The arcade’s main floor still buzzes. Matches flare and fade on half a dozen small pads, shouts and groans ricocheting off plastic and concrete. Screens loop ads between rounds—AstraForge merch, highlight reels, polished pros with pristine rigs.

  At the far back, past the vending machines and the faded CASUAL QUEUE sign, Naomi has carved out a pocket of quiet.

  Mason slows before he reaches her table.

  She’s already in postgame mode. Notebook open, lines of tight handwriting crawling down the page. Her rig arm rests on the tabletop, cable clipped into a portable dock that chews on match data, its tiny indicator light pulsing. A plastic cup of something iced sweats onto a napkin beside her elbow.

  He hesitates for half a breath, suddenly aware his own hands are still a little shaky.

  Naomi glances up.

  “You’re late.”

  “Late?” He pulls out the chair across from her.

  “I started annotations ten minutes ago.” She shifts the notebook so he can see the current page. “You’re already behind.”

  “Had to sign the slip for bracket updates, listen to Blitz Fang scream in my ear, get lectured by Denise.” He drops into the chair. “Busy, high?profile life.”

  One corner of her mouth moves. “Congratulations. They posted the win.”

  “So it wasn’t a mass hallucination.”

  “No.” Her pen taps the margin by a block of numbers. “It was very real. That’s why I’d like you to walk me through it.”

  Hearing it framed that way sends a small jolt through his chest. Not just “nice clutch,” but something worth dissecting.

  “Walk you through…what, exactly?” He leans in, trying to look casual. “Because if you want every dumb impulse that shot through my brain, I might need two notebooks.”

  “I’ve got more at home.”

  He can’t tell if she’s joking. Maybe a little.

  Naomi flips back a page. Columns of timestamps march down the paper, each with shorthand notes: B9–B12 R3 / C:18–13 / VF var ~.

  “Start with round one.” Her pen hovers over the margin. “Beat three. You had a micro?Opening when my Warden stepped off the initial grid line. You didn’t throw into it. Why?”

  The moment replays in his head: grid lines under Blitz Prowler’s paws, that first drag, Warden’s lumbering step forward. The faint tug in his stomach not to commit.

  “I didn’t trust it,” he says. “Looked like bait.”

  “It was.” Ink scratches across the page. “Specifically, I wanted you to burn a Tactic early so I could map your priorities. You passed, which meant either you didn’t see it, or you evaluated it as low value. I assumed the first during the match. That was an error.”

  “So you thought I missed it.” He squints at her notes. “Kind of insulting.”

  “I recalibrated by Beat five. By then it was clear you were processing grid friction instead of treating it as flavor.”

  “Big words for ‘you noticed I didn’t faceplant into your wall.’”

  “You’d be surprised how many players do.” She flips forward. “Round one, Beat seven. Ghostline Runner triple. You queued Lowline Gambit into an unscouted Trap radius. What were you thinking?”

  “Honestly?” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “I wanted to see what your traps looked like.”

  Her brow creases.

  “Everyone else here sets the obvious stuff,” he goes on. “Basic Roots, glass walls, the usual net. You’d already dropped Lattice and that charge siphon thing. I figured whatever you put under Warden wasn’t going to be stock.”

  “So you sacrificed a Tactic and half your creature’s health for information.”

  “That, and if it hit, I’d get to say I read you.” He gestures toward the arena. “Win?win. Or, uh. Win?lose.”

  Naomi’s pen pauses.

  “You call that intuition?” she asks.

  “Feels like it.” He shrugs. “I see a pattern and my brain yells ‘poke that.’ Sometimes I listen.”

  “Intuition is just compressed pattern recognition.” Her gaze lifts. “When you say ‘poke that,’ what you mean is ‘my subconscious flagged an anomaly.’ Naming it for what it is reduces the mystique.”

  “So my gut’s just a spreadsheet with bad UI.”

  “Essentially.” Her eyes go back to the page. “You’re very good at reading weird states even when the board tells you to sit still.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment?”

  “It is.”

  She flips to the spread marked R3. Round three gets its own grid of arrows and numbers.

