The tremor in her left index finger had developed a frequency. Three-point-two hertz, consistent, reproducible — Sora timed it against the second hand of the clinic's wall clock while sitting in the waiting area of Seoul National University Hospital's pediatric rehabilitation wing. The tremor appeared after extended low-intensity healing sessions, which meant it appeared every morning now, because she'd been running calibration exercises on rat sciatic nerves for four weeks straight and the neural fatigue had accumulated in her fine motor pathways like scar tissue forming in a wound that won't stop being reopened.
She pressed her left thumb against the tremoring finger. Held it still. The mana channels in her hand protested — a dull, deep ache that radiated from the metacarpals to the wrist, the kind of bone-level pain that told her the channels themselves were fatigued, not just the muscles. She'd been pushing them to do something they weren't designed for: throttle. Her channels had been rebuilt in Thornveil for maximum throughput, every pathway widened and reinforced to carry the dual-polarity flow at combat intensity. Asking them to produce a trickle was like asking a fire hose to drip.
But they were learning. She was learning.
The pediatric rehabilitation wing smelled like antiseptic and floor wax and the particular sweetness of children's hand sanitizer — strawberry-scented, a concession to the ward's primary demographic. Sora catalogued the smell the way she catalogued all new environments: sterile, climate-controlled, two exits (main door, emergency stairwell at the corridor's far end), seventeen heartbeats within passive sensing range. Most were small, fast, the elevated resting rates of pediatric patients. One belonged to a nurse at the intake desk who'd been watching Sora since she sat down and whose heart rate had been climbing steadily for the past six minutes.
The nurse knew who she was. The name badge on her uniform said JUNG and her pupils were dilated and her grip on the desk phone suggested she was considering calling security or had already called security or was deciding whether the situation warranted calling security.
Sora didn't blame her. The Calamity Healer, sitting in the pediatric ward. The forums had not been kind about the optics.
"Yeon Sora." The voice came from the corridor. A man, mid-thirties, wearing a healer's white coat with an Association crest on the left breast. His heartbeat was at ninety-four — elevated, anxious, but controlled in the way that medical professionals controlled their anxiety: by converting it into procedural attention. He carried a tablet and a mana-resonance scanner and the specific facial expression of someone who'd been assigned a duty they didn't volunteer for.
"Dr. Shin Woosung. I'll be supervising today's session." He didn't extend his hand. Whether this was because he'd been briefed on her contact restrictions or because he didn't want to touch her, the result was the same.
"D-rank healer?" Sora asked.
"Yes. Assigned by the Association's civilian medical oversight division." He glanced at his tablet. "The patient's mother is already in the treatment room. She's requested to be present for the duration."
"I expected that."
Dr. Shin led her down the corridor. His stride was efficient but slightly too fast — the pace of someone who wanted to minimize the amount of time spent walking next to her. Sora matched it without comment. The corridor was lined with rooms whose doors featured cartoon animals and cheerful color schemes, and through each door the diagnostic modality picked up the heartbeats of children recovering from injuries that a world with dungeons inflicted on the people least equipped to survive them.
A boy with a prosthetic leg, the stump still tender with recent surgical scarring. A girl whose left arm ended at the elbow, the amputation site carrying the distinctive mana-burn signature of dungeon energy exposure. Another child, younger, maybe eight, whose heartbeat was irregular in a pattern that suggested cardiac damage — myocardial scarring, probably from proximity to a mana detonation.
Dungeon break casualties. The ones who survived. The ones whose bodies bore the cost of a world that had been torn open and filled with things that didn't belong in it.
Treatment Room 4 was at the end of the corridor. Dr. Shin opened the door, and Sora stepped inside, and Yoon Seoyeon looked up from her phone and said: "You're the one who broke my nerves."
---
The girl was sitting on the treatment table in a hospital gown. Thin legs dangling, sneakers on — she'd insisted on wearing her own shoes, apparently, because the hospital slippers were ugly. Her heartbeat was at eighty-two. Calm. Calmer than her mother, who sat in a chair against the wall with her arms crossed and her pulse at one-oh-four, watching Sora the way a person watches a needle approaching their child's arm.
