Raphael stood there and, for once, had nothing to say.
He had never been particularly equipped for this kind of moment.
He could trust Evelyn completely, had trusted her with his back in situations where that trust was literally the only thing keeping him alive, but closeness of a different kind was foreign territory.
Which was part of why he hadn't told her about the stone tablet. Hadn't told anyone. Some things stayed internal until he understood them himself.
He put his arms around her anyway, gently, and held her for a moment.
While he did, he was thinking about the synchronization rate.
No notification. The percentage hadn't moved. He waited a beat longer to be sure, then filed the observation away with something that was almost, not quite, but almost, disappointment.
So synchronization wasn't the same as proximity. Wasn't a measure of how close two people stood to each other or what they did with that closeness.
He was quietly relieved by this. The alternative would have made the bond between them into something transactional, something that could be gamed, and that would have changed what it was.
He didn't want it changed.
The footsteps in the corridor came fast and light, the way Eva's always did, accompanied by her voice carrying through the door before she'd bothered to knock on it.
"Evelyn? You up? Come on, let's eat."
Raphael raised an eyebrow and gave Evelyn's shoulder a small push. She made a sound that could generously be described as acknowledging him and held on.
The door clicked open.
Eva stood in the frame wearing the same casual home clothes she seemed to exist in outside of missions, a bag of chips in one hand. She looked at the two of them. Her jaw dropped by approximately one centimeter.
Her finger came up. It pointed. The expression on her face communicated, without any words at all, a very specific question about the nature of their relationship.
"...Evelyn. That's enough."
Evelyn bent neatly at the waist, slipped free, and crossed the room to Eva's side in a few quick steps. She looked back at Raphael with her head tilted.
"Come on, Hunter. The food here is genuinely good."
Eva made a thoughtful sound and fell into step beside her, the look on her face taking on a particular quality.
"Did I come at a bad time?"
Evelyn smiled and didn't answer.
The cafeteria was smaller than Raphael had expected, a clean, warmly arranged room that felt more like a quiet restaurant than a military facility.
Red Gloves units cycled through on irregular schedules, which meant at any given hour there were maybe two or three teams eating at once.
The solution had been to make it available around the clock, staffed and ready regardless of when someone came through the door.
No buffet line. You ordered. The menu rotated through a reasonable variety, with customization options that reflected the fact that Red Gloves members came from every corner of the Federation.
Eva had explained this on the walk over, along with the observation that when your unit had a sixty-five percent fatality rate, the organization tended to make the quality-of-life provisions fairly generous.
Raphael put together something slightly unusual from the available options. While they waited, the three of them had nothing pressing to do, so they talked.
Business first.
"You probably don't know this yet," Evelyn said, setting a sheet of plain white paper on the table.
Raphael recognized it, the same kind she'd been holding during the investigation. "Red Gloves compensation runs on a merit system, not a salary."
She closed her eyes.
The paper filled with text.
Not slowly, not neatly, all at once, dense and overlapping, the contents of her mind pouring onto the surface in layers that crossed and contradicted and rearranged themselves at a pace that made it difficult to follow.
Words dissolved and reformed. Threads untangled, merged, ran parallel for a moment before finding a common line.
By the time the motion settled, what was on the paper read like a reference document.
On the Merit System.
Each completed mission generates accumulated merit for the unit, scaled to difficulty, complications encountered, and duration.
Merit functions as currency redeemable for cash, supplementary potions, runes, weapons, and contracted Demon materials including Demon Cores.
Mission difficulty runs from F- to S+ in ascending order, with corresponding merit values. Individual contribution during a mission is calculated separately based on the bounty value of confirmed kills, 1,000 Federation coin equals 1 contribution point.
Raphael read it through.
"That's the Profiler ability?"
Evelyn opened her eyes, looking mildly surprised. She nodded.
"One application of it. The Profiler is a contracted Demon, it helps me organize what's in my head and render it into something legible.
Useful during investigations, mostly. It maps the thinking rather than doing the thinking."
He filed that away and decided this was as good an opening as any.
"I've never had a complete picture of how the leveling system actually works. Could you walk me through it? Use the ability if it helps."
The system he operated through didn't look like something that was distributed to everyone. The other operatives in the organization called it experience. They didn't call it Sin.
Whatever the stone tablet had connected him to predated IFSA's understanding of it, possibly by a considerable margin.
Evelyn considered for a moment, then slid the paper across to Eva instead.
"I have some unusual variables on my end. Better if she explains the baseline, the ability works on other people too, as long as they're open to it."
Eva didn't seem unfamiliar with the process. She closed her eyes. An invisible hand began its work on the paper.
On the Contract System.
Advancement through levels requires two conditions: sufficient experience, and a contract with a supernatural entity.
The entity may be a Demon, Angel, spirit, or in certain cases a witch. Without a contract, the arcane circuit cannot be established and transcendence cannot occur.
Level 1 requires no experience, the circuit forms immediately upon signing.
From Level 2 onward, both accumulated experience and a contract with an entity of at least equivalent level are required.
Experience is understood to derive from combat, with higher-level opponents yielding proportionally greater amounts.
Raphael read it and set the paper down.
So the organization knew the mechanism existed but not what it was made of.
Experience was a placeholder for something they couldn't measure directly.
The system he carried had a different name for it, a different logic underlying it, and apparently a scope that extended far beyond any single hunter.
Raphael Alanster, the hunt begins.
That line had stayed with him since the first night. Not welcome to the system. Not you have been selected.
The hunt had already been in progress when he arrived. He was a participant, not an originator.
Three hunting grounds. Demon, Witch, Sinner, between them covering most of what the transcendent world contained. All of them potential targets.
His eyes moved to Evelyn without fully deciding to.
The question that had been sitting at the back of his mind resurfaced. Her Cardinal Sin was Luxuria.
This woman who wore a nun's veil as a matter of habit, who spoke with the unhurried warmth of someone who had never been in a hurry.
Who had spent the better part of a decade in one of the most demanding combat roles the Federation had to offer, what in her mapped to that particular word?
Luxuria's traditional image was surface-level. But the seven sins as theological concepts ran deeper than their popular associations. The original definitions were more expansive, more abstract.
He picked up the white paper and held it out to Evelyn.
Then, for the first time, he used the Profiler ability himself, drawing on the synchronized skill rather than asking her to deploy it.
The ability moved through him strangely, a borrowed fluency in something he was still learning the shape of.
"Evelyn. One more thing I've been curious about." He held her gaze. "The definitions of the seven sins. The real ones, the philosophical ones." A beat. "Would you explain them to me?"
She looked back at him with that particular quality of attention she had, the kind that didn't perform itself, that simply was. The corner of her mouth moved.
On the paper, the characters shifted from noise into stillness, arranging themselves into a single line as she began to speak.
Cardinal Sin: Superbia.