  “Now. Beats nine to twelve.”

  His throat tightens. The clinch, Cliff Edge’s glow, Storm Sabre’s weight—everything from that last stretch feels sharper than the earlier rounds.

  “Beat nine,” she says. “You saw me tap my deck box.”

  “You saw me see you tap your deck box.”

  “Yes.” Something wry edges her tone. “That was new. Most people don’t notice micro?habits once the timer drops below four Beats. You broke off the Charge Sink line earlier than usual. Was that because of the tap?”

  He thinks back: tightness in her shoulders, Seal Zone blooming exactly where a straight?line player would dash.

  “Partly.” He shifts his cup. “And…you looked like you wanted it too much.”

  Her fingers still. “Wanted what?”

  “The textbook answer.” He taps the table. “That tidy ‘you overextend, I punish’ clip you can drop into a guide. There was this…click.” His knuckle raps the laminate. “Like the board lined up a little too clean on your side.”

  Naomi watches him for a second, then starts writing again, faster.

  “What?” he asks.

  “You’re using how I feel to supplement what you see,” she murmurs, half to herself. “That’s…not in any of my models.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It means you’re factoring my emotional investment into your decision tree.” She looks up. “Not just card text.”

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  “No. Most players are so spun around by their own nerves they barely register the other person except as numbers across the pad.”

  “Kind of depressing.”

  “Efficient,” she says, then adds, more quietly, “but limited. Which is why I lost.”

  “You mean because I read you?”

  “Because you forced me to consider that you were reading me.” Her pen taps the paper. “That polluted my control variables. I had to spend brainpower not broadcasting more tells, which meant less brainpower for full board calculations.”

  “English, please.”

  “My brain was busy with you when it usually only worries about cards,” she says. “It slowed me down. That’s not a complaint. It’s…new.”

  He sits with that, pride snagging on guilt.

  “I still feel like you had an answer somewhere,” he admits. “Like if you’d wanted to, you could’ve blown Sabre up and walked off with a clean 2–.”

  Her pen stops.

  “That’s not how this works.”

  “You literally told me you held back a response map.”

  “In that branch.” She slides the notebook so a little diagram between them is visible. “There is no ‘perfect’ line floating above the game. The decisions I made fit what I knew at each point. You punished them with decisions that fit what you knew. That is the game.”

  “So the secret tech you didn’t show—”

  “Was only optimal under assumptions that weren’t true anymore.” Her gaze is steady. “If I prime you to think your win was charity, you’ll play worse later. That would help me if we meet again, but it ruins the data. I don’t want that.”

  “Wow.” He leans back. “You really do think in data.”

  “Yes. Do you not?”

  “I think in ‘ow, that hurt, maybe don’t do that again.’”

  Her lips twitch, almost a smile. “I misclassified you.”

  “As what?”

  “Local Striker with decent tech and no discipline.” A small shrug. “The ‘decent tech’ part stands. The rest, inaccurate.”

  “You sure? Denise would back you up on the no discipline thing.”

  “Denise sees you as a walking safety risk. That’s different.”

  “She does not.”

  “She glared at you through the entire second round.”

  “She glares at everyone. It’s like…genetic.”

  Naomi glances toward the front counter.

  Denise is breaking up an argument between two middle?schoolers, one hand on her hip, the other on a confiscated deck box. The glare is indeed in full effect.

  “You have a point,” Naomi concedes.

  Something slams into the back of Mason’s chair.

  “Dude!”

  Blitz Fang Hoodie is suddenly there, grinning, hair in fresh disarray.

  “That clinch break?” Blitz says. “Half my brain fell out watching it. Clip’s already on three servers. You’re trending in, like, small?fish oceans.”

  “Small?fish oceans,” Mason repeats. “That a technical term?”

  “Means you’re legit now.” Blitz raps knuckles lightly against Mason’s rig band. “Also, Naomi? That grid into Drip sequence was disgusting. In a good way.”

  Naomi inclines her head. “Thank you.”

  “You two doing a breakdown?” Blitz peers at the notebook. “Nerds. Actual nerds. Love that for you.”