"I resolved a spinal cord compression and caused iatrogenic demyelination in the process," Sora said. "That's the accurate description."
"Mom says you fried my nerves."
"Your mother isn't entirely wrong."
Seoyeon tilted her head. Thirteen years old, sharp-eyed, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that someone — her mother, probably — had tied with more care than the setting required. She looked healthy from a superficial assessment. Color was good. Body weight appeared appropriate. But the diagnostic modality, running on passive, painted the invisible damage in precise detail: the T10-T12 segment, the demyelinated motor pathways, the degraded nerve conduction velocity that manifested as the subtle weakness in her lower extremities that she was probably learning to hide.
"Does it hurt?" Sora asked.
"My back?"
"The neuropathy. You've been having tingling in your feet and lower legs. Probably worse at night, when you're trying to sleep. Pins and needles, or a burning sensation, or both."
Seoyeon's expression shifted. The teenage bravado dimmed, replaced by something more honest. "How'd you know about the nighttime thing?"
"Demyelinated nerves misfire when peripheral input decreases. At night, when you're still and there's less sensory information competing for bandwidth, the damaged fibers generate spontaneous signals. Your brain interprets them as pain because it doesn't know what else to do with the data."
"Yeah." Seoyeon rubbed her left ankle through her sock. A small, unconscious gesture that told Sora the left side was worse — consistent with the asymmetric damage pattern she'd mapped during the initial assessment. "It's like my feet are full of static. Like a TV channel that doesn't come in right."
The image was precise. Better than most clinical descriptions Sora had received from adult patients. She filed it.
"I'm going to try to fix that," Sora said. "The process will be slow. Each session, I'll address a small number of damaged nerve fibers — remyelinating them individually, restoring their conduction velocity. The work is microscopic and incremental, and it will take many sessions."
"How many?"
"I don't have a definitive number yet. The damage involves approximately forty thousand individual nerve fibers, and I can safely treat between two and three hundred per session at my current calibration level." The math was not encouraging. Seoyeon did it faster than Sora expected.
"That's like... a hundred and fifty sessions?"
"At minimum. More if the regeneration rate varies between fiber populations, which it likely will."
"So I'll be coming here for over a year."
"Approximately."
Seoyeon looked at her mother. Mrs. Yoon's jaw was set, her hands gripping the chair's armrests. Her heartbeat had spiked to one twelve at the mention of a hundred and fifty sessions — not from anger, Sora thought, but from the particular exhaustion of a parent who'd just been handed a timeline for their child's recovery and was calculating the logistics of a year and a half of weekly hospital visits while holding a job and keeping a household intact.
"Can I listen to music during?" Seoyeon asked.
Sora blinked. "What?"
"During the sessions. Can I have my earbuds in? Because if I have to sit here for like two hours every Thursday without my phone I'll literally die."
Dr. Shin made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. He converted it into a cough. His heartbeat had dropped to eighty-six — the slow decompression of a man who'd expected something worse than a thirteen-year-old negotiating phone privileges with the most dangerous healer in Seoul.
"Music is acceptable," Sora said. "Physical movement is not. You'll need to stay still while I work on the spinal nerves."
"Deal." Seoyeon pulled her earbuds from her gown pocket with the speed of someone who'd been prepared for this negotiation. "Okay. Do the thing."
---
The thing.
Sora pulled on nitrile gloves. Not for hygiene — for ritual. The gloves created a barrier, a millimeter of latex between her skin and the world, and while they couldn't actually contain the mana flow (nothing physical could), the act of putting them on engaged a specific set of neural pathways that she'd been training for four weeks. Gloves on meant calibration mode. Low output. Controlled. The same way scrubbing in before surgery told a doctor's brain to shift into a different operational register.
