I don't remember driving home.
That's not me being dramatic. I have no memory of Cave Creek Road, or the turn onto our street, or parking, or getting the front door open. The next thing I actually have is sitting on the couch in the dark with the blinds shut, still holding my keys, with no idea how long I'd been there. The AC cycling on and off.
The house does this thing in the afternoon where the light comes in the west window and lands on the TV stand. There's a photo on the TV stand.
Me at sixteen with a paper crown on. Mom laughing at something off to the side. Dad holding the cake at a bad angle so you can only read half of it.
That was my birthday. They went in the next morning.
I sat there and watched the light move across it.
And then I got mad. I couldn't tell you why it happened right at that minute, at four in the afternoon on the worst day of my life, but it did. Not at the crystal or the principal. At me, sitting in the dark holding my car keys, deciding it was over before I'd even looked at it.
I hadn't looked at it.
Not once.
"Status," I said out loud, and felt like an idiot, and then thought it instead.
The screen came up about a foot in front of my face. Pale blue, hanging in the air on nothing. When I moved my head it stayed put relative to my eyes. When I put my hand behind it I could still see my hand.
─────────────────────────────
Name: Miles North
Level: 1
Strength: 8
Agility: 6
Stamina: 7
Intelligence: 8
Trait: Exercise (F-Class)
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
─────────────────────────────
I read it four or five times.
Here's something you don't really get until you're looking at your own: an average adult sits around 5 in everything. Five is the guy at the grocery store. Five is your uncle.
I was 8, 6, 7, 8.
Because for two years I'd been getting up at five in the morning and running until I wanted to throw up, in a house with nobody in it to tell me to knock it off. I wasn't training. I was coping. But the body doesn't know the difference, apparently. It had been writing all of it down the whole time.
Which was lucky, because that body is the only one I'm ever getting.
That's rule number one and they teach it to you in middle school. Once you awaken, training stops working. Your stats freeze where they are. After that the only thing in the world that moves a stat is leveling, and the only thing that levels you is killing what comes out of the portals. Push-ups do nothing. A year in a gym does nothing. That's why every kid who's serious about diving trains like a maniac the year before they turn eighteen, and why the ones who didn't spend the rest of their lives bringing it up.
You get one body free. Then the door shuts.
I looked at the screen again.
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
I sat forward so fast I dropped my keys on the floor.
Because that isn't a weak version of something. It's not minor regeneration or slightly better hearing. That sentence doesn't sit on top of the rule.
That sentence breaks the rule.
The door shuts for everybody. It doesn't shut for me.
I said it out loud to the empty living room, to check whether it still held up outside my head. "The door doesn't shut for me."
It held up.
Now, I want to be honest about what I actually knew sitting on that couch, because later on people would tell this part like I'd had the whole thing figured out, and I didn't have anything figured out. I didn't know how much a workout was worth. Didn't know if it was a tenth of a point or a hundredth or if it only ever worked one time. Didn't know if there was a ceiling. For all I knew I'd do a thousand push-ups and get a notification that said nice try.
What I knew was that there was a lever, nobody had told me it was there, and nobody was going to come take it away from me.
That was enough to get off the couch.
* * *
I dug a legal pad and a pen out of my backpack, which was still by the door from Friday with the graduation program crumpled in the front pocket. Sat at the kitchen table. Wrote the date at the top like a crazy person.
Then I wrote WHAT I ACTUALLY KNOW and put nothing under it, because the honest answer was nothing.
So I flipped the page and wrote PROBLEMS, and that one filled up right away, which is how you know you're being honest.
One. I don't know the rate.
Everything comes off this and I've got zero data. How much exercise for how many points. Does intensity matter or is it just volume. Is there a daily limit. Does it work on all four stats or only the physical ones. There's no point planning anything until I've run it, and I can run it tonight, for free, in the backyard.
That one goes first because it's free and because it answers all the rest.
Two. I can't dive yet and nobody's going to carry me.
I'm level 1 with a 6 in Agility. Walking into an F-rank portal alone right now is a way to die on a Tuesday afternoon.
And the normal fix isn't available to me. Everybody's first few levels come from getting carried by a party who wants the clear anyway. But the reason anybody carries you is that you'll be worth something later, and nobody on this planet looks at an F-Class and sees later.
There's a word for what they'd think I was. An oil bottle. Dead weight you haul along so somebody's cousin can hit level three.
Nobody's hauling an F-Class oil bottle anywhere.
So I don't get carried. I get strong enough on my own first, and then I go in.
Three. Money.
I made myself write the number down.
$3,000/month out. About $9,000 in the account.
Three months. That's the whole thing, and that's if nothing breaks. Not the AC in a Phoenix July, not the car, not a tooth.
Which means whatever comes next has to have a paycheck on it, and I don't have a degree or a class letter that opens a door or two years to go get either one.
But I do have a trait that pays me for exercising. So I need a job where I'm inside a gym all day.
I wrote fitness coach and looked at it for a while. Front desk, trainer, mopping, whatever they'll actually give me. Free equipment, free hours, somebody else's air conditioning. Getting paid to stand in the building where my trait works.
It's not clever. It's the only plan where all three problems point the same way.
Four. What kind of diver.
That one I could answer, and it took about nine seconds, because I've known since I was sixteen.
I'm not fast. My Agility is a 6, my worst number, and it's my worst number after two years of trying to fix it. That's not a hole in my training. That's what I'm built like. I'm never going to be the guy who isn't there anymore when the claw comes down.
So I'll be the guy who's still standing when it does.
Front line. Shield.
I wrote SHIELD and underlined it twice. It looked insane sitting there on a legal pad in my mom's kitchen, an F-Class writing down that he's going to tank.
But it works out. Everything I'm ever going to get, I get by surviving long enough to do the work again tomorrow. A glass cannon with a 6 in Agility dies in his first real fight and never gets a second one. If the only thing I've actually got is days where I'm not dead, then the right build is whatever gets me the most of those.
Survive, train, repeat. That's the strategy. It's stupid and slow and it's mine.
I looked at the four of them for a while. Then I tore the page off and stuck it on the fridge with the magnet shaped like a chile pepper that my mom bought in Santa Fe.
Outside the light had gone long and orange. The thermometer on the patio said 106.
Everything comes off number one, I thought. And number one is free.
I went to find my running shoes.