The city gate loomed ahead, its weathered timbers standing tall against the sky. Two guards leaned lazily against their spears, looking bored in the morning sun. One of them, a man with a familiar, scarred face, straightened up as we approached, a friendly grin spreading beneath his helmet.
"Well, hello, Seres. Back again so soon?" he called out, his tone easy and familiar.
His eyes flickered to me, curiosity evident in his quick glance, taking in my bandages and the large sack I carried. But he was professional, or perhaps just polite, and didn't comment further. Seres offered a polite, wordless nod and handed over the required coins—the non-citizen entry tax. The guard pocketed them with a nod of his own and waved us through the gate without any more fuss, his attention already drifting back to the quiet road.
The Adventurer's Guild hall was a cacophony of life and noise, a stark contrast to the quiet forest path. The moment we stepped through the heavy wooden doors, the sound washed over us—the heavy clatter of armored boots on worn floorboards, the constant, low hum of a dozen overlapping conversations, and the occasional loud shout of laughter or boasting about a recent hunt or kill. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, ale, and oiled leather.
Seres moved with a quiet purpose, leading me into the line that wound its way toward the long reception counter at the far end of the hall. I kept close, the sack of pelts feeling heavier under the weight of so many gazes. My presence, the bandages, my unfamiliar face—it caught a few curious eyes. A woman with a longbow strapped to her back gave me a long, appraising look. A pair of grizzled veterans near the notice board paused their conversation to watch us pass.
But for the most part, the adventurers kept to themselves, too absorbed in their own worlds—haggling over the value of monster parts, swapping exaggerated stories by the hearth, or quietly counting their hard-earned coin at small tables. We were just another pair in the daily flow of business, another story waiting to be traded at the counter. I tightened my grip on the sack, my focus narrowing to Seres's back and the path to the front of the line.
Finally, we reached the front of the line and stood before the polished wooden counter. A woman with kind eyes and auburn hair tied neatly back looked up and offered a warm, professional smile.
"Welcome. I'm Katherine, the guild receptionist. How may I help you today?"
Seres stepped forward and hoisted the large bundle onto the counter, untying the cords. She spread out the dark, thick wolf pelts, their fur still holding the sharp, wild scent of the beast. The D-rank pelt was largest, its quality unmistakable.
"We'd like to sell these," Seres stated simply.
Katherine's professionally pleasant expression shifted into one of genuine surprise as she carefully counted the pelts, her fingers brushing over the thick, dark fur. "These are from rank E wolves…" she murmured, her assessment clinical. Then her touch stilled on the largest, most imposing hide. Her brows rose. "And this one—this is a rank D pelt. The fur is denser, the hide much tougher to pierce." Her eyes flicked from Seres to me, her warm tone sharpening into one of pointed curiosity. "This is quite a haul. How did you manage to bring down so many? And a D-rank at that? That's no small feat for a small foraging party."
The question hung in the air between us, heavy and direct. I felt my muscles tense, my mind scrambling for an answer that wouldn't sound utterly insane.
Seres hesitated only for a brief moment, her pale eyes meeting mine. There was a silent question in them, a request for permission. Then she gave a single, slight nod toward me. "He did," she said, her voice calm and factual, devoid of boastfulness. She glanced back at me, and I saw the same unresolved wonder in her gaze that I'd seen when I'd chopped wood. She was stating a truth she herself didn't fully understand.
Katherine's attention snapped to me fully, her gaze becoming intensely analytical. It was no longer the casual glance one gives a stranger but the assessing stare of a professional evaluating a new variable. "I don't recall seeing him before on the rolls," she stated, more to Seres than to me. She tapped a finger on the D-rank pelt. "Adventurers must be registered with the guild to sell pelts of this grade. It's a regulation—ensures quality, tracks dangerous hunts, and prevents… complications." Her eyes narrowed slightly, not with suspicion, but with pure professional interest. "So. What rank is he? If he took down a D-rank beast, he can't be a novice. Which guildhall is he registered under?"
Katherine's analytical gaze was fixed on me, waiting for an answer. I caught the meaning behind her questions—the repeated word 'rank' stood out clearly. I understood enough. She wanted to know what I was. The problem was, I had no answer to give. I tilted my head slightly, meeting her expectant look.
"Rank…" I began, the word feeling foreign. I shook my head, my voice quiet but firm in the bustling hall. "…none."
The effect was instantaneous. The two simple words struck the noisy guild hall like a physical blow. A man nearby, who had been lifting a mug of ale to his lips, froze, the drink halfway to his mouth. A conversation about goblin hunting tactics at a nearby table cut off abruptly. The clatter of dice from a gambling circle silenced. The once-roaring space fell into a dead, stunned silence as every eye in the room turned toward the counter, toward me. I could feel the weight of their collective disbelief and curiosity pressing down.