She placed her hands on Seoyeon's lower back. The girl flinched — a reflexive contraction of the paraspinal muscles, the body's protest against contact from something it had learned to fear. Her heartbeat jumped to ninety-five.
Then settled. Eighty-eight. Eighty-five. Eighty-two.
The girl was braver than her autonomic nervous system.
Sora activated the diagnostic modality at full resolution. The spinal anatomy bloomed in her awareness — vertebrae, discs, ligaments, and the spinal cord itself, a pale column of neural tissue protected inside its bony canal. The T10-T12 segment. The damage site.
She'd mapped it before, from a distance, through the air. But contact mapping was different. Contact mapping was intimate in a way that no amount of passive scanning could replicate — the full immersion, every cell, every fiber, every molecule of myelin and axon and node of Ranvier laid bare as if she were holding the girl's nervous system in her palms.
The damage was worse than she'd assessed from a meter away.
Not catastrophically worse. Not enough to change the prognosis. But the granular detail of contact mapping revealed what air-gap diagnostics had missed: the scar tissue was already forming along the demyelinated fibers, thin sheaths of fibrotic tissue that the body was laying down in its attempt to repair what Sora had broken. The scarring would impede remyelination if it was allowed to consolidate. She'd need to address it during the repair work — dissolve the fibrotic tissue before rebuilding the myelin sheaths, which added a step to each fiber's treatment protocol and increased the per-fiber time from forty-five seconds to approximately ninety.
The math adjusted. Not a hundred and fifty sessions. Closer to three hundred.
She didn't share this recalculation. Not yet. The girl had already done the arithmetic once today.
"Beginning treatment," Sora said. "You may feel warmth in your lower back. That's normal. If you feel any sharp pain or sudden numbness, tell me immediately."
"'Kay." Seoyeon's earbuds were in, her phone screen showing a music app. She pressed play and the tinny overflow of a K-pop group leaked into the room.
Sora reached for the golden flow. Drew it forward through channels that resisted the low-intensity command the way a river resists being forced through a straw. The mana built behind the restriction — pressure, heat, the insistent demand of power that wanted to surge — and she held it. Compressed it. Shaped the output into a thread so fine that the energy reaching her fingertips carried less therapeutic force than a standard E-rank healing pulse.
Less than what she'd been capable of before Thornveil. Less than what Mirae could produce. The minimum viable dose for neural tissue repair.
She fed the thread into Seoyeon's T10 segment. Found the first damaged fiber — a motor neuron serving the left tibialis anterior muscle, the one that lifted the foot during walking. The myelin sheath was degraded across a twelve-millimeter segment, the insulating layer thinned and frayed like old electrical tape. The axon underneath was intact but conducting impulses at roughly forty percent of normal velocity, which translated to the subtle foot drop that Seoyeon probably compensated for without realizing she was doing it.
Sora began the repair. The golden mana wrapped around the damaged myelin segment like a splint around a broken bone, providing a scaffold for the oligodendrocyte cells — the body's natural myelin producers — to lay down new insulation. The process was biological, not magical. She wasn't creating myelin from nothing. She was providing the optimal conditions for the body's own repair mechanisms to function, clearing the fibrotic scar tissue and stimulating the oligodendrocytes and maintaining the chemical environment that myelin production required.
It was, she realized, the opposite of everything Thornveil had taught her.
In the dungeon, healing had been about speed. About force. Maximum intensity, maximum coverage, because the injuries were massive and the timeline was death. She'd healed her own shattered wrist by flooding it with so much mana that the bone fused in minutes, the callus forming thick and irregular because precision was a luxury she couldn't afford.
This was not that. This was slow. This was gentle. This was watching a single cell respond to a single stimulus and adjusting the input in real time, the way a surgeon adjusted the pressure on a scalpel — not to cut deeper, but to cut exactly deep enough.
The first fiber's myelin sheath began to thicken. The conduction velocity improved: forty percent, forty-two, forty-five. Each percentage point represented thousands of individual molecules being laid down in precise formation by cells that were doing work they would have done on their own eventually, just slower, just less completely.
