Chapter 72: First Mission

The bottom was full of mud and stagnant water, and Ethan sat in it, his knee still bleeding a little, his mind working much faster than his body.

He thought about every isekai novel he’d ever read unintentionally, hundreds of Chapters accumulated in his brain over years, and now all of it had to transform into something actually useful.

Every novel had the same fundamental rule, even if written in different ways: the weak protagonist doesn’t get strong through fighting alone. He gets strong through cunning, through relationships, through early understanding of rules nobody else had noticed yet.

He looked at the blue screen hanging in front of him.

```

[QUEST LOG: EMPTY]

```

"Empty," he whispered to himself. "So nobody’s given me a mission. So nobody’s seen me as... what? A player at all?"

He thought more, tried to remember any system logic he’d seen in any novel. If this was like a game, and quests appeared when someone "needed you," then the solution wasn’t to go looking for a monster to kill while he could barely stand on his feet. The solution was to look for someone who needed help, something simple, something that wouldn’t force him to fight again before he understood the rules of the game properly.

He stood up, his leg still hurting badly, and walked through the dark tunnel, his hand on the cold wall to balance himself. The water under his feet was so cold he felt it through his shoe.

He walked for long minutes, the darkness around him constant, except for a crack of faint light coming from distant openings above.

He finally heard a sound, faint crying, a small child.

He headed toward it, cautious this time, having learned his lesson from the street earlier. He walked slowly, trying to hear if there was anything else besides the crying.

He found a little girl, maybe seven years old, sitting in a relatively dry corner of the tunnel, her knees pulled to her chest, her hair wet from the dampness of the place.

"Are you okay?" Ethan asked, his voice calmer than he expected from himself, calmer than anything he’d said since he arrived.

The girl looked up, scared, her body shrinking further into the corner.

"Don’t be afraid," he said, kneeling at a distance far enough that he wasn’t a threat. "I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Ethan."

She stayed silent, but she didn’t run.

"Lost?"

She nodded her head, and after a second said in a small voice: "I was playing with my friends, and then the sky changed, and everyone ran, and I got scared and ran the wrong way."

Ethan thought quickly. That sentence, if it were in a novel, would be the beginning of a long relationship with an important character. But even if it wasn’t, even if she was just an ordinary child, he had to help her regardless.

The thought surprised him a little, a simple feeling that he wasn’t just calculating.

"Okay. I’m a little lost too," he said. "We go out together?"

After hesitation, the girl extended her small hand. Ethan took it, felt how small and cold it was, and also felt a strange responsibility toward her that he wasn’t used to.

The blue screen flickered.

```

[QUEST GENERATED: ESCORT]

[OBJECTIVE: RETURN THE CHILD SAFELY]

[REWARD: WORLD SYNC +3%]

```

Ethan smiled a wide smile, the first real smile since the incident, something completely different from his fake smile when he was trying to look like a hero in front of the laundry lady.

"I knew it," he said to himself, almost whispering. "I knew the rules would work."

He walked with the girl through the tunnel, looking for any way out, trying to remember the path he came from, counting the openings above him one by one.

"Are you a hero?" the girl suddenly asked him.

Ethan was surprised by the question, thought for a moment before answering.

"I don’t know yet," he said with a honesty strange to him. "But I’m trying."

"My friend said there are no real heroes."

"Maybe I haven’t met the right one yet."

The girl laughed a small laugh, her first laugh, and Ethan felt something warm in his chest unrelated to any system or mission.

At a small intersection, they heard the sound of other footsteps, slow, metallic, approaching from another direction of the tunnel.

Ethan froze. The girl gripped his hand tighter, and grabbed his jacket fabric with her other hand.

"We need to hide," she whispered.

Ethan pulled her to the side, behind a narrower branch pipe, and held his breath, feeling his heart pounding in his ears with the same intensity he’d felt in the street.

The metallic sound passed without noticing them, continued far away, its echo fading little by little until it disappeared completely.

Ethan let out a long exhale, and smiled at the girl. "See? We’re a good team."

"You’re scared too," she said, not a question.

"A little," he admitted, for the first time since he arrived. "But that’s not a flaw."

They continued walking, and finally found a metal ladder leading to an opening above, faint gray light coming down from it like the first light Ethan had seen since the incident.

The girl climbed up first, Ethan helping her from below, then he climbed up, feeling the cold city air on his face, and the smell of distant rain.

They were in a side street, one building lit a few meters away, its windows small but warm-colored.

"Where’s your home?" he asked.

The girl pointed to the lit building, almost ran before stopping herself and coming back to hold Ethan’s hand.

He walked with her to the door, knocked, and a woman opened quickly, her face white with worry before she saw who was with him, then it exploded with pure joy when she saw the girl.

"Oh my God! Where were you?! I was going crazy!"

The two hugged tightly, and the woman finally looked up at Ethan, her eyes still teary.

"Who are you?"

"Nobody important," Ethan said, trying to imitate the "mysterious hero" tone he’d read in many books, but his voice came out more genuine than he intended. "Just was in the right place at the right time."

The woman closed the door after a quick thank you and an attempt to give him money which he refused, and Ethan stood alone in the street, the blue screen flickering in front of him.

```

[QUEST COMPLETE]

[WORLD SYNC: 8%]

[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: OBSERVATION]

```

Ethan opened the new list, his heart beating with genuine excitement this time, excitement different from what he’d felt while watching videos before the incident.

```

[OBSERVATION: REVEALS BASIC INFORMATION ABOUT NEARBY ENTITIES]

```

He looked around, tried the skill on the nearest thing, a broken lamppost next to him.

```

[BROKEN LAMPPOST — NO THREAT — AGE: UNKNOWN]

```

Ethan laughed out loud, a laugh completely different from his broken laugh in the first room.

"Okay," he said to himself. "Okay, I figured out how this game is played."

He walked in the street, his skills still weak, his body still tired and his knee still hurting, but something in his walk had changed, closer to real confidence instead of the borrowed confidence he’d entered this world with the first time, the confidence that was built on words he’d read not on something he’d lived.

He tried the skill on another lamppost, then on a stone, then on a closed door, enjoying the simplicity he’d been missing since the incident.

Far away from him, from the window of a dark building, someone had been watching him since he climbed out of the manhole, standing motionless, with the patience of someone used to waiting.