The notification system did not go away.
He spent two days outside Kelvar finding this out. Slept in the open rather than the inn because the inn had too many people and he'd felt the drain the moment he walked through the door, that sensation of something bleeding out of him that the text called Proximity Drain, and he'd turned around and walked back out before ordering anything. The innkeeper had called after him. He hadn't answered.
Outside was better. He found a hillside a kilometer from the main road, enough trees to break the wind, and sat with his back against one and read through every notification the system had sent him since he arrived.
It took a while. The system had apparently been sending notifications since the moment he woke up and had been courteous enough to queue them all.
He read them in order.
He read them again.
He sat with the information for a long time, the way he sat with any tactical assessment, letting it settle into the shape of the problem rather than reacting to it immediately.
His power grew when he was alone.
The closer people were, the weaker he got. Not metaphorically. Actually, measurably weaker, stats draining in real numbers the way a wound drained blood. The math was in the notifications if you wanted to read it, and he did want to read it, because he was the kind of man who needed to understand the terrain before he moved through it.
He looked at the line again: Direct contact resets accumulated bonus to base stats.
The Hobgoblin had hit him. The power burst had happened. He'd woken up this morning at base, which explained why everything ached more than usual and why a rabbit had gotten away from him at dawn that he would normally have caught without thinking.
Fine.
He set about understanding the accumulation rate the same way he'd learned swordsmanship: by doing it, tracking the variables, drawing conclusions. By the end of the first day he understood the basic shape of it. By the end of the second he understood it well enough to stop being surprised by it.
The system was, as far as he could tell, rewarding him for something he had already been doing for years.
He found this funny in the way things were funny when they were also slightly terrible.
On the third day he walked back toward Kelvar for supplies and found a woman sitting on a flat rock at the side of the road, fletching an arrow with the focused attention of someone who did this often and well. Recurve bow across her knees, practical clothes, the kind of face that spent most of its time outdoors. She glanced up when he came around the bend.
"You're the guy," she said.
He stopped.
"From the dungeon." She went back to her fletching. "I was at the perimeter. Saw you go in."
He assessed her. No hostile intent in the posture. Bow across the knees, not in her hands, the arrow in her fingers pointed down. She had positioned herself on a rock that gave a clear view of the road in both directions, which was either paranoia or professional habit, and she didn't read as paranoid.
"And," he said.
"And nothing." She smoothed the fletching against the shaft. "I was curious. So I waited to see how long you'd be in there. Forty minutes, according to the scouts." She looked up again. "D-class dungeons usually take a full team two to three hours with casualties. You came out alone without a scratch."
"I had a scratch."
"A scratch then."
A pause. He was at the edge of her being within fifty meters. He could feel the faint pull of the drain, not significant yet but present.
"What do you want," he said.
She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "Nothing right now. I'm just noting that you exist." She went back to her arrow. "You can keep walking. I'm not following you."
He kept walking.
He made it about thirty meters past her when the system notification appeared.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
[Lyra Voss] Detected within 50 meters. NEUTRAL.
Proximity Drain: Paused.
He stopped.
He looked at the notification. Then back at her, still on her rock, head down, working on her arrow.
She was exactly at the edge of the range.
He didn't know if she knew that. He filed it under: probably coincidence. He kept walking.
He found Kelvar's general store and bought dried fish, hard bread, and a whetstone. The shopkeeper spoke to him in Common and he spoke back in as few words as the transaction required, which was three. The shopkeeper seemed slightly unsettled by the efficiency of this and tried to fill the silence with conversation about the dungeon clearing, about the Guild scout report, about whether the stranger was a registered adventurer, and Ren waited for all of it to finish with the patience of a man standing in rain.
He left with his supplies.
Outside, he nearly walked into Davan.
Davan looked equally surprised and then immediately more official. He straightened his badge. "Hey. So. You cleared the Kelvar dungeon."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
Davan made the face of someone trying to figure out how much trouble this created. "The Guild scout report says you went in without authorization, cleared a D-class dungeon solo without registration, and left before anyone could document your class or method." He pulled out his clipboard. "That is technically several violations."
"Write them down," Ren said.
"I am writing them down." He kept writing. "The thing is, we'd usually fine someone for this, but the dungeon is clear so the net outcome is positive, and I don't actually have a precedent for." He stopped writing. "What is your class? Actually. I'm just asking as a person, not officially."
"I use a sword."
"You said that last time."
"It is still true."
Davan gave up with the specific quality of someone who had encountered a wall and decided to find a door somewhere else. "Okay. Look, I'm not here to make your life difficult. The Guild Director wants to meet you. The dungeon you cleared, the official team would have lost people in there given the boss grade. The Director's view is that someone who can do what you did is someone the Guild wants to talk to."
Ren said nothing.
"Not recruit," Davan added quickly. "Just talk. Over food, potentially. The Director likes to do meetings over food." A pause. "She thinks it makes people less likely to leave mid-sentence."
"Does it work."
"Mostly." He thought about this. "On normal people."
A short silence.
"No," Ren said.
He walked past Davan and back toward his hillside.
"The form has to be filed," Davan called after him. "Eventually. There is a form. It exists. It has your name on it already, I filled in what I had, but there are empty fields and those fields have purposes, they are not decorative."
Ren did not turn around.
"I'm going to keep finding you," Davan said. "That's not a threat. It's just my job. I'm going to keep finding you and reminding you about the form."
He was probably not wrong about that.