Ninety seconds per fiber. She moved to the second one.
---
Two hours. One hundred and sixty-three fibers.
Sora lifted her hands from Seoyeon's back and sat back in her chair and felt the mana depletion hit like a wave of nausea — not from the volume of energy expended, which was trivial, but from the concentration required to maintain output that low for that long. The effort of restraint. The sustained, unbroken focus of holding a river at a drip for a hundred and twenty minutes.
Her hands trembled. Both of them now, not just the left index finger. The fine motor tremor of depleted calibration pathways.
"Done for today," she said.
Seoyeon pulled out one earbud. "Already?"
"Two hours."
"Oh." The girl looked at the clock. Looked at her phone's timer. "Huh. Didn't feel like two hours."
"How do your feet feel?"
Seoyeon swung her legs. Flexed her ankles. Pointed her toes, then pulled them up toward her shins — dorsiflexion, the movement controlled by the tibialis anterior, the muscle served by the fibers Sora had been repairing.
"Same, mostly. Maybe..." She flexed again. "My left foot feels a tiny bit less buzzy? Like the static turned down a notch?"
A hundred and sixty-three fibers out of forty thousand. Less than half a percent. And the girl could already feel the difference.
"The improvement will be incremental," Sora said. "Each session should produce a small, measurable reduction in the neuropathic symptoms. The progress may not be linear — some weeks will feel like more improvement than others."
"Like leveling." Seoyeon grinned. "Some levels take forever."
Dr. Shin stepped forward with his scanner, performing the mandated post-treatment assessment. His movements were careful, professional, but Sora noticed that his heartbeat had settled to seventy-eight over the past two hours. The anxiety was gone. He'd spent a hundred and twenty minutes watching her work with the kind of precision that his D-rank abilities couldn't approach, and the clinical part of his brain — the part that assessed competence the way Sora assessed biology — had recategorized her from threat to colleague.
"Neural conduction in the treated segment shows a four-point-six percent improvement over baseline," he reported, reading the scanner's output. "Consistent with early-stage remyelination. No adverse effects detected."
"Four-point-six percent," Sora repeated. Held it. One hundred and sixty-three fibers, two hours, and a measurable improvement in a child's ability to feel her own feet.
From the chair against the wall, Mrs. Yoon's heartbeat was at eighty-four. Down from one-oh-four at the session's start. Not calm — Sora doubted the woman would be calm in her presence for a long time, if ever — but quieter. The cardiac rhythm of someone whose threat assessment was being revised in real time by evidence that contradicted the hypothesis.
"Same time next Thursday?" Seoyeon asked, hopping off the table.
Sora looked at Mrs. Yoon. The mother's mouth was tight. Her nod was a single, controlled motion.
"Same time next Thursday."
---
The subway was worse than last time.
Sora descended the stairs at Dongdaemun Station and the recognition started before she reached the platform. A woman on the escalator did a double-take — the sharp head turn of someone matching a face to a forum post. Two teenagers with phones angled toward her, the screens reflecting her image. A man in a hunter's casual gear — off-duty, C-rank based on his mana signature — who saw her and stopped walking and stood perfectly still until she'd passed, the way prey animals freeze when a predator enters their perimeter.
The Calamity Healer. Trending for the second week.
She boarded the train. Found a spot near the door, standing, because sitting would put her at eye level with the seated passengers and the recognition would be faster. The car was half-full. Thirty-one heartbeats in range. The typical arrhythmia of a Seoul afternoon — office workers, students, elderly passengers, all carrying the base-level anxiety of people who lived in a city where the ground could open and monsters could climb out.
A grandmother in the nearest seat looked up from her knitting. Looked at Sora. Looked at her hands, which were gloveless now — she'd removed the nitrile before leaving the hospital — and visible, scarred, the left index finger still tremoring at three-point-two hertz.
