Eloy walked out of the Director's chamber with a Rank A death sentence rolled up in his hand and the distinct impression that Caldwell had enjoyed writing their names on it.
Panic was an inefficient allocation of resources. He bypassed it entirely, dropping into emergency analytical mode. More organized. Colder. Better footnotes.
Problem one: Caldwell had assigned him and Isolde Reichenbach to a Rank A extraction mission. Together. Neither of them was remotely equipped for it, which was almost certainly the point.
Problem two: He had to find Isolde before the deployment bell rang and explain the trap before she walked into it.
Problem three: He had no idea where she was.
The Grand Library was the logical first move. Long reading table at the back, partially shadowed by the upper shelves.
He pushed through the heavy oak doors.
Empty. Not even an abandoned book. The table looked like it had been wiped.
"She must still be at orientation," he muttered.
The chat's collective opinion arrived before he finished the sentence.
[IsoldeSimp47]: she hates crowds she is NOT at orientation
[LoreKeeper]: try the north garden. she hides there in ch2
[Vortex_Runner]: east tower roof
[GigaChad_99]: check under your bed bro
He closed the library door and kept moving. Listening to the chat had a statistically terrible track record for his physical safety, and he needed a moment to think without the feed scrolling.
If Isolde wasn't findable right now, he could focus on things that mattered the most. Basic achievements. Pre-mission inventory. Prep that would matter when the deployment clock started.
That was rational. That was speedrunner thinking.
He found a dead-end maintenance corridor in the West Wing. Dust motes drifting through thin shafts of pale light. Stone floor. No patrol schedule, no reason for anyone to linger. The kind of hallway that existed in every large institution because large institutions always generated corridors that led nowhere important, and those corridors always ended up belonging to no one.
He put his back against the wall and pulled up the full HUD.
The interface unfolded across his field of vision in translucent blue layers. Grid-precise. Quietly absurd against the backdrop of medieval stone.
Center screen: his stats.
Class: Peasant → The Speedrunner.
Magic Affinity: Locked.
Level: Locked.
Rank: E.
He already knew the numbers. Knowing them and seeing them hard-coded into the air in front of him were two different experiences. The second one had weight. He was the weakest person on this continent by every measurable metric, and in less than twenty-four hours, he had to survive something designed not to be survived.
He swiped left. The chat window expanded into full backend view; not just the live feed now, but metrics. Viewer graph over time. Peak count. Session duration.
And the number in the top right corner.
7,004.
He stopped reading.
The digits held steady. White. Unchanging. Just sitting there like a plain fact about the world.
[PraiseTheSun]: eloy?
[LMAO_cat]: eloy you spaced out
[goatofsushima]: did the VR headset die
[IsoldeSimp47]: he's staring at nothing again
Seven thousand.
His numbers on Earth had been solid: a real community, regulars who came back every week for routing streams and frame-data analysis. He'd built that over years. Seven thousand concurrent viewers was a different stratosphere, and he'd never gotten close.
None of them knew.
They thought this was a VR beta. High-budget immersive experience, that was the line he'd given them when the system warned him not to explain. They thought he'd log off in a few hours, raid someone, go sleep in his apartment.
His apartment. The dark room. The PC turned off on the desk.
Seven thousand people were here. Zero were there. It would be days before anyone thought to check.
He filed the thought somewhere lightless and shut the drawer. The grief could have its turn later. He had a routing problem.
He swiped the chat window aside and opened the Achievement Tab.
[ Complete the tutorial! ] ✓
[ First Quest: Here We Go! ] ✓
[ Consume an item for the first time ]
[ Defeat your first post-tutorial enemy ]
[ Reach 10 Affinity with any character ]
[ Unlock your Magic Affinity ]
He started mapping aloud, voice below carrying distance. "Item consumption. Mess hall, probably still open. Magic affinity needs the awakening stone in the central courtyard, locked behind Phase Two. Combat has to wait for the mission."
The chat matched his register. When the situation turned technical, they usually did. Routing suggestions came in, dependency chains got argued, someone made a reasonable case for stacking the combat achievement against the mission encounter to save time. Almost collaborative. Almost useful.
Then IsoldeSimp47 posted three times running.
[IsoldeSimp47]: hey
[IsoldeSimp47]: "reach 10 affinity with ANY character"
[IsoldeSimp47]: ANY
He kept reading the achievement list.
[LMAO_cat]: eloy
[LMAO_cat]: she exists
[PraiseTheSun]: the math is right there
[Vortex_Runner]: maximum efficiency. you know what it requires.
He closed the menu.
Because they were correct. That was the problem. That was always the problem with this chat.
Affinity achievement rewards scaled with the target character's narrative relevance. Isolde was the central variable of the entire run.
Grinding ten affinity points with a random dining hall NPC would yield a fraction of the system returns compared to grinding those points with the Dark Lord's daughter. Every minute spent not talking to her was objectively indefensible.
He was routing around discomfort. Speedrunners didn't do that.
He pushed off the wall.
The north garden: sculpted hedges, a fountain drained for winter, two junior students who went silent when he rounded the corner and stayed silent until he was out of earshot. The garden was large enough to get lost in and empty enough that there was nowhere to be lost.
No Isolde.
The east tower: he made it as far as the base before the chat preempted him.
[TrollKing99]: she's not at the tower either
[LoreKeeper]: I'm telling you north garden was wrong too
[sasmke05]: stop running laps
He kept moving anyway.
The east tower base was empty. He turned back without breaking stride.
