The smell of ginger and soy sauce still lingered in the small apartment. Dinner had been a quiet, comfortable affair, stripped of the heavy, suffocating tension that had plagued their meals for the past few months.
Yuta cleared the plates, moving with his usual methodical efficiency, while Hina dragged a dining chair into the living room, planting it directly in front of the old flat-screen television.
"HDMI 2, right?" Hina asked, holding the television remote like a detonator. She had changed into an oversized, comfortable sweater, her damp hair wrapped in a towel. She looked relaxed. She looked like a normal teenager.
"Yes," Yuta said, carrying his VR helmet out of his bedroom. He plugged the casting cable into the back of the console unit. "The resolution on the TV won't match the internal display, but it will give you a direct feed of my optical sensors and the HUD."
He sat down on the edge of the sofa, holding the sleek black helmet in his lap. He tapped a sequence on the side panel, enabling the external audio passthrough.
"I can hear you while I'm in," Yuta explained, adjusting the straps. "But try not to shout. Sudden auditory spikes can be distracting during complex calculations."
"Calculations?" Hina teased, leaning forward. "I thought this was a fantasy game. Aren't you going to slay a dragon to save a princess?"
Yuta looked at his sister, his charcoal-gray eyes completely serious. "Dragons are an inefficient source of revenue. Their hide is too thick for standard extraction tools, and their loot tables are highly contested by large guilds. I am currently focusing on material science and market monopolies."
Hina stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing. "You are such a nerd, Yuta. Just put the helmet on. I want to see the mafia boss in action."
Yuta offered a faint, acknowledging smile. He pulled the helmet down.
The transition was instant. The physical weight of the sofa vanished, replaced immediately by the solid, digital floorboards of Room 2B in the Riverwood Rest.
Yuta opened his eyes. He didn't look around the room; he immediately looked down at his torso.
The Zephyr-Circuit Cuirass hugged his avatar perfectly. The dark brown leather was broken up by sleek, geometric panels of pale blue, aerodynamic fur. The heavy linen stitching pulsed with a faint, rhythmic azure light, humming with the contained Essence of Zephyr.
"Whoa," Hina’s voice echoed faintly in his ears, filtered through the external microphone. "That actually looks really cool. Did you buy that?"
"I engineered it," Yuta replied, his voice calm. "Now, we test the physical parameters."
He didn't walk to the door. He walked to the window he had opened the night before. He climbed onto the wooden sill, crouching like a coiled spring. He looked down. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the cobblestone street below. A fall from this height for a Level 4 player would normally result in a twenty percent health penalty and a temporary 'Sprained Ankle' mobility debuff.
"Yuta, what are you doing?" Hina asked, a hint of alarm in her voice.
"Testing the localized gravity," Yuta said.
He stepped off the ledge.
He didn't plummet like a stone. The moment he began to fall, the pale blue fur on his shoulders and chest flared with azure light. The cuirass actively manipulated the air resistance beneath him, creating a microscopic cushion of dense pressure.
He landed softly on the cobblestones. His boots barely made a sound. His knees bent automatically to absorb the remaining kinetic energy.
He checked his interface.
[-2 HP]
He had taken virtually zero damage. The thirty percent fall damage reduction was active, but combined with his Agility and the frictionless nature of the armor, the physical impact was completely neutralized.
Yuta stood up, a satisfied smirk crossing his face. He began to run toward the village gates.
The acceleration was jarring. Normally, movement in the game felt grounded, tied to the heavy drag of simulated gravity. But with the
+15% base movement speed modifier, Yuta felt like he was gliding. The air didn't push against his chest; it slipped seamlessly around the aerodynamic panels of his armor, actively pulling him forward.
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He blew past the NPC guards at the gate, becoming a blur of brown leather and pale blue fur as he merged onto the dirt path leading east, away from the dense Western Woods.
"You're so fast," Hina observed, watching the scenery fly by on the television screen. "Where are we going?"
"The Whispering Gorge," Yuta explained, not losing a breath as he sprinted. "It's a steep canyon known for high-purity Silver Ore veins. Silver is a highly conductive metal, necessary for advanced alchemy equipment."
"If it's so valuable, why isn't everyone mining there?"
"Because of the security system," Yuta said, his eyes scanning the horizon as the trees thinned out, revealing a massive, jagged scar in the earth ahead. "The gorge is guarded by Level 6 Canyon Bandits. They have the high ground, and they exclusively use ranged weapons. Solo players get pinned down and deleted before they even reach the ore."
