He was at the watchtower by accident.
He had been moving toward the capital, Auren, because the capital was where information concentrated and he needed more of it. The world's geography, its political structure, the nature of the dungeon problem, who the relevant powers were. None of this was available in border towns. He needed a city.
What he did not need, it turned out, was to actually enter one.
He got within two kilometers of Auren's gates and stopped.
The system was not screaming. But the drain notifications were coming in overlapping bursts, dozens of them, each representing another person within his radius, and the cumulative effect was a pressure behind his eyes and a heaviness in his limbs that he recognized from battles where he'd overextended himself. He was losing accumulated stats in real time, the number falling every second, and he wasn't even inside the walls yet.
He stood on the road and looked at the city.
Thousands of people in there. Maybe hundreds of thousands. The geometry of a capital city was the geometry of maximum proximity. Every street a corridor, every market a crowd, every inn a room full of strangers pressed against each other by habit and necessity.
He turned around and walked until the pressure stopped.
He found the watchtower on a hill two kilometers east of the city wall. Abandoned. Old military construction, solid stone, stairs intact, the top level open to the sky but sheltered enough. He climbed to the top and looked out over the surrounding land.
From here he could see the road, the city wall, and a broad enough radius that he'd know if anything was coming. The dungeon concentrations Davan had mentioned were visible in a different way from up here, a faint wrongness in the air above certain parts of the city, a shimmer that probably only made sense to him because the system had been training his eyes to see it.
He sat down against the battlement.
He would stay here. Work from here. Information would come eventually, either through Davan, who seemed persistent enough to find him anywhere, or through whatever the next problem was. Problems had a way of finding people who could solve them.
He unwrapped the dried fish and ate without tasting it.
Below, the capital made its noise, that particular low roar of thousands of people living close together, and it traveled up the hill and reached him as something almost gentle. From two kilometers, at the edge of the drain range, the city was just sound. Not pressure.
From here he could almost stand it.
He was still sitting there when the light changed and evening came in. The city below lit up with lanterns in a pattern that had no meaning to him yet but was, objectively, not terrible to look at. He watched it for a while, with the same attention he gave to anything that might eventually become useful.
Then he heard footsteps on the watchtower stairs.
One person. Light step, confident, not trying to be quiet but not loud either. He had his hand on the katana grip before the footsteps reached the top.
The trapdoor opened.
A girl climbed through. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Short dark hair, ink stains on her fingers, a satchel over one shoulder that was clearly overstuffed with papers. She came through the trapdoor, saw him, and stopped.
She looked at him with the focused assessment of someone running calculations.
"Your stats are pretty bad right now," she said.
He looked at her.
"I have Stat Sight," she said, in the tone of someone providing a footnote. "Passive ability. I can see numbers. Yours are low for someone who cleared a D-class dungeon solo three days ago." She tilted her head slightly. "You were near the city, weren't you. That would explain it."
He said nothing.
She came the rest of the way through the trapdoor and sat down on the opposite side of the battlement, which put her at roughly the edge of his proximity range. Close enough to talk. Far enough that the drain was minimal.
He didn't know if she had done that on purpose.
She opened her satchel and took out a folded piece of paper. Set it on the stone between them.
"This is for you," she said. "I was going to have Bolt deliver it but you moved faster than I expected." She paused. "Bolt is my pigeon. Guild courier pigeon. I use him for correspondence with people who are hard to reach. You qualify."
He looked at the paper without picking it up.
"Go ahead," she said. "I didn't poison it. I'm twelve."
He picked it up.
The handwriting was small and precise, the kind that came from someone who had written a lot and cared about doing it correctly.
As of this date, D-Class Dungeon at Kelvar: cleared solo by unregistered operative, forty minutes, zero casualties. Boss grade was Hobgoblin Warlord, typically requires a minimum team of four.
I know what your numbers look like during solo accumulation. I have not told anyone. I will not tell anyone, including the Guild Director, who has asked me twice.
You should eat something that isn't dried fish. There is a food stall two streets down from the south gate that does decent grilled skewers and stays open late.
Also: your accumulation rate is faster than any passive stat build I've seen documented. I think you should know that, even if you already do. Information is better held by two people than one.
Sera Nighthollow, Guild Scribe, Rank 3.
He read it twice.
Then he looked at her. She was watching him with the patient attention of someone who had already decided she would wait as long as the answer took.
"Why," he said.
"Why what. Be specific."
"Why tell me. Why not tell the Director."
She thought about this the way she seemed to think about everything, with visible processing rather than instant reaction. "Because the Director would try to use it. I don't think information about you should be used yet. I think it should be observed." A pause. "Also, you cleared a dungeon that would have gotten people killed and you didn't ask for anything for it. That's interesting. I pay attention to interesting things."
A silence.
"How long have you been tracking me," he said.
"Since the day after Kelvar." She wasn't defensive about it. Just factual. "You're not that hard to find if you know what to look for. You avoid populated areas, which means you move predictably around them. And your stat signature is distinctive."
He looked at her for a long moment.
She looked back without flinching, and he noted this, because most people flinched.
He folded the paper and put it in his coat.
"The grilled skewers," he said. "Two streets from the south gate."
She blinked. The closest she'd come to showing surprise. "Yes."
"They're good?"
"Better than dried fish. That's not a high bar, but yes."
He stood up.
She watched him do this. "You're going now? It's late."
"The city is quieter at night. Fewer people on the streets."
She processed this. "Because of the proximity drain."
He looked at her sideways.
"I have Stat Sight," she said again. "I can see what the drain does to your numbers in real time. I figured out the rough mechanics about six hours after I started watching you." She picked up her satchel. "If it helps, I'll stay up here while you go. I'm technically still within your radius from the watchtower, but I can move back further if the numbers start going somewhere you don't want."
He considered this.
"Fifty meters," he said. "Within fifty meters, I feel it."
She nodded, pulled out a small notebook, and wrote it down. He watched her do it. "I'm not going to cause you problems," she said, without looking up. "I just think you're worth paying attention to."
He stood at the trapdoor.
"Sera Nighthollow," he said.
She looked up.
"Next time," he said, "send the pigeon."
He went down the stairs into the dark, toward the quieter streets of the capital, toward a food stall two streets from the south gate, toward something that neither of them had a word for yet.
Behind him, upstairs, Sera wrote in her notebook: Day 4. Subject: communicative. In the technical sense only. Will continue observation.
She thought about it, then added: Also the skewers are genuinely good. He should go.
She closed the notebook.
Outside, two kilometers from the city wall, the capital went on making its noise into the night, and somewhere in the quieter streets of it, a ronin from a country that didn't appear on any map was looking for something to eat that wasn't dried fish.
It was, by any reasonable metric, a small thing.
But Sera Nighthollow wrote down small things. That was the entire job.