NOVGO.NET Chapter 25: Start From Zero
Chapter 25: Start From Zero
Fin unlocked the front door with his apartment key, stepping into the quiet apartment while wearing his stained porter overalls.
The familiar smell of yesterday’s braised beef stew lingered in the hallway, mixing with the cool breeze from the open transom.
The middle school dismissed early for a citywide civil defense drill, leaving the residential streets empty of afternoon traffic.
Jolly sat cross-legged on the woven floor mat, having arranged her belongings into three neat piles across the low coffee table.
The first pile held the school crayon drawing of a green swordsman, the paper creased from weeks inside her school folder.
The second pile was her small black debt notebook, resting beside a clean sheet of ruled paper covered in timestamped columns.
She adjusted her glasses with one finger, watching him untie his work shoes without offering her usual greeting from the floor.
"School ended two hours ahead of schedule," she noted, keeping her hands resting flat against her knees in an upright posture.
"The siren sounded while I was washing the salt from my tools," he replied, hanging his jacket on the wall peg.
She tapped the lined paper with the back of her pencil, pointing toward the neat rows of numbers she compiled.
"Tuesday night, after the loading dock breach," she began, reading the forensic timeline she recorded after the loading dock gate breach.
"Third-floor classroom window, nine meters from the yard, zero fire ladders present in the yard, and zero broken bones," she stated.
"You promised to explain the jump when the rent was cleared," she reminded him, looking directly into his exhausted brown eyes.
"Start from when you jumped," she demanded, repeating the exact requirement she filed in her ledger nearly a month ago.
He chose not to take the armchair, sitting down directly on the floorboards across from her to avoid looming over her desk.
A chair would turn the moment into a parental lecture, and she wanted the ledger balanced with verified receipts rather than excuses.
"I died in the alley behind the docks," he confessed, keeping his voice level as the confession entered the quiet room.
Her pencil stopped moving across the paper, her dark eyes widening behind her spectacles as she held her breath in silence.
He willed his system interface into visibility, allowing the luminous golden panels to project across the surface of the coffee table.
Brackets of machine-formal script floated between them in the dim light, displaying his current E+ status and raw attributes without flourish.
[ Infinite Absorption System: online ]
[ Host: Fin ]
[ Rank: E+ ]
[ EXP: 33,500 / 50,500 ]
She reached out with a trembling finger, watching her small hand pass harmlessly through the golden light without disturbing the text.
"What is this interface?" she whispered, leaning closer to inspect the mathematical columns of strength, agility, endurance, and sensory ratings.
"It is an unregistered system that woke up when my heart stopped beating," he explained, resting his open palms between them.
He reached into his sub-space matrix, summoning his hatchet and twin matte-black daggers into his palms with a faint spatial shimmer.
The three weapons appeared instantly from empty air, their dark edges resting across his fingers under the pale afternoon sunbeams.
He closed his fists, sending the blades back into his sub-space inventory to prove that his hands were empty once again.
"Pocket dimension storage," she whispered, her analytical mind categorizing the phenomenon faster than an Association clerk could draft an incident report.
"It stores equipment, but the core function is far more troublesome," he admitted, looking down at his rough packing-line hands.
"I absorb traits from monster carcasses," he revealed, refusing to soften the ugly reality of his daily progression for her ears.
"After the initial quest rewards, I gain strength and endurance by draining monster remains, assimilating their muscle and speed into my own marrow."
"The Magma Troll, the shadow wolf, and the swamp basilisk all ended up fueling my numbers," he continued in a murmur.
"Who gave you this power?" she asked, her voice dropping into a tense whisper as she scanned the empty kitchen corners.
"A patron without a name," he answered, opening the secondary communication tab on his floating panel with a flick of his wrist.
"She called me a little spark, offered an unsigned deal while I was bleeding, and vanished before stating her full price."
He unmuted the dormant channel, letting the hiss of cosmic static fill the small gap between them for five seconds.
The static buzzed like distant rain on a sloped roof, proving that an open line connected his soul to someone far away.
He closed the audio channel, watching her stare at the faded drawing of the green swordsman with an unblinking gaze.
She did not burst into tears or shriek in horror, processing the monstrous revelation with the discipline of an orphan.
She picked up her red pen, drawing a firm diagonal line across the green crayon sword in the center of the drawing.
With deliberate strokes, she sketched two small jagged daggers in his stick-figure hands, making the weapon profile match his real kit.
"Swords belong to television actors," she said quietly, setting the red pen down on the paper beside her notebook.
"You fight with kitchen tools and butcher knives, which means my drawing was inaccurate from the very first day," she added.
"Are you angry?" he asked, searching her calm expression for any trace of fear toward the monster sitting across from her.
"I am annoyed that you waited nearly a month to settle an outstanding invoice," she replied, pushing her spectacles up her nose.
"You eat monsters to pay our rent, which means we will eventually need to purchase a much larger grocery freezer," she reasoned.
"I can look into secondhand refrigerated storage units this weekend," he promised, releasing the breath he held through her questions.
"And you are never permitted to die again," she commanded, pointing the tip of her red pen directly toward his nose.
"Dying is strictly prohibited by household policy, effective immediately," she declared, turning to a fresh page in her black notebook.
At the very top of the ruled page, she wrote three words in bold block letters, recording their agreement about family secrets.
[ Rule: family knows ]
She turned the notebook around, pushing the paper across the low table so that the signature line rested before his thumb.
"Initial the margin like a warehouse delivery slip," she instructed, handing him the red pen with a solemn, unyielding stare.
Fin took the pen, pressing his initials into the corner of the paper with the careful precision of a shipping clerk.
The new study laptop remained closed on the shelf nearby, because their family debts were never meant to be resolved through screens.
This audit belonged to the kitchen table, settled with plain honesty between two survivors who shared the same four peeling walls.
Outside the window, the municipal civil-defense siren began its descending pitch, winding down from its high operational wail into evening silence.
The crimson ink of the redrawn daggers remained on the construction paper, glistening beneath the golden rays of the afternoon sun.
She gathered her three piles into a single stack, tapping the edges against the table until every sheet lined up flush.
"Next time you decide to jump out of a building," she whispered, closing the notebook cover with her thumb.
"You tell me before you break the window," she added, looking up to meet his eyes with an unyielding smile.