Chapter 28: Drifting Time

Delivering the stuffed jackalope to Melissa began one of the happiest periods of Rick's life. She laughed hysterically when she saw the jackalope, remembering when he'd pretended that he didn't get it and finding it just as funny as he'd hoped. For the next week she kept setting it in different positions around the house, putting objects in its jaws or taping things to its paws. Seeing her delight in the stupid present put him in an excellent mood.

The rest of his life was flowing smoothly too, in a way it almost never had since he'd realized that he couldn't rely on his parents. Though he still hadn't managed to crack the top ten in the rankings, he was doing quite well at work. The normal paychecks alone were far more money than he was used to getting, and when he got a bonus of almost 20,000 lucrim it just seemed insane.

Overall he felt ridiculously rich, even though he knew that wasn't true. Compared to his extended family, he was certainly swimming in cash. Unfortunately, Uncle Alan and some others heard he was doing well and tried to beg money off him, but he managed to put them off.

No, nearly all of that money went straight into the bank or into his own development. He kept biking everywhere, eating cheaply, and not wasting anything. Once or twice he and Melissa ate from their favorite Chinese place, though now that he was drawing a normal salary he realized how cheap it really was. But it was good, and they enjoyed it, and that was the only value that mattered to him.

So far he'd managed to collect over 35,000 lucrim in the bank. That seemed like a ludicrous amount of money to just have sitting there, but it was still far short of the 100,000 he'd need for a fighter deposit on an apartment. It irritated him not to invest that money back into his own strength, but he told himself that this was part of growing up. Allegedly some paths required their acolytes to leave tens of thousands of lucrim in unused generation rate just sitting in a lucrim mass until the proper moment.

Still, eventually he hoped it would come together. He could move into a better apartment and not tell anyone in his extended family except Uncle Frank. Then he could stay focused on his work and start investing his salary back into himself. Maybe he'd even convince Delsin to train him and he'd learn something useful.

Dating Emily proved much less stressful than he'd feared. She had a spiky outer shell, but as she grew comfortable with him, the spines weren't directed toward him so much. The relationship wasn't terribly intimate, but it was comfortable. Once when they watched a movie at her place, he'd been anxious that she was propositioning him, but Emily just fell asleep lying against his side. The ease she felt with him and the soft presence of her sleeping against him were incredibly satisfying.

There hadn't been anything interesting at work, so she hadn't gone with him, but for a few of their dates they sparred together. She was all burning intensity there and he welcomed the chance to test his defensive core against her aura blades. At full strength they'd deal serious injuries, but he could endure a weakened version and he was getting tougher.

Delsin's advice about his foundation proved to be correct: all his biking had been strengthening his foundation. It had been a while since he'd done the Buffet's Buffer exercise, since his core had been cut to the bone, but now he had new lucrim gains to harvest. He resisted the urge to invest them and instead set them aside in a separate mass, just in case Delsin changed his mind.

He didn't see the old man so frequently anymore, since they'd finally found and eliminated the last of the lucrim anomalies in the Peakless Wildlife Refuge. The anomaly Delsin showed him in return was extremely vague, not much better than surveying randomly. It seemed like the old man knew it and chewed on the debt between them irritably.

Mostly Rick's work was boring, but he'd gotten better at meditating while doing the survey technique. Between that and all the biking, his daily shifts were also workouts, leaving his other hours more free than before. That time was quickly absorbed by Emily and Melissa, but that wasn't a problem - what was the point of saving time, if not to spend it with people he cared about?

On one occasion he'd stumbled across a small warren of jackalopes and expected a fight, but there weren't many. He let them attack him for a while, hoping that his defensive core had grown enough to ignore their antlers. All he got out of it was a lot of cuts, a bit of humility... and a bit more growth of his defensive core.

Once while surveying for an anomaly he ran across a coyote with a broken leg. He didn't think that it was a lucrim-using creature at all, just a normal animal, but he still used the cage to capture it. Back at the Refuge, Wemilat confirmed that it was just a normal coyote, but said that he could nurse it back to health.

That time he did run into Delsin again, the old man just grunting something about improving his foundation and gathering more lucrim. It almost sounded like he was coming around to training him, but Rick didn't want to press his luck.

Unfortunately, not everything was positive. Sparring with Lisa had become strange. She was still friendly, yet space had grown between them. Once they had spent less time talking about details of technique and wandered into personal topics, yet now she kept things far more professional. Though she was still his favorite client, the sessions always left a bad taste in his mouth.

He realized with a mild sense of irony that starting dating had actually made his life a lot more technically focused. When he was with Emily they talked about lucrim a lot of the time, and now that Lisa was focusing on skill and Melissa was preparing for her exams, every part of his life was consumed by it. Though he didn't mind, he did think about it more often than he expected.

In any case, he couldn't doubt that Lisa continued supporting him, and he did his best to support her with all her mixture experiments. He had Melissa join in with some of them, plus he got Emily to give him another can of the EthCorp Bioenergetic Restorative. Though Lisa thanked him, she was much more reserved after that and he wished that he hadn't done it.

She was getting better, though, her mixtures providing more of a boost. Combined with his new salary, he was growing faster than he expected. Not explosively, and nothing compared to a Birthright Core, but he enjoyed it.

Would it be enough, just to enjoy growing and spending time with people he cared about? Was that a full life? It was certainly more than most people in Rick's family had, yet he wasn't sure. For so much of his life he'd been scrambling just to get by, so having options was strange. The more people he met, the more he got the sense that almost everyone was just struggling to get by. Fighters most of all, driven by a world of endless competition and little thought.

