“Using Charisma on those who cannot perceive it is not illegal. It is merely the fastest way to ensure no one trusts you again. Most practitioners consider this a sufficient deterrent.” — Sol Alliance Social Conduct GuidelinesThe train hummed beneath me, the familiar vibration of Schwarzstahl engineering carrying me through tunnels and over sky where it wasn’t feasible.[Paid: ¢2]I slumped into a window seat, the coilgun’s heat still radiating faintly through my hoodie where it sat mag-locked against my spine, and let the adrenaline finish draining.The carriage was half-empty.A few commuters in corporate dress, faces buried in holoscreens. An old man asleep three rows up, his head resting against the glass at an angle that would guarantee neck pain. Nobody was paying attention to the twenty-year-old in the tactical hoodie who was quietly having a retrospective crisis about every decision he’d made in the last six hours.I stared at the tunnel wall streaming past and let my mind unspool.The dive replayed itself in fragments, not chronologically but in order of emotional weight, and the heaviest fragment kept surfacing first.I’d almost stayed.Not for the quest. Before that. In the diving room, when Alfa had pitched the near-spawn shard with that calibrated grin and those reasonable-sounding arguments, I’d almost stayed.That was the part that bothered me.I’d wanted to walk away. Every rational signal had pointed toward the door. The Scavantis woman had warned me directly, and my own instincts had been screaming trap loudly enough to drown out a Midorikawa artillery barrage.And then Alfa had talked, and the screaming had gotten... quieter.Like someone had turned down the volume on my self-preservation just enough for the other signals, the excitement, the greed, (...)