Month two started with a problem.
People were noticing.
Not many. Not loudly. But Greyveil was a small town and small towns ran on observation the way larger cities ran on coin. When a minor noble's kid who nobody had ever seen before started turning in hunt reports that didn't match his guild rank, people talked.
I heard it first from the butcher I sold excess beast meat to. Offhand comment while he was counting out coin. Something about how the other hunters had been asking questions.
I noted it and kept moving.
The status at the start of month two:
[Name: Caiden Knox][Level: 23][XP: 12,400 / 14,000][Strength: 33 | Agility: 36 | Intelligence: 27 | Endurance: 31 | Mana: 30 | Perception: 34 | Vitality: 30 | Luck: 2][Skill Points: 210][Skills: Basic Body Reinforcement (Passive) | Mana Sense (Passive) | Master Swordsman (Passