Chapter 7: My First Summon Asked for Payment
Chapter 7: My First Summon Asked for Payment
"I don’t have anywhere to go."
"Then we find somewhere." She said it like it was obvious, like the apocalypse was just another problem to be solved with sharp objects and stubbornness. "Food first. Safety second."
"Shouldn’t safety come first?"
"Not if you starve while searching for it." She nudged the mystery can with her boot. "Is this food?"
"I don’t know. The label fell off."
She picked it up, produced a third knife from somewhere I hadn’t seen, and punched a hole in the lid. The smell hit immediately — cheap, processed, unmistakably meat-flavoured in the way that meant no actual meat had been involved.
Dog food.
She sniffed it. Then, before I could stop her, she ate a small amount, and I stared at her in horror.
"Not the worst thing I’ve eaten," she said.
"That does not make me feel better."
"It wasn’t intended to." She set the can on the counter. "You should eat. It’s calories."
"I’m not eating dog food."
"You are starving in a ruined apartment." Her ears flicked. "You don’t get to be picky."
I ate the dog food. It tasted exactly like it smelled, I hated every bite, and my stomach accepted it anyway — desperate and grateful — while the ache of starvation receded another inch.
Liora kept searching while I ate, moving with the same practical efficiency, checking corners and crevices. Eventually she crouched near the broken bookshelf, and her tail stiffened.
"Here."
She pulled something out from beneath the fallen books: a sealed nutrition bar, still intact, overlooked because it had dropped behind the furniture. She tossed it to me without hesitation.
"Eat."
I tore it open. Chocolate-flavoured cardboard, and the best thing I’d tasted in two weeks.
When I finished, she extended her hand. I looked at it.
"What?"
"Hold it."
"Why?"
"Because I saved you."
"I summoned you. Doesn’t that count as payment?"
Her ears tilted forward. "That sounds like administrative payment."
"What’s the difference?"
"I want personal payment." Her tail curled behind her, but her expression stayed carefully neutral. "You can say no."
I hesitated. Velisara’s hands were still a fresh memory — the invasion, the entitlement, the way she’d touched me without asking and then expected gratitude for it.
Liora waited.
"And you’ll still help me?" I asked. "If I say no?"
"Obviously." She snorted. "I’m not letting my summoner get eaten before I understand why looking at him is ruining my concentration."
That is either a compliment or a complaint. Possibly both.
I took her hand. Her fingers closed around mine — warm, calloused, the grip of someone who used her hands for work. Her tail curled into a slow S-shape behind her, and her ears betrayed her completely, tilting forward and slightly down, the universal cat signal for pleased but pretending not to be.
A silent blue window appeared.
[Resonance updated.]
Desire: 72 → 74
Trust: 4 → 6
Resonance: 2%
My class had assigned numerical consequences to hand-holding. That seemed like information a respectable interface would keep to itself.
Liora released my hand after three seconds. Or maybe five. Neither of us counted.
"We need to leave," she said.
Right. The blood. The Crawlers. The very real possibility of dying in my own apartment.
"Gather everything useful," she continued. "Water. Food. The dog food. Something sharp. Bandages. Clothes. A bag."
I found a backpack crumpled in the corner of my closet and stuffed it with the water bottle, the stale crackers, and the remaining half-can of dog food. A kitchen knife with a five-inch blade. A mostly-clean shirt. A torn sheet that could become bandages.
My status window was still open. I’d received attribute points when I levelled — two of them, unassigned, waiting.
Strength: 3
Vitality: 2
Agility: 4
Charisma: 100
I could put them in Charisma.
It would be stupid. Actively self-destructive. It would make me more beautiful and more useless and more likely to attract goddesses who treated consent like a restaurant suggestion. But the temptation was there.
"What are you doing?" Liora’s voice came from the doorway. She’d been scouting the hall, and now she was watching me stare at empty air like an idiot.
"Nothing."
Her ears flattened. "If you make yourself prettier instead of harder to kill, I will throw you at the next monster as a distraction."
"I wasn’t—"
"You were."
I allocated both points.
Strength: 4
Vitality: 3
The numbers changed immediately. My body did not improve quite as cleanly. A faint warmth spread through my limbs, settling into muscle and bone, but the permanent flaws smothered part of the effect — the points were there, my damaged foundation simply couldn’t express all of them yet. Even so, I felt steadier. Less likely to collapse. Marginally more difficult to kill.
"There," I said. "Happy?"
"I don’t know what you did."
"Made myself harder to kill."
"Good." Her tail flicked approval. "Now come here. We have a problem."
❖ ❖ ❖
The hallway outside my apartment was dark. The emergency lights had died days ago and the windows at either end were boarded or shattered. Liora crouched near the stairwell with her ears swivelling and her nose twitching.
"Blood," she whispered. "And multiple humans. Below."
"Survivors?"
She didn’t answer immediately. Her ears angled forward, then back. Her tail went rigid.
"Three men."
"Monsters?"
"Worse." She looked at my bruised face and the fading split in my lip. "One of them carries your blood scent."
The words hit my stomach like ice water.
No.
The Level 9 bastard had found me. Maybe he’d got my blood on his clothes. Maybe one of the men with him had a tracking skill. Either way, this was not an accidental search.
From somewhere below — maybe the third floor, maybe the second, close enough to echo and far enough to be indistinct — a voice called out.
"Pretty boy!"
I knew that voice. I’d heard it yesterday, harsh and thrilled, while a thick hand closed around my wrist.
"I know you’re up there!"
Liora looked at me, and her playful expression was gone. The teasing, the hand-holding, the catlike curiosity — all of it had vanished behind a mask of cold assessment.
"Is that the one who hit you?"
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.
She drew both knives. The motion was silent and smooth, and the blades gleamed in the thin grey light coming through the stairwell window. Her remaining timer flickered in the corner of my vision.
[Manifestation Remaining: 41:12]
My first summon was D Grade. The man downstairs was Level 9.
And for the first time in two weeks, those numbers did not make me feel completely helpless.