Small earnings finally formed a visible stack in Emma's ledger. They could not replace Sarah's hours or let Marco leave Ridgeway, but the blue profit cells no longer looked like accidents separated by large red purchases.
Emma turned the tablet sideways across the kitchen table.
“The first run made thirty-four,” she said. “The next four averaged ninety-nine and twenty cents after direct costs and arrows.”
“You added the arrows twice on this one.”
“I did not.”
Marco checked. She had not.
“Then it seems excellent.”
“It seems improving. Excellent would pay you for all the hours you spend cleaning.”
The refrigerator clicked off. In the sudden quiet, water dripped from a row of washed fungus bags over the sink.
Marco had worked a Ridgeway shift, spent two hours rebuilding route cards, and still needed to wax the bowstring. Emma's sheet counted permits, processing, insurance, bait, wire, arrows, fuel, and repairs. It did not assign a wage to the hours between.
“Keep that column,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Time. If the money goes up and the hours go up faster, I want to know.”
Emma added it.
Lucy leaned over the table. “Can you make the good cells greener?”
“They are already blue.”
“Blue is not a money color.”
Marco left them negotiating design and went to inspect his boots.
The left sole had begun separating at the toe.
Only an eighth of an inch. The gap vanished when he put weight on it. Mud from Dry Creek had dried inside the seam, which meant the damage was older than that evening.
He cleaned it out, photographed it for the equipment log, and put the boots beside the door.
The next available repair appointment was Monday.
His place in Saturday's Boone group was already paid.
Outing Six lasted forty-three minutes underground.
The station checker approved Marco's taped boots for the dry upper loop on one condition.
“You feel movement, you turn.”
At Marker Four, the left sole clicked away from the upper.
The tape might have lasted another hour. The agreement had not been turn if the boot fails.
Marco turned.
A tunnel rat crossed the return branch. Because the damaged sole made a low stance unreliable, Marco drew it into an open section instead of crouching behind the shelf. His arrow hit forward of the heart and buried itself in a wall seam. Boone guarded Marco's bad side until the animal fell.
The shaft stayed in the stone. Marco took the obvious clean material, added two fungus bundles from the return shelf, and left.
The short outing still produced a profit. It also consumed fuel, preparation, decontamination, an arrow, and most of a morning. Repairing both boot soles took the rest of Monday evening.
Turning early reduced the return without reducing every cost.
It remained cheaper than another ankle.
Outing Seven began in rain hard enough to drum on the station roof. Talia Cross led five entrants and warned them that runoff drove animals uphill as often as it drove them deeper.
Dry Creek itself stayed dry in name only. Water followed visitors down the entry stairs and condensed along the colder passages. The upper farming gallery remained open, but the county closed two lower branches for runoff.
Marco rewrote his route before he scanned in.
The repaired boots held.
At the first warm shelf, he found a field of bluecaps cut down to pale stumps. Skirt tissue hung beneath them in clean ribbons. He could see where another harvester had stopped when a permit alarm sounded; one knife lay forgotten on the ledge, its county rental number stamped into the handle.
Marco bagged the knife separately for lost property and began working the skirts.
Halfway through the bed, the portable mana alarm chirped yellow.
He stopped cutting.
The fixed wall sensor remained green. Moisture had collected around the portable probe. Marco dried it, moved ten feet toward the route marker, and tested again.
Green.
He did not resume immediately. The manual required two stable readings after a moisture fault. He waited the full interval while water tapped somewhere in the dark.
Both readings held.
The delay cost eleven minutes. It also kept him from learning to ignore a yellow chirp merely because rain offered an explanation.
At the next shelf, two mana beetles fed inside the same hollow. Marco set a bait strip in the open and backed to his chosen line.
The first beetle emerged. The second stayed behind it.
He waited until they separated.
His shot entered the first beetle below the shell rim. It died against the wall, pinning the arrow beneath its body. The second rushed over it before Marco could recover the shaft.
He dropped the bow on its sling and brought the spear forward.
The beetle struck the point sideways. Marco let the shaft slide through his hands, moved off its line, and drove again beneath the front plate. The creature snapped at empty air where his knee had been.
The second thrust held.
When both stopped moving, Marco found the arrow crushed between shell and stone. Fifteen remained.
The fight had lasted seconds. His breathing took several minutes to settle.
He packed the obvious plate and used the remaining permit time on known shelves rather than an unfamiliar branch. After costs, it became his strongest public-run profit yet.