"You're that healer," the grandmother said. Not a question.
Sora said nothing.
"My grandson was at the Mapo shelter. The dungeon break, last month." The grandmother's hands kept moving, the knitting needles clicking with an autonomic rhythm that matched her resting heart rate at sixty-two. "Second floor collapsed. The hunters got most people out, but the ones in the basement — the rescue team said there was a healer. From one of the guilds. That she stabilized people until the ambulances came."
The Mapo break. The same event that had brought Seoyeon to her table. Sora hadn't been at the shelter itself — Taeho had carried Seoyeon from there to the guild — but Vanguard's combat medics had deployed to the site, and Sora had provided diagnostic support from the guild's medical wing via the communication link, identifying the most critical injuries and triaging patients by remote sensing until the Association's medical teams arrived.
"My grandson has a broken collarbone. It's healing." The grandmother's voice was matter-of-fact, the dry pragmatism of someone old enough to have survived several versions of Seoul and adaptable enough to knit on a train that might be swallowed by the earth. "Thank you."
Sora's fingers tightened around the overhead strap. The two words landed in a place she hadn't fortified — somewhere behind the clinical terminology and the survival calculus, in the soft tissue that she'd spent seven weeks learning to ignore.
"He should be doing range-of-motion exercises," she said. "The collarbone. If it's healing in a sling, the shoulder joint will stiffen. Pendulum swings, ten minutes, three times a day."
The grandmother nodded as if she'd received a prescription, which she had, and returned to her knitting. The interaction lasted fourteen seconds and ended without fear.
Three stops later, a hunter got on. B-rank, male, early thirties, his mana signature carrying the aggressive charge of a damage dealer's offensive attunement. He scanned the car — the automatic threat assessment of someone who processed all environments through a combat lens — and locked onto Sora.
His heartbeat was at seventy. Not afraid. His lip curled.
He didn't speak. Didn't need to. The expression said it: *I see you. I know what you are. And I'm not impressed.* The specific contempt of a combat hunter looking at someone who'd been classified as a threat without ever proving themselves in the ranked hierarchy. Sora's power existed outside the structure that men like him had spent their careers climbing, and that anomaly grated the way all anomalies grated — not because she was dangerous, but because she was uncategorizable.
Sora met his gaze. Held it for three seconds. Then looked away, not because the stare intimidated her — nothing about a B-rank's mana signature registered as threatening to the survival instincts Thornveil had burned into her nervous system — but because three seconds was the clinical threshold for a stare to transition from assessment to confrontation, and confrontation on a subway car was not on today's schedule.
The hunter got off two stops later. His heartbeat never changed.
---
Vanguard Guild's headquarters was louder than usual when Sora arrived. Voices from the briefing room on the second floor, audible through the sound-dampening panels that apparently needed replacement. Multiple heartbeats — elevated, the cardiac signatures of an argument in progress.
She found Dohyun in his third-floor office. He was standing behind his desk, which meant the meeting had either just ended or been paused, because Dohyun sat when conducting business and stood when processing its aftermath. His tie was straight. His cuffs had been adjusted recently — the fabric at his wrists showed the creasing pattern of repeated manipulation.
"Three guilds," he said without preamble. "Ironclad, Storm Front, and Aegis Division have filed formal objections with the Dungeon Access Bureau against Vanguard Guild's inclusion in joint operations."
"Because of me."
"Because of your classification." He placed a tablet on the desk and rotated it toward her. Three documents, each bearing a different guild seal, each containing variations of the same language: *concerns regarding the inclusion of an unranked Calamity-class operative in multi-guild dungeon operations... unacceptable risk to allied personnel... insufficient control documentation...*
"The objections are procedurally valid," Dohyun continued. "Current Bureau regulations require all members of joint operations to carry a recognized rank classification. Your Calamity designation is not a rank — it's a threat classification. Technically, you remain unranked, which means any dungeon requiring joint-guild clearance is now inaccessible to teams that include you."