  In a blink they’re off again, yelling at someone across the room.

  “Sorry,” Mason says. “They’re…loud.”

  “Observation: you have a reliable hype section.” Naomi makes a small note. “That matters.”

  “Matters how?”

  “In long events, outside voices can steady you.” She taps her pen once. “People yelling your name makes it easier not to tilt.”

  “I’m not on a level where tilt matters.”

  “You’re in the regional feeder bracket. Tilt matters.”

  He rests his elbows on the table. “What about you? Anyone yelling your name besides math?”

  Her eyes flick toward the main aisle, then back.

  “I prefer quiet,” she says. “But I also didn’t expect to be playing past round one.”

  “You didn’t?” That throws him. “Why enter if you thought you’d just get knocked out?”

  “Data.” As if that explains everything.

  He waits.

  She sighs, a small release. “I can only model so much from VODs and patch notes. Live play gives different noise. I wanted a sample.”

  “You came here…for homework.”

  “For research,” she corrects. “There’s a difference.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “What exactly are you researching?”

  “Game theory. Resource optimization. How real?time decisions diverge from ideal models.” Her fingers smooth the paper edge. “I wanted fresh input.”

  “So you’re, like…writing a new rulebook in your head.”

  “A more accurate one.” She hesitates, then adds, “And not just for cards.”

  The way she says that pushes against his curiosity, but before he can pry, she flips to the last page.

  “Also,” she adds, almost as an afterthought, “I needed live data for my subscribers.”

  “Your what?”

  “Subscribers.” She glances up. “You’ve read my work.”

  “Read your—”

  “NP_Theory.” She says it like she’s bored with the name. “That’s me.”

  For a second, all the arcade noise feels like it drops a level.

  “Wait.” He leans in. “NP_Theory, like the ‘Why Drip Isn’t Actually Slow’ thread? And ‘Don’t Play Colossus Like a Blunt Object’? And that twenty?page rant about everyone misplaying Beat four?”

  “‘Rant’ is a strong word.” Her ears tint faintly pink. “It was structured criticism.”

  “I thought NP_Theory was some forty?year?old bored quant on a hedge fund desk.”

  “That’s…an oddly specific image.”

  “You write like you own a tie rack.”

  “I don’t own a tie rack.” She tilts her head. “Disappointed?”

  “A little?” He laughs, heat creeping up his neck. “No, just—okay. Sure. Rewriting my brain. I’ve been cribbing sideboard ideas off your posts since last season.”

  “That explains some of your list choices.” Her tone turns dry. “You didn’t credit properly.”

  “How was I supposed to know you were three tables away, scribbling on legal pads?” He waves at her notebook. “You use twelve?syllable words and reference obscure Japanese regionals. Forgive me for picturing someone who’s paid off a mortgage.”

  Her nose wrinkles. “A mortgage.”

  “Yeah. You know. Old, corporate, surrounded by spreadsheets.”

  She mutters something under her breath that definitely includes “mortgage.”

  “So…all those graphs,” he presses, “the Charge maps? That’s you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the spreadsheet that predicts when people panic?Drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I printed that thing,” he admits. “Highlighted it. There was color coding.”

  A tiny sound slips out of her, halfway to a laugh.

  “I’ll add you to the acknowledgments,” she says. “For boosting my metrics.”

  “If I’d known the person behind it was at my locals, I would’ve…shown up less.”

  “That would have hurt my dataset.”

  He quiets.

  “Speaking of data.” She taps a bulleted list. “Would you be willing to share more matches? I’m building a set on adaptive players.”

  “Adaptive how?”

  “Reactiveness. Pattern breaking. Resistance to common control lines.” Her pen underlines his name. “Players who don’t just memorize guides but improvise away from them.”

  “You mean you want to study me.”

  “Study with you.” She meets his eyes. “You get structured feedback. I get more logs from someone whose instincts don’t fit my usual buckets.”

  “That sounds…intense.”

  “It’s a fair trade. And your choice.”

  The last part takes some pressure out of his chest. No hint of “you owe me.” Just an offer.

  “Where does this all go?” he asks. “Just forum posts?”

