Hollow System Ascension

Cael opened his eyes. The ceiling of his apartment was the same water-stained beige it had been yesterday and the day before. A c***k ran from the light fixture to the far corner like a river on a bad map. He'd started thinking of it as a landmark. ‘Home.’ He lay still for a moment, the feeling sitting in his chest the way it always did in the first few seconds of morning, shapeless, dull, the colour of old bruises. He didn't know what caused it. He'd stopped trying to figure that out around year three. Now he just let it be there until it faded, which it always did, eventually, into something more workable. He got up. The bathroom mirror was honest with him, as usual, not like they could be anything else. Twenty-four years old and already he had the eyes of someone who'd been doing the maths on their life and kept arriving at the same answer. Dark circles under his eyes gave him a hint of danger, but mostly tiredness. His jawline was decorated with a patchy beard. He ran cold water until it was colder, then splashed his face and stood there dripping. His status window hovered in the corner of his vision the moment he thought of it, a habit, like checking your phone. The pale blue interface materialised, quiet and indifferent: > ''CAEL VOSS'' > ''RANK: F'' > ''CLASS: —'' > ''LVL: 1'' > STR 4 | AGI 5 | END 6 | INT 7 | PER 8 > ''SKILLS: ,'' > ''TITLE: Porter (Provisional)'' He dismissed it. ‘Provisional.’ Six years, and it was still provisional. He supposed that was technically accurate. Everything about him felt provisional. He got dressed, ate something that could have passed for bread once and headed out. There was work to do. The transit car was packed with the morning rush with office workers, students, and the usual current of people going somewhere with purpose. Cael stood near the door and watched the city move past the scratched window. Veldmoor had rebuilt itself twice in twenty years. Once, after the IMF crisis, the old wound the older generation still talked about at dinner tables. And once after the First Fracture, which was the wound everyone talked about everywhere, all the time, because it never really closed. The Fracture sites were marked on every city map in red. Most were cordoned and regulated. The ones inside city limits had permanent Guild presence, barricades, checkpoints, and the particular bureaucratic ugliness of danger that had been made routine. You didn't really see them after a while. They tended to blend in with the regular folk. Cael saw them every time. The staging area for Fracture KS-7 was a converted loading dock near the old industrial quarter, the kind of place that smelled like rust and river water even in winter. Cael arrived eight minutes early, which he knew because the team lead always arrived at seven minutes early,y and he liked not being the last one there. Three other porters were already unloading crates from the equipment van, Jiso, who was twenty-two and talked too much and was the best person Cael knew; Minho, who was forty-one and said almost nothing and had been doing this longer than anyone and had the knees to prove it; and Darae, who had awakened last year at D-rank, taken one look at her class 'Weaver', some kind of support thread-manipulation thing, and decided guild combat pay wasn't worth dying for when porter pay was almost as good and considerably less lethal. Cael respected that logic enormously. "You look like you slept in a dumpster," Jiso said by way of greeting. "Good morning," Cael said. "No, really, are you okay? You've got that face." "I have one face." "You have several. This is the grey one." Jiso handed him a manifest clipboard. "C-rank group, nine Awakened plus their handler, plus us. Fracture's been sitting at yellow-stable for two weeks,s so the guild clearance came through. Should be straightforward." 'Should be' was porter language for 'probably won't be, but we're going anyway.' "What's the handler rank?" Cael asked. Jiso glanced over his shoulder. "See for yourself." The Awakened arrived the way they usually did. You felt them before you saw them. A shift in the air, a subtle pressure, the particular awareness your body developed around people whose souls were actively trying to rewrite the laws of physics. Nine C-ranks and one presence that hit differently, and Cael tracked that second signature without even thinking about what he was doing. She came around the side of the equipment van last, talking into a comm, and even at a distance, she registered as 'more', not louder, not flashier, just 'denser', like she occupied space more thoroughly than other people. B-rank insignia on her Guild badge. The name tag read ''YUNA SEIL'', and the small icon beside her rank was a compass rose, which meant her class was probably Navigation-type or Pathfinder-adjacent. High spatial awareness. Good at shifting terrain. She finished her call, looked at her manifest, and started running through it efficiently without looking up. The nine C-ranks spread out into their pre-run checks, and that was when Cael became visible in the wrong way. He noticed the two of them noticing him the way he always did, a little later than he should have, because he'd gotten good at not looking like he was paying attention, and they'd gotten to that age where they didn't bother hiding it. Both male. Both young, early twenties, the kind of young that had never really been tested. Their gear was good. Their posture was bad, the particularly bad posture of people who'd never needed to be careful around anyone. One of them, thick neck, a red-thread skill line running up his forearm that suggested something in the Force or Pressure category, looked at Cael's badge and then looked at Cael with the specific expression people got when they found something they'd decided was beneath them. "F-rank," he said. Not to Cael. To his companion, like a zookeeper noting a species. "And no class," the other one said. He'd clocked the dash on the status window, Cael hadn't realised he'd left it visible. He closed it. Too late. "Six years in and no class. How does that happen?" "Genetics, maybe," the first one said. "Some people just don't have it." Cael kept moving, adjusting the shoulder strap on the equipment pack, doing the thing he'd learned to do, which was give them nothing, no eye contact, no posture change, no response that could be grabbed and used. You became boring. Boring was safe. It didn't always work. "Hey." The thick-necked one stepped slightly into his path. Not blocking it. Just 'adjacent' to it, in the way of someone who wanted you to know they could block it if they felt like it. "I'm talking to you." "I know," Cael said. "Then—" "Ito." The name landed flat and sharp, the way commanders’ voices did even when they weren't trying. Yuna Seil didn't look up from her manifest. She turned a page. "If you've finished your gear check," she said, "the pre-entry briefing starts in four minutes. I'd suggest not being late." A pause. The kind of pause that had a shape to it, someone deciding whether they were willing to pay the cost of pushing back. Ito decided he wasn't. The two of them drifted away without another word, in the practised way of people who'd had enough practice making exits look like choices. Cael exhaled slowly through his nose. Yuna finally looked up, not at him, exactly. More in his direction, the brief functional check of a team lead accounting for all moving parts. "Porter. You're on rearguard carry today. Stay fifteen metres behind the point team, maintain sight lines, don't engage anything above your clearance level." A pause, just barely long enough to be deliberate. "And close your status window in proximity to combat Awakened. It invites…problems." "Yes," Cael said. "Thank you." She was already looking back at her manifest. He stood there for one second more than he meant to, because there was a feeling moving through him that he didn't entirely have a word for, something warm and something that ached at the same time, a gratitude that reminded him of how much he'd needed it. 'You're twenty-four years old, and you can't even get a class.' He picked up his pack. He had a job to do.