Chapter 401 | The Quest Is Rotten

Chapter 401: 401 | The Quest Is Rotten

Jordan stared at the three-word response on his screen and tried to remember what normal looked like.

Forty-seven seconds meant Eliza had typed something longer first. Deleted it. Tried again. Settled on the absolute minimum required to confirm a time and place without admitting she’d been thinking about him since Saturday at 11:38 PM when she hung up on him after making that sound.

He should leave it there. Walk away. Let Thursday arrive on its own.

Instead he typed don’t be late and hit send before Chloe’s script could stop him.

The bubble appeared immediately. Disappeared. Appeared again.

ELIZA: i’m never late

ELIZA: you’re the one who shows up to everything looking like you just woke up

JORDAN: Just be ready for Thursday

The bubble appeared and stayed for eleven seconds, which meant she was typing something real, something with teeth, something she’d have to commit to if she sent it.

It disappeared.

Nothing came through.

Jordan locked his phone and tossed it on the couch. Dealing with Eliza without being worried or overthinking.

His phone buzzed twice.

CHLOE: what did you just do

CHLOE: i can feel you being a problem from two doors away

Jordan typed back with one thumb while scraping dried rice from the pot with the other.

JORDAN: nothing happened

JORDAN: literally sent two words about thursday

CHLOE: i know what you sent

CHLOE: kumiko screenshotted the notification preview from across the hall

CHLOE: you told her don’t be late

CHLOE: that wasn’t in the script jordan

He leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at the ceiling. The fluorescent bar above the stove hummed at a frequency that made his fillings ache. Somewhere through the shared wall, Kumiko’s lo-fi study playlist bled through in bass-heavy pulses, and Jordan could picture her cross-legged on her new pink sheets with the notebook open to whatever page she’d designated for cataloguing his crimes.

JORDAN: it was two words

CHLOE: four words

CHLOE: and the wrong four

CHLOE: my four would have been "see you at two"

CHLOE: yours were "don’t be late" which reads as

CHLOE: anticipation

Jordan set the pot in the sink and ran water into it, watching the starch cloud swirl.

She wasn’t wrong. Chloe operated with the precision of a financial audit, and she’d built a script for the Eliza situation that accounted for every variable except the one standing in the kitchen eating leftover rice out of a pot at nine-oh-seven on a Monday night. The variable being Jordan’s mouth moving before his brain could catch up, which had been a documented failure mode since approximately birth and showed no signs of patching in subsequent updates.

JORDAN: i’ll stick to the script thursday

JORDAN: promise

CHLOE: you promised that saturday too and then you sent alexis a disneyland photo

CHLOE: and called her princess

CHLOE: on a phone

CHLOE: at midnight

CHLOE: while i was in the bathtub

Jordan winced. Fair point. Devastating point, delivered with the clinical remove of someone itemizing damages for an insurance claim. Chloe Kim didn’t argue; she presented evidence and waited for the defendant to convict himself.

JORDAN: i hear you

JORDAN: thursday. library. script. white tshirt. in and out

CHLOE: and then you come home

JORDAN: and then i come home

The typing indicator blinked for six seconds.

CHLOE: good boy

Jordan locked the phone and pressed it facedown against the quartz. His thumb throbbed from the cold of the countertop, and the ache in his lower back had settled into something permanent and architectural, a load-bearing pain that existed because the structure above it refused to stop growing. He turned off the kitchen light and stood in the amber glow leaking through the factory windows from the harbor, the Newport skyline throwing long gold fingers across the concrete floor of Unit 404.

The Eliza quest sat in his pocket like a tumor.

Not the notification itself, which had gone dark hours ago and would remain silent until Thursday generated new data. The weight lived deeper than that, in the part of Jordan’s chest that the System couldn’t track and the gacha couldn’t fix and Chloe’s spreadsheets couldn’t optimize. Fifty-eight percent. Eleven drafted messages. Nineteen days remaining on a thirty-day timer. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, fifty tickets, a platinum gacha, and a permanent ten percent chemistry boost across all registered women. The numbers stacked into a tower that blocked the light from everything behind it.

Jordan pulled a glass from the cabinet, the second drawer under the microwave where Chloe had confirmed she knew the location of his knives, filled it with water from the Brita, and drank half of it standing up. The cold hit his empty stomach and sat there like a stone.

He wanted it done.

The wanting surprised him with its violence. Jordan had spent six weeks learning to sit with discomfort, to let anxiety exist in his body without reacting to it, to treat fear as data rather than a command. Maya had taught him that in the ring with her fists. Chloe had taught him that in the kitchen with her voice. Kumiko had taught him that on a bare mattress with her tears. But the Eliza quest didn’t respond to patience or discipline or the slow accumulation of honest effort. The Eliza quest required Jordan to walk into a room with the girl who broke him and perform a version of himself that had never existed, the version that felt nothing, noticed nothing, wanted nothing, until the weight of his indifference crushed her into wanting him back so badly that she would throw away everything she’d chosen over him just for the chance to be rejected.

And then he had to reject her.

And then he had to collect the money.

Jordan finished the water and rinsed the glass. The faucet squeaked as he shut it off, and the building’s plumbing groaned through the walls in response, a sympathetic shudder from infrastructure built eighty years ago to house textile workers who punched clocks and went home and never once had to worry about a magical phone app grading their love life on a percentage scale.

He climbed the stairs to the loft. The mattress wore its new fitted sheet, Chloe’s contribution, tucked with hospital corners that would survive a military inspection. Jordan lay down on his back and stared at the exposed ductwork that ran the ceiling like mechanical veins. His shoulder throbbed where Maya had planted the body hook Saturday morning, a lifetime ago, before blue milk and breadbasket forts and a four-year-old girl in a Belle dress who thought he was a prince because he wore foam ears.

The ceiling didn’t offer answers. Ceilings never did, despite the amount of time Jordan had spent staring at them over the past six weeks.

What he knew was this: the Eliza quest was rotten at the foundation.