  “For now.” Her expression tightens. “Eventually, maybe more.”

  “Like official work?”

  “Maybe.” A beat. “If I decide I can live with that.”

  He doesn’t know what that means, but he hears the caution.

  “I’m in,” he says. “If you want my…adaptive whatever.”

  “Good.” A small spark lights in her eyes. “I was going to ask even if you lost.”

  “Wow. Way to kill my ego.”

  “Your ego survived NP_Theory showing up in your bracket.” She caps her pen. “It’ll cope.”

  “Do I get any control over how brutally you roast my misplays online?”

  “No.”

  He groans.

  “You’ll be anonymized,” she adds. “Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  “Statistically, no one reads author notes.”

  “Except people like me.”

  “Then you’ll see yourself coming.” Her mouth twitches. “Adjust.”

  She uncouples the rig cable, closes the notebook with a snap.

  “I want a cleaner screen for VOD review. This setup is loud.”

  “Where were you thinking?”

  “There’s a café three blocks over with tolerable Wi?Fi.” She tucks the notebook into her bag. “We can pull the official VOD and my raw logs.”

  “We?” He arches a brow.

  “If you want feedback, come. If you’d rather hang out with Blitz Fang’s volume issues, that’s your call.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Accurate.”

  He glances toward the main floor. Blitz is already yelling at someone else’s match. Union Cap is arguing about priority rules with a kid half their height. Denise catches his eye from behind the counter, brows raised in a silent question.

  He tips his chin toward the door, then toward Naomi.

  Denise’s mouth tightens, then curls just enough to count as permission.

  “Lead the way, NP,” he says, standing.

  “Don’t call me that in public.”

  “Why, afraid of autograph hunters?”

  “Afraid of sponsorship reps.” Her tone goes flat. “Those are worse.”

  They weave through the aisles. A few players nod at Mason, one murmur of “nice clinch,” a thumbs?up at his rig band. He mutters thanks, but doesn’t slow.

  The door hisses shut behind them, trading neon noise for the low hum of the corridor’s air system. Fluorescent panels buzz overhead. A cluster of teens in school uniforms loiter near a vending bank, rigs hanging from their wrists.

  “Café’s this way.” Naomi angles left.

  He falls in beside her, adjusting his bag.

  “You’re really fine breaking down a match you lost?” he asks. “Right away?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there’s no cool?down where you go home and scream into a pillow?”

  “Why would I scream into a pillow?”

  “Because losing sucks?”

  “Losing is information.” She smooths a hand down her bag strap. “The spike of feeling after is information too. Unchecked, it just muddies decisions.”

  “You and your variables.”

  She glances back. “You’re not wrecked?”

  “I mean, my Core’s fine.” He taps his chest. “And my arm’ll stop buzzing.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  He stares ahead. A delivery truck rumbles past outside the glass doors. A billboard above the street cycles from a Sigil Clash promo to a banking app.

  “I thought about my dad for half a Beat before the clinch,” he says. “About what he’d say if I choked again in front of a crowd.”

  Naomi goes quiet.

  “What did he say last time?” she asks.

  “That I was wasting time.” He adds, “He’s not wrong about the money. It’s just—”

  “Not how you want to hear it.”

  “Yeah.” He blows out air. “So I play and there’s this little meter in my head that ticks like, ‘If you lose, that voice gets louder.’ Not healthy, I’m aware.”

  “That’s a lot to stack on top of Core math.”

  “It is what it is.” He lifts one shoulder. “You?”

  “My parents want me to quit before I get ‘too invested.’” Her mouth flattens. “They like the scholarship potential. They don’t like the time sink or the risk articles.”

  “Risk articles?”

  “Corporate contracts. Lifestyle instability. Black?market adjacency.” She ticks them off. “They sent me three news links about illegal rigs before this event.”

  “My mom does that. Even for official stuff.” He huffs a laugh. “Full horror?reel over breakfast.”

  “Do you listen?”

  “About the illegal stuff? Yeah.” His jaw tightens. “Official scene’s risky enough. I’m not frying myself for real.”

  “You play like someone who doesn’t care what happens to his Core.”