Katherine blinked, her professional composure cracking. She stared at me as if I'd just spoken in a completely alien tongue. An unranked, unregistered nobody, standing there bandaged and quiet, claiming credit for killing a pack of wolves that would challenge a full party of seasoned adventurers? It was beyond improbable; it was impossible. Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. She was utterly lost for how to proceed with such a blatant breach of every guild protocol and understood law of nature.
Seeing her frozen shock, Seres leaned forward across the polished wood of the counter. She moved quickly, whispering something directly into Katherine's ear. Her words were too low and too fast for me to catch, meant for the receptionist alone. I saw Katherine's body stiffen, her eyes widening fractionally. Her gaze flicked to me—a sharp, reassessing look that held a new, dawning understanding—then snapped back to Seres's calm, serious face.
Without another word of explanation to anyone, Katherine gathered the valuable pelts with suddenly efficient movements. She didn't even bother to finish the transaction at the counter. Turning on her heel, she clutched the furs to her chest and hurried away, disappearing through a small, unmarked side door and leaving a gaping void of silence and speculation in her wake.
Seres Crone's POV
The stunned silence left by Katherine's abrupt departure was thick enough to taste. It was in that heavy quiet that a new threat emerged, not from the side door, but from the main hall itself. Three adventurers pushed their way through the crowd, their movements deliberately disruptive, their presence sucking the tentative curiosity from the air and replacing it with a familiar, ugly tension.
My body went rigid, my hand instinctively moving closer to the herb pouch at my belt—not that its contents would be of much use here. The one leading them was massive, a mountain of a man who towered over everyone, including Ardyn. His gut strained against the leather of his worn armor, and a giant, well-used axe was strapped carelessly to his broad back. Several daggers, their edges nicked from use, gleamed on his belt, swaying with his rolling, confident gait. His face was mostly hidden behind a thick, greasy beard stained with what looked like old food and ale.
The two flanking him were thinner, wiry, but they carried themselves with the predatory looseness of men who not only sought out trouble but cultivated it. The one on the left had a vicious scar running from his cheek down to his chin, pulling his mouth into a permanent, unpleasant sneer that revealed yellowed, uneven teeth. The other wore a grin that was all cold calculation, not a trace of warmth in his eyes as he flipped a narrow knife end over end in his hand, catching it by the blade with practiced ease, again and again, as if itching for a reason to let it fly.
I knew them. Everyone in the guild knew them. Zeren and his lackeys. Bullies who thought a high rank and brute strength granted them the right to whatever—and whoever—they wanted. And their eyes were fixed squarely on us, on the space where Katherine had stood, on the bandaged stranger at my side who had just declared he was nothing. This was not going to be good.
The large man took another step forward, his heavy boots thudding against the worn wooden floorboards. The sound seemed to echo in the tense quiet. He stopped directly in front of our counter, his shadow falling over us. "So, these are the ones?" he rumbled, his voice a low, grating sound that dripped with open mockery. He let his eyes, small and piggish, sweep over Ardyn and then me with a slow, dismissive contempt that made my skin crawl. "Don't tell me you expect us to believe this twig of a boy and his… little friend brought in all those pelts." A nasty smirk twisted his lips beneath the filthy beard, as if we were a particularly amusing joke.
He turned slightly, raising his voice to address the entire hall, playing to the audience of silent adventurers. "I'm Zeren," he announced, puffing out his chest. "D-rank adventurer." He said it like it was a royal title. "I know the risk of hunting wolves like those. The speed, the teeth… the cunning. Even I'd think twice before challenging a full pack without a proper team." He turned his sneer back on us, his gaze lingering on Ardyn's bandages as if they were proof of weakness, not survival. "But you? Don't make me laugh."
He jabbed a thick, grimy thumb in Ardyn's direction. "Look at him. Pretty face, fancy hair. You think this soft-looking boy killed a horde all on his own? More likely he stole the loot from others—or worse," he added, his voice dropping into a theatrical, accusing whisper that carried through the entire hall, "robbed dead adventurers of their kills."
A wave of uneasy murmurs rippled through the crowd. Doubt, once seeded, began to sprout. I saw heads nodding, eyes narrowing as they looked at Ardyn with new, suspicious eyes. Zeren had taken the impossible truth and twisted it into a far more believable, far uglier lie. And the guild, always wary of thieves and scavengers, was listening.
THE GUILD HALL'S POV
Ardyn didn't understand the full, ugly meaning of Zeren's words, the specific accusations of theft and grave-robbing. But he didn't need to. He caught the sneers, the mocking tone that needed no translation, and—more importantly—he saw the look that transformed Seres's face. Her usual calm stoicism evaporated, replaced by a burning, silent fury. Her eyes narrowed to slits, her jaw clenched, and her fists were balled so tightly at her sides that her knuckles stood out, white and sharp against her skin. That was all the translation Ardyn needed. A low, protective instinct stirred within him, and he shifted subtly, placing himself just a fraction closer to her side.
