The iron-reinforced gates of the Adventurer's Guild groaned on their hinges, a sound like a dying titan that echoed through the soot-stained cobblestones of the Sinks. The dawn was not a herald of light in this district; it was merely a shifting of shadows, a transition from the pitch-black of the midnight hours to a heavy, charcoal gray. Within the hall, the atmosphere was thick—a stagnant soup of stale ale, the metallic tang of old blood, and the low, rhythmic murmur of weary hunters. It was the hour of the "Graveyard Shift," the time when the battered and the broken returned from the fringes of the world to settle their accounts, their eyes glazed with the fatigue of survival.
The massive front doors swung inward with a deliberate, heavy thud that silenced the room.
Aleric Thorne stepped across the threshold. To the casual observer, he looked remarkably unremarkable—a lean youth draped in the gray wool of a charity student, his face obscured by a cloth mask attached to his adventurer clothes that covered his lower face. Yet, it was not the boy that stopped the breath of every veteran in the room. It was what stood directly behind him.
Through some inexplicable feat of logistics that defied the very ledgers of physics, Aleric had arrived with the Stone-Hide Boar. The five-ton carcass loomed behind him, a mountain of muscle and fractured granite-hide that seemed to swallow the light. He had brought the beast through the narrow, twisting labyrhens of the Sinks, through alleys where two men could barely walk abreast, and through the sucking mire of the forest outskirts. Yet, he possessed no wagon, no team of straining oxen, and no visible means of transport.
Aleric stopped several paces into the hall, the heels of his boots clicking sharply against the stone. He did not look back at the gargantuan trophy he had dragged from the mouth of the Blackwood. He did not check to see if it was still there; his Gaze-Detection already provided him with the constant, crushing feedback of the beast's presence. He simply faced the main counter, his posture as straight as a plumb line, his hands tucked within the folds of his crimson cloak.
"The contract is fulfilled," Aleric stated. His voice was not a shout, but a flat, hollow ring that cut through the silence of the hall like a razor through silk. "The asset is delivered. I suggest thou findest a way to move this mass immediately; it is currently occupying the primary thoroughfare of thy' hall and obstructing the flow of commerce."
The silence that followed was absolute. A veteran hunter in the corner dropped his ceramic mug, the shards clattering and spinning on the floor, yet no one turned to look at him. Every eye was fixed on the F-Rank student who had just deposited a C-Rank Prime specimen in their lobby as if he were delivering a simple sack of grain. To the hunters, who spent weeks planning for such a kill, the sight was an affront to the natural order.
The Registrar—a woman whose name was whispered with respect in the lower taverns, known for her mechanical copper arm and a whirring glass eye—walked slowly toward the edge of her counter. Her mechanical eye zoomed with a series of frantic, metallic clicks, the aperture widening and narrowing as it tried to calculate the impossible weight of the beast and the lack of structural damage to the floorboards beneath it until the moment of its release.
"Thou." she started, her voice shaking with a combination of shock at her professionalism and basic confusion. "Thou art the 'Liability' from the Academy. The boy who won the contract for the Blackwood. I remember the entry. I remember the copper plate."
She vaulted over the counter with the ease of one who had done it a thousand times before, a copper limb hissing out a plume of steam as she headed for the boar. She prodded at the shattered stone shell, and as her fingers came out, they were covered in a sparkly dust that was the calcified form of mana. But with a glance at Aleric's muscular, 'normal' body—his defined abs straining through the effort of his tunic, his chest heaving with little effort—she turned away.
"I have two questions for thee, Hunter," she stated, her tone sinking into a low, venomous hiss that echoed throughout the room. "First, it is astonishing that one Hunter could surpass an opponent that even a group of trained Hunters have trouble defeating. I do not see a scratch on thy body. I do not see a drop of blood on thy grey robes. How did thou manage to defeat a C-Rank Prime without so much as a blemish on thy body?"
Aleric's head cocked slightly, the cloth mask glimmering with no hint of emotion, its surface seeming to sneer at her in its perfect, unmoving pose. "So, you knowingly sent me to slay a monster that takes an entire party to vanquish? That's an interesting line item for the Guild's error account."
