Insomniac Player

John received the guild summons while eating breakfast intended for four people.

A red window appeared above his plate, hovering just past the edge of a stack of pancakes tall enough to qualify as a structural hazard. He read it, sighed, and continued chewing.

Damien waited, elbows on the counter, watching John work through the mouthful with the patience of a man who had learned that interrupting John’s breakfast rarely ended well for the interrupter.

John finally swallowed. "A dungeon has become unreasonable."

"Dungeons are known for that."

"My guild entered yesterday. The inner gate closed after the third team, and now the walls are producing copies of dead monsters." He said it the way another man might report a plumbing issue, mildly annoyed rather than alarmed.

"They need you."

"They claim they need leadership." John set his fork down with the air of a man deeply wronged. "What they need is a sufficiently large hammer."

"You could bring both."

"I intend to."

It was the eighth day since Damien’s last coma. His wounds from Silas had closed, though his shoulder still went stiff after training, a dull complaint that surfaced whenever he reached too far to one side. John had spent those eight days watching him with the suspicion usually reserved for unstable explosives, checking on him at odd hours, appearing in doorways without warning, asking questions that were really just excuses to look him over.

"How long?" Damien asked.

"Three days. Perhaps four. The dungeon exit only opens after the core breaks." John rubbed the back of his neck, already calculating supply logistics out loud. "Long enough that I should pack properly this time. Last dungeon I brought jerky and regret."

"Go," Damien said.

John narrowed his eyes at him, fork still in hand. "You said that too quickly."

"Your guild is trapped."

"And you own a martial manual, fifty-one unused points, and no instinct for resting." John gestured at him with the fork for emphasis, as if pointing out evidence in a trial only he was aware was happening.

Damien said nothing.

"That silence admitted everything."

"It admitted that arguing with you before breakfast is finished is a poor use of my remaining energy."

John grunted, unconvinced but willing to let it go for now. He packed enough food to supply a squad, checked Damien’s medical cabinet twice, and sent Doctor Smoke a message asking her to monitor him.

She replied that she was a physician, not a babysitter.

John offered double payment.

She changed her answer to maybe.

At the transport platform, wind cutting sideways across the deck and the guild carrier’s engines already humming, John pulled Damien into a hug that briefly threatened the work Doctor Smoke had done on his ribs. He held it a beat longer than the moment strictly needed, the way he always did before leaving.

"I will be back soon," he said, releasing him just enough to look him in the eye. "Do not enter any Gates, secret worlds, criminal organizations, or unusually reflective buildings."

"That list is specific."

"Experience improves instructions."

"Should I avoid poems as well?"

John considered this seriously for a moment. "Only the expensive ones."

He boarded the guild carrier. The platform shook when it lifted, scattering loose gravel across the deck, and then the ship banked west and shrank into the morning haze.

Damien returned to a quiet penthouse.

He rested for twenty-three minutes, which felt, by his own private accounting, like an act of tremendous discipline.

Then he opened Walk of Night.

Xuan Wuye’s manual divided the first phase into two components. The movement section described how weight should pass through the foot without disturbing the surface beneath it. The breathing section required mana to circulate with each step, hiding the body’s rhythm from surrounding senses.

Damien understood the words.

His feet did not.

He crossed the training room slowly. Heel lowered. Weight shifted. Toes settled.

His boot made a faint sound anyway, a soft scuff against the polished floor that seemed, in the silence of the empty penthouse, almost insultingly loud.

He started again.

The instructions prohibited forcing silence. A practitioner was meant to accept the ground before touching it, place weight where resistance was weakest, and let movement follow the existing darkness.

Accept the ground. As if the ground has ever accepted me.

Damien disliked instructions that became less clear the more carefully he read them.

On the ninth day, he practiced until his legs trembled, small tremors running up through his calves every time he tried to hold a position too long. He removed his boots, repeated the sequence barefoot, and discovered that bare skin only made failure colder, the polished floor pulling heat straight out through the soles of his feet. He used Nocturnal Eyes to study his own shadow and copied the manual’s drawings one angle at a time, adjusting his stance a fraction of an inch, then a fraction more.

Nothing changed.

The breathing component was worse. The manual required mana to enter with one breath, divide through both legs, and return to the chest before the next. Damien managed the first circulation, a warm thread sliding down through his hips exactly the way it was supposed to. On the second attempt, the mana struck the wrong meridian and numbed his left foot entirely, turning it into a dead weight he had to drag rather than a limb he could trust.

He waited for sensation to return, flexing his toes experimentally, and tried again.

By evening, he could either place his feet correctly or breathe correctly. Attempting both at once made him stumble like a drunk trying to sneak home past a sleeping parent.