  “I care,” he says quietly. “I just care more about not going home and admitting this never went anywhere.”

  She doesn’t answer right away.

  They reach the café—glass front, generic logo, chalkboard promising “energy lattes” and “gamer specials.” Inside, metal chairs, faux?wood tables, the smell of burnt beans and syrup sitting under a hiss of steaming milk.

  Naomi pushes the door open. A chime pings. Cooler air washes over them.

  The evening crowd is sparse. A couple in matching jackets share a tablet in the corner. Two kids in tournament badges hunch over a portable console by the window.

  “This okay?” she asks.

  “Way better than the vending machine bench.”

  They join the short line. Naomi scans the menu with clinical focus.

  “You drink coffee?” he asks.

  “Sometimes.” Her mouth tightens at the sugar bombs. “Not that much syrup.”

  “So not an ‘ultra?caramel clash frappé’ type.”

  “I like to taste the beans, not the lab,” she says.

  He orders something iced and sweet, chasing the last of his nerves with sugar. She orders a small black with a splash of oat milk, all clean instructions like lab work.

  Drinks in hand, they claim a table by a wall outlet. Naomi sets down her tablet, flips open the cover, unlocks it with a quick gesture. Her AR lenses shimmer faintly when the screen lights.

  “Public Wi?Fi is exploitable,” she says, connecting anyway. “But I doubt anyone wants locals match logs.”

  “You say that now.” He sets his rig gently on the table. “Wait till conspiracy forums get ahold of ‘mysterious Beat seven spike.’”

  “Spikes are real.” She opens the Sigil Clash client. “Conspiracy is an overloaded term.”

  The match VOD appears on screen, trimmed to their three rounds. Angles flick past—overhead, side?on, close?ups of their faces at key Beats. The software flattens Naomi’s focus and Mason’s half?grimaces into clean broadcast content.

  He takes a gulp of his drink and winces when his own worried face fills the tablet.

  “I look twelve,” he mutters.

  “You look your age.”

  “You look like you were solving a physics exam and trying not to yawn.”

  “Different people process differently.”

  Round one rolls. Neon overlays trace Charge bars, Core integrity, control metrics.

  “There.” She taps Beat four. “See your shoulder? It tenses before you send Prowler in. Your rig reads that as intent. It pulses haptics half a second early.”

  “I didn’t know rigs did that.”

  “They shouldn’t.” Her brows knit. “Official specs say feedback only fires on resolved actions.”

  “You think mine’s glitching?”

  “Or marketing pushed a firmware update and didn’t tell anyone.” She zooms in. “Might just be my sensitivity. I’ll want another player’s feed later.”

  The matter?of?fact tone keeps it from turning into panic. He files it away with a faint prickle.

  “Anyway.” Her finger drags the timeline. “You telegraphed intent before commit. Against a better Grappler, that’s a throw.”

  “I know.” He winces as onscreen Warden slams Prowler. “Round one was rough.”

  “You adapted.” She taps. “Round two. This is where you started playing me instead of the cards.”

  Slow Burn terrain ripples onscreen. Both Cores tick down.

  “You ate more damage than most people,” she says.

  “Baiting resource bleed.” He nudges his Core icon. “Drip and Burn both want long games. I figured if I made you comfortable with clock damage, you’d go greedy to lock me out. Which you did.”

  “I misjudged how much pain you’d accept to keep options.” She watches his avatar hold position. “Most players flinch as soon as their Core shows double digits.”

  “That tracks.” He watches himself stand in a Siphon beam. The Mason in the chair shifts with the impact. “Seeing it from the outside is weird.”

  “That’s why review matters.” She takes a small sip. “There’s what you remember doing, and there’s what you actually did.”

  “You really record and annotate every match?”

  “Every match that gives me something new.” She shrugs. “Some are just noise.”

  “And today was…not noise.”

  “Today was interesting.” Her eyes linger on the timeline. “Especially round three.”

  They watch the clinch exchange again. In slow?mo, Sabre’s escape looks clean, almost planned. In reality, his heart had been slamming in his throat.

  “The drop center move,” she says. “Was that planned?”

