Kael moved like someone who had nothing left to lose and too much to protect. The taste of moss still lingered in his mouth from the node in the tannery; it sat under his tongue like a warning. He had followed the trail of quiet changes — a ledger entry rewritten, a guildman who started skipping meals, a carthorse that began walking their routes at night instead of in the day. The hive hid in plain sight, and hiding meant it could grow.
Ryn was at his shoulder, silent as a shadow. She'd shaved the hood off her braid for this run, and the sight of her crossbow felt steadier than any soldier's lance. The captain had given them a small team — not a squad, out of caution — but the real reconnaissance had been the pattern Kael read in the margins of city life. Nodes loved paper, records, transactions; the hive fed on the things people used to organize their lives.
"Registrar Solen keeps the ledgers for the Merchant Guild," Ryn murmured. "If a node buries itself anywhere, it's in a place people mind very little — they assume ledger mistakes are clerks' faults."Kael nodded. "We don't need to break the entire Merchant Guild. We need to pull one vine and see what falls."
They approached the Registrar's quarter with quiet steps. The office building was narrow, three stories of narrow windows and a brass plaque that read Registry & Ledgers — L. Solen, Registrar. A clerk pushed the door open for them, expecting the usual morning mutter; the clerk's eyes widened when he saw Dorrin's shoulder-plate and the small, grim knot of hunters behind him.
Captain Dorrin — B-Rank (Low), ~1,100 GP — stepped forward and gave the registrar a curt order. "Solen, step outside. We need to ask you a few questions." His voice carried authority; the presence of a B-Rank captain usually made people cooperate.
A thin man with ink-stained fingertips bowed, smiling too easily. The public Registrar — the face of the ledger — looked harmless in his plain coat. Kael smelled paper and the faint lemon oil of polish. Nothing else.
Registrar Leto Solen — public face: Rank Unknown to Kael; public reputation: senior civil clerk.
Kael watched the man's hands as they moved. There was a twitch in the knuckle of the left index finger — a small, habitual thing that meant nothing to anyone except a hunter trained to read the little tells of beasts. He felt the edge of something in the air, an almost-imperceptible dampness of green that belonged to the hive. It wasn't loud; it was careful.
"Mind if I look at the logs?" Kael asked in a voice low enough that Ryn could only hear.Solen smiled. "Please. If there's an error, I can fix it."
They followed Solen into the records room — a cool little vault of shelves, each ledger wrapped in cloth and tied with string. Kael noticed one ledger in particular: a bulky ledger for the orphan yard's food allotments. The margins had been scribbled in a different ink. He touched the page and a faint dampness came off the stitching.
Solen's smile tightened. Then he blinked.
The smile became wrong.
Bark ridges rippled up Solen's forearms, and the ledger under Kael's fingertips writhed as though a finger had been laid on it from below. The clerk's face cracked, bone and root sprouting beneath the skin like a knot opening.
"Stand back," Kael snarled. The team behind him moved like trained shadows. Dorrin's hand went to the hilt of his short sword; Ryn slid two bolts into place. The register room smelled suddenly of earth and rot — a node waking.
The disguise fell away from Solen. Where his chest had been, a dull pulsing bulge — a node-carved gland — throbbed like a slow, stubborn heart. The thing smiled without humor now, and the ink on the page crawled like a living thing.
(Kael didn't have a hard GP reading for Solen; the node hid and dispersed its signature into the ledgers. But the strength felt comparable to a strong guild hunter — dangerous.)
Solen didn't wait for the conversation. He whipped his arms open. Tendrils of fibrous root shot from the ledger bundles, uncoiling like snakes into the air and striking at the hunters.
Kael moved first into the vortex.
One tendril struck down a clerk who had been frozen in fright; another lashed for Dorrin's face. Kael's blade flashed, severing the third tendril mid-swing. The cut smelled of wet sap and old ink.
He moved toward the ledger pile, feeling the pull. The hive wanted the paper to survive; the paper was its throat and its tongue. If the ledger lived, the node could hide forever. If Kael cut the ledger, maybe the node would die back.
A small, pale beast — one of those creeping page-larvae the Shaper had started to make from leftover bindings — skittered across the floor and struck at Kael's boot. He stamped it flat, and the wet crush of it spat heat into the air.
He sliced through a second tendril and felt the telltale warm pulse of blood on his palm. The moment the warm hit him, his body drank — visceral, immediate.
[C-Rank (Mid) | GP: 570 + 15 = 585]
The numbers hung in his mind with the clarity of an anvil. He still had room before the next threshold. He kept moving, knife biting into the ledger edges, tearing bindings, ripping the embroidered threads where the node anchored itself.