Xuan Wuye had written one note beneath the diagram, the ink slightly darker than the rest of the page, as though it had been added afterward out of spite:

The night does not hurry to become silent.

Damien suspected the Dark Lord had included it specifically to be irritating.

Hamari visited with lunch and found him standing on one foot beside the sofa, arms out slightly for balance, looking like a man attempting a very slow, very serious form of yoga.

"Is this Murim training or a medical emergency?"

"Training."

"Disappointing. I brought bandages for nothing."

She set the food down, looked at him standing there a moment longer, and then deliberately began scattering snack wrappers across the floor in a loose arc around his feet, watching him with the focused attention of someone conducting a genuinely important experiment.

"What are you doing?"

"Testing whether you notice obstacles or just trust the universe."

Damien crossed them without touching any, his weight settling with careful precision between one wrapper and the next, and still produced sound when his foot landed just beyond them, a soft creak that undercut the whole effort.

"You move like a stealthy person wearing loud shoes," she said.

"That’s a strange compliment."

"I don’t give compliments. I provide elite feedback."

"Is there a fee for the feedback?"

"Lunch. Which I already brought. So really, you’re in debt."

She stayed long enough to test whether small controlled explosions affected his concentration, producing a firecracker from somewhere in her jacket with the casual confidence of someone who traveled with several. Damien refused the test outright, holding up a hand before she could get any closer with it. Hamari accepted this as proof that the manual had not yet made him interesting enough to risk actual property damage.

"Boring," she said, already pocketing the firecracker. "Tell me when you can dodge a locust in complete silence. That, I want to see."

After she left, he found a voice message from John inside the guild dungeon. Metallic impacts sounded behind every word, along with the occasional distant crash that made Damien wince in sympathy for whatever wall John had recently argued with.

John: The dungeon remains unreasonable. I have solved two rooms through structural criticism. Eat properly.

Damien sent a photograph of his untouched lunch.

John: That is not food. That is a plate holding food hostage.

John: Eat it before I return and confiscate your training privileges.

John: I am serious. I will hide the manual.

Damien ate half of it, mostly to avoid finding out whether that threat was real.

After John’s message, Damien stopped trying to imitate silence.

He followed the manual exactly, letter by letter, instead of correcting what looked inefficient.

The first diagram placed the foot at an unnatural angle. The second seemed wastefully slow. The third shifted weight backward before moving forward, which felt, on every attempt, like the wrong direction entirely. Damien had been quietly correcting those movements for two days because they felt inefficient, smoothing the manual’s oddities into something that made more sense to him.

He stopped correcting them.

On the tenth day, shortly before dawn, with the penthouse still gray and unlit around him, he completed the sequence from beginning to end without adjusting a single step.

The first step made a whisper.

The second made less.

The third produced nothing at all.

Damien continued across the room, his pulse loud in his own ears by contrast. His clothes moved. His breathing remained audible. The floor beneath him did not acknowledge his presence.

A System window opened.

➤[Walk of Night: Partial Comprehension achieved.] ➤[First Phase — Movement Component: Complete.] ➤[Second Phase — Breathing Component: Incomplete.] ➤[Passive Effect acquired.] ➤[Footsteps no longer produce sound while the movement pattern is maintained.]

He tested it by walking normally, letting his weight fall the way it always had.

Sound returned immediately, an ordinary footstep, almost startling after the silence before it.

He adjusted his weight according to the manual again.

Silence followed.

It was not a separate activated skill. There was no duration and no cooldown. As long as Damien maintained the movement correctly, his steps remained silent, a standing rule rather than a triggered one.

The breathing section refused him completely. Mana broke rhythm after the fourth circulation, and his heartbeat remained easy to sense. He could move without sound, but he could not yet hide that a living person occupied the silence.

Half a ghost. Better than none.

Damien closed the manual after sunrise, his hands faintly aching from a night spent holding careful, unnatural positions.

His communication window rang.

➤[Incoming Call: Sir Martin]

Damien accepted.

The Field Marshal appeared in uniform, the light behind him too bright and too even to be anywhere but a briefing room.

"Nova Corps is required at Region 21 Central Command," Martin said, without preamble. "All members. Noon."

"Mission?"

"Recognition first." Martin’s expression didn’t change, which told Damien more than the words did. "Then something less pleasant."

"Can you be more specific than ’less pleasant’?"

"At noon."

The call ended.

Damien crossed the room again, testing the new stillness in his own steps. No footstep followed him.

John had asked him to avoid criminal organizations.

Martin’s final expression suggested that request was already impossible.

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