The Registrar narrowed her eyes, her copper arm crossing over her chest with a metallic clink. "I said there was a mission open. I did not tell thee to take it and go hunt it, boy. The Guild is a board of opportunities, not a school for the slow-witted. If a child walks into a forge and touches the red-hot iron, is it the blacksmith's fault for leaving the fire lit? Thou art alive, which means the gamble paid off, but do not mistake thy' survival for my instruction. Thou wert a suicide mission that somehow returned."
"The wind was favorable," Aleric replied, the answer as vague and dismissive as the air itself.
"The wind?" she barked, a short, disbelieving laugh escaping her thin lips. "The wind does not carry a Stone-Hide Boar across three miles of mud and through the city gates! Speak the truth, Auditor. What manner of forbidden artifact or hidden escort dost thou possess? No F-Rank in the history of the High Spire has the mana capacity to levitate such mass, and thou hast no muscle to drag it."
"I am an Auditor," Aleric said, his voice now acquiring a cold, keen edge which did much to kill the conversation. "I do not carry; I merely ensure the assets reach their destination via the most efficient path available. Thy' questions are a waste of my processing time and thy' own. I have fulfilled the contract. The asset is delivered. My body is fit, but I am not a pack animal. Carry the meat to the slabs and give me my gold."
The Registrar whirred her eye once more, turning to the sea of hunters now beginning to encircle them. She could feel the resentment in their eyes-the envy of men that had lost limbs to beasts far smaller than this.
"Art thou truly so arrogant? Fine. Keep thy' secrets," she snapped. "But do not think the Guild is a simple vending machine where thou insertest meat and receivest gold instantly. This is a Prime specimen. Its value is tied to its processing."
She slammed an iron-bound ledger onto the counter and pointed toward the heavy iron doors at the rear of the hall, where the scent of blood and cold salt wafted through the cracks.
"The process of evaluation takes time," she explained, her voice regaining its professional authority. "First, the beast must be moved to the Slabs—and since thou hast arrived alone and seemingly refuse to lift a finger further, my men shall have to do the labor thou hast so 'indirectly' requested. Our specialist butchers must carefully remove the stone-hide; the calcified minerals are worth a fortune to the armorers, but only if they are removed without mana-fractures. Then, every pound of meat must be weighed and inspected for forest-taint. The tusks must be measured for marrow-density, and the gall-bladder must be extracted for the Alchemists' Circle."
She stepped closer, her mechanical eye clicking inches from his mask.
"To complete a full audit of a specimen of this magnitude... it will take a day, perhaps longer. We must ensure every sellable component is accounted for before a final valuation can be issued. Return tomorrow at the morning bell. Only then shall thy' account be settled. Until then, thou art still just a boy with a dead pig and no coin to his name. Go find a bed, Auditor. Thou lookest like a ghost."
Aleric looked at the boar, then back at the Registrar. He had calculated the value of the kill, but he had underestimated the friction of the Guild's bureaucracy. The delay was an inefficiency he had not budgeted for, a gap in the timeline of his survival. He felt the hunger in his stomach—a sharp, acidic reminder of his "normal" biology—and the dwindling mana in his core.
"Very well," Aleric said, turning toward the exit with a flare of his crimson cloak that seemed to swallow the nearby torchlight. "Ensure the cuts follow the natural grain of the aura. I shall know if a single ounce is missing from the final report. I have already measured the volume of the carcass to the fourth decimal. If the numbers do not match my own... I shall return for a manual correction."
"Threatening the Guild's butchers?" she snorted, watching his retreating back. "Go back to thy' books, boy. We know how to count meat better than any scholar."
Aleric went out into the thick air of the Sinks. He had no gold in his pockets yet, not yet, but this "Anomaly" he'd introduced to Guild records was immense, a ripple in the pond of power in this city.
Aleric headed back to the Academy, already thinking about budgeting for tomorrow.
Moving through the misty dawn, he was aware of a prickling sensation at the base of his skull. Gaze Detection.
It was not the broad, clumsy stares of the hunters either. No, this was a slender, cold gaze—one that belonged to a person who understood how to hide within the openness of the world. There was someone monitoring him from the side of a nearby distillery, observing the manner in which he moved, the manner in which he breathed. Aleric did not turn around. He did not quicken his pace either. He simply recorded the coordinate and went on towards the High Spire.
The hunt was now finished, but only just was the audit of the city starting.