Suzume arrived at the headquarters walking on autopilot.

  The entire time, all her brain power was used up replaying last night's... moments. The weight of Kasumi's body, the way those green eyes had dropped to her lips, that moment where it felt like the entire world stopped and Suzume forgot how breathing worked.

  Suzume sighed.

  [Get your head in the game.]

  She lightly slapped herself with both hands.

  "FIGHTING!" She whisper-yelled before walking inside.

  She pushed through the door and instantly froze.

  Yumi was bent over the desk near the window, rifling through a stack of paperwork. Her ass was up in the air, perfectly framed by dark jeans that hugged her near-endless legs all the way down to black high heels.

  Suzume's eyes tracked down before her brain could engage.

  [Oh my god.]

  Probably feeling some eyes on her, Yumi half-turned, caught her staring, and a lethal grin spread across her face.

  "I'd tell you where my eyes are, but something tells me you find them way less interesting than whatever you're looking at right now," she said before wiggling her butt a little.

  Heat flooded Suzume's face so fast she probably looked like a tomato.

  "Your—the jacket! It's cool. The jacket."

  Yumi straightened fully. She tilted her head, smirking.

  "Uh-huh. The jacket. Sure, Suzu-chan."

  She grabbed two coffee cups from the desk and walked over with a deliberate sway to her hips. Suzume tried very hard to look anywhere else and failed, so she ended up staring at the ceiling instead.

  "Here." Yumi pressed a cup into Suzume's hands, standing close enough that Suzume could smell her perfume. "You're fun when you're flustered, you know that?"

  Suzume took the coffee and focused intensely on the motivational poster behind Yumi's head. Something about teamwork and eagles.

  "I'm not flustered."

  "Right. Of course not."

  The door swung open. Hikari walked in carrying a stack of textbooks, her ponytail swaying with each precise step.

  "Good morning. I trust you're both ready to study?"

  "Yes!" Suzume said way too quickly, practically lunging toward the conference table.

  Yumi's laugh followed her across the room.

  ---

  They set up at the long table. Hikari spread out materials—three thick textbooks on dungeon law, a binder stuffed with practice questions, and color-coded notes from her own exam preparation. Everything organized by difficulty level.

  "We'll start with liability clauses," Hikari said, opening the first textbook to a marked page. "They're the foundation of everything else. If you don't understand who's legally responsible when things go wrong, the rest of the exam will destroy you."

  For the next two hours, Suzume absorbed information like a sponge.

  Hikari was a genuinely good teacher. She broke down complex legal concepts into manageable chunks, used real examples from guild operations, and never made Suzume feel stupid for asking clarifying questions.

  Suzume scribbled notes, her pen flying across the page. Her brain clicked into that focused state it always hit when processing new systems—the same state that let her memorize hundreds of monster patterns and dungeon layouts.

  During their first break, Yumi leaned over Suzume's shoulder to read something, her arm brushing against Suzume's.

  For... whatever reason, Suzume shivered.

  "Ugh, this section's a nightmare," Yumi said, pointing at a page filled with subsections and exceptions. "Look at all these footnotes. Who writes like this?"

  "Lawyers who get paid by the word," Hikari muttered.

  Suzume tried to focus on the legal text.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  [Stop it. Stop being weird. What is up with you today? It's just Yumi!]

  "It's not that bad once you see the pattern," Suzume managed, her voice slightly strained.

  "You say that because you're smart." Yumi straightened, stretching her arms overhead. Her tank top rode up, showing a strip of toned stomach and the edge of her hip bone.

  Suzume's eyes dropped for half a second before she caught herself.

  She grabbed her coffee and took a long drink, staring intently at her notes.

  [What the hell is wrong with me today?]

  They pushed through three more chapters. Suzume's hand cramped from writing. The information piled up in her brain, getting sorted into mental folders and cross-referenced with everything she already knew about dungeon operations.

  "You're retaining this extremely well," Hikari observed, watching Suzume answer a practice question without referring back to her notes. "Better than I expected, honestly."

  "Thanks. I think."

  "It's a compliment. Most people struggle with the density of this material. You're processing it at nearly twice the normal rate." Hikari closed her textbook. "That said, we're done for today. You'll burn out if we push harder."

  "I'm fine—"

  "You're not. Your focus started slipping twenty minutes ago." Hikari started packing up her materials with the same precision she did everything. "Take the afternoon to rest and process. We'll continue tomorrow."

  After Hikari left, Suzume stayed at the conference table. She had another problem to solve: the XP issue.

  Time to figure out what worked for Rescuers.

