Bai Rong pulled a document from somewhere inside her armor with the efficiency of someone who had learned that hesitation in administrative contexts was its own kind of weakness.
She set it on the table near the window. A thick sheaf of papers, bound with red cord, stamped with a seal I didn't recognize. Her hand left it and returned to her side. Professional. Clean. The ears were still red. She had decided, apparently, to simply not acknowledge them.
I respected that strategy.
"Standard intake form," she said. "Previous Administrators completed it without incident. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"Administrator Chou refused section four on philosophical grounds and attempted to rewrite the System's mission parameters on day one." A pause. "He lasted nine days."
"What happened on day nine?"
"He completed a mission without reading the full parameters."
She said it the way people say things they consider self-explanatory. I filed it carefully.
I sat down across from the table and looked at the document. The first page was standard enough. Name, origin, date of arrival, prior administrative experience. I filled in the honest answers: Wei Yin Zhu, somewhere that no longer existed in any meaningful sense, today, none.
The second page was less standard.
SECTION TWO: AFFINITY ASSESSMENT.
Please rate your tolerance for the following on a scale of one to ten.
The list was thorough. It was, in places, creative. I was aware of Bai Rong standing behind me at a precise and deliberate distance, looking at the wall rather than the document, which told me she had read it before and made a professional decision about her relationship to its contents.
I filled it out honestly. Several of my answers were ten. One category I hadn't considered before landed at eight on reflection. I turned the page.
SECTION THREE: PSYCHOLOGICAL STABILITY MARKERS.
Standard questions. I moved through them quickly. Stable. Functional. Flexible relationship with dignity, as previously established by my stat sheet.
SECTION FOUR: ADMINISTRATOR AUTHORITY ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
This was the section that had caused philosophical problems for Administrator Chou.
I read it twice.
The Administrator held binding authority over all System-generated missions. The Administrator could modify parameters within established limits. The Administrator was responsible for world stability metrics. The Administrator could not leave until stability metrics reached a defined threshold.
Could not leave.
I read that line a third time.
CORRECT, said the System, helpfully, in my peripheral vision. THAT SECTION IS ACCURATE.
"How long," I said, without turning around, "does it typically take to reach stability threshold?"
A pause behind me. Measured.
"The threshold is currently at 34%," Bai Rong said. "The target is 90%. Previous Administrators moved it between two and six percentage points before their tenures ended."
I did the math. It was not encouraging math.
"So I'm here for a while."
"Potentially."
I signed section four. Not because I had a choice, but because acknowledging a reality you can't change is more useful than fighting it in a document.
She moved forward then, collected the papers with the same efficiency she'd produced them, and tucked them back into whatever architectural marvel of armor storage she was working with.
"The threat assessment," she said, "requires a practical component."
"Of course it does."
"Every new Administrator is assessed for combat capability. The world has active destabilization zones. If you encounter one without knowing your combat parameters, the outcomes are poor."
Reasonable. Logical. I had no objections to knowing my combat parameters.
"Where?" I said.
"Training yard. Ground floor." She moved toward the door, then stopped. Her back was to me. The precise line of her shoulders said something she wasn't saying with her voice. "Administrator Wei."
"Wei is fine."
A fractional pause at that. "Wei. The practical assessment involves a sparring match. Standard procedure is for the Captain of the Guard to conduct it personally." Another pause, shorter. "I want to be clear that this is standard procedure."
"Noted," I said. "Very professional."
She walked out without responding.
MISSION PARAMETERS UPDATED, the System announced.
HIDDEN OBJECTIVE REVEALED: Bai Rong wants to lose this sparring match.
CLARIFICATION: She does not consciously know this yet.
RECOMMENDATION: Do not mention it.
SECONDARY RECOMMENDATION: Do not lose anyway. It will complicate things in ways that are, on balance, interesting but premature.
I stared at that for a moment.
She doesn't know it yet.
I followed her downstairs.
The training yard was behind the building, which turned out to be a Guard administrative post rather than my permanent residence, a detail nobody had clarified and I was filing for later. The yard was sand and stone, functional, marked with faded lines indicating sparring boundaries. Two guards were visible at the perimeter. They looked at me, looked at Bai Rong, and very deliberately became interested in something happening in the opposite direction.
Smart people.
