Max held the phone in his hand and paused as he read over the message once more. It wasn’t that odd to be hearing from her, was it? They did exchange phone numbers for this very reason. But wasn’t Casey training extra diligently for the midterms as well? Could they really just hang out at a café all afternoon? But then again: he hadn’t been very productive the last few days anyway, what was one more day of hanging out?

Also, if he recalled correctly, Casey said they should hang out if either one of them stumbled across something important about the midterms.

Maybe that was why she was texting him.

Either way, he wasn’t going to find out anything until he spoke to her.

He texted her back and they arranged a time to meet the next day.

The following afternoon, they met at a café downtown in the heart of the tower-zone.

Casey sat in the back drinking a matcha latte.

He ordered a simple black coffee and joined her at the table.

“Where’s Toto,” asked Max.

As if it had heard its name, the girl’s pet gerbil poked its head out of Casey’s pocket.

“Shh!” said Casey. “You’re not allowed pets in here.”

She crumbled off a bit of her biscotti and handed it to Toto as bribery to go back into hiding deep within her hoodie’s pocket. The gerbil picked up the cookie crumb which looked gigantic between its little hands and nestled itself away out of sight.

“Toto loves cookies,” giggled Casey. “So do I!”

Max took a sip of his black coffee. He wanted to ask why she had invited him here, but he figured there was no way to straight up ask that without sounding like a total jerk.

“How is your mid-term training going?” Casey finally asked.

Max had thought about how much he was going to tell Casey on the way here and he figured he had nothing to hide from her.

“I ranked up,” he said.

“You hit E-rank!?” she gasped. “You’ve only been in the tower-zone for a couple of months and you’re already at E-rank? It took me almost two years to get to E-rank and I’m still nowhere close to getting up to D-rank. That’s incredible, Max.”

He smiled. He was pretty pleased with himself for ranking up, but he also kept his ego in check. Casey ranked up without going up to the endless forest. No wonder it took ages. She must have had to practice mana channeling every day, maybe even save up to buy a silver monster core. It wouldn’t have been easy; but then she and the rest of the students at the climber academy besides him had years to get there. He had to play catch-up and exploit any advantage he had.