It had been six days in a row on Floor 6 when Daren showed up at the Broken Crown.

Nothing strange there. He knew my routine well enough by now, knew that I made appearances in the evening, and knew that I tended to go to the Crown since Sena didn’t ask questions and her cups were always full. The strange thing was his expression as he stepped into the room.

Not bad. Not good. Neither of those.

He saw me, walked across the room, drew up the seat opposite mine and took his place without invitation. Nothing strange either. We had moved past that stage.

Sena showed up, placed a cup before him without prompting and vanished once more. I waited.

"I spoke with Vorn."

I laid down my cup.

"When," I inquired.

"Two days ago. I’ve been thinking about it ever since." He clasped both hands around the cup and stared at it. "Needed to clarify my own thoughts before I brought anything to you."

This was very much how Daren operated. Most people processed their emotions out loud. Daren processed his privately and reported his findings to me. This is partly why he and his relationship meter with half the city were where they were at.

"How did it go?" I asked.

He paused for a second. "He told me everything. More than you did, the ins and outs of it, mechanics. The details of how the flags work, the corruption meter effects on a person, and how the whole thing works from his side. Her numbers before you reset them."

He knew her numbers? I hadn’t told him her numbers. He knew about the shape, but not the specific details.

"Her corruption meter?" I asked.

"Ninety-one," Daren said. "Out of a hundred."

Her numbers sat between us on the table.

"Yep," I said.

He nodded slowly. No rage — he had surprised me by not being angry. Angry would have been easier to deal with.

"And he didn’t make excuses," Daren repeated. "That’s the one thing that keeps coming up for me. When I went in, I thought he would make excuses, justify himself, give me a context. He just told me what he did and why he did it the way he saw it at the time. And then he was done."

"Pretty much, huh?"

"You could see it coming."

"I did have a read on him."

"What you’re saying is, you triggered the stop point, knowing how things would fall into place."

"Yeah, I triggered the stop point because it was the right play. Everything else he chose on his own."

DAREN — STATUS 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Lyra Relationship Meter: 861

Kai Relationship Meter: 894

Vorn Relationship Meter: 147 — organic discussion finished

Status Mood: Processing / Stabilized

Active Flags: 1

Flag 2 — Vorn/Daren direct engagement — COMPLETE

The relationship meter between Daren and Lyra had risen by eight points. Not only had nothing been disturbed within Daren by the conversation, but whatever it did for him it had solidified their bond somehow.

"Something he said towards the end," Daren said. "When he was done. He said — he had another target before Ashveil. That she came right out and asked him if what he was doing was real, and he stopped. He said he couldn’t really understand why until Kai did the same thing."

I took my cup again. "What did he say he was doing right now?"

"He hasn’t figured that out yet." And Daren delivered the information without judgment. "That’s the truth, and he thought he should just admit that instead of giving me some bullshit answer."

And Vorn sitting on the canal bench, how he sat, his patience, how completely not performing when he revealed things he could reasonably have performed while telling. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t a liar, ever. Even when he’d been flying the flags, and especially now he hung.

"And Sera?"

"He spoke with her." Daren’s face changed just the slightest bit. "He spoke to her before coming to me, actually. She understands what he was trying to do. She understands how he was trying to use those 41 points and she understood what he intended."

"And?"

"And she told him to come back when he figured out what he really wanted." Daren nearly smiled. "Those were her exact words."

That got some consideration.

Sera — no user interface overlay, no corruption level displayed, no safeguards from being tampered with, clothing vendor for six years — had realized that the manipulation method that he had used against her had generated points based off an organic connection to achieve a certain end result, and she’d responded by telling him to go get himself straightened out before he tried again if he was serious about it.

Civilian grade. No mechanics. Just a human.

"She’s got a lot going for her," I commented.

"I don’t believe Vorn expected that reaction," Daren added.

"Nobody would expect such a response."

Daren took a drink from his cup. The Crown was starting to fill out now — end of the night, adventurers emerging from the Undercroft, merchants ending their business transactions. The ambient chatter helped mask what felt like a judgment from the start.

"How is Lyra?" I asked.

There was a sort of easing on his face that I didn’t have a name for. "She’s good. She has blanks in there that she just doesn’t know where to fill in. There’s disorientation that has stuck with her, and she has been asking questions that I don’t know how to answer. She will want to speak with you."