The forgotten knife added no value. He turned it in at the gate and signed the property record.
“Could've kept it,” Lucy said that evening.
“It had a number.”
“You could've kept the number too.”
Sarah looked up from folding laundry. “This is why we do not let you write policy.”
Marco set the cleaned spear beside his pack. Its shaft carried a fresh mandible groove.
The boots were sound. His hands had no cuts. The ledgers gained another blue cell.
His right knee still shook when he remembered where the beetle's mouth had closed.
Routine had not made the animal safe. It had given him a practiced direction in which to move.
At Ridgeway, Dana increased Marco's controlled pest assignment from one support block every other week to one each week.
She delivered the news in the yard beside a temporary crawler lane.
“This is not independent clearance inside the Ridge,” she said. “You work with an armed field lead and a crew that knows your lane.”
“Ray?”
“When available. Cal or another licensed F-rank escort when Ray isn't.”
Wes, carrying a backstop panel past them, said, “I inspire confidence through contrast.”
Dana ignored him.
The yard lane held three moving foam targets on cables. Marco had to identify a safe shot, draw, and release before the target crossed a painted hazard line. The first pass offered a clear broadside. He hit behind the front shoulder.
The second target crossed behind a steel support.
Marco held.
The third came fast along the floor. He released before his anchor settled and struck the outer scoring ring.
“What changed?” Dana asked.
“I rushed because the second one got away.”
“The foam from the second target did not join the third target.”
“I know.”
“Know before you shoot.”
They ran the lane again.
Over four weeks of public groups, Marco had learned routes, processed his own kills, and returned on time. At work, he had an armed escort, a team, medical response, and equipment maintained by someone else. The contexts reinforced each other. They did not become interchangeable.
Dana signed the expanded assignment after he completed the retreat drill twice without crossing the hazard line.
“Consistency,” she said. “That is what I'm authorizing. Not talent. Not a future rank. The things you did correctly last week are the things I expect next week.”
The word sounded less glamorous than advancement.
It also sounded like work Marco understood.
Outing Eight punished him for changing two things at once. Boone led the group, and Marco worked the less-used branch while the warden held its mouth.
He entered a less-used branch off the farming gallery and carried a new folding sample box intended to keep fungus from crushing beneath heavier plates. The branch was legal, mapped, and more cluttered than the upper loop. Limestone fins narrowed the floor into uneven steps.
Marco watched the new route so closely that he failed to notice the sample box shifting against his quiver.
At Marker Three, the box latch caught two arrow fletchings and bent them sideways.
He stopped. Fourteen usable arrows remained after he removed one shaft whose vane had torn at the base. The other could be repaired aboveground, but he moved it out of the working rotation.
The new box went inside the pack, where it consumed space intended for harvest.
Five minutes later, he reached a shallow mineral shelf peppered with old extraction holes. The legal surface samples were common iron-bearing stone, almost worthless by weight. Behind the shelf, brown fungus grew along a warm seam in compact fans.
Marco filled two bags before scratching approached from the branch ahead.
A ridge crawler stepped over the marker line.
The passage offered a clean backstop and poor footing. Marco retreated to a flat section he had marked on entry. The crawler followed, head low.
He drew at eighteen yards.
The first arrow hit the near shoulder and glanced upward into a limestone fin. It shattered. Thirteen immediately usable shafts remained, plus the repairable one in the pack.
The crawler charged.
Boone shifted into the lane with his spear ready, forcing the crawler to choose between two threats. “Your shot if it turns. Mine if it closes.”
Marco backed through the open lane, nocked, and waited until the animal slowed around the rock projection. His next arrow entered beneath the jaw.
The crawler struck the floor hard enough to slide.
Boone pinned one foreleg until Marco confirmed it had stopped moving. The kill remained Marco's; surviving the imperfect first hit belonged to the team.
Marco took both glands and one obvious clean section before Boone's three-minute call. The load filled his new sample box, so the far half of the route disappeared from the plan.
One gland later downgraded because the first arrow had bruised it. A clean cut could not undo a poor hit. The run remained profitable, just less than the body had first promised.
Marco repaired the bent fletching that night and counted the shaft back into service.
Fourteen arrows remained after the outing, not thirteen. He updated the inventory before Emma could find the discrepancy.
Then he left the next range session off the calendar.
His shoulders ached from hauling the dense recovery packs. His sleep had shortened across two Ridgeway shifts and the public run. Repetition accumulated fatigue as faithfully as it accumulated practice.
