Light Bringer: New World[LitRPG, Fantasy, a very crazy idea]

The corner diner served the cheapest plate lunch in the neighborhood.

Three thin sirloin steaks, white rice, black beans stewed with pork rind, and a raw cabbage-and-tomato slaw seasoned with nothing more than coarse salt and white vinegar. It was the sort of meal Maria usually inhaled in ten minutes flat, asking for a second scoop of rice before Dante even finished carving up his meat.

Yet on that Thursday afternoon, her metal fork lay idle in her right hand.

Dante observed the girl out of the corner of his eye while chewing slowly.

With thirty Intelligence and twenty-three Wisdom, his perception of physical cues relied on no mystical hunch. He read the data. Maria’s shoulders slumped an inch below her habitual line of posture. Her brows held a rigid pinch at the center of her forehead, and she had been chewing the same morsel of steak for nearly thirty seconds without swallowing.

Her plate was still half full.

”Is the steak burned?” Dante asked, puncturing the lull beneath the clatter of silverware across nearby booths.

Maria blinked slowly, as if returning from miles away. She swallowed the meat with a dry flex of her throat and looked down at her plate.

”Tastes normal,” she answered, her voice dropping below its usual volume. ”Beans have plenty of garlic.”

She pushed her rice around with the tip of her knife, nudging the grains toward the center of the plate without bringing a forkful to her mouth.

Dante set his fork down.

He had known Maria since she was nine years old. He knew how she breathed when irritated, how her boots drummed the floorboards when she was hungry, and how her knuckles popped when she was ready to drop her steel bar onto some wasteland beast’s skull.

She never acted like this. Not even the night he dropped bleeding into the alley behind her home, nor when an infernal hound nearly ripped her arm off when they were fifteen.

Something is wrong.

He finished his meal in silence, settled the check at the counter with two twenty-real bills, and stepped out with her onto the avenue sidewalk.

The trek back to the Acacias building took fifteen minutes. Throughout the walk, Maria matched his shorter stride, offering none of her usual snide jabs about his sluggish pace or his railing-height frame. She simply marched onward, hands buried deep in her school jacket pockets, eyes pinned to the oil-stained asphalt.

The apartment stood quiet as the solid wood front door shut behind them.

Dante slipped off his sneakers at the entryway, hung his backpack from the wall peg, and walked into the kitchen. He poured two tall glasses of ice water from the fridge, set them on a plastic tray, and carried them into the living room.

Maria hadn’t flopped onto the sofa to turn on the TV like she did every day after classes.

She was perched on the edge of the bench press on the right side of the room, elbows resting on her knees, head hanging low. Her large hands were laced before her face, fingers loosely woven, staring into the thick calluses of her palms as if searching for some fundamental defect in her own flesh.

Dante halted two paces before her.

He held out one of the glasses.

”Here.”

Maria raised her head slowly. She looked at the condensation-beaded glass, took it in her right hand, and drank a shallow sip before placing it onto the hardwood floor beside a forty-five-pound plate.

”Thanks.”

Dante pulled over the small wooden stool he used when sketching chalk glyphs, planted it squarely in front of the bench press, and sat down. He sat up straight, ignoring the faint twinge in his right collarbone, and locked his gray eyes onto her face.

Feelings had never been Dante Miller’s strong suit.

He had been born with a cold, calculating intellect that processed existence through damage calculations, Mana expenditures, and survival odds. He had never spoken a genuine word of affection to Maicon or Kayla in all seventeen years spent under their roof. They had been mere temporary shelter providers in a biological arrangement dissolved the moment the emancipation papers were stamped at the registry.

Maria, however, was different.

She was the only living person who knew what he truly was. The only one who had clamped her bloody hands over his shredded ribs on the cold tiles of a dark wash shed when he was nothing more than broken bones clinging to four hit points. She had spent seven years crushing scrap iron by his side, eating cold rations off the stone floor of Hell, and throwing herself in front of five-ton constructs just to give his Mana bar time to fill.

He cared about her. Far more than he would ever voice aloud, and certainly more than his character sheet could quantify in Charisma points.

”You’ve been off ever since you came out of that restroom at school,” Dante began, his voice direct and unvarnished, yet stripped of its usual clinical distance. ”You barely touched half your steak, and you haven’t taken a single verbal swing at my head in the last two hours.”

Maria let out a dry, mirthless chuckle through her nose, staring down at the water glass on the floor.

”Just tired, Dante. That’s all.”

”Bullshit,” he countered without a beat of hesitation. ”When you’re actually exhausted, you demolish three plates of food, sprawl out on the couch with your boots off, and complain about soap opera plots until you pass out with your mouth open. You’re quiet. And you despise being quiet.”

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Maria stared at her knees, drawing breath slowly through parted lips.

”The guy in the white jacket showed up again,” she said, her words dragging out. ”In the bathroom.”

”I figured,” Dante adjusted his posture on the stool. ”The hundred-and-eighty-day quest had to come from him. But you’ve talked to him before. What’s with the funeral expression now?”

Maria raised her eyes to meet his. A heavy, roiling frustration sat in her brown gaze, tangled with an uncertainty that seemed to scorch her from within.

”He didn’t see the fight, Dante.”

Dante furrowed his brow. ”What do you mean, he didn’t see it?”

”He has no idea what actually went down inside that boiler,” she leaned her back against the barbell rested on the bench uprights, her knuckles cracking under strain. ”His log read that the Guardian dropped because you found the internal pressure valve and threaded a bolt into the weak spot. He thinks the machine died from an engine failure.”

”You’re the one who split the thing’s chest wide open with that sword.”

