea and even better conversation. They'd been building a rapport over the past few months, and Luca was patient about it.
Evenings at the bar with his crew, playing cards, talking noise, maintaining the social fabric of the organization. A couple of off-schedule jobs — a debt that needed physical reinforcement, a territorial dispute between two small outfits on the same block that needed a mediator before it turned into a funeral. Standard maintenance work.
The Stansfield situation remained stalled.
Henry and Jimmy had been working their contacts for two days and come up empty. Nobody knew where Stansfield's off-books stash was. The man was careful — he'd built his operation on compartmentalization, and the people who knew individual pieces didn't know how they connected. Maurizio's people had even less; the Family's intel on federal operations was always limited by the obvious fact that the Feds didn't socialize with them.
The product had vanished, as far as anyone could tell.
Luca wasn't worried. He knew where at least one piece of it was.
He just needed more time with the listening device before he'd have enough to move on.
He and Mathilda had fallen into a loose pattern in the hallway — she was up early, he was up earlier, and they'd occasionally cross paths near the elevator. She asked questions. A lot of questions, delivered with the casual relentlessness of someone who'd decided he was interesting and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Where'd you learn to do that with the knife?
You said Arthur Avenue — which block?
Do you actually work, or are you like the other guys in the building?
He answered what he could, deflected what he couldn't, and let her steer most of it. She was mapping him — building a picture, testing consistency, doing the quiet due diligence of a kid who'd learned that people revealed themselves through small things if you paid attention. He respected it.
The third evening, Luca was in his apartment reading when he heard the commotion start across the hall.
Not the stepfather this time. Higher-pitched. Faster.
Then: running feet, and a loud knock at his door.
"Luca! Luca, open up, someone's trying to kill me—"
He opened the door.
Mathilda was already behind him before he fully registered her, one hand gripping the back of his jacket, her head poking around his arm to make a face at the girl in the hallway.
The girl in the hallway had stopped dead.
She was maybe sixteen, and the first thing Luca clocked about her was that she looked like someone had taken Mathilda's features and rebuilt them with better nutrition and more time in front of a mirror. Same bone structure, softer expression, currently cycling rapidly through furious, startled, and something else as she processed what she was looking at.
That last one landed and stayed. Her posture shifted subtly. The anger evaporated.
Luca glanced at the panel.
Nothing. No card, no notification, no rank indicator. Just a girl in the hallway.
Passerby, he concluded. He'd known from the film that Mathilda's older stepsister existed and had approximately three scenes before Stansfield's men used her as a footnote. No card made sense.
"Oh," the girl said, her voice recalibrating to something entirely different from whatever she'd been about to say thirty seconds ago. A slow smile. "Hi."
"Hi," Luca said politely.
Mathilda's grip on his jacket tightened approximately ten percent.
"I'm Isa," the girl said, tucking her hair back in a gesture that managed to be both casual and deliberate. "Mathilda's sister. You must be the new neighbor — she's mentioned you." She shot a brief look past him at Mathilda, all sweetness. "I've been meaning to come say hello."
Luca glanced back at Mathilda. She was physically unharmed. A little flushed, the way kids got when they'd been running, but no damage. He turned back to Isa.
"She doesn't seem to want to see you right now," he said, keeping his tone pleasant. "Give her a few minutes to cool down and I'll send her back over."
"Oh, that's really thoughtful of you — you don't have to do that—"
"It's no trouble."
Isa looked like she was running a quick calculation. Her sister was in that apartment. If she pushed to come in, she'd have to deal with Mathilda actively undermining every sentence she said. If she left, she lost the opening but preserved the impression.
"Okay," she said finally, with the tone of someone making a gracious concession. "Just — tell her I wasn't really mad. It was just a joke." A pause. "And maybe tell her to stop stealing my cigarettes."
Luca kept his expression neutral.
She smokes too, he filed. That's where the loose cigarettes come from.
"I'll pass it along," he said.
Isa smiled at him for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, then turned and walked back across the hall with a practiced ease that was very conscious of being watched.
Luca closed the door.
Mathilda was already in his kitchen, setting a paper bag on the counter with the proprietary confidence of someone who'd decided this was a reasonable place to be.
"She's going to knock on your door," Mathilda announced, without looking up. "Probably tonight. She does that with anyone she thinks is worth it."
"I'll manage," Luca said.
"She's going to pretend to need sugar or something. That's her move."
"Noted."
Mathilda looked up at him then, and for just a second the performed indifference slipped and she was just a kid who'd been running from her sister in the hallway and had instinctively run to the one door in the building where she felt like someone might actually open it.
She covered it fast. Pushed the paper bag toward him.
"I baked," she said. "Chocolate chip cookies. Don't make it weird."
Luca looked in the bag. Twelve cookies, neat and even, clearly made by someone who'd done it before and cared about the result.
He picked one up and ate it.
"These are good," he said.
"I know." She hopped up onto the counter to sit, swinging her feet. "So. You said you had a sister."
"I did."
"Older or younger?"
"Younger. By three years."
"What was she like?"
Luca thought about it for a moment — genuinely thought about it, which she seemed to notice. "Loud," he said. "Confident about everything even when she was completely wrong. Terrible at admitting mistakes." He paused. "I miss her."
Mathilda absorbed that. Something in her expression shifted — not quite softening, but adjusting. Recalibrating slightly.
"Where is she now?" she asked.
"Gone," Luca said simply.
Mathilda didn't push it. She'd learned, somewhere along the way, to recognize the shape of a sentence that wasn't going anywhere.
They sat in a comfortable quiet for a moment. Luca ate a second cookie. Mathilda stole one.
Downstairs in the building, a car alarm was going off. Through the wall, someone's television was running a laugh track. Normal city noise, the kind that was so constant it became a kind of silence.
This is how it gets built, Luca thought. Not through anything dramatic. Just this.
He'd needed an excuse to get into that apartment and check the placement of the listening device without arousing suspicion. Isa had essentially handed it to him by being Isa. He'd work that angle tomorrow — offer to return Mathilda in person, spend three minutes inside on a pretext, done.
But that was tomorrow's problem.
Right now there was a twelve-year-old on his kitchen counter eating a cookie she'd baked herself and asking careful questions about a man she was still deciding whether to trust, and the bond was at Interested and climbing.
[You de-escalated a dispute between siblings and prompted a genuine shift in how Isa regards Mathilda. You defended the peace of your neighbor's family.]
[+3 Skill Points]
Luca stared at the notification.
He looked around the kitchen.
He had opened a door, said approximately forty words, accepted a cookie, and answered one question about his sister.
That counted?
He thought about it for a second. The system rewarded peace defended, regardless of method. He hadn't needed a gun. Hadn't needed a threat. He'd just stood in a doorway and been a reasonable adult, and the situation had resolved.
He looked at Mathilda, who was now inspecting his bookshelf with focused curiosity.
Am I defending peace with my face now?
He decided not to examine it too closely. Three Skill Points were three Skill Points.
"Don't reorganize the shelves," he said.
"They're in the wrong order," Mathilda said, without turning around.
"They're in my order."
She pulled out a book, looked at the cover, and put it back. "Your order is wrong."
Luca ate a third cookie and said nothing.
[Reader Event Active]
500 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter
10 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter
Thanks for reading!
20+advance chapters on P1treon Soulforger