"I know."

"She’s not angry. That’s important. She’s trying to understand something that she does not have all of the facts on."

PASSIVE MONITORING — LYRA

Relationship / Daren: 861 — stable, rising

Corruption: 0/100

Mood flag: Questioning / Resolute

Secondary bond / Kai: trust level 71/100

Active interaction: NONE

Pending: direct interaction with Kai — Lyra’s timeline

Her trust threshold had shifted seven points. She was making her way towards the talk on her own terms without any prompting. It needed to happen like this.

"When she’s ready," I stated.

"Yeah." He rotated the mug between his hands. "She said something else to me last night. She said she felt like she was staying in a place where someone came in, cleaned it, and rearranged everything while they were doing it, and she couldn’t tell which stuff they’d moved around, and why everything felt so different." He stopped to take a breath. "This is what the reset felt like."

The gravity of those words hung with me.

It had been my decision. Full corruption reset with a one-time bonus, spent. The calculation was simple, and the result would have been Lyra with ninety-one corruption points, Vorn’s flags activated, and her relationship bar collapsing. I would make it again in a heartbeat. But hearing Daren describe how he thought the reset affected Lyra was another form of intelligence that the user interface hadn’t provided to me.

"I rearranged things. I’ll do it again. That’s just being honest."

"I know," said Daren. "I think she knows, too. It’s not the problem." He paused. "It’s the fact that she’s trying to separate her own feelings from whatever was caused by the corruption. And some of those lines are murky."

They wouldn’t be. The corruption meter wouldn’t tell them which emotions belonged to the person and which had been faked. Lyra at ninety-one had still been Lyra — the warmth, the easy laugh, the feeling of ease she inspired. Corruption had built up around all of that, without taking any of it away. The corruption meter was reset, but not accompanied by a user guide.

There wasn’t an easy answer for that one. I shelved it under the ’no cheat system solutions’ problem and carried on.

"Vorn," I said. "Any new thoughts on him?"

Daren considered. "I don’t trust him. I don’t want to act like the conversation changed anything. But I understand him more now. And he didn’t lie when he could have."

VORN — STATUS

Flags: ALL — SUSPENDED

Post-trigger status: SELF-DETERMINING

Daren conversation: COMPLETE

Sera disclosure: COMPLETE — Sera’s reaction: relationship conditional on Vorn’s self-determination

Current activity: UNKNOWN

Threat assessment: INACTIVE

Unknown. For the first time since my arrival in Ashveil, the current activity of Vorn was truly unknown to me. It wasn’t the case that the wiki was withholding information — the wiki had never provided any real-time information on him — but rather that suspended and self-determining meant he was scripting his own course of action. No flags to track, no approach vector to monitor, no stop condition to work towards.

That was either very positive or the most dangerous aspect of the city depending upon what he wanted for himself.

I hoped for the former. I’d been wrong before.

"Floor 6," Daren replied, shifting position. "How’s it coming along."

"Interesting," I replied. "No wiki information. Generating field notes. Zero experience so far — hypothesizing gate guardian kill requirement."

He analyzed the statement. "Zero experience gained across how many kills."

"We’ve got eight confirmed. Eleven total."

"Tomorrow, too?"

"Sure."

He made it sound so clear, and it was so clear to me. "Don’t forget about the ceiling."

I turned to look at him. "Mira mentioned that."

"Mira gives me information that she thinks will be pertinent." He smiled almost involuntarily. "She says you almost fell off it."

"Almost."

"And she also mentioned that Combat Instinct I caught it before you did."

"Yep."

"Gaining skills nicely," he commented.

"Improving all the time," I answered.

Then we were silent together, just the background noises of the Crown in between us. No agenda. Daren drinking down the rest of his drink and me finishing my own. Quiet without having to say anything because there was nothing left to be said.

The talk between Vorn and Daren was finished. Sera had planted seeds for Vorn to ponder on. Lyra was slowly gearing up for a talk with me on her terms. The wiki was silent on everything — not because it was holding back information but because it was beyond the canonical material, something the game wasn’t made to produce.

Now I was penning down the wiki. Same as Floor 6.

Sena refilled both mugs without even asking.

I didn’t argue.