Lio is not in the Cradle anymore.
The space is larger. It's a cavernous antechamber, maybe fifteen meters across, with walls of rough-cut stone, the kind of work done by people moving ore rather than building anything meant to last. Rusted brackets are set into the rock at intervals (whatever they once held is gone). Faint veins of luminescent ore pulse in the mortar cracks, slow and rhythmic, the only light. The floor is uneven, worn into shallow grooves by something heavy dragged repeatedly in the same direction. Ahead, a single exit tunnel opens into the dark. Somewhere in that dark, distant, a flicker.
He stays on the floor for a moment longer than necessary. His hands are on cold stone. His knees ache from the impact. The specific wrongness of it (real weight, real cold, no padding) is something the simulations never landed correctly, and he is filing that gap away with the rest of the things that turned out to matter more than he thought.
Ten seconds. He gives himself ten seconds to be a person and check what other information the HUD has for him.
The HUD is like a second pair of eyes: overlays only he can see, projected directly into his optic nerve, crisper and more intimate than any mock-up. He'd expected it to feel external, like a screen. It feels more like a thought that arrived formatted.
(...)
VOCATION: Ally
KEY: Stasis
STRANDS: 0 / 32
LIFESTRANDS: 0
GRADE: 0
INTEGRITY: 64 / 64
FLUX: 64 / 64
KINETIC INPUT: 8 OUTPUT: 8
QUANTUM INPUT: 8 OUTPUT: 8
SYNAPTIC INPUT: 8 OUTPUT: 8
AXIAL INPUT: 8 OUTPUT: 8
(...)
He reads it twice.
Everything at eight. Every I/O. It's a perfect lattice of sameness: nothing dominant, nothing trailing.
He knows what this means. Every standard Vocation auto-assigns half their Grade points the moment the Key binds. A Vanguard's Kinetic Output is already pulling ahead. A Sentinel's Kinetic Input is already a wall. A Savant's Quantum Output is already loaded. The system reads your Vocation and immediately starts building you toward what you're supposed to become.
The Ally gets no automatic direction whatsoever.
Why not Axial Output? he wonders, before he can stop himself. Axial is about the things an Ally is supposed to do. It would make sense. It would be the obvious call.
The sheet doesn't answer him. The sheet is just flat.
He reads it a third time, looking for the thing he missed.
There isn't one.
The Integrity and the Flux pool shows 64. Eight times eight. The same number, over and over. This is a pattern the Lattice follows. He knows this from the briefings.
Flux is not regenerating passively without more Synaptic Input. Flux powers Protocols, and when Mesh unlocks it will sustain his support links across every active member of whatever party he manages to join. More capacity means longer uptime. More uptime means more contribution.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
He dismisses the HUD. Breathes.
Before the tunnel, one thing.
He needs to know what he's working with.
He focuses the activation intent. The rings pulse once, sharp... ...and the world screams.
Everything moves. The dust motes don't hang, they streak. The ore-veins don't pulse, they strobe, cycling through three full beats in the time it takes him to register the first. Something in the tunnel, the distant flicker he'd been tracking, resolves and vanishes in under a second: a shape, fast, gone before he can name it.
He tries to move. His body responds normally, his hand comes up, his weight shifts, but normal is useless when the world is running sixty-four times faster than he can read it. He turns his head and the tunnel has already changed. He takes a breath and the ore-veins have already cycled again.
One second and it stops.
The world settles back to its usual speed. He is standing against the wall, hand half-raised, lungs mid-breath, with the specific disorientation of someone who just tried to act inside a situation they couldn't parse.
One of the rings has changed. The amber line along its surface is gone, just dark metal now, flat all the way around.
He checks the HUD.
STASIS KEY [Semaphore / Ally]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
On activation, dilates time around the bearer.
The bearer experiences 1 second within 64 seconds.
CHARGES: 7 / 8 [+1 in 524,286s]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
"Time unfolds slower when it folds."
One second.
He was conscious for all of it. He could move. He could act. The Key didn't take anything from him. The world was simply moving too fast to do anything with. Sixty-four seconds of external time compressed into one, and he spent that second watching everything blur past him before he could get his hands up.
He stares at the readout.
What, the hell, he thinks with great precision, is the point of that?
He pushes himself back to his feet and takes stock.
The Stasis Key is useless. It's not broken. The dilation is working exactly as stated. The problem is him: one second of his time against a world running sixty-four times faster means everything he tries to respond to is already gone before he finishes the motion. He can act inside it. He just can't act usefully inside it.
He has seven charges left. He will not be testing it again today.
He has one Protocol: Mesh. It is locked. The HUD is explicit about how to unlock it: Join a Squad. But he is currently one person in a stone room. The only Protocol he has is sitting behind a door that requires another human being to open.
He has no starter Catalysts. He has no starter Anchors.
The tunnel is making sounds. Faint skittering, picking up, drawn by the noise (maybe), or the stillness, or whatever passes for ecological attention in a Grade 1 Node. Low-threat, almost certainly. Something he could handle badly or not at all.
He straightens. The plan assembles itself, grim but workable.
Ally is the worst possible Vocation in a Semaphore pool of eight. Solo scaling is trash with no damage ceiling, no self-buffs that function without a party to attach them to. The Key is clearly a liability. His Vocation requires other people to really start, and he is currently alone in a stone antechamber with something skittering toward him.
But it isn't permanent. Not if he plays it correctly.
He needs a Keystone. That's the path. It's the only known way to get a fresh Reading, a chance for the system to assess his pattern again and land into some Vocation with a Key he can actually use. Keystones are rare, but grindable, at least theoretically. He can join a Squad, cover whatever minor support the Ally kit produces at low Grade, survive long enough to access better content. He would need a year, maybe, two, if the Keystone proves difficult to obtain. That's survivable. What a waste of time...
He knows the risk. A new Reading isn't guaranteed to be different. The system reads the same pattern and might produce the same Key. But it's better than spending years as a support, watching a Key he can't use accumulate charges he can't spend.
He rolls his shoulders. Grips the wall once, hard, until his knuckles stop shaking.
The tunnel isn't waiting.