  ---

  Experiment One: Knowledge Acquisition

  She pulled out her personal notebook—the one filled with trap diagrams, monster weaknesses, dungeon layout patterns, and survival protocols she'd compiled over six months of obsessive research. She reviewed her notes on C-Rank dungeons, adding new information from recent missions. Cross-referenced monster behavior patterns. Sketched out three new potential escape routes based on common architectural features.

  After an hour of focused study, a notification appeared.

  [+5 XP - Knowledge Acquisition]

  Five XP. Better than nothing, but she'd need to study for 120 hours to level up at this rate. Completely impractical.

  ---

  Experiment Two: Skill Refinement

  She headed to the empty training area in the back of headquarters—just a cleared space with support beams and crash mats. She took a breath and activated her primary skill.

  [Skill Activated: Rescue Line]

  The glowing rope materialized in her hands. She practiced throwing it, wrapping it around distant support beams with increasing accuracy. Tested the maximum distance. Worked on her reaction time—how fast could she spawn and deploy it in an emergency?

  She pushed herself. Faster. More precise. One beam to another in rapid succession until sweat dripped down her face and her MP dropped by half.

  An hour later, another notification.

  [+10 XP - Skill Refinement]

  Ten XP. Better than studying, but still inefficient. Sixty hours of pure skill training to level once? There had to be something better.

  ---

  Experiment Three: Simulated Rescue

  She booted up the VR dungeon simulator—the one Akane's guild had given her, the expensive kind that top Players used for training. She strapped on the headset and selected a rescue scenario.

  Difficulty: Moderate.

  The world dissolved into pixels and reformed as a collapsing cave system. The simulation was disturbingly realistic—she could feel the rumble of unstable stone, smell the dust in the air, hear the distant roars of approaching monsters.

  Three Players trapped under rubble. Monsters approaching from two directions.

  Time limit: ten minutes.

  Suzume's mind shifted into mission mode. She activated Detect Life, pinpointing the trapped Players' locations. Used Rescue Line to clear debris from the first victim. Spawned a crowbar from Toolkit to lever a boulder off the second. Had to spend precious seconds administering emergency first aid to the third, who was bleeding out.

  Seven minutes in, the monsters arrived—B-Rank Stone Golems. She couldn't fight them, so she created a distraction using a flash grenade from Toolkit, then extracted all three Players through a narrow side passage she'd spotted earlier.

  Timer: 9:47 remaining.

  [Mission Complete]

  [+30 XP - Simulated Rescue]

  Thirty XP. Much better. But when she pulled off the VR headset, she was drenched in sweat and her hands were shaking. The simulation left her completely drained—mentally and physically.

  She couldn't do more than maybe two of these per day without collapsing.

  Still. It was progress. Data she could work with.

  The door opened. Honoka poked her head in, her school uniform slightly rumpled from the afternoon commute.

  "Um, Suzume-san? Do you have a minute?"

  "Sure." Suzume pulled off the VR headset completely, wiping sweat from her forehead. "What's up?"

  Honoka stepped inside, hands clasped nervously in front of her.

  "I was wondering... could you teach me proper protocols? I know basic healing spells, but I'm not great at prioritizing multiple injuries under pressure. During that last outbreak, I kind of panicked when three people needed help at once."

  Suzume stood, her exhaustion forgotten.

  "Yeah. Absolutely. Let's go through it."

  ---

  They spent the next hour running scenarios. Honoka asked smart questions, took detailed notes, and genuinely wanted to improve. She wasn't just powerful—she was dedicated.

  "Thanks," Honoka said when they finished, carefully tucking her notes into her school bag. "This helps a lot. I don't want to be the weak link."

  "You're not. You saved four people during that outbreak. You're doing great."

  Honoka's smile was bright enough to light up the room.

  As evening approached, the team started filtering out. Rina headed to wherever Rina went when she wasn't working (Suzume still wasn't entirely sure). Emiko locked up the administrative office. Kasumi had texted earlier that she had a mandatory meeting with her marketing agents tonight and would be unavailable.

  Yumi was the last one standing, shrugging on that leather jacket.

  She walked over and threw an arm around Suzume's shoulders, pulling her in close.

  "Good work today, Rescue Girl."

  Suzume scoffed, trying to push her away playfully.

  "Stop calling me that when we're alone!"

  "But it's literally your title!"

  Her eyes dropped to Yumi's chest. The tank top really didn't leave much to the imagination. Suzume could see the edge of a black bra strap.

  She looked away fast, her face heating up again.

  "Thanks for the coffee this morning," she mumbled.

  Yumi squeezed her shoulder once more.

  "Anytime. Get some actual rest tonight, yeah? You looked wiped by the end there."

  She left with a casual wave, calling goodbye over her shoulder.

  Suzume stood alone in the empty headquarters, staring at her hands.

  [Okay. What the actual hell happened to my brain today?]