Sunday became recovery: food, stretching, equipment cleaning, no bow.
The ledger received zero dollars.
Marco counted the day anyway.
Ethan reached Level 18 before Marco's ninth outing.
He announced it at a family cookout by letting Lucy discover the updated badge on his public profile.
“Rank F,” she said, loud enough for the next yard. “You're actually professional now.”
Ethan grinned. “Actually as of Thursday.”
His sponsor had moved him onto an E-track: coaching hours, approved dungeon blocks, recovery monitoring, and performance reviews every month. After six weeks of asking what everyone else recommended, Ethan had chosen the extraction-and-containment elective over a second striker block. Keystone approved it with a note that his combat evidence might advance more slowly. The program still paid part of his expenses in exchange for first rights on team contracts.
Marco stood beside the grill holding a plate of uncooked burgers.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Heard you're running Dry Creek every week.”
“Most weeks.”
“That's good. Consistency matters.”
Ethan meant it kindly. The word still changed shape coming from somebody eight levels ahead, wearing a Rank Marco would not reach for months even if every plan held.
“How's the money?” Ethan asked.
“Positive.”
Emma called from the picnic table, “After direct costs.”
“I have an auditor.”
Ethan laughed. “Keep her. Our team lost six hundred last month because nobody logged consumables correctly.”
The admission made the gap feel less magical, not smaller.
Ethan had coaches, sponsorship, and System Rank E as his next target. Marco had a repaired pair of boots, fourteen arrows, and a permit for an abandoned gallery.
Both could miscount supplies.
Outing Nine took Cross's weekday group back to the old extraction wall beyond Marker Seven. She held the junction while Marco examined the exhausted cut.
The bluecap beds had thinned. Somebody had harvested the new skirts too close to the root, leaving brown scars where the tissue should have regrown. Marco documented the damage for the ecology log and moved on.
At the extraction wall, fresh mineral gleamed inside one of the old square cuts.
The cut had been exhausted according to the public survey. Pick marks covered its back face in a neat grid, each hole numbered in faded yellow paint. Yet a narrow silver-brown seam now ran behind the old marks, exposed where the stone had flaked outward.
Marco did not touch it immediately.
He compared the location with his route map. Legal sample zone. No instability flags. Portable alarm green.
Salvage registered the exposed material as usable mineral, common but cleaner than the surface shelf. Nothing suggested a fortune hidden behind the wall.
What bothered him was the seam's position.
It crossed directly behind the old extraction grid, as if new material had formed where surveyors had already removed everything worth recording.
Marco photographed the numbered cuts, measured the seam, and took one permitted sample from the loose outer edge. The material separated without prying.
A tunnel rat interrupted before he could inspect farther.
It came down the warm shelf above the wall, dislodging chips beneath its feet. Marco retreated to the gallery center and drew.
Cross called the other entrants behind stone and covered Marco's flank.
The shot struck cleanly. The rat fell against the base of the extraction face, trapping the arrow under its chest.
When Marco rolled the body with the spear, the shaft snapped against a projecting pick mark.
Thirteen arrows remained.
Cross watched the warm shelf while Marco took the obvious hide and incisors. At her first warning glance, he left the musk tissue and carried the mineral sample out separately.
The processor paid ordinary assay value. No rare element, no anomalous mana density, no reason for the seam to matter economically. The automated assay added one line beneath the mineral composition: SYSTEM RESIDUE TRACE — BELOW REPORTING THRESHOLD. The clerk crossed it out when calculating payment.
“Same name as the gray flake?” Marco asked.
“Same database bucket,” she said. “That can mean the same material or two instruments admitting they don't know.”
She retained the assay sample under standard processing terms. Marco retained the report.
Across outings six through nine, $591 remained after direct costs.
Four arrows were gone. Thirteen remained. The boots had been repaired. Marco remained uninjured.
Those facts belonged on the same page as the profit.
The System notices appeared in the decontamination bay while he rinsed mineral dust from his gloves.
Bow reached Level 2.
Marco watched the blue lines fade.
Bow Level 2 recorded the technique accumulated through good releases, bad angles recognized too late, practiced retreats, and arrows he had chosen not to fire. His personal level remained ten.
He logged the skill change after the equipment count.
On Monday, Dana posted the next Ridgeway roster.
Marco had two controlled pest blocks, one surface post-processing shift, and two collection assignments in Zone 1.
Beside the second Zone 1 assignment, a small warning light blinked amber.
The route note had not loaded yet.