”Exactly!” Her voice spiked for the first time all afternoon, slashing through the room’s quiet like banked thunder. ”My pelvis was almost pulverized by that hammer. I sheared through the drive piston on pure leverage. And when I brought it up to him, he brushed it off like it didn’t mean a damn thing. Said that’s all I’m there for: to be the bumper. Take the ugly hits, get bashed in the face, and keep you drawing breath because you’re the chosen Light.”

She dragged in a ragged breath, her broad chest heaving violently beneath the black shirt.

”I’m not a wooden shield, Dante. I’m not a disposable tool he tosses into a furnace just to see if it cracks. I almost died on that floor.”

She paused for two seconds, swallowing hard. Her voice dipped to a whisper that tied a knot in Dante’s gut.

”And there was something else.”

Dante leaned forward, tuning his focus to every micro-expression. ”What was it?”

”Right when that vice jaw was coming down on your throat...” She looked at her hands, turning her palms upward. ”Something bizarre happened. It wasn’t any Sentinel skill. My blood boiled, Dante. It literally burned. I tasted sulfur smoke venting from my teeth, and the interface pinged with a temporary Strength surge that shot all the way to thirty-four. I sheared through five tons of armor plating like it was rotten cabbage.”

She searched his eyes, looking for any logical explanation.

”What is wrong with me? That guy assigned me a generic class, but that wasn’t normal. And he doesn’t even know it happened.”

Dante held his silence for ten long seconds.

His intellect, accustomed to charting rift schematics and arcane variables, halted its cold calculations of routes and thresholds.

He remembered the night the ivory feathers burst through his own back. The sheer terror of harboring something ancient, perilous, and unfathomable buried deep beneath the mortal husk of his soul. He knew the crushing weight of carrying an anomaly that the system itself sought to quarantine or suppress.

And now, Maria was staring into that same abyss. Only, while he had thirty Intelligence and stacks of ancient alchemical treatises to decipher his condition, she stood alone with that burden, dismissed by a higher authority as nothing more than meat meant to cushion the blows meant for him.

A cold, dense fury took root at the base of Dante’s chest.

A rage not aimed at the beasts of the First Great Continent or the ache in his shattered collarbone, but at that man in the white jacket who thought he could play warlord using their lives as expendable pawns on a board.

Dante stood up from the wooden stool.

He stepped forward, stopping right in front of Maria. Their height difference was such that, even seated on the bench press, her eyes lined up almost level with his.

”That guy in the white jacket is an asshole,” Dante stated, his voice clear, level, and entirely devoid of hesitation.

Maria blinked, taken aback by the choice of words.

”He might have system authority, he might freeze water in the pipe, and his irises might glow gold,” Dante continued, leveling his left forefinger at her chest, directly above the old scar on her shoulder. ”He doesn’t know everything. He’s a desk clerk peering at logs from a safe distance while we bleed in the dirt.”

He closed the distance, keeping his gaze locked to hers.

”Seven years ago, he assigned you that quest to protect the Light because he assumed you’d be a cheap shield that would crack and get swapped out the moment my power awakened. He’s an idiot. He understands nothing about what we built here.”

Dante drew a breath through his nose, feeling the cool weight of the basilisk bone plate braced against his spine.

”You are not my bumper, Maria. You never were. You are my partner. If you hadn’t torn through that colossus’s drive leg, I’d be ashes scattered over the Black Smelter floor. I’m the one who screwed up charging in without a proper breach plan, and you’re the one who dragged us out of my mess on raw leverage.”

He carefully folded his arms, keeping pressure off his injured collarbone.

”As for what happened during the fight...” Dante offered a sharp, crooked smirk, the very expression he wore when spotting a loophole in market regulations. ”If there’s something dormant inside you, if your blood boils with fire from that other realm, we will figure it out together. We have a hundred and eighty days. We have cash, we have this penthouse, and we have the system. We train, we run the tests, and if that guy in the white jacket thinks he owns us, we do what we’ve always done: we play by our own rules until he chokes on his condescension.”

Maria sat motionless on the bench press for five full seconds.

She looked at the pale, five-foot-eight youth standing before her, arm strapped in a makeshift sling, chin tilted as though he were ready to wage war on Heaven and Hell simultaneously.

The tension in her broad shoulders began to loosen. The hard line between her brows smoothed out, and the breath she let out carried a short, raspy, genuine laugh that finally dispelled the gloom suffocating the room.

”You talk pretty when you want to act clever, bighead,” she said, running a heavy palm through her short brown hair.

”I’m not acting clever,” Dante stepped back half a pace, feeling relief wash through his temples. ”I’m stating empirical facts.”

”Empirical facts...” she mocked, reaching out her right arm to rap her knuckles lightly against his uninjured shoulder. The tap was gentle by her standards, but it sent Dante rocking two steps back across the timber floor. ”You’re an idiot, Dante.”

”I know,” he recovered his footing with a grimace. ”Now finish that water before the ice melts, and go hit the shower. You still smell like stale lettuce from that diner.”

”Your face is stale lettuce,” she rose from the bench press with her usual fluid power, grabbed the glass, and drained it in one long draught.

She strode down the hallway with firm, confident steps that set the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. Just before entering the bathroom, she paused at the doorframe, looked back over her shoulder at Dante as he stowed the wooden stool back by the shelf.

”Hey, Dante.”

He turned his head. ”What?”

”Thank you,” she said simply, unadorned, and pulled the bathroom door shut before he could say a word in response.

Dante remained standing in the middle of the room, looking at the closed door as the hiss of the shower began rattling through the pipes.

He let out a long breath, dragging his left hand over the back of his neck.

His pulse beat in a calm, steady rhythm. The mystery of what Maria had unleashed within the central boiler remained unresolved, hanging in the air like a volatile variable in a complex equation. Yet for the very first time since tumbling into that muddy alley seven years ago, Dante did not feel alone against the world on the other side of the rift.