Zoey woke up and didn't know where she was.
It lasted three seconds. Three seconds of her brain running through the list of places she'd woken up in the past two weeks: Prometheus's safehouse, the medical room where Sable had checked her vitals, and the inside of the Oubliette, where there was no ceiling, no floor, no walls, no anything, just an absence that went on forever in every direction and ate your screams before they left your mouth.
Three seconds.
Then the familiarity clicked.
'Morning, bitch.' Inner Zoey greeted.
Zoey exhaled. Unclenched her hands. Stared at the ceiling and let the normalcy of the room reassemble itself around her. Dresser on the left. Closet door half-open because she was rushing on her trip out to Dhara. Track trophies on the shelf, a row of gold that represented time of running slightly ahead of her competitors, winning by inches instead of miles. Posters on the wall. A pair of boxing gloves hanging from the back of the door, the ones Zack had given her when she'd outgrown her first set.
Her room. Her actual room. Not that black infinity of nothingness.
She sat up and immediately regretted it. Every muscle in her body screamed at her. Her arms felt heavy. Her legs felt heavier. Even the simple act of swinging her feet off the bed and onto the floor required a reconnect between her brain and her body that shouldn't have been necessary. She was used to moving without any problems.
Now there was a gap. A big one. The thought said "stand up" and the body said "give me a second."
She gave it a second. Stood. Her knees didn't buckle, which was progress from a few days ago. The burns on her arms were mostly healed, pink and tender and new. She flexed her fingers. All ten worked. She could ball her fists.
The clock on her nightstand said 7:42 AM. She'd slept for almost twelve hours. Twelve hours of dead, dreamless nothing. It didn't remind her of the Oubliette because she wasn't conscious during that sleep. Which was refreshing.
The hallway was quiet. Zoey went to the bathroom. Brushed her teeth. Washed her face. Looked at herself in the mirror.
She looked like herself. That was the strange part. Same face. Same brown skin, same sharp jaw, same eyes. Her hair was a mess. But underneath the face that looked right, the body was wrong. She could see it in the mirror even through the oversized t-shirt she'd slept in. She was thinner.
Her shoulders, which had been round and solid and packed with the kind of muscle that came from throwing thousands of punches a day, looked softer. Less defined. Her arms, visible below the shirt's sleeves, were leaner than they should have been. The new skin from the re-entry burns made patches along her forearms that were lighter than the rest, a patchwork of old and new that looked like bad camouflage.
The Oubliette had taken something from her body. Not permanently, she hoped, but the taking was visible. The ninth gate had pushed her past every limit the Box had ever set, and the cost was written in the muscle mass she'd lost and the strength she couldn't feel and the way her reflection looked like a version of herself from maybe a year ago, before the training had really started ramping up, before the battles had hardened her, before the Box had turned her into something that made daemons fear on sight.
'We look like shit,' Inner Zoey observed.
'And not the good type of shit.' Zoey agreed.
'Remember when we first started and we'd flex in the mirror like a Chad and get excited about having abs? We're like three steps back from that.'
Zoey turned away from the mirror.
She hadn't opened the Box since before the Oubliette. Hadn't checked her stats since before the mission to Luminaurora, before the siege, before Poison, before any of it. The last time she'd pulled up her Status, she'd been at the height of everything the Box had built for her. Body 20. Magic 15.5. Skills that read like a highlight reel of every fight she'd ever won and every lesson she'd ever learned.
She could check right now. Pull it up. See the numbers. Know exactly where she stood.
She didn't.
Not yet.
The stairs creaked in the same places they always did. Third step from the top, seventh step from the bottom. She'd memorized the pattern years ago, back when sneaking downstairs at midnight to get a snack required the stealth of a ninja and the awareness of a burglar, because if Alicia heard you in the kitchen past bedtime, the lecture or ass-beating that followed was unwanted to say the least.
The antiseptic smell hit her halfway down. It had seeped into the house. The Winters home now smelled like two things: Bruce's cooking and a hospital. She didn't like the latter.
She went to the dining room first.
