The konbini was a FamilyMart, and the lights inside were on, and the automatic door opened when they approached, which felt almost aggressively normal.
A man in his fifties was barricading the back storage room door with a mop handle. He looked up when they came in, assessed them in the way people had apparently started assessing strangers, and went back to the mop handle. Behind the door something moved, once, and then stopped.
"Don't touch the register," the man said. "And if your systems are combat type, I need your help."
"Mine is," Tsuna said.
"What about yours," he said to Amato.
"I'm still figuring it out."
The man gave him a look that communicated a very efficient amount of skepticism and then turned back to the door. "There's a staff member in there. She turned an hour ago. I locked her in before she could get to the other two."
"Other two?"
"Back office. They're fine. Scared but fine."
Amato stood in the candy aisle and opened his system interface while Tsuna and the man talked logistics. The interface was still mostly empty. No instructions. The search function in the BONDS section seemed to be searching for something, or waiting to search for something, but there was no input field. Just a passive readout.
He walked closer to Tsuna.
The interface flickered.
There was a faint pulse around her name in his vision, not visible exactly, more like a presence he was suddenly aware of the way you're aware of a sound you couldn't hear a moment ago. TSUNA SHIRABE. POTENTIAL BOND. The text was small and sat at the edge of his vision like a watermark.
He didn't do anything with it. Not yet.
The man with the mop handle was named Kato, and he had been a middle school PE teacher before yesterday, which explained both the mop handle competence and the way he talked to them like they were students who needed to be kept focused. He had a system too, something he described as Fortify, which allowed him to temporarily reinforce objects he was in contact with. Hence the mop handle now being functionally immovable.
The other two in the back office were a teenage girl who hadn't said anything since Amato and Tsuna arrived and a young man in a FamilyMart uniform who was eating a rice ball with the focused determination of someone who had decided that eating was the only thing he had control over right now.
Amato sat on the floor in the drinks aisle and drank a sports drink and thought about his system.
The phrase kept coming back to him. You are the chain that holds all blades together. Which meant he wasn't a blade. Which meant he was never supposed to be a blade. He'd read enough about RPG mechanics to understand the rough shape of what he had, some kind of support or amplifier class, but the specifics were empty. The interface showed nothing active. Nothing usable. Just that persistent counter.
BONDS: 0.
He looked at Tsuna across the store. She was checking the front windows, methodical, not touching the glass. She moved like she had a precise understanding of how much space her body occupied and exactly what to do with it, an economy of motion he associated with people who had trained for a very long time.
He walked over to her.
"Can I try something," he said.
She looked at him sidelong. "Depends on what."
"My system. I think it works by forming connections with other people. I don't know exactly how it works yet, but there's a reading I get when I'm near you. Like a potential marker."
"You want to connect to me."
"I want to understand what that means first. I'm not going to do anything you don't agree to."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, something moved down the street, two of them this time, moving in that same directionless way. Not toward the store.
"What does it do when you connect," she said.
"I don't know."
"You want my permission for something you can't explain."
"Yes."
She looked at him with an expression he couldn't read. "Later," she said. "When we're not standing next to a window."
That was not a no. He filed it carefully.
They spent the next four hours in the konbini. Kato handled the barricade. Tsuna handled the windows. Amato inventoried the food, which was not a glamorous task but was a necessary one, and the teenage girl, whose name turned out to be Hana, helped him once she decided he wasn't going to do anything alarming. The FamilyMart employee, Sato, continued eating rice balls at a pace that Amato found both concerning and deeply understandable.
At some point his system sent another notification.
QUEST INITIATED: Ensure the survival of 5 individuals within 24 hours. REWARD: Unspecified. TIMER: 23:12:44
He stared at it for a long time.
No reward. Just a timer. Just the bare instruction to keep people alive.
He counted the people in the store. Kato, Hana, Sato. Three. Tsuna made four. Him.
Five.
The timer was already running.