  “Yes and no.” He curls his hands around the cup. “I know Warden hates low center shifts. Learned that from your write?ups. But in that second? All the lines where I tried to rip free up top felt wrong. Like they slid sideways in my head. This other line just…lit up.”

  “Lit up.”

  “Like a big neon GO LOW sign.”

  She exhales through her nose, amused. “That was the right read. Not statistically safe. Right.”

  “Feels weird hearing those aren’t the same.”

  “Statistics assume infinite tries. You and I get twelve Beats.”

  He turns that over. “So what you call ‘greedy’ is just pretending we have infinite shots.”

  “In simple terms, yes.”

  He looks at the paused frame of Storm Sabre, sword raised, overlays declaring his win.

  “You really wouldn’t have answered if I’d swung?” he asks.

  “I had a narrow line with Warden,” she admits. “But it depended on draws that never came. Showing you the shell without the full tree would have been misleading.”

  “So I didn’t steal anything.”

  “You earned it. Stop arguing with the result.” Her gaze stays on him. “You wanted this to mean something. Let it.”

  The words land harder than he expects.

  At home, his dad will still grumble. Bills will still sit on the table. One clean match at locals won’t change that.

  But across from the person whose posts he’s been secretly living by for months, it’s being logged as something that counts.

  He sits a little straighter.

  “Okay,” he says. “Teach me how not to spike my haptics before I move.”

  “We can work on that.” She uncaps the pen again. “And I want more than VODs from you.”

  “More than bruised Cores and ugly faces?”

  “Subjective descriptions.” She writes: FEELING / FEEDBACK. “What you feel using certain cards. How the Field changes between archetypes. Anything that seems…off.”

  “Off like too hot, too cold, too sharp?”

  “Yes. Feedback that doesn’t match impact. Delays where there shouldn’t be any.”

  “You really think the Field’s that weird?”

  “I think AstraForge is patching faster than they admit.” Her fingers tighten on the pen. “Unannounced changes mean bugs.”

  “Bugs are one thing.” He thinks of the news clips his mom forwarded—rigs smoking, players screaming. “What about those black?market stories?”

  “Different layer,” she says. “Possibly connected.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It shouldn’t be.” She finishes the last of her coffee, sets the cup down. “Either way, more logs help. I can’t model rumors.”

  “You always talk like this?” he asks. “Or is this the deluxe research edition?”

  “This is how I talk.” She considers. “Sometimes I use fewer qualifiers with my parents. They don’t enjoy nuance.”

  “What do they enjoy?”

  “Grades. College brochures. Jobs with health insurance.” She parks the pen behind her ear. “They see Sigil Clash as an extracurricular that makes me ‘interesting’ to admissions.”

  “They’re not wrong,” he says.

  “They’re not right either.” Her shoulders tighten. “For them, the game is a step toward an institution. For me, the game is…” She stops.

  “Is what?”

  “A system with hidden rules and real consequences.” Her thumb brushes the tablet’s edge. “That’s rare. Worth paying attention to.”

  He thinks of his dad’s mutters about “corporate playgrounds” and “kids breaking themselves for someone else’s ratings.” Of Denise’s careful way of watching the Field when it hums wrong.

  “Real consequences,” he echoes.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I do.” He looks at his rig. “I just also think if I don’t climb, I’m stuck bagging groceries three nights a week and pretending I don’t care when matches are on the breakroom TV.”

  “Groceries are honest work.”

  “So’s construction.” His voice roughens. “My dad used to do that. Then AstraForge built half the stuff he could’ve worked on without hiring local crews. Now he picks up jobs when he can, and every time he drives past that big arena downtown, his hands go tight on the wheel.”

  “You blame the game.”

  “I blame the company.” He shrugs. “Game just…exists. It’s what they built on top that got messy.”

  Her gaze lingers on him a moment longer.

  “That’s more self?aware than most players I talk to,” she says.

  “You talk to a lot of players?”

  “Online.” A faint smirk. “They don’t know my age either.”

  He laughs; something under his ribs unclenches.

  “So,” he says, “if we keep doing this—”

  “Post?match review.”

