Corvin's Outfitting & Repair occupied the ground floor of a three-story building that leaned slightly to the left, its structural enchantments overdue for maintenance, its sign faded to the point where the "& Repair" was more suggestion than statement. The interior smelled of weapon oil, leather conditioner, and the particular acrid scent of mana-solvent - the alchemical solution used to strip failed enchantments from equipment before re-inscription.

  Tam Corvin himself was behind the counter, as he always was - a barrel-chested man in his fifties with forearms like bridge cables and a [Weaponsmith] class that had plateaued at Level 14 sometime in the previous decade. Normal-tier, Crafting role, and perfectly content with both. He'd told Jace during the hiring interview that he'd been a delver once, years ago. A [Skirmisher], solid but unremarkable, until a tunnel collapse in a Tier 2 Stable Dungeon had crushed his left knee and ended his combat career in the time it took for a ceiling to fall.

  "Late," Corvin said without looking up from the sword he was inspecting - a one-handed longsword with a notched edge and a pommel that had been replaced at least twice.

  "Tram was delayed. Ice on the Switchback track."

  "Ice on the track. In winter. In Chicago." Corvin set the sword down and pushed a crate across the counter. "Adventuring party dropped these off last night. Full kit maintenance - clean, oil, assess, tag anything that needs enchantment work. The plate armor's got a crack in the left greave that goes deeper than the surface. Check it with your mana-sense thing."

  Jace pulled the crate closer and began sorting. Gauntlets, a chain shirt, the cracked greave, a quiver of arrows with dulled tips, two daggers that needed sharpening, and a belt with four potion holsters - three empty, one containing a cracked vial that had leaked some kind of blue-green liquid into the leather.

  "SP restoration," Jace said, holding up the cracked vial. "Leaked through the holster. The leather's saturated - it'll need to be replaced or the residual potion-mana will interfere with any future vials stored in it."

  Corvin glanced over. "Good eye. Tag it."

  Jace worked methodically. The job was unglamorous - cleaning dungeon grime from armor joints, oiling blades, cataloging damage, and occasionally using [Mana Sense] to assess enchantment integrity on items that Corvin's own skills couldn't fully evaluate. It paid four credits an hour, barely enough to cover his tram fare and a meal. But the real compensation wasn't monetary.

  It was *exposure*.

  Every piece of equipment that passed through his hands taught him something. The way a [Guardian]'s tower shield was weighted - heavier at the base for stability, the upper rim thinned for sight-line clearance, the interior grip positioned to allow quick transitions between defensive stances. The difference between a mass-produced Common-tier sword and a hand-forged one - the mass-produced version was uniform, efficient, adequate; the hand-forged version had character, the smith's intentionality visible in the tang geometry and the fuller's depth. The way enchantments layered - elemental resistance on armor, sharpness enhancement on blades, durability reinforcement on everything, each inscription following a grammar of rune-logic that Elara would have given her left hand to study.

  His [Analysis] chewed through it all. Every item was a data point. Every party's loadout was a case study. He could feel the skill pushing against its Journeyman ceiling, the accumulated pattern-recognition straining for the next proficiency threshold the way a muscle strained against a weight it was almost strong enough to lift.

  And the veterans talked.

  Not to him - they barely noticed the kid behind the counter. They talked to each other, to Corvin, to the walls. About dungeon layouts and monster behavior. About the K'tharr incursion pushing further west - rumor had it the Crimson Maw had spawned three new tributary gates along the eastern seaboard, and the Iron Legion was quietly pulling reserve units from garrison duty to reinforce the containment line. About a Tier 3 Wild Dungeon that had opened somewhere in the northern wastes, connecting to something the Planar Cartographers were calling a "Mana Typhoon" - a region of such extreme Mana density that unprotected exposure meant death in minutes. About loot tables and drop rates and the economics of dungeon farming versus deep exploration. About friends who'd died last month, last year, last decade.

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  Jace listened. He watched. He absorbed.

  And he felt, beneath the slow grind of daily labor, the faint but persistent accumulation of Experience - not the explosive surge of combat, but the patient trickle of a class that rewarded breadth. [Vagabond] didn't care *how* he grew. Only that he did.

  * * *

  He called his mother on the mana-comm during his lunch break.

  The comm-station was a public unit bolted to the wall outside a noodle shop - a crystal receiver housed in a weathered metal casing, its attunement dial worn smooth by a thousand hands. Jace fed two credits into the slot and watched the crystal pulse as it reached across the city toward the Rust Boroughs, searching for the frequency signature of the home unit his mother kept on the kitchen counter.

  "Jace?" Her voice came through clear but slightly flattened - the public units compressed the signal to save mana, stripping warmth from consonants and softness from vowels. "You're eating?"

  "I'm eating."

  "Real food? Not those ration bars?"

  "Noodles, Ma. From a shop. With vegetables and everything."

  "Hmm." The sound carried a lifetime of skepticism refined into a single syllable. Lin Miller did not trust food she hadn't cooked, institutions she hadn't vetted, or promises that hadn't been kept. "How's the job?"

  "It's fine. Cleaning gear, mostly. The owner's decent."

  "He paying you fair?"

  "Four an hour."

  "That's low."

  "It's standard for unskilled seasonal."

  "You're not unskilled. You're a sophomore at Ironhold with a-" She paused. The pause was familiar. His mother had never quite found the right way to reference his class. She didn't understand the System the way academy families did - she'd Awakened as a [Laborer], Level 3, and had never progressed beyond it. The System was a fact of her life, not an identity. "With your training," she finished.

  "The training's why I took the job. I'm learning things, Ma. How equipment works, how parties operate, how the real delving economy functions. It's useful."

  Another pause. Longer. "Your father used to say that. 'It's useful, Lin. I'm learning things.' Right before he did something that scared me half to death."

  The words landed in the cold air between the comm-station and the noodle shop, and Jace had nothing to put against them. His father - Dane Miller, [Scout], Level 7, killed during a minor incursion in the Boroughs' maintenance tunnels. A crack in reality no wider than a doorway. Two Sewer Lurkers. The response team had put them down in minutes, but Dane had been right there when the gate opened, doing pipe repair in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jace remembered calloused hands. A calm voice. The sound of the front door closing for the last time.

  "I'm being careful," he said.

  "I know you think you are." Her voice softened. "I'm proud of you, baby. Seventh place. Torrin's mother called me - did you know they talk? She said you planned the whole thing."

  "It was a team effort."

  "Hmm," she said again, and this time the syllable carried something warmer. "Come home for New Year's at least. I'll make the dumplings."

  "I'll be there."

  "With your friends, if they want. Torrin's mother said he's staying too. And the girls - the healer and the scholar."

  "I'll ask them."

  "Good. Eat your noodles. I love you."

  "Love you too, Ma."

  The crystal dimmed. Jace stood in the cold for a moment, his breath fogging, the sounds of the Dungeon Sector washing over him - the clang of a smith's hammer three streets over, the shout of a vendor hawking fresh monster-core fragments, the low hum of the ward-barrier that surrounded the nearest dungeon gate, the distant rumble of a cargo golem navigating an intersection. The city lived around him, vast and indifferent and achingly alive, and he was one small piece of it, standing outside a noodle shop with two credits less in his pocket and a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with the food.