The phone buzzed in Reiji's hand before he'd even finished typing.

  I'm at my apartment. You okay?

  Taiga's response came within three minutes. Not a question mark that suggested curiosity. A full stop that suggested readiness. Reiji stared at the message and made a decision he didn't remember deciding on. He called instead of texting back.

  The phone rang twice before Taiga picked up.

  "Hey," Taiga said. No greeting, just the word itself, solid as a handhold. In the background, Reiji heard movement—a drawer opening, the soft clink of keys being found.

  "The world just changed," Reiji said. "Something fundamental. I wasn't hallucinating."

  "Yeah," Taiga said. No surprise in his voice. No skepticism either. "The world just got insane. Magic's real. You were right about something happening. This is what you were preparing for?"

  Reiji didn't answer directly. The answer would require him to explain that he'd spent five years training for a System that no longer existed, that he was a man with memories of another timeline wearing the skin of someone making real-time decisions. Too much. Too specific. Too dangerous.

  "I need someone to tell me if I'm losing my mind," Reiji said instead. "I'm looking at a status screen and nothing is what I thought it would be."

  He heard Taiga pull air through his teeth, a sharp sound of someone processing contradiction.

  "I'm coming over," Taiga said.

  "You don't have to—"

  "I'm already moving."

  The call ended. Reiji lowered the phone and looked at the status screen still floating in his vision.

  REIJI AKIRA

  STATUS: [SUPPORT - DEPRECATED]

  LEVEL: 1 | EXP: 0/100

  ATTRIBUTES:

  Vitality: 6

  Strength: 4

  Dexterity: 8

  Intellect: 11

  Wisdom: 9

  Charisma: 7

  SKILLS (ACTIVE):

  Observation [LVL 1]

  Spatial Mapping [LVL 1]

  SKILLS (DEPRECATED - Version 1.0 Legacy Module):

  Predictive Analysis [LVL MAX] — [UNAVAILABLE IN CURRENT SYSTEM BUILD]

  Tactical Acceleration [LVL MAX] — [UNAVAILABLE IN CURRENT SYSTEM BUILD]

  Mana Construction (Framework Obsolete)

  Advanced Synthesis (Legacy Module Removed)

  The red banners sat like tombstones.

  Twenty-three minutes later, Taiga arrived at his apartment door looking like someone who'd gotten dressed in the dark of his car. His shirt was on backwards. He'd corrected it by the time he came through the door, but Reiji saw that shirt-flip in his mind and understood: Taiga didn't hesitate. Taiga had moved directly from "something's wrong" to "I will be where you are."

  "Show me," Taiga said, leaving his keys on the table by the door. His phone lay beside them, already pulled out as if he expected to need it for reference.

  They sat on Reiji's apartment floor, knees almost touching, and Reiji pulled up the status screen. He gestured for Taiga to see it, though he knew Taiga couldn't—status screens were personal, locked to perception, visible only to the person whose System they reflected. But the gesture was necessary anyway. It made the moment feel less like a confessional.

  "Okay," Taiga said, his voice the kind of steady that only came from people who were good at handling crisis. "Walk me through what's wrong."

  "Everything's wrong," Reiji said. "The class system is different. I thought there would be eight specialization branches within the Support class. There's four now, and they're named differently. The skills don't match. Some of them have been completely deprecated. The System updated between now and the last time I—"

  He stopped himself.

  "The last time you what?" Taiga asked.

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  "The last time I checked," Reiji finished, which was not the truth and was not quite a lie.

  Taiga looked at him with the kind of focus that suggested he was listening to what wasn't being said as much as what was. Then he nodded, accepting the deflection, and looked back at the status screen that only Reiji could see.

  "What does deprecated mean?" Taiga asked.

  "It means obsolete. Legacy. No longer supported in the current build." Reiji pointed at the red banners. "I trained for a version of the System that doesn't exist anymore. Five years of—" He stopped again. Again, Taiga accepted the silence. "Five years of preparation for skills that won't even activate."

  "Can you respec? Switch to new skills?"

  "I don't know yet. The interface is different. Half of what I understand about how this works is just... wrong." Reiji felt the weight of it settle across his shoulders. Not fear, exactly. Something older than fear. The specific horror of knowing you're walking into a known place that's been rearranged. Every footstep a potential collision with something that wasn't there before. "I'll think I understand something because it matches my memories and I'll be wrong. Close enough to be dangerous, far enough to be useless."

  Taiga was quiet for a long moment. The city hummed outside the apartment window—still the same city, still running on the same rules, but the rules had changed. Somewhere in that humming darkness, millions of people were waking up to a status screen, to the System, to the sudden awareness that reality had overwritten itself.

  "What do we do?" Taiga asked.

  Not what do you do. Not what do I do.

  What. Do. We. Do.

  Something crystallized in Reiji's chest. Not hope—hope was too small a word, too fragile. Something more like recognition. Taiga had moved toward him without being asked. Taiga would stand beside him while the ground shifted. Taiga wouldn't ask him to carry this alone.

