After staying on the line with his sister long enough to confirm that she was stable, Rick jammed his phone into his pocket and put everything he had into sprinting. He was nowhere near as fast as the lucrima masters who blurred through their own lanes, but he was a good bit faster than the average runner just due to his physical condition.

It would have been very dramatic to run all the way back home, but pointless. His goal was just to get away from the suburb his lousy strip mall was in to a busier street, where he could find a taxi. He kept his eyes open, but hadn't spotted any yet.

Usually he didn't even notice the people moving overhead, but now he found himself noticing when one passed by. Not so many in a small city like Branton, but he saw a red streak of aura pass him by overhead, and five minutes later a woman passed by in a lucrima manifestation. It was shaped like one of the early World War III era planes, which was just pretentious, and he found himself glowering up at it.

But he didn't let himself get so distracted that he didn't notice the taxi. Rick hailed it wildly and fortunately the driver pulled over for him. He jumped into the back, scrambling for his ID and swiping it through the reader.

The driver was an old man who stared at the screen until the information came up. Only once his account and rating information appeared did he look back. "Where to?"

"1867 Fifth. Hurry, if you can."

"Hmph. It'll be quite a day when a customer tells me to take my time." But the old man pulled away and into traffic without any delays, leaving Rick to catch his breath.

Usually he didn't pay much attention to politics, but he was glad that a bill had changed the national ID laws during his last year of high school. It used to be that everyone's tier was printed on their card, which might have prevented him from using some taxis. Now government IDs didn't discriminate by lucrima, though your rating was still relevant for everything else.

Sometimes he wondered if it wouldn't have been easier to take a different path. Just take however much lucrim his employer gave him and not worry about fighting, like most people did. If he'd done that, he could have gotten a ride with someone doing ride-sharing, but for someone like him, who had some power but not enough strength to defend it, the risk was too high.

But he'd fallen into this path because he was good at sparring in school. His test scores were good but nothing exceptional, and Uncle Frank had advised him against going into business young. If his parents hadn't been such deadbeats, he might have gotten into a combat sect or a university, but even combining his scholarships with government loans, it just wasn't enough to afford it.

Which left him working as a human practice dummy in a cheap little strip mall.

As they passed the Branton Arena, his eyes couldn't help but wander over it. There had been a time when he'd thought about being a professional fighter, though the truth was that less than 1% of all fighters had a shot at going pro. Once he'd enjoyed watching the matches and picking up what he could, but now it was too depressing.

Sure, the fighters in the professional leagues were all brilliant and dedicated to their craft. But they also had truckloads of potions, steroids, and alchemy to boost their lucrima portfolios. Competing on that level wasn't even a dream at this point.

When the taxi began slowing down, Rick immediately jerked from his distracted thoughts. He peered forward and saw that they were entering heavier traffic... and it looked like everything had jammed at the intersection ahead. If they had turned sharply they might have avoided it, but the driver was already getting locked into traffic.

"This is close enough." Rick glanced at the meter and hastily tugged several bills from his pocket. He wasn't rich enough to just throw them and tell the driver to keep the change, but he rounded to the nearest dollar and handed over the wad. "Thanks."

With that, he hopped out of the taxi and darted ahead of the slowing cars to the sidewalk. It was only a few streets now, so he sprinted the rest of the way to Fifth. Of course, their house was quite a few more blocks down from the main streets, but the taxi ride had let him rest, so he took them at top speed.

Rick and his sister lived on the third floor of an apartment complex that made the strip mall where he worked look positively upscale. No ambulance in the parking lot, which was a good sign. No police cars either, which meant the meth dealers and the power junkies were still doing good business from the other side.

He took the stairs three at a time and practically tore open the door to their apartment. "Sis? You doing okay?"

When he didn't get a response, Rick rushed inside, barely remembering to lock the door. No one in the living room, television off. He checked the bathroom was empty before opening the only other door, to his sister's room. For a moment he thought she was missing entirely, then he saw her.

Melissa lay on the floor off the side of the bed, eyes closed but shivering intensely. It looked as though she had reached for something on the nightstand and fallen. Her long hair, a shade lighter brown than his, fanned out over the carpet. She'd changed out of her school clothes to more comfortable ones, but her glasses lay several feet from her.

"You okay, sis?" Rick bent down and lifted her in his arms, placing her more comfortably on the bed. She didn't answer, though she shivered less intensely at his touch.

This one was serious. Rick got out his phone and flipped to check on her - not with the cheap combat app he used for himself, but a medical app with a lucrim subscription. He gently settled the sensor against her forehead, letting it take a reading and then checking the results.

Melissa Hunter Lucrim Generation 3114 Current Lucrim 19 Ether Void -2487

He winced at the numbers - things hadn't been this bad in months. Rick stroked the hair out of her face while he grabbed the bottle of pills she had been reaching for. The normal dosage was one, but the instructions said that she could take two in an emergency. Even if she'd already taken one that day, this qualified as an emergency.

Thankfully, she didn't struggle when he fed her the pills, swallowing them easily. He felt one of her hands grip his arm, and a moment later her eyes fluttered open.

"Rick..." She gave him a weak smile. "Sorry to... worry you..."

"You're going to be fine, Melissa. Did anything bring on this attack?"

"No... normal day..." Her eyes were already beginning to fall closed again, so Rick decided that he didn't have a choice.

He carefully removed the two pearl bars from his backpack and drained the lucrim from them. In an ideal world, he would have absorbed the energy himself and used it to increase his strength. But compared to his sister's life, that didn't seem so important. Rick set up a stream of power into her body, where it gently washed through her before it disappeared.