Yuta slowed his pace as he approached the edge of the canyon. The gorge was deep, with steep, rocky walls that dropped into a rushing river far below. A series of narrow, precarious wooden suspension bridges crisscrossed the chasm, leading to the glittering silver veins embedded in the opposite cliff face.
Standing on the first bridge, scanning the path with hawkish precision, were three bandits. They wore ragged leather armor and held long, curved wooden bows.
System Identify: Canyon Archer.
Level: 6.
"Yuta, they have bows," Hina said nervously. "There are three of them. You only have a little knife."
"A knife is sufficient if you understand angles," Yuta replied.
He stepped out from behind a large boulder, fully exposing himself on the canyon edge.
The archers reacted instantly with programmed aggression.
"Intruder!" the lead bandit shouted, his voice rough and digitized.
In perfect unison, the three bandits drew their bowstrings back to their cheeks. The sound of creaking wood and stretching tension filled the air.
"Run!" Hina yelled through the comms.
Yuta didn't run away. He sprinted directly toward the bridge.
Twang. Twang. Twang.
Three iron-tipped arrows sliced through the air, their trajectories calculated to intercept Yuta’s current path.
Before crafting the cuirass, Yuta would have been forced to dive into the dirt, losing all his momentum and leaving himself vulnerable to the next volley. Now, he simply leaned his torso slightly forward.
He didn't dodge the center arrow. He let it hit him.
The iron tip struck the pale blue fur panel covering his left shoulder. But instead of piercing the fabric and biting into his digital flesh, the arrow met the localized field of frictionless air generated by the Essence of Zephyr.
Cling!
A sharp, metallic sound rang out. The arrow instantly lost its kinetic grip. It skidded wildly off the smooth, aerodynamic surface, sparking faintly before spiraling harmlessly into the gorge below.
[-0 HP]
"What just happened?!" Hina gasped in the real world. "It bounced off!"
"Passive skill: Frictionless," Yuta said, his charcoal-gray eyes locking onto the archers. "Minor projectile trajectories are deflected by the manipulated air currents."
The bandits were visibly stunned by the failure of their volley. They fumbled to draw new arrows from their quivers, their artificial intelligence struggling to process the invalid data.
But Yuta was already moving.
He hit the wooden suspension bridge without slowing down. The bridge swayed violently, but his enhanced Agility kept his center of gravity perfectly balanced.
He closed the thirty-yard gap in a matter of seconds.
The lead archer managed to nock another arrow, pointing it point-blank at Yuta’s chest.
Yuta didn't stop. He dropped into a brutal slide across the wooden planks, his boots kicking up splinters. He slid entirely beneath the archer's line of sight, the frictionless armor allowing him to glide across the rough wood like it was polished ice.
As he passed beneath the bandit, Yuta reached up with his sharpened skinning knife. He didn't slash wildly. He targeted the gap in the bandit’s ragged armor, driving the blade cleanly upward into the knee joint.
[-45 HP]
[Critical Debuff: Hamstrung. Mobility reduced by 80%.]
The bandit screamed, his leg collapsing under him.
Yuta popped up behind the second archer before the enemy could turn around. He grabbed the bandit by the back of his collar, utilizing the momentum from his slide to violently throw the Level 6 enemy forward. The bandit crashed heavily into the third archer, sending them both tumbling into a tangled heap of limbs and dropped bows.
"Physics," Yuta whispered, his knife flashing in the sunlight.
He didn't give them a chance to recover. He moved with a cold, terrifying efficiency, stepping into the tangled pile and executing precise, lethal strikes to their vital points. The glowing blue circuitry on his armor pulsed rapidly, feeding his movements, making him an untouchable blur on the narrow bridge.
Within fifteen seconds, the fight was over.
The three Level 6 archers shattered into gray data particles, leaving behind a scattering of copper coins, some cheap iron arrows, and the absolute silence of the gorge.
Experience Gained: 240.
Yuta sheathed his knife, not even slightly out of breath. His stamina bar was still at eighty percent. He walked past the dissipating data, his eyes fixed on the rich, glittering veins of Silver Ore embedded in the cliff face ahead.
In the real world, Hina was staring at the television screen in absolute, stunned silence.
"Yuta..." she finally whispered, her voice a mix of awe and slight intimidation. "You didn't even take a single point of damage. You just... walked through them."
"I didn't walk," Yuta corrected her, pulling a heavy iron mining pick from his inventory. He approached the silver vein, ready to harvest his monopoly. "I calculated their trajectory, and I nullified their variables. It's just a matter of having the right equipment."
"It looked like magic."
"No," Yuta smiled softly, raising the pickaxe. "It's structural engineering."