They'd given Danica and Mark some space. Though they stayed close enough to be there if something went wrong, they were far enough away to let the reunion be what it needed to be. Atlas had watched the moment Danica hit Mark hard enough to stagger him, watched Mark catch her without hesitating, and had looked away after that.
He found a table near the edge of the room, one that gave him sightlines to the main entrance, the portal wall, and the gem-inset counters along the far side. Old habit from back in the foster home. Rhea had chosen the same angle without discussion.
His interface had been sitting in the corner of his vision for hours, patient and undemanding, waiting for him to deal with it. The two unassigned skills blinked at the edge of it like a question he didn't have a good answer for. He'd pulled up the options maybe a dozen times. Read the first few entries. Closed it again.
In a game, picking a skill was a fifteen-second decision. You went with what sounded good, adapted if it didn't work out, started over if you had to. He'd always played that way, off instinct, off feeling, chasing the build that interested him rather than the one that optimized him. But this wasn't a game, and the wrong choice meant something real, and the people who depended on him making the call correctly were sitting six feet away.
He closed the interface again.
"Nia."
She looked up from the small flame rotating between her fingers.
"Skill selection." He opened the interface and turned it toward her, which felt slightly absurd since she couldn't actually see his overlay, but the gesture seemed to land anyway. "I've been staring at it for three hours."
Nia set the flame down, it hung in the air briefly before dissolving, and held out her hand. "Tell me your class parameters. What the System gave you at selection and what you've acquired since."
He ran through it. Light Warrior, archer focus, the two passive skills that had come standard with the class, the one he'd earned mid-dungeon when he'd held a choke point for twenty minutes with nothing but a makeshift barricade and considerably more arrows than he'd expected to need.
Nia listened without interrupting, which from her was a form of focused attention that most people had to earn.
"Did you use a bow before?" she asked when he finished.
"Some. Camp counselor thing when I was seventeen. Nothing serious."
She nodded slowly. "Then you already have most of what the System's archery track would give you. Muscle memory encodes differently here — it reads what you already know and builds from it rather than starting over. Buying into that line now would give you marginal returns." She tilted her head. "What did you actually do well in your dungeon? Not what you planned. What worked."
Atlas thought about it honestly. "Positioning. I knew where things were going to be before they got there."
"Threat assessment?"
"Crowd control. Knowing which one to take first."
Nia's expression shifted in the way it did when something fit a pattern she'd been working on. "Tactical Foresight. It's a composite skill — reads as rare because most people don't have the right combination of prerequisite instincts when they come through. It builds on what you already have rather than teaching from scratch." She paused. "The System will offer it to you if you look in the advanced filter. It won't be in the standard list."
Atlas opened the interface again, found the filter she meant, and scrolled until the skill appeared. He read the description twice.
[SKILL Description: Tactical Foresight — Composite | Passive]
Tactical Foresight reads the battlefield before the battle exists — mapping threat vectors, identifying priority targets, and flagging movement patterns before they fully resolve. The user does not calculate these things consciously. They simply know where to look, and they are rarely wrong about what they find there.
Effect: Passive threat assessment running at all times. Threat priority automatically sorted by lethality, proximity, and behavioral pattern. Enhanced awareness of flanking angles, chokepoints, and structural vulnerabilities in any environment. Reaction time to anticipated threats significantly reduced.
Advancement Note: This skill evolves through engagement, not repetition. Novel threats accelerate growth. Known threats maintain it. Ignored threats degrade it.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"That's it," he said.
"Yes," she agreed, in the tone of someone who had known that approximately forty seconds ago.
He confirmed the selection, felt the quiet internal click of something slotting into place, and closed the interface. One skill left. He'd figure that one out himself.
"Thanks," he said.
Nia had already retrieved her flame. "You would have gotten there," she said. "I just removed the inefficiency."
"So," he said, tilting his chair back slightly, "are we going to talk about the walking red flag, or are we doing the thing where we pretend a woman with literal mind-control magic isn't going to be a problem?"
Rhea, positioned with her back to the corner and her eyes on the room, didn't look at him. "We're talking about it. That's why we're waiting."
Nia looked up from the flame. "New conflicts follow people who carry them. Joining with someone who has unresolved enemies means inheriting the blast radius."
Atlas nodded. "Drama attracts drama."
Nia looked faintly pained but didn't disagree. "That's not my concern."
