Dr. Vasquez had the hands of a woman who'd sewn people back together in worse places than a Block 11 clinic, and the bedside manner to match.
"The rib's healing crooked," she said, pressing two fingers into Shin's left side with the precision of someone reading braille. "You've been moving on it. Carrying weight."
"I have a job."
"Your job is going to give you a permanent knot of scar tissue between your fifth and sixth ribs if you don't rest it for at least four more days." She pulled his shirt back down. Her clinic was a converted ground-floor apartment — two rooms, a folding screen for privacy, shelves lined with salvaged medical supplies and unlicensed pharmaceuticals from the Tier 5 underground. The examination table was a kitchen table with a yoga mat on top. "Four days. Minimal lifting. No impacts."
"Can I walk?"
"You can walk. You can eat. You can sleep. That's the complete list." She wrote something on a pad — actual paper, because digital records in Tier 5 ended up in databases that the Bureau could subpoena. "You cannot carry eighty-pound bags through dungeon corridors."
"What about forty-pound bags through surface corridors?"
Vasquez looked at him. She had brown eyes and gray-threaded hair and the particular expression of a medical professional who'd learned that patients in Tier 5 would do what they needed to survive regardless of medical advice, and that the best she could do was minimize the damage.
"What are you carrying, and how far?"
"Market deliveries. Block 4 to Block 9. Six trips a day."
"Twenty-pound limit per trip. Use your right side. Come back in four days, and if that rib has shifted, I'm strapping you to this table."
Shin paid her fifteen credits. She handed him a small tube of burn cream — the real kind, with mana-infused accelerant that cost fifty credits retail.
"For the cooking accidents," she said.
He took it without argument. Generosity in Tier 5 was rare and specific. You accepted it when it came, and you remembered who offered.
---
Market delivery paid eight credits a day, which was worse than portering and better than nothing.
The work was simple: pick up crates from the Block 4 wholesale depot, carry them to vendors on Blocks 5 through 9, collect signatures, return for the next load. The crates contained rice, canned goods, medical supplies, cleaning products — the basic infrastructure of Tier 5 survival, shipped in from Tier 3 warehouses at a markup that would have been criminal if anyone with authority cared enough to investigate.
Shin carried twenty-pound crates with his right arm and kept his left side still and thought about weapons.
The bent dagger was done. He'd tested it in the barracks — held it up to the light and seen the warp in the blade, the hairline fracture running from the tip to mid-spine. The Sharpness I enchantment had dimmed to a flicker, barely visible. One more hard strike and the blade would snap at the fracture line, leaving him with a handle and four inches of jagged steel.
He needed a replacement. Something that could penetrate crystal. Something with an enchantment rated for harder materials. Something in his budget, which — after Dr. Vasquez, bus fare, ration bars, and three days of market delivery wages — stood at forty-one credits.
Forty-one credits bought a lot of nothing in the weapons market.
---
The Tier 5 secondhand market occupied a stretch of Block 6 between a decommissioned water tower and a parking structure that had been converted into apartments. Stalls lined both sides of the street, selling everything from salvaged electronics to pre-Awakening clothing to dungeon drops that had been rejected by the legitimate appraisers and filtered down through three levels of resale until they landed here, priced for the desperate and the ignorant.
The weapons stall was at the far end, run by a man named Togashi.
Shin had bought the bent dagger from Togashi six months ago, before any of this had started, when his only use for a weapon was the vague Tier 5 necessity of having something sharp within reach. Togashi was a retired Level 22 awakener — retired meaning injured, meaning a dungeon break seven years ago had taken his left leg below the knee and most of his interest in re-entering the field. He'd pivoted to salvage, buying damaged dungeon equipment from guild discard bins and refurbishing it for resale at prices that were extortionate by Tier 5 standards and laughable by any other.
He sat behind his stall on a reinforced stool, prosthetic leg extended, surrounded by racks of blades, shields, armor pieces, and accessories in various states of disrepair. A cigarette burned between his lips. He watched Shin approach with the mild interest of a man who recognized a returning customer and was already calculating the markup.
"Zero." Togashi had heard about the awakening. Everyone in the porter community had. "Back for an upgrade, or you finally break that pig-sticker I sold you?"
"Both." Shin scanned the racks. Short swords, long knives, a few medium blades, an assortment of daggers. Most were common-grade — functional but unenchanted, the kind of gear that Level 1-5 hunters used for their first few dungeon runs and discarded when they could afford better. "Need something that'll hold up against crystal-class materials."
"Crystal-class." Togashi's eyebrow went up. "What's a Level 0 porter doing fighting crystal-class materials?"
"Reading about them. I like to be informed."