Solen let out a keening noise and slammed his palm down on the biggest ledger. Sheets fluttered, rose, and formed into a wall of paper that tried to push Kael back. He bucked into it, forcing through the papery wave, ripping pages as he went. Ryn fired again; a bolt tore a seam in the paper wall and set ink to steam.
From the doorway another small horror crawled — a clerk's chair remade into a snapping maw. It lunged at Dorrin. The captain brought his blade down and split it clean in two, but the thing sizzled and reformed out of wet pulp.
Kael jolted free of a paper lash and drove his blade at the node's exposed chord. He felt the chord tighten, and in that instant a second surge of warm blood splashed his face — the node's flesh breaking.
He tasted it, and the power came like a struck bell.
[C-Rank (High) | GP: 585 + 20 = 605]
The change was a physical thing: his limbs felt thicker with purpose, his breath deeper, the world's edges sharpening like the blade he held. It wasn't a Main Rank breakthrough; it was a sub-rank surge — but Kael felt the difference in bone and blood. The ledger's last threads snapped, and the node reeled.
That was when the registrar — now a tangle of root and ledger — roared and shifted shape. The room swam with the sound of paper and root and the sharp clack of a thousand scrawled pens. It lunged like a man desperate to survive.
"Hold it!" Dorrin barked. He charged with two guards flanking him — both B-Rank (Low), ~1,000–1,050 GP — and hammered the thing's flank with cold iron. Ryn moved in tight, her bolts quiet and deliberate; one hit the node's exposed pulsing gland and drove a seam of soot through the flesh.
The node staggered. It tried one last gambit — rolling the ledgers like a tidal wave and slamming them into the group. Kael threw his back into a stack and let the weight go through him, Stonehide rising like a second skin, his muscles bearing what would have dented bone.
He felt a faint tug — the hive reaching for him, a tenacious root trying to take hold.
"Now!" Ryn spat.
Kael lunged, driving his blade up into the nodal core. The thing screamed, not like a man but like a thousand presses grinding. The ink-stained air thickened and fell away as the node convulsed. A final, raspy sound escaped it, an imitation of pity, and then the ledger mass slumped into a wet heap.
Hands trembled and then were steady. The clerks who had not been torn were ushered out, pale and mute. Dorrin wiped his sword on a skirt and looked at Kael like a man who had seen what he'd expected and yet been surprised.
Ryn came to Kael's side, eyes flashing. "That could've been in the Council hall next week," she said. "They're seeding themselves where no one thinks to look."Kael nodded; his palms still smelled of ink and root. The new rank burned in his limbs — a promise and a bait both. Being stronger made the city safer, but it also made him more visible.
Captain Dorrin sheathed his blade and inclined his head. "You did good, Kael." He was the blunt type, the kind of man who measured things by whether they had ended or not. "You should come with me to the barracks. We'll report the node. Officially."Kael's mouth went dry. Official meant tapes, names, records — the very things the hive used to hide. He burned the thought away. For now, the node was gone, the ledger shredded, and the city's machinery could do its work.
But as they stepped out into the light, a courier stumbled up the lane, hair wild, eyes frantic. He thrust a note at Dorrin's feet before he could draw breath: Council session — emergency — registrar's ledger compromised — Councilor Mara requests immediate attendance.
Dorrin's gaze flicked to Kael, then to the ruined ledger sack. "Seems they want to hear about the clerk's mistake in person," he said.
Kael's jaw hardened. "We're not going to stand here for them to spin this. They'll say 'clerical error' and move on."
Ryn's eyes were hard. "And if the hive has a hand in the Council?"
Kael looked at the folded note in Dorrin's hand and felt, for the first time since the Shaper's heart died, the thing he'd feared most: that the hive would use rules and parchments and committee votes to widen its roots. He could kill nodes. He could cut the vine at the street level. But if the vine had hands in the halls where decisions were made, then the city itself could be used to spread the Shaper rather than to hold it back.
He slid his knife back into his belt, feeling the new C-High strength sit under the surface like coiled wire. "Then we go to the Council," he said quietly. "Together."
They moved toward the Council Hall, the guildmen's eyes on them like measuring sticks. The ledger heap lay behind them, a damp thing to be burned. The city had bought a little time. Kael felt the hive's careful attention shift like a shadow behind a curtain.
Someone in the Council would notice. Someone in the Council would answer.
But Kael already knew that the most dangerous thing he could do now was walk into a meeting where every word could become a ledger entry — and an entry could be an anchor.
He straightened his shoulders and walked on.