Alicia was the same. The same. No change. Stable vitals. Steady breathing. The monitors doing their beeping thing, the nurse in her chair doing her reading thing, and Zoey's mother doing her lying-there-not-waking-up thing.
The nurse looked up. Gave the same professional smile from yesterday.
"Good morning, Zoey. She had a comfortable night. No changes."
"Thanks."
Zoey turned away from the doorway and went to the kitchen.
Bruce was already there, standing in front of the stove like he'd been generated there by the universe specifically to make breakfast. He was in another gaming shirt, this one featuring a character from some RPG that Zoey vaguely recognized, and he was doing something with eggs and a pan that involved a lot of butter.
"Morning," he said without turning around.
"Morning."
"Eggs?"
"Sure."
"Scrambled or fried?"
"Scrambled."
"Toast?"
"Yeah."
"Butter or dry?"
"Butter."
"Chocolate milk?"
"Please."
He set a plate in front of her. Eggs, toast, a glass of chocolate milk that he'd poured without asking because he knew how much she preferred it.
"Sleep okay?" Bruce asked, settling into the chair across from her with his own plate.
"Yeah. Long."
"That's good. Your body's catching up."
Zoey bit into her toast. Chewed. Swallowed. The food tasted great. That was something she'd noticed since waking up in the safehouse: food tasted more right than it had in a long time. Not better, necessarily, just more present. Like her taste buds had been dialed up a notch after the Oubliette, as if existing in a void where there was no food at all did something to your taste buds.
'Do you think our body and mahna is so weak because our body was like eating itself in there?' Inner Zoey wondered.
'I guess so? I doubt the thing would purposely try and keep us alive. It doesn't make sense to me.'
Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy for a thirteen-year-old, but Everett had been growing. He appeared in the kitchen doorway in the same pajamas from yesterday, hair sticking up in three different directions, phone already in his hand.
"Is there food?" he asked.
"Probably." Zoey said.
"Anything, I eat?" Everett dropped into his chair. Bruce was already up, already cracking more eggs, already back in the rhythm. "You look less dead today."
"I wasn't dead. I'm like in recovery." Zoey didn't know how to word it.
"I'm just saying." He scrolled through his phone with one hand while reaching for the orange juice with the other. "Yesterday you looked like you hadn't slept in a month. Today you only look like you haven't slept in two weeks."
"Everett," Bruce said mildly from the stove.
"What? It's a compliment. Kind of."
Zoey gave a tired smile. The talking was normal. The kitchen was normal. The eggs and the milk and the gaming shirt and the kid on his phone were all normal. It was so aggressively, relentlessly normal that it made the abnormal parts of her life feel like a fever dream. Had she really punched a daemon so hard that the shockwave registered on sensors across the continent? Had she really been sealed in a pocket dimension of absolute nothingness? Had she really opened the ninth gate of Overdraft and burned through so much mahna that her body had literally started to combust?
From the dining room, the monitor beeped.
Yeah. She had.
Breakfast was quiet after that. Just three people eating in a kitchen at eight in the morning on a regular day, with nothing urgent to say and nothing urgent to do.
Everett finished first and disappeared upstairs to do whatever thirteen-year-old millionaire streamers did at eight-thirty in the morning. Bruce washed the dishes. Zoey sat at the counter with her hands wrapped around the milk mug, feeling the heat through the ceramic, watching steam curl upward in thin wisps that caught the morning light from the kitchen window.
"I'm going to try going to the gym tomorrow," she said.
"Okay," he said. "You sure you're ready?"
"No. But I'm not going to get ready by sitting around."
Bruce nodded. Turned back to the dishes. "Coach Scott called again yesterday while you were sleeping. Didn't say much. Just asked if you were home."
"What did you tell him?"
"Told him you were home and you'd call when you were up for it." Bruce set a plate on the drying rack. "He's been calling every few days since you left. He's worried."
Of course he was. Coach Scott, who had taken a skinny girl with no experience and turned her into a fighter. Who had watched her grow from someone who couldn't throw a proper jab to someone who could crack a heavy bag chain with a hook. Who had plans for her future.
"I'll go see him tomorrow," Zoey said.
"Good."
