It happened by accident, which maybe was the point.
They were moving supplies from the back shelves to the front counter, consolidating what was worth keeping portable, when Tsuna stepped on a piece of broken glass from a display rack that had fallen during the initial chaos. She didn't make a sound. That was the Tsuna thing, Amato was already learning. She absorbed pain with the same efficiency she did everything else, a small inhale, a momentary stillness, and then she bent down to look at the cut on her palm.
Amato felt it in his wrist.
Not as bad as the actual cut must have been, a fraction of it, a thin bright line of sensation that was there and then fading. But it had been there. He touched his own wrist and found nothing. No mark. No injury. Just the echo of one.
He looked at his interface.
BOND: TSUNA SHIRABE — LEVEL 0 / ACQUAINTANCE THRESHOLD NOT YET MET.
Note: Passive resonance detected. Physical sensation sharing active at minimal level. Full Bond not yet established.
He hadn't done anything. He hadn't agreed to anything. The system had apparently started something on its own just from proximity and whatever criteria it was using that it hadn't explained to him.
He looked at Tsuna.
She had wrapped her hand with a bandage from the first aid kit under the counter and was already moving again.
"Hey," he said.
She looked over.
"When you cut your hand. I felt something." He said it flat, because there was no good way to say it and adding drama would make it worse. "In my wrist. For a second."
She went very still.
"It's already fading," he said. "I don't think it's going to keep happening at this level. But I thought you should know."
The stillness lasted another moment. Then she looked down at her bandaged hand and back at him, and her expression was doing something he couldn't name.
"You felt my pain," she said.
"A version of it. Weaker."
"Without asking."
"Without asking," he confirmed. "I'm sorry. I don't know how to turn it off."
She looked at him for a long time. Long enough that Amato started constructing apologies in his head, because this was the kind of thing that could reasonably make someone very angry, having their pain borrowed without consent, even a fraction of it. He thought about how he would feel. He thought it was reasonable to be angry.
"Does it go both ways," she said finally.
"I don't know yet."
Another pause. Then she turned back to the shelves. "Don't apologize for it again. You didn't choose it."
He didn't say anything. The wrist sensation was completely gone now, but the memory of it was sitting in his chest somewhere, not painful, just present.
Around hour six, Kato asked him directly what his system did.
He explained what he knew. The Bond framework. The levels. The passive resonance. The fact that he had no combat ability and no stat boosts that applied only to himself.
Kato listened with his arms crossed. "Support class," he said.
"I think so."
"Support classes are useless without a team."
"I know."
Kato looked at Tsuna, then back at Amato. "You already have one," he said, and went back to the door.
Amato sat with that for a while.
The quest timer read 19:43:02 when it quietly, without fanfare, completed.
QUEST COMPLETE: 5 individuals survived. BOND SYSTEM UPDATE: Passive resonance range increased.
No celebration. No reward screen. Just a small acknowledgment that five people had made it through the first stretch of whatever this was.
He didn't know why that felt like so much. It just did.