The quarantine was tightening. Not through overt hostility — through paperwork. Through regulations written for a system that hadn't anticipated her, weaponized by guilds that feared what they didn't control.
"Which dungeons does this affect?"
"All B-rank and above within the Seoul metropolitan zone. The Bureau requires multi-guild verification for any dungeon above C-rank, and if participating guilds object to a team member's inclusion, the operation is suspended pending review." He picked up the tablet. Set it down again. A small, controlled motion that in another person would have been throwing it. "Effectively, Vanguard Guild's operational ceiling has been reduced to C-rank dungeons that we can staff entirely with our own roster."
C-rank. The tier they'd been running before Sora joined. Low profit, low risk, low prestige. The dungeons that kept a guild solvent but never let it grow.
"We were already running below capacity. This will—"
"Accelerate the financial pressure. Yes." Dohyun's heartbeat was at fifty-four. Steady as always. But his right hand — the one that had tremored when reaching for the door two weeks ago — rested on the desk in a position that Sora recognized as deliberate immobilization. He was preventing it from shaking.
Mana erosion. The channels degrading under the constant strain of maintaining the façade of strength that a guild master required. She wondered how often the tremor appeared now. Whether it was progressing on the timeline she'd estimated or faster.
"There is an alternative." He opened a different document on the tablet. "A B-rank dungeon in Gangnam. Appeared three days ago, standard formation, well-mapped analogs in the Bureau's database. The hosting guild — Phoenix Spear — has withdrawn from the clearance operation due to internal restructuring. Their withdrawal leaves an open slot. A single guild can claim the operation if they can field a full team independently."
"Without joint-guild approval."
"Without joint-guild approval. The Bureau's regulations only require multi-guild consensus for joint operations. A single-guild operation under full internal command is exempt."
"What's the team requirement?"
"Eight members minimum. Two damage dealers, one tank, one healer, one support specialist, one scout, and two flex positions." He looked at her. "Vanguard can field seven from our current active roster. The eighth would be you."
"In what role?"
"Diagnostic support and secondary healing. The primary healer would be Cho Hana."
Cho Hana. The D-rank healer Sora hadn't met. The other half of Vanguard's inadequate healing corps — a woman she knew only from staffing files and Mirae's occasional mentions.
"When?"
"Twelve days. The Bureau's operational window opens on the first of next month." He paused. The pause lasted four seconds, which for Dohyun was significant. "This would be Vanguard Guild's first B-rank operation since the guild's founding. The revenue from a successful clear would cover three months of operational costs. The failure to clear would—"
"Would confirm the narrative that a guild with a Calamity-class member can't function in the ranked system."
"Yes."
The calculus was clean. A B-rank dungeon, staffed by a guild that had been running C-rank operations for the entirety of its existence, with a diagnostic healer whose primary claim to fame was breaking a child's nerves. Success meant survival. Failure meant validation of every objection those three guilds had filed.
"I'll need to meet Cho Hana," Sora said. "And review the dungeon analogs. If this operation is our proof of concept, I need to know every variable before we enter."
"Cho Hana returns from deployment tomorrow. I'll arrange the briefing." He straightened his tie — an unnecessary adjustment that served as punctuation. "The operational details are forthcoming. I wanted you to understand the strategic context first."
"I understand it."
"Good." He sat down. Meeting concluded.
Sora turned to leave. Stopped at the door. Her System interface — the translucent display that appeared at the edge of her visual field when she focused on it — had flickered.
Not the normal flicker of interface activation. Something else. A color she'd never seen on her display — not the blue of standard information panels, not the gold of healer-class indicators, not even the red of warning notifications. A deep, shifting violet that appeared for less than a second in the upper-right corner of her interface, where the navigation menu options were listed.
She focused on the spot. The violet was gone. The menu looked normal: Status, Skills, Party, Settings. The four options available to every hunter.
Except — had there been five, for that fraction of a second? A fifth option, below Settings, rendered in that violet text before it disappeared?