Other than quotas at work, where he was well ahead of the minimums, there was only one major deadline in his life: Melissa's CLAT examination. As it drew closer he put extra effort into helping her polish her portfolio so that she'd be ready for anything.

As the day drew close and she showed him her portfolio, he felt a real sense of pride:

[Name: Melissa Hunter

Ether Tier: 18th

Ether Score: 203 (preliminary score)

Lucrim Generation: 17,350

Current Lucrim: 17,350]

[Melissa Hunter's Lucrima Portfolio

Foundation: 3500 (Lv II)

Steel Lucore: 5700 (Lv IV)

Combat Core: 4300 (Lv III)

Secondary Combat Core: 3850 (Lv I)

Total Lucrim: 17,350]

His only regret was that he hadn't ever found the time to help her invest her extra lucrim into a truly fitting Lucore. Instead they'd set up a secondary combat core, which was just to put her in peak condition for the CLAT. Afterward it wouldn't be difficult to liquidate it and find a technique more fitting for her. Melissa didn't seem to care, though, just pleased with the rapid growth that came with first gaining a mature lucrima soul.

Hopefully she would keep growing at a faster rate than he had. She wouldn't be trapped working at the House of the Cosmic Fist - where she continued to burn clients when she could get away with it. She wouldn't be stuck on the bottom rung of society with no qualifications. The world was really open to her, especially if she did well on the exams.

In fact, at this stage a tiny amount of lucrim wasn't going to do her any more good, so in their final days, as he saw the tension start to creep in, he made sure to take time to help her relax. They went out to eat ice cream at a place they hadn't since they were kids, he got her a massage with Lisa, and they stayed at home and watched Fist of the Sublime yet again.

One night after Melissa went to bed, Rick pulled up the CSLA page again. It had actually been a while since he'd checked the scoreboard, since his life had just been too full of positive things to care about a list. He was shocked to find that he'd just scraped into the top ten.

[1) Pan Zhou - 194 merits

2) [redacted] - 192 merits

3) Kate Durham - 183 merits

4) Damian - 174 merits

5) Heidi Cunningham - 171 merits

6) Elliot Rutherford III - 164 merits

7) Jack Ganess - 163 merits

8) Machk Bearan - 158 merits

8) Oswaln - 158 merits

10) Rick Hunter - 153 merits]

The next three people were at 150, 147, and 141 merits, though, so he couldn't relax. Or... maybe he could. He was already getting solid bonuses, so was it worth breaking his back just to get slightly higher ones? Rick decided that it would be better to focus on Melissa and help her through the CLAT. He could afford to take some days off work and go with her, just as moral support.

Content, Rick put his phone away and shifted to fall asleep. Just before he did so, his phone beeped a notification. He sat up to get it, since it might be Emily texting something funny before bed. She wasn't an affectionate texter at all, but when she was up late she tended to send him random things.

Instead, he saw a message from the CSLA insisting that he call as soon as possible. Rick stared at it and very nearly put the phone down. Yet after a while, he decided that he couldn't ignore it - the organization was his boss, after all. Instead he padded out the entrance hallway so he wouldn't wake up Melissa with the conversation and stepped out onto the apartment complex walkway.

It was colder outside than he expected. Gritting his teeth, Rick called the indicated number. They picked up on the first ring.

"Thank you for answering." It sounded like the woman who administered things, who he hadn't seen or heard from in some time. "I'm afraid that something has come up and we're going to need to call the top candidates in for some additional work. You'll be compensated accordingly, of course."

"What's wrong?" Rick rubbed his arm holding the phone with the other, trying to ward off the chill outside. "Not something like the reaction you showed us at the beginning, is it? Couldn't you just squash that?"

"The risk is the same: an out of control reaction near the city. But this one is more complicated, entangled with demonic business interests. If we react too aggressively, their corporations will move to block us, and that would be an inconvenience for the Central States Lucrim Authority."

"So that's the reason you're sending us in?"

"Just the top ten candidates."

Rick grimaced. If only he had done a little less well, he could have skipped this entirely. Yet as he thought about it, he decided that he didn't want to be involved anyway. Something about their approach rubbed him the wrong way: sending the top ten at the problem instead of a far more powerful specialist struck him as throwing bodies at the problem.

Maybe it was another test, maybe it was a sacrifice, maybe some kind of power play between human and demonic corporations. He didn't care. Everything in his life was going wonderfully and he didn't want to ruin that. So after shaking the cold off, Rick answered in as confident a voice as he could. "Sorry, but I don't think I'm qualified to help with something like that. I'll pass."

"Of course." Her voice actually had a bit of emotion: troublingly sweet. "Your contract doesn't require you to participate in any extraordinary events such as this, after all. However, you should know that participating will be worth over 100 merits in the rankings... and not participating will deduct 100 merits from your total and 50 from this month's quota."

He froze, the night air around him suddenly biting deep. For a while, he'd let all the positive things in his life lull him into a sense of peace, but the CSLA was a corporation. It had no mercy or humanity.

"Will you choose to participate, then?" She asked the question, but it was no question at all. He tried to calculate if he could take that hit to the month and still make his quota. It didn't seem likely.

"Yes."

"Wonderful." With that, she hung up, leaving him in the cold dark. Rick stayed outside for a long time before he went back inside.