  "We figure it out," Reiji said. "Together. You pull up your status screen. Let me see what a baseline warrior looks like in this version. I'll compare it to what I remember. We make notes. We test things carefully. We assume nothing."

  Taiga nodded and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, the air around him shimmered slightly—Reiji couldn't see the screen itself, but he'd learned in the past hour that he could read certain body language cues that told him when someone was interfacing with their System. A particular kind of stillness. A slight change in eye focus.

  "I'm looking at it," Taiga said. "What do you want to know?"

  They spent the rest of the night like that, sitting on the floor of Reiji's small apartment while the city outside turned from night-dark to pre-dawn grey. Taiga called out his stats while Reiji listened and thought through implications. Warrior-class. Offensive bonuses stacked heavy toward Strength and Dexterity. Two active skills: Cleave and Shield Bash. No deprecated modules for Taiga. He got something clean and straightforward, a class that made sense, a System that knew what he was.

  TAIGA NAKAMURA

  STATUS: [WARRIOR]

  LEVEL: 1 | EXP: 0/100

  ATTRIBUTES:

  Vitality: 10

  Strength: 12

  Dexterity: 9

  Intellect: 5

  Wisdom: 6

  Charisma: 8

  SKILLS (ACTIVE):

  Cleave [LVL 1]

  Shield Bash [LVL 1]

  Clean. Simple. The System looks at you and decides what you should be. It sees Taiga clearly—a man built for directness, for physical dominance, for the kind of courage that stands at the front of the line. Reiji watched him read off the numbers and felt something like envy and something like confirmation settle together in his stomach. The System knew what people were. It looked into them and knew.

  That meant it was looking into Reiji too.

  That meant the System saw him as someone whose value was in support. Someone whose purpose was to make space for others to be their full selves. Someone whose nature was supplementary.

  That meant five years of training in a deprecated module was exactly what someone like Reiji would do. It meant the System saw him clearly too.

  Around three in the morning, Taiga fell asleep.

  He'd been mid-sentence, describing the exact damage numbers on his Cleave ability, when his voice just stopped. His head tilted against the wall behind him, and his breathing deepened, and Reiji watched the moment when consciousness checked out. Taiga's phone slipped from his fingers. He didn't stir.

  Reiji got up and grabbed his apartment's single throw blanket—thin thing, more ornamental than functional—and draped it over Taiga's shoulders. Taiga didn't wake. His face in sleep was younger than it was awake, less defended. Reiji looked at him and thought about what it meant that Taiga had come. What it meant that Taiga had asked "what do we do" instead of "what should you do." What it meant that Taiga had sat on this floor through the night, calling out numbers, asking questions, refusing to let Reiji carry the weight alone.

  He went to the window and watched the city turn from black to blue to grey.

  The System had updated. His entire foundation of knowledge was suddenly, irrevocably wrong. In another timeline, he'd had five years to prepare for this moment, and in this timeline, those five years had made him wrong in specifically dangerous ways. He could die from being half-right about how to survive. He could get Taiga killed by thinking he understood something that no longer worked the way he remembered.

  The old fears came back up, the ones he'd managed to suppress. The fear of being alone. The fear of being wrong. The fear that he was fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of preparation could fix.

  The fear that he would fail the world the way he'd failed before.

  Behind him, Taiga slept. One arm had come out from under the blanket. His hand was open, relaxed, as if he'd fallen asleep mid-reach toward something kind.

  I'm still alone, Reiji thought, and the thought sat like a stone in his chest. I'm alone in this apartment. I'm alone in this knowledge. I'm alone with the weight of five years of training that doesn't matter anymore.

  But I'm alone with someone who's willing to be alone with me.

  Maybe that's enough.

  Maybe that's everything.

  As dawn broke over the city, painting the apartment walls in soft amber light, Reiji sat on the floor and watched the warrior-class man sleep on his couch, and understood something he hadn't understood before. He wasn't fixed. His knowledge wasn't suddenly made right. The System hadn't rewritten his mistakes or given him a clear path forward.

  But he had chosen not to carry it alone.

  And Taiga had chosen to be the person he carried it with.

  The status screen still floated in his peripheral vision, red banners and all. The deprecated skills still wouldn't activate. The System still knew what he was, and what he was hadn't changed.

  But something had shifted anyway. Something that the System's interface couldn't quantify in numbers or add to a stat sheet.

  Reiji pulled his phone out and texted his mother: I'm okay. System arrived. I'm okay.

  Then he turned back to the window, watching the city wake up beneath the new reality, and waited for Taiga to sleep the kind of sleep that only came from someone who'd decided to trust that another person would be there when they opened their eyes.

  In the apartment's gathering light, the System knew what they were.

  Ten out of ten, Reiji thought, and meant it for the first time since the System arrived: having someone show up and ask "what do we do" was exactly the thing he'd needed most.

  The city moved below them. The System moved within them.