  “Right. If we keep doing post?match review.” He gestures between them. “What does that look like? Every round?”

  “Whenever you play something non?trivial.” She opens to a fresh page. “I can only annotate so many games before my hand gives up.”

  “Wow. Priorities.”

  “Would you rather I water down my sample with bad reps?” Her brow arches. “You’re free not to volunteer.”

  “No, I—” His thumb runs along his cup rim. “It’s good. Just…feels like I’m giving you extra work.”

  “You’re not giving me anything.” Her voice stays even. “I choose who I log. I chose you. If you decide you’re done, I’ll pick someone else.”

  “Harsh again.”

  “Accurate again.”

  He watches as she writes his name at the top of the page: CARVER, M. – LOCALS / INITIAL SET.

  It sends a small jolt through him. Not just Mason the kid grinding locals. Mason as a line in someone else’s notes.

  “Do I get to see the finished thing someday?” he asks. “Or does it vanish into some NP vault?”

  “You’ll see pieces.” She caps the pen. “Guides. Threads. Maybe something longer.”

  “Like a book?”

  “Or a paper.” She shrugs. “Depends who I write for.”

  “You could write for AstraForge.” He aims for light, but the words land heavier. “Bet they’d kill to have you patching their game.”

  Her eyes go distant for a beat.

  “They might,” she says. “I haven’t decided if that’s a good outcome.”

  “You already had an offer, didn’t you?”

  “Not formal.” There’s a defensive edge now. “Someone from a subsidiary commented on my last series. Asked if I’d considered ‘professionalizing’ my analysis.”

  “And you said?”

  “That I’m in school.” A micro?pause. “And that I like my independence.”

  “Bet they loved that.”

  “They sent a winking emoji.” Her nose wrinkles. “I hate winking emojis.”

  “Actual crime.”

  Her tablet pings softly. She dismisses the notification, then starts packing up.

  “We should get back. Bracket updates in fifteen.”

  He checks the time and jolts. “Right. Yeah. Don’t want to miss my shot at getting steamrolled by Kellen Royce live on camera.”

  “You might not draw him.”

  “Lucky me.”

  They stand.

  At the door, she hesitates and holds out her screen. “Here. ID?”

  He blinks, then bumps his rig against her tablet. His username—MASONJOLT—flashes, then settles into her contacts list. She nods.

  “I’ve seen that on the local leaderboards,” she says. “Your win curve isn’t terrible for someone without a testing group.”

  “You track that too?”

  “Of course.”

  He adds her handle in his own HUD. NP_THEORY appears with a tiny grid icon.

  “If we end up across a pad again,” he warns, “I’m demanding you swear not to use any of this against me.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “I will absolutely use this against you.” Her mouth lifts a fraction. “That’s the point.”

  He lifts his hands in surrender. “This how you treat your precious data sources?”

  “With rigor.” She nudges the door open with her hip. “Try not to fall behind.”

  They step into the corridor. Arcade sound seeps down the hall, that familiar mesh of commentary, laughter, and energy.

  As they walk side by side, their shoulders almost brush. The space between them feels suddenly very specific—measured in beats, not inches.

  “You know,” he says, “for someone all about reducing mystique, you’re pretty mysterious.”

  “That’s just because you met me in a noisy bracket.” She glances over. “Give it enough matches, I’ll flatten out.”

  “Don’t.” The word is out before he can filter it.

  She blinks. “Don’t what?”

  “Flatten out.” His throat works. “Figuring you out is…fun. Keeps me sharp.”

  Something flickers in her eyes. Not quite amusement. Not quite alarm.

  “Mutual,” she says, barely louder than the hum of the vents.

  Then the arcade entrance is in front of them again—bright screens, shouting, the live roar of sixty local lives spun around one glowing Field.

  Mason breathes it in, rig band warm around his forearm, and follows Naomi back toward the brackets.

  Data, he thinks.

  For once, the word doesn’t feel cold. It feels like a new line on the matchup chart—one he and Naomi are drawing side by side, one annotated beat by beat as they move deeper into the game than he ever thought he’d get.