It wasn't absorbed into her body, the power simply disappeared into a void. Melissa had a rare condition that left her lucrima foundation with a hole that constantly drained her. Though her generation rate was above average for a girl her age, in practice she never had that much strength. With medication she could live a normal life, but occasionally the ether void would grow more intense and drain all her strength. If the ether void number ever rose above her generation rate, death was certain.

Not if she had been in a proper medical facility, of course. If they had been part of a major sect or been wealthy enough, there were a variety of effective treatments. From what Rick had read online, rich people with the same condition could lead normal lives, and some of them even fought competitively. Those weren't options for them.

When he had drained away enough of his new lucrim, Melissa finally stabilized. That left him with only about 500 lucrim from his unexpected windfall, but he just felt lucky that he'd had it. Without that, he would have needed to drain his own lucrim into her, which wouldn't had completely reversed the fit and left him too exhausted to care for her.

Instead, he could see a bit of strength returning to her. His sister had always been ghostly pale, and her body was much too thin, but she stopped shivering. When she next opened her eyes, there was a bit of a spark in them again.

"Hey, Rick." She smiled up at him gently. "Sorry to worry you again."

"No, I should have been home earlier. I ran into some problems."

"Really? A bad client?"

"Not exactly... believe it or not, a group of three Birthrighters came into the gym to pick a fight."

"Haha, oh my gosh, really?" Melissa sat up, a big silly grin on her face. Seeing her expression was a huge relief and the tension finally drained out of him. "Like in an 80s movie or something?"

"A bit, though they didn't challenge us or threaten to close down the local martial arts school unless we could raise a specific amount of money." No, those were problems that had easy solutions, whereas this was just mundane cruelty. He kept all of that off his face. "Anyway, one of them beat me pretty good, but Lisa showed up and healed me. So I actually came out of it 500 lucrim richer, plus it helped my defensive core."

"Wow, your day was a lot more eventful than mine. I had a normal day at school and I was just going to veg out for the rest of the night. And before you ask, I already finished my homework."

Melissa hopped up to go to the living room, and though his instincts wanted her to stay in bed, he suppressed them. Now that the incident had passed and her lucrima had stabilized, she was essentially healthy. Forcing her to stay in bed would only push her toward depressing thoughts, so he just followed her out.

They sat on the couch and watched bad television, cracking old jokes that weren't funny to anyone else. For the first time in almost the entire day, Rick was truly able to relax. Given how rough things had been, he really needed it.

But as soon as he felt his lucrima regain a placid calm, he began his usual training exercises. They were nothing elaborate, just simple meditations he could repeat while watching TV, but he practiced them religiously. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he had missed them, if he didn't count the one time he'd fallen unconscious at work and lost an entire day.

Such work wouldn't revolutionize his life, but he was slowly and surely increasing his lucrim generation rate. He didn't have a choice, not if he wanted to support his sister, much less ever make anything of himself. For the thousandth time he considered applying for a demonic bond, or taking bigger risks for greater profits. But the truth was, given his life, a single major failure could ruin him, and that would ruin his sister's life as well.

"God, that guy is such a... such a mallard head." Melissa's joke was interrupted by a loud yawn. "Wow, I am way sleepier than I thought. Will you be okay without me if I turn in early?"

"I don't know, sis. Without your guidance I might end up jamming meth into my eyeballs."

"Don't do that, ya dummy." She hit him in the shoulder playfully. "You have to smoke the meth."

"Wow, really? You're such a good role model."

"And don't forget it!" Melissa wandered into the bathroom to brush her teeth and get ready for bed, leaving him alone on the couch.

Watching TV was boring without her and he'd already finished his exercises, so Rick instead began doing some more research on what this "Golden Core" in his profile might be. But despite his best efforts, he didn't end up learning anything useful. He might need to ask someone about it, and the problem there was always finding someone he could actually trust. If only his uncle was taking calls at the moment...

"Oh, by the way." Melissa poked her head out the bathroom door. "I grabbed the mail on my way home and it's all on the little table. I threw out the junk, but I wasn't sure about those ether course flyers. Anything that might be useful to you?"

"Nah, those are almost all scams."

"I figured, but I kept them just in case. Anyway, other than the bill, the only other letter is a big sealed one. It had your name on it, so I left it alone."

"Thanks, sis."

Rick forced himself to get off the couch and walked over to the "little table", which was also the only table. Another running joke that wasn't really funny, just a comfortable habit. There he brushed aside the useless flyers promising instant power, glanced at the bill, and then examined the big sealed envelope.

Immediately his relaxed mood evaporated and he tore it open. The return address was for the legal agency that handled everything related to their parents. There'd been a time when he'd hoped their parents would come back, but ever since his mother had abandoned Melissa, he'd given up on that. He'd expected that he wouldn't hear from them again until they died, unless they ended up calling to try to make bail.

So he wasn't sure how to feel when he learned that his parents were dead.

Rick read the simple sentences several times, trying to glean more significant information from them. It sounded like it had been illegal fighting, no doubt undertaken for more drug money. The letter danced around the subject, but that kind of thing happened often enough that he could read between the lines.

It had actually happened several days ago, it had just taken until now for the authorities to take care of the details. Now Rick needed to go take care of his parents' effects. The letter claimed they left him a Birthright Core, but he doubted it could be much of anything - more likely there was a small amount of compensation based on how they'd died. He'd take it.

Still, he found himself wondering. The meeting wasn't for three days, yet he couldn't put it out of his mind as he wished Melissa goodnight, brushed his teeth, and lay down on the couch to sleep.

Had his parents left him some sort of core? He told himself that it was probably nothing, and he'd find out soon enough, but it was still difficult to get to sleep.