He watched her. He'd learned a long time ago that when Nia shifted registers, you paid attention, because she only did it when she was about to say something she'd been working up to.
"New variables can be useful," she said. "I don't object to the group expanding." Her fingers had gone still on the table, which for Nia was the equivalent of someone else taking a breath before a hard sentence. "But we cannot separate. Whatever happens with Danica's group, whatever we build here — we don't split up. The three of us stay together." She looked at Atlas directly, green eyes level. "The world is different now. If we come apart in this, we may not find each other again." A pause. "That outcome is unacceptable to me."
The table was quiet.
He knew how Nia worked. She didn't say I'm scared of losing you, she'd translated that feeling into its functional components so long ago the translation had become its own language, and it was the only one she had for this. He'd stopped needing the other version years ago.
He nudged her shoulder with his. "Could've warned me before you went for the gut."
She frowned. "That was a reasoned assessment based on probability and—"
"Yeah," he said. "I know. We stick together." He held her gaze. "Like we promised."
Something in her posture eased by a fraction.
"Like we promised," she agreed.
Rhea had been listening without speaking. She shifted slightly, arms still crossed but her stance no longer quite so braced. "Danica's loyal," she said. Not a character reference, a conclusion she'd reached and was offering as data. "First thing she did when I came through the portal was ask if I could move. Not who I was. Not what happened. Whether I was still functional."
Atlas looked at her. "She healed you."
"She did." Rhea's fingers tightened slightly against her own arm. "It wasn't like anything I've felt before. Cold — not painful, just wrong in a way that took a minute to stop noticing. But it worked."
A beat of quiet settled between them. Atlas had an understanding of what it worked meant coming from Rhea, because Rhea did not describe things in terms of whether they worked unless the alternative had been genuinely on the table.
"How bad were you hurt?" he asked.
Her jaw shifted slightly. "Bad enough that I wasn't sure I could stand up on my own when she found me. Bad enough that I was willing to let a complete stranger cast a spell on me in the small hope it would help."
He didn't push further. He didn't need to. Talking with Rhea about some things was like walking a minefield and he'd learned not to push when Rhea drew that particular line. Atlas turned his attention somewhere safer.
He thought about the healing potion. The last twenty minutes of his dungeon, his legs threatening to give out, and then the moment his wounds closed and they didn't. He'd made it to the portal. He was fairly sure that was why. He hadn't known someone else had paid for it until Rhea told him.
He thought about what that meant in practical terms. She hadn't known his dungeon type. Hadn't known his class or his load-out or how far gone he was. She'd made a calculation with incomplete information and spent real credits on the result. Credits she'd apparently earned the hard way and spent in a single afternoon on people she'd never met.
The thing that kept snagging on him was the timing. Before she'd known anything about them. Before she'd known if any of them were worth the investment or if they were even going to make it through.
He thought about Nia's hug. Nia, who did not hug people she'd known less than a year as a rule, who had wrapped her arms around a near-stranger and meant every second of it. That had told him what he needed to know. He'd just wanted to hear Rhea say it.
"She sent supplies," he said. "Before she knew anything about us."
Rhea nodded.
"Before she knew if we were worth it."
"Before she knew if any of us were coming through at all," Rhea said.
"In this world," Rhea said, "loyalty is going to be worth more than almost anything else. And it's going to be the hardest thing to verify."
"And you've verified it," Atlas said.
She looked at him — that look, the one he'd never found a word for and had stopped trying.
"I've verified it," she said.
Atlas held it for one beat, then let his gaze drift back to the room. He could count people like that on one hand. Looked like he needed to make room.
"Then I guess we know where we stand."
It wasn't certainty. But it was enough to start.
Rhea turned back to her scan of the space, and if her shoulders were slightly less rigid than they'd been when she sat down, neither of them mentioned it.
Across the room, something had shifted at the other table. Mark had apparently said something, Atlas caught the tail end of a gesture that suggested it had involved significant dramatic license, and the response it got was unexpected. Danica laughed. A real one, slightly uneven, the sound of someone whose relief was still fresh enough to catch her off guard. Mark's face did the thing faces did when they'd been waiting a long time to produce that specific result.
Even Mark's familiar’s tail flickered, violet sparks drifting briefly upward before settling.
Atlas heard it and thought: yeah, we're going to be okay.
He didn't say it out loud because it was the kind of thing that got jinxed.
But he thought it.