"Informed costs more than curious." But Togashi stood — a practiced motion that accommodated the prosthetic — and moved to a section of the rack that Shin hadn't browsed before. The back row. Where the stock was older, more damaged, and more interesting.
"I've got three pieces that'll bite crystal. Two of them are out of your range." He pulled a blade from the rack and laid it on the counter.
It was a short sword. Maybe sixteen inches of blade, broader than a dagger, with a slight taper and a weighted pommel for balance. The grip was wrapped in dark leather that had cracked with age. The guard was plain steel, scratched but solid.
The blade itself was the issue. A fracture line ran diagonally across the flat, about four inches from the tip — not a crack through the edge, but a stress fracture in the metal's body that weakened the structural integrity. And the enchantment — visible as a faint blue luminescence along the edge — flickered. Not the steady glow of a working enchantment or the dead absence of a spent one. A stutter. Like a light with a bad connection.
"Uncommon-grade short sword," Togashi said. "Enchantment is [Piercing II] — that's a tier above your old dagger's Sharpness. Designed for penetrating hardened materials: armor, carapace, crystal. Problem is the fracture. Blade took a lateral impact — some idiot used it as a pry bar in a dungeon, snapped the internal mana channel. The enchantment works in bursts. Couple seconds on, couple seconds off. Can't predict the cycle."
"How much?"
"For anyone else? Eighty credits. Enchantments rated for crystal penetration don't come cheap, even broken." Togashi took a drag. "For you, since you're a repeat customer and I feel sorry for your tragic awakening story, sixty."
"I have forty-one."
"Then you're nineteen credits short of pity pricing."
Shin picked up the short sword. The weight was decent — heavier than the dagger, but the extra length meant more reach, more leverage, more margin for error when fighting crawlers. The fracture line was a problem, but the blade's edge was intact. The intermittent enchantment was a bigger problem — Piercing II was exactly what he needed for crystal combat, but if it cut out mid-strike, his blade would bounce off a crawler's shell instead of penetrating it.
Unpredictable. Dangerous. Perfect for a man whose entire strategy was built on doing things that shouldn't work.
"Forty-one credits and the dagger," Shin said.
"Your dagger is bent, burned, and enchant-dead. It's worth its weight in scrap metal, which is about two credits."
"Forty-one credits, the dagger, and I don't tell the other porters that your 'guild discard' inventory comes from the Tier 4 theft recovery auctions."
Togashi's cigarette paused halfway to his mouth. A micro-expression — there and gone — that confirmed Shin's guess. He'd noticed the auction lot stickers on three of Togashi's higher-end pieces, half-scraped but legible if you knew what to look for. The Tier 4 theft recovery auctions sold confiscated goods at wholesale — technically legal to buy from, but the transportation across tier boundaries without a commercial permit was a Bureau violation. Minor, but enough to get Togashi's stall shut down.
"Forty-five," Togashi said. "Including the scrap dagger."
"I have forty-one."
"Then you owe me four. I'll add it to your account." He produced a battered ledger — paper, like Vasquez's records, because digital left trails. "Four credits, payable within two weeks. Interest is one credit per week after that. Miss three weeks and I sell the debt to collections."
Tier 5 credit. The informal lending system that kept the outer district running when official banking wouldn't touch unawakened customers. Interest rates that would be illegal in any tier with consumer protection laws. Consequences that were enforced not by courts but by the debt collectors who worked the blocks — unawakened men with blunt objects and a professional understanding of which bones were least essential.
"Deal," Shin said.
Togashi wrote the debt in his ledger. Shin handed over forty-one credits and the bent dagger and walked away with a cracked short sword that might or might not work when he needed it.
Progress.
---
The Ashburn Caverns entrance was busier than Shin had ever seen it.
He walked past it on his delivery route — Block 4 to Block 9 took him within a quarter mile of the cavern hillside, if he took the long way around. For three days, he took the long way around.
The Bureau had set up a staging area outside the main entrance. Temporary structures — inflatable shelters, equipment racks, a communications tent with a satellite uplink. Vehicles came and went: Bureau transports carrying assessment teams, guild SUVs delivering specialists, supply trucks hauling equipment and provisions for the 24-hour rotation cycle.
Shin watched from across the road, carrying his delivery crates, and catalogued.
The main entrance was locked down. Bureau security, mana scanners at the gate, ID verification for every person entering. Assessment team members wore tagged badges and submitted to spectrum analysis before each descent. No one entered without being scanned, logged, and tracked.
The main entrance was not an option.
But on the second day of observation, Shin noticed the trucks.