Bruce went upstairs. The kitchen was empty. The house was quiet except for the ever-present beeping from the dining room and the faint sound of Everett's keyboard through the ceiling. Zoey sat alone with her choco milk and her thoughts.
The Box. She pulled it up. In her mind, the way she always did. The familiar interface that had been with her since the day she'd found it, the invisible screen that only she could see, the system that had turned a scared, awkward seventeen-year-old into someone who could fight daemon kings.
[Status]
[Name: Zoey]
[Sex: Female]
[Body: 0.9]
[Mental: 3.5]
[Magic: 1.0]
[Skills: 17]
[Zoey's Victorious Boxing Lv10]
[Focus Lv12]
[Teaching Maxed]
[Abnormal Conditions Maxed]
[Endurance Maxed]
[Fighting Aura Lv7]
[Gaming Lv20]
[Mahna Manipulation Lv34]
[Combo Magji Maxed]
[Twisting Force Maxed]
[Mahna Gathering Bomb Lv8]
[Overdraft Maxed]
[Dash Lv2]
[Flexibility Lv2]
[Friends of the Oppressed Maxed]
[Meditation Lv2]
[First-Aid Lv1]
Zoey stared at the numbers and felt something cold settle into the center of her chest.
Body: 0.9.
Zero point nine.
She'd been at twenty. Twenty. A number that had taken her months of grinding, fighting, bleeding, pushing her body past breaking points that normal humans didn't have names for. Twenty meant she could punch through walls. Twenty meant she could take hits from A-Grade magjistars and keep standing. Twenty meant she was, pound for pound, one of the most physically capable beings on the planet, a girl in a body that the Box had refined and strengthened and pushed to heights that should have been impossible for someone her size.
Zero point nine meant she was back to the start pretty much. She'd lost almost ninety percent of her physical capability.
The mental stat was the same. Three point five. Unchanged. Her brain hadn't been damaged by the Oubliette or the ninth gate, at least not in ways the Box could measure. Small mercies. Zoey definitely didn't need to become any dumber.
Magic: 1.0.
That one stung differently. Her mahna reserves had been at 15.5, a number that had let her use Overdraft, cast barriers, charge her fists with enough mahna to level buildings. Now it was 1.0. Not zero, which meant her body was still producing mahna, still refilling the reserves that the ninth gate had burned through like a wildfire through dry grass. But 1.0 was normal, she figured. The starting point.
And the skills.
Zoey scrolled through the list. Every skill was still there. Every single one. Victorious Boxing at Level 10. Focus at 12. Teaching, Abnormal Conditions, Endurance, Combo Magji, Twisting Force, Overdraft, all maxed. The knowledge, the technique, the years of muscle memory and combat instinct and hard-won experience, all of it was intact. The Box hadn't taken any of that. It couldn't. Skills weren't physical. They were something else, something written deeper than bone and muscle, something that existed in the space between thought and action where the real learning happened.
She knew everything. She could probably still execute all of it.
Zoey closed the Box. The numbers vanished. The cold feeling in her chest stayed.
Zero point nine.
She'd started at 0.3 when she first found the Box. A normal, untrained, slightly out-of-shape teenager with no athletic background beyond running from her own problems. 0.3. And she'd ground her way up from there, one punch at a time, one fight at a time, one stat point at a time, from a girl who couldn't do ten push-ups to a woman who could bench press multiple cars.
Zero point nine was higher than where she'd started. Of course it could be worse. It could always be worse. The Oubliette could have held her forever. The ninth gate could have killed her. The re-entry could have turned her into a smear across the atmosphere. It could have been so much worse that 0.9 should feel like a blessing.
She'd done it once. She could do it again. The grind didn't scare her. It never had. Even back when she was a nobody with a 0.3 Body stat and a terror of two magjistars at school who she'd seen doing magic in an empty classroom, she'd walked into a gym and started punching things. Not because she was brave. Because she was scared and being scared was worse than being tired and hitting a bag until your knuckles bled was better than sitting at home waiting for someone to find you and do whatever magic people did to people who saw things they weren't supposed to see.
She pushed off the counter. Went to the sink. Washed her mug. Dried it. Put it in the cabinet. Closed the cabinet.