She blinked. Looked again. Four options. Blue text. Standard formatting.
The diagnostic modality offered nothing. The interface was a System construct, not a biological one — it existed outside the domain of her medical sensing, in whatever computational layer the System used to communicate with its users. She couldn't diagnose what she couldn't touch.
She filed the observation. Anomalous visual artifact. Interface color outside normal display spectrum. Duration: less than one second. Possibly a rendering error. Possibly fatigue-related — the two-hour calibration session had depleted her focus, and pareidolia was a known symptom of neural exhaustion.
Probably nothing.
She left Dohyun's office and descended to the medical wing, where Mirae was inventorying supplies and humming tunelessly the way she did when she thought no one was listening.
"How was the session?" Mirae asked without looking up from her clipboard.
"One hundred and sixty-three fibers. Four-point-six percent improvement. No adverse effects."
"That's good. That's really good." Mirae made a note. Looked up. Her heartbeat was at seventy, the new baseline she'd settled into since joining Vanguard — lower than the panicked rhythms of her suicide-squad days, higher than true calm, the resting rate of someone who was recovering but not yet recovered. "You look tired."
"The calibration is neurologically demanding."
"I meant you look tired tired. Like person tired, not mana tired."
Sora considered this. The distinction was one she would have dismissed three months ago — fatigue was fatigue, a metabolic state measurable in blood lactate and glycogen depletion and cortisol levels. But Mirae had identified something outside those parameters. Something in Sora's posture, maybe, or her expression, or the way she stood in the doorway instead of entering the room.
"I'm adequately functional."
"That's not what I asked."
The echo of Taeho's words from the dungeon entrance: *Wasn't what I asked.* Different people, same refusal to accept the clinical deflection. She was surrounded by individuals who insisted on reading her as a person rather than a system.
"I'm managing," Sora said. It wasn't the full truth. The full truth involved three hundred sessions instead of a hundred and fifty, and a subway car full of people who recognized her face, and three guilds that had formally declared her a liability, and a violet flicker on a System interface that she couldn't explain.
But it was close enough.
"The B-rank dungeon," Mirae said. "Taeho told me. He's excited. He's been sparring with Jina all afternoon — I think he broke a punching bag."
"Have you met Cho Hana?"
"Once. When I transferred in. She was leaving for deployment." Mirae paused. Set down her clipboard. The pause carried information — the particular hesitation of someone choosing which parts of an assessment to share. "She's competent. Technically. D-rank healing with good fundamentals, steady output, reliable under pressure."
"But."
"She doesn't like working with people she can't categorize." Mirae picked the clipboard back up. Busied her hands. "Her last deployment was with a standard raid team. Damage dealers, tanks, support — everyone in their lane. She... might have questions about your role."
Might have questions. The polite phrasing for: *She'll be afraid of you, or hostile, or both, and the team's healing coordination will depend on your ability to manage that dynamic twelve days from now in a dungeon that will be the hardest thing any of them have ever attempted.*
"I'll manage it," Sora said.
Mirae nodded. Returned to her inventory. Her heartbeat ticked up by two beats — the micro-elevation of someone who wanted to say something more and chose not to.
Sora walked to the treatment room. Closed the door. Sat in the chair beside the empty medical bed and held her trembling hands in her lap and looked at the ceiling and thought about forty thousand nerve fibers and twelve days and a violet flicker that was probably nothing.
Thursday was over. The next one was seven days away.
In seven days, she'd repair another hundred and sixty-three fibers. Maybe a hundred and seventy, if the calibration continued to improve. A fraction of the total. A percentage of a percentage. The kind of progress that only mattered if you measured it against the alternative, which was not trying.
Sora pressed her trembling left index finger against the ridge of the malunion fracture in her right ulna. The crooked bone. The old wound.
Some things healed wrong and stayed wrong. She'd accepted that about her arm months ago. What she hadn't accepted — what she was only now beginning to diagnose — was that the same principle didn't have to apply to everything.