Bai Rong had removed the outer layer of her armor. She was working in what was apparently her training configuration, lighter plate over practical clothing, her sword replaced with a blunted practice blade. She held a second one out to me.
I took it.
SYSTEM COMBAT TUTORIAL: SKIPPED, the System noted. YOU INDICATED NO PRIOR EXPERIENCE. THIS IS EITHER BRAVE OR VERY STUPID. STATISTICALLY: THE LATTER.
I had no martial arts background. No military training. I had, in my previous life, done six weeks of a beginner fencing class before the schedule conflicted with a limited release I needed to be home for. My physical stats were baseline average. My one genuinely impressive number was Luck, at 999.
I was curious what that looked like in practice.
"Ready?" Bai Rong said.
"Define ready."
She moved.
She was fast. Formally trained, technically precise, the kind of speed that comes from years of practice rather than raw ability. The blunted blade came in at my left side, angled, the entry point of someone who knew where most untrained people left gaps.
My body moved.
Not because I told it to. Not because I had training. My foot shifted, my weight redistributed, the blade passed close enough that I felt the air displacement, and I was somehow two feet to the right of where I had been standing.
LUCK PASSIVE: ACTIVE, the System noted. PROBABILITY MANIPULATION: LOW-LEVEL. YOUR BODY IS CURRENTLY BEING PLACED IN POSITIONS WHERE ATTACKS STATISTICALLY MISS.
THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS COMBAT SKILL.
YOU WILL FIGURE OUT THE DIFFERENCE SHORTLY.
She adjusted. Came again, lower this time, testing. I moved again, the same way, automatic, my body going where the math of probability pushed it. Bai Rong's expression shifted from assessment to something more engaged. She was recalibrating.
The problem with Luck as a combat mechanic, I discovered over the next ninety seconds, was that it was passive. It kept me from getting hit. It did absolutely nothing about hitting back.
I was extremely hard to touch and completely useless offensively.
Bai Rong figured this out at approximately the same time I did.
She stopped. Stepped back. Lowered the practice blade to a neutral position. Her breathing was slightly elevated. Mine was significantly more elevated, because dodging through probability manipulation apparently still required physical movement and I had the cardio of someone who worked from home.
"You have no training," she said.
"Correct."
"But you have something." She was watching me with the look of someone reclassifying a problem. "What is it."
"Luck," I said. "Apparently."
A long pause.
"That's," she started. Stopped. "That's going to be a problem in active destabilization zones."
"Because Luck doesn't attack."
"Because Luck at high values starts affecting the environment, not just the individual." She sheathed the practice blade with a precise motion. "We had an Administrator three generations back with a high Luck stat. He walked through a destabilization zone and came out fine. Everything within thirty meters of him did not."
NOTED, the System said.
I noted it also.
She was quiet for a moment. The two guards at the perimeter were still finding the opposite direction extremely interesting.
"The threat assessment result," Bai Rong said finally, "is: non-standard. You are not a combat asset in a conventional sense. You are a probability variable." She picked up both practice blades and walked toward the rack at the wall. Her back was to me again. The shoulder line was doing the same thing it had done by the door upstairs. "I will need to revise the protection protocols."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," she said, hanging the blades precisely on their hooks, "that until you develop supplementary combat skills, you require supervision in active zones."
"Personal supervision?"
A pause.
"Standard procedure," she said, "is for the Guard Captain to supervise high-risk Administrators directly."
The System notification appeared in my peripheral vision.
SHE IS STARTING TO KNOW, it said.
MISSION PROGRESS: 34%.
THIS IS, FOR THE RECORD, FAST.
Bai Rong turned around. Her expression was exactly as professional as it had been since she knocked on my door. Her ears had progressed from red to a color I was going to charitably describe as committed.
"First patrol tomorrow," she said. "Dawn. Don't be late."
She walked past me toward the building.
"Captain," I said.
She stopped.
"Thank you," I said. "For the honest assessment."
A beat.
"It's standard procedure," she said, and kept walking.
MISSION PROGRESS: 41%, the System updated.
CHAPTER TWO COMPLETE. SHE WILL THINK ABOUT THAT THANK YOU FOR APPROXIMATELY FOUR HOURS TONIGHT.
THIS IS, IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT, SIGNIFICANT.