The corridor outside the main dining hall: stragglers from the orientation assembly still filtering through in small clusters, uniforms pressed, voices low. They looked straight through him with the particular efficiency of people who had learned not to waste social resources on someone below their rank threshold.
[Salty_Tears]: ask a guard where the villainess is lmao
[hungrycatty]: lost and found
[TrollKing99]: try yelling her name
Asking faculty about Isolde Reichenbach: daughter of the man who'd burned six cities, the student the entire academy navigated around like a structural fault would be definetely a bad choice. A nameless commoner requesting her coordinates would generate questions about why, and those questions would generate more questions, and that chain of follow-up was a problem he didn't have time for.
He needed someone who tracked her movements as a matter of habit and wouldn't treat the question as politically actionable.
He stopped at the corridor intersection near the alchemy labs. Two options, equal foot traffic. He stood there running the calculation.
"It's you."
The voice came from directly behind him. He turned.
A girl stood three paces back in a perfectly pressed Academy uniform. Light brown hair pulled into a severe braid. A stack of leather-bound ledgers held against her chest, spine-out, edges aligned with a precision that had nothing to do with accident.
"You're the boy who knocked out that spoiled brat in the courtyard."
[PraiseTheSun]: IS THAT
[LoreKeeper]: MAYA DE ALNE
[MayaBestGirl98]: MAYA DE ALNE MAYA DE ALNE MAYA DE ALNE
[GigaChad_99]: WE FOUND HER
Maya De Alne.
The only person in this building who had ever genuinely tried to help Isolde. Tried, failed, tried again. Never once made it work. In the original timeline, she'd kept track of Isolde's location at every hour of every school day: not because anyone asked her to, but because she'd decided someone should.
Her eyes moved from his tunic to his boots and back up. Whatever category she'd filed him under three seconds ago was already being revised.
[IsoldeSimp47]: talk to her
[LMAO_cat]: talk to her
[PraiseTheSun]: talk to her
[xwariopartyx]: talk to her
[MayaBestGirl98]: you NEED to talk to her
Half a second. That was all the board needed.
Maya De Alne wasn't in the current route. He hadn't planned to recruit her yet: she wasn't in the sequence, wasn't factored into the pre-mission window.
But she was standing in front of him with a complete mental map of Isolde's movements and the rare, specific quality of being someone who would answer the question without writing it down afterward.
The system notification blinked quietly in the corner of his vision.
[ NEW AFFINITY DETECTED ]
[ Maya De Alne — 0 / 100 ]
[ NOTICE: This character possesses information regarding Isolde Reichenbach. ]
The smile was small. Controlled. The kind that formed when a gap in the routing map turned out not to be a gap.
"Yeah," Eloy said. "That was me."
Maya didn't move. Her expression did the kind of work that didn't need word: category assigned, category questioned, category left open. "You're not in any of the noble intake registers. I checked."
"I'm not a noble."
"I know." A beat. "That's the part I can't explain."
The ledgers shifted slightly against her chest. Someone thinking quickly whose hands moved when they did. "Who taught you that technique?"
"I practiced a lot," Eloy said, which was technically accurate.
The answer didn't satisfy her. It wasn't supposed to. She filed it anyway and moved on, which told him something about how she operated.
"You're looking for someone."
He hadn't said anything. He'd been standing at a corridor intersection. "What makes you say that?"
"You've been walking the same loop for twenty minutes," Maya said. "But you're not lost." She paused. "You're searching for something that isn't where it's supposed to be."
[LoreKeeper]: she's terrifying
[LMAO_cat]: big sister character has logged on
[IsoldeSimp47]: TELL HER
The routing math resolved on its own.
"I need to find Isolde Reichenbach," Eloy said. "Before the deployment bell."
The name landed differently than other names did in this building. Maya's grip on the ledgers didn't shift. Her expression didn't shift.
"Why," she said.
"We're both on a mission assignment she doesn't know about yet." He held up the scroll. "She needs to know before she walks into it."
The silence that followed was longer. Maya looked at the scroll, looked at him, and arrived at a decision with the quiet efficiency of someone who had made a lot of difficult calls in places where the wrong one cost something real.
"West arcade," she said. "Second floor. Window alcove at the far end. She goes there when the library gets too loud." A pause. "Or just too quiet for her liking."
[IsoldeSimp47]: SHE KNOWS
[PraiseTheSun]: of course she knows
[MayaBestGirl98]: she always knew
"Thank you," Eloy said.
Maya didn't acknowledge it. She was already reassigning him to whatever category had just opened up. "You're strange," she said, "for a commoner."
"I get that a lot."
He was already moving when she said it.
[ Maya De Alne — Affinity: 0 / 100 → 3 / 100 ]
[ +3: honest disclosure under social risk ]
The notification faded before he hit the staircase.
West arcade. Second floor. Window alcove at the far end.
He had a location. He had a direction. He had a Rank A mission with a partner who didn't know they were partners, a scroll that was essentially a signed assassination attempt from their own director, and no strategy for any of it.
Every encounter with Isolde so far had been forced: the chat pushing him, the system triggering, the building itself redirecting him into her orbit. Even the first contact in the library had been a poll he'd lost by a humiliating margin.
This time he was choosing to go.
He wasn't sure that made it easier.
He took the stairs two at a time anyway, and tried not to think about the fact that he had never once, in any of the three games, any of the supplementary material, any of the fanmade guides or lore documents he'd consumed over years of routing, seen a single line of dialogue for what you were supposed to say to her next.