Supply trucks arrived at the staging area three times daily — morning, afternoon, and evening. They carried equipment, provisions, replacement gear, medical supplies. The trucks entered through the main gate, unloaded at the staging area, and left.
But the heavy equipment — the industrial-grade mana sensors, the portable ward generators, the drilling rigs for geological sampling — was too large for the main entrance. It went through a different route.
On the far side of the hillside, about two hundred meters from the main entrance, a service road led to a wider opening — a secondary entrance that Shin recognized from old porter briefings as the Ashburn Caverns freight access. It had been sealed years ago when the Bureau downgraded Ashburn from active excavation to routine D-rank classification. Now, with the C-rank assessment underway, they'd reopened it.
The freight entrance had security. A single guard station, a vehicle barrier, and a log-in system. But the security was oriented toward vehicles and equipment, not personnel. The guard checked truck manifests and driver IDs. The dozen workers who moved between the staging area and the freight entrance — carrying cables, hauling containers, setting up the heavy equipment inside the dungeon — wore high-vis vests and hard hats and moved with the anonymous efficiency of manual labor.
Porters. Some of them were porters. Shin recognized two from the barracks — Dalton and a woman named Reese, both wearing the high-vis vests of Bureau-contracted support staff. They carried equipment containers in and out of the freight entrance without being scanned, because the mana-spectrum analyzers were at the main gate and nobody had bothered to install them at the freight access.
The freight entrance had porters. The porters weren't being scanned. And the freight entrance led into the same dungeon as the main entrance — just from a different angle, accessing the service corridors that connected to Ashburn's deeper levels.
Shin carried his delivery crate past the staging area, noted the guard rotation at the freight entrance (single guard, twelve-hour shifts, changeover at 6 AM and 6 PM), and continued to Block 9.
---
On the third day, a discarded Bureau memo solved the access problem entirely.
Shin found it in the recycling bin behind the staging area's communications tent, crumpled and coffee-stained, while delivering a crate of batteries to the supply depot next door. He smoothed it out and read it while walking back to Block 4.
**MEMORANDUM — ASHBURN CAVERNS C-RANK ASSESSMENT**
**TO: All support staff supervisors**
**FROM: Bureau Operations, Sector 7**
**RE: Additional porter requirements, freight access rotation**
**Assessment teams have requested additional porter support for the freight access corridor. Current staffing is insufficient for the volume of equipment being moved between the staging area and the sublevel geological survey sites.**
**Requirements:**
**- 4 additional porters, 5-day rotation**
**- Standard Bureau contract rates (enhanced)**
**- Porter crews to operate during 1800-0600 shift (overnight)**
**- Access via freight entrance ONLY — porters are NOT cleared for main entrance**
**- No mana screening required for freight access personnel (screening equipment not available at secondary entrance)**
**Supervisors should submit porter availability to Garrett Cole, Porter Crew Supervisor, Tier 5 Barracks.**
Garrett. The contract went through Garrett. Of course it did — every porter assignment in the sector flowed through Garrett's desk, and Garrett's desk flowed through Garrett's preferences, and Garrett's preferences flowed toward whoever was currently useful to Garrett.
But the memo said four additional porters. Overnight shift. Freight entrance. No mana screening.
Shin folded the memo into his pocket and adjusted his delivery route to pass by the barracks.
---
Old Man Sato was in his chair. Same spot, same cigarette, same posture that suggested he'd been sitting there since the founding of New Bastion and would continue sitting there until the city collapsed.
Shin almost walked past without stopping. But Sato spoke first, which was unusual — the old man typically waited to be engaged, letting conversations come to him like a spider waiting at the center of a web it pretended wasn't there.
"Togashi's a thief," Sato said.
Shin stopped. "What?"
"Togashi. The weapons stall, Block 6." Sato's eyes were on the middle distance, focused on nothing specific and everything relevant. "Word gets around when a porter buys a short sword. Porters don't buy short swords. Porters buy pocket knives and pepper spray."
"It was on sale."
"It's never on sale. And the piece he sold you — the one with the cracked mana channel — that blade's been on his rack for eight months. Nobody wants it because the enchantment cycles. Three seconds on, two seconds off, and you can't predict which three seconds you'll get."
Shin's jaw tightened. "You know a lot about weapons stalls."
"I know a lot about everything that happens in these ten blocks, kid. I've been sitting in this chair since before you were born." Sato took a drag. "The mana channel's not cracked. It's split. There's a difference. A crack can be sealed. A split runs the full length of the blade. The enchantment will keep cycling until the channel degrades completely, and then you've got a dead sword."
"How long until it degrades?"
"Hard to say. Depends on use. Heavy combat?" Sato shrugged. "Maybe a hundred strikes. Maybe two hundred. Could be less."