But Zeren wasn't done. Emboldened by the murmurs of the crowd and his own bluster, he swaggered forward another step. His hand, thick and calloused from years of handling weapons and who knew what else, shot out suddenly, seizing Seres by the arm. His grip was viselike, meant to intimidate, to demonstrate his dominance in the most physical way possible.
"Look at this twig!" he barked to the room, giving her a rough, jerking tug that made her stumble forward. She didn't cry out, but a sharp gasp was torn from her lips. "You really believe this little mouse was part of killing wolves? She looks like she'd snap in a strong breeze! This is a farce!"
His two cronies laughed on cue, the sound sharp and ugly in the tense hall. "Yeah, a strong breeze, Zeren!" one of them echoed, his scar twisting as he grinned. The other just flipped his knife faster, his cold eyes watching for any reaction, any excuse to escalate the violence. The display was crude, brutal, and effective. He was reducing her to an object in his narrative, a prop to prove his point through sheer force.
But before Zeren could drag her any further, his own wrist was caught—clamped in a vice-like grip that stopped his motion dead. Ardyn had moved without a sound, stepping forward into Zeren's space. His hand, despite the bandages wrapping his forearm, closed around the larger man's wrist with a strength that made the bones creak in protest. Zeren's smug expression faltered for a split second, surprised by the unexpected power in the grip.
Ardyn's mismatched eyes, one still holding a faint, fading gold glint, glared up at Zeren with an intensity that was utterly calm and utterly dangerous. His voice, when he spoke, was low, each word in the local tongue deliberate and clear, cutting through the background noise of the hall. "Let go."
Zeren recovered quickly, his surprise twisting back into a brutish smirk. He turned his head to look down at Ardyn, but he didn't release Seres. Instead, he tightened his grip on her arm, making her wince. "What's this, pretty boy?" he jeered, his voice dripping with condescension. He leaned in closer, his ale-soaked breath washing over Ardyn. "Think you can order me around? You're nothing but a liar hiding behind a woman's skirts."
His free hand drew back, muscles in his thick shoulder bunching beneath his leather armor. His fist clenched, the knuckles cracking audibly. The intent was clear, violent, and immediate. He was going to slam his punch directly into Ardyn's face. The two thugs behind him grinned wider, anticipating the spectacle. The entire guild hall watched, breath held, waiting for the impact.
But the impact never landed. Before Zeren's fist could even complete its arc, his vision blurred. A searing line of pain grazed his cheekbone, dangerously close to his eye. His instincts screamed a warning he was too slow to heed—the boy had moved faster than thought, faster than sight.
Zeren froze, every muscle in his body locking in place. The boy's hand—the one he hadn't been watching, the one that should have been weak and bandaged—now held one of Zeren's own belt daggers. And its cold, sharp point was pressed firmly against the soft skin just below his eye.
The world narrowed to that single point of cold steel. It glinted, deadly and precise, under the warm glow of the guild's lanterns. Zeren's breath hitched in his throat. He realized with a sickening, icy chill that the blade was positioned with terrifying accuracy. If the boy's hand slipped even a fraction, if he so much as twitched, the point would plunge straight into his eyeball. His sight would be gone forever.
Worse still was the grip. When Zeren instinctively tried to yank his head backward, to put distance between himself and the knife, he found he couldn't. The boy's other hand, the one still clamped on his wrist, held him with unshakable iron strength. He was trapped, held perfectly in place for his own blade. He couldn't escape without forcing the knife forward himself. A cold sweat broke out on his brow. The mocking laughter from his cronies died in their throats, replaced by stunned silence. The only sound was Zeren's own ragged, fearful breathing and the faint whisper of the knife against his skin.
The guild hall fell into a silence so absolute it was suffocating. Every adventurer, from the greenest recruit to the most grizzled veteran, watched the scene with rapt, disbelieving attention. The sharp, encouraging laughter from Zeren's cronies died instantly in their throats, choked off by sheer shock. No one moved. No one even seemed to breathe.
Ardyn stood there, a statue of cold, focused intent. His expression was utterly unreadable, devoid of anger or fear, which made it all the more terrifying. The stolen dagger in his hand was an extension of his will, its point poised with lethal precision a hair's breadth from Zeren's eye. It glinted, a promise of death itself under the flickering lantern light.
No threat was spoken. None was needed. The message was written in the unwavering steel, in the unbreakable grip on Zeren's wrist, in the absolute stillness of the boy who had been called a twig and a liar. One wrong move, one single aggressive twitch from anyone in the room, and Zeren would pay the price. Not with humiliation, but with his eye. Or his life. The air itself seemed to crackle with the unspoken ultimatum.