Two hundred strikes. At three strikes per crawler kill, that was roughly sixty-five kills. At 10 units per kill, six hundred and fifty experience points. Added to his 250.3, that was nine hundred — still short of Level 1 by a hundred points.
Not enough. But close.
"Thanks," Shin said.
"Don't thank me. I'm not doing you a favor." Sato stubbed his cigarette. "I'm telling you that whatever you're doing — and I don't want to know what you're doing — you're doing it on borrowed time, with borrowed equipment, in places you shouldn't be."
"I've been called worse."
Sato's expression shifted. Not much — a tightening around the eyes, a deepening of the lines around his mouth. The look of a man who'd heard something he recognized and didn't like.
"Your mother used to say that," he said.
The words landed in the quiet air between them like a stone in still water. Shin's hand, reaching for his pocket, stopped.
"You knew my mother."
"I knew a lot of people." Sato picked up a fresh cigarette. Lit it with a match from a box so old the label had worn off. "Most of them are dead. That's what happens to people in Tier 5 who find things in dungeons they weren't supposed to find."
He didn't say anything else. Shin stood there, waiting for more, and more didn't come. The old man smoked his cigarette and watched the middle distance and the conversation was over.
Shin walked to the barracks with a second-hand sword, a stolen Bureau memo, and a sentence about his mother that he'd be turning over in his head for weeks.
---
Garrett posted the Ashburn freight access positions at 6 PM that evening. Four slots, overnight rotation, enhanced rate.
Three went to his favorites. The fourth — the one nobody wanted because overnight shifts meant arriving at 6 PM and working until 6 AM in a dungeon that was actively being reclassified upward — stayed open.
Shin signed his name at 6:02 PM.
Garrett appeared at 6:03. The man had a sixth sense for things that interested him, which was anything that involved control.
"Ashburn freight. Overnight." Garrett's flat eyes. "You just got off a Hollowfield rotation that's currently under Bureau review. And now you want to work the dungeon next door."
"Enhanced rate. I need the credits."
"Everybody needs credits. Not everybody needs them at 2 AM inside a dungeon that's spawning C-rank crystal variants."
"I'm a porter. I carry things. The crystals can spawn wherever they want."
Garrett studied him. The assessment wasn't hostile — it was transactional. Garrett was calculating whether Shin's presence on the Ashburn rotation would cause problems that might flow uphill to Garrett's desk. Risk management, Tier 5 style.
"Bureau memo says no mana screening for freight access," Shin added. "So my tragically zero status screen won't complicate your paperwork."
A flicker at the corner of Garrett's mouth. Not a smile. An acknowledgment that Shin had read the situation correctly and had packaged his request in terms that addressed Garrett's actual concern, which was always paperwork.
"Overnight shift starts tomorrow, 1800 hours. Freight entrance, south side. Wear the vest they give you. Carry what they tell you. And Zero—" Garrett's voice dropped half a register. "If the Bureau review of Hollowfield turns up anything interesting in the porter activity logs, I'm going to have questions. And you're going to have answers."
"I always have answers."
"That's what worries me."
Garrett walked away. Shin stood at the assignment board with his name under the Ashburn freight access slot and ran the numbers one more time.
Overnight access. Freight corridors connecting to Ashburn's deeper levels. Crystal variants spawning in sections that the assessment teams hadn't fully mapped. A new weapon with maybe two hundred good strikes left in it. And 250.3 shadow experience points standing between him and a level that would change everything.
Seven hundred and fifty points to go.
He went to his cot, pulled out the short sword, and tested its grip. The leather was old but firm. The balance was good — better than the dagger, with a weight distribution that suggested whoever had originally commissioned the blade knew what they were about. The fracture line caught the light, a diagonal scar across the flat.
He held the sword and waited for the enchantment to cycle. Three seconds of Piercing II glow — the edge lit up blue-white, and he could feel the enchantment's hum through the grip, a vibration that said *I can cut through anything*. Then two seconds of nothing. Dead steel.
Three on. Two off. Unpredictable within the cycle.
He'd have to time his strikes. Learn the rhythm of the enchantment's stutter. Build it into his combat pattern the way he'd built the crawlers' behavioral loops into his approach.
One more variable. One more thing that could kill him if he miscounted.
Shin wrapped the sword in his spare shirt, tucked it into the bottom of his storage locker, and lay down. His rib ached. His burns itched under the cream. His body wanted four more days of rest, and it was getting one.
Tomorrow at 6 PM, he'd walk into Ashburn Caverns through the freight entrance with a high-vis vest and a cracked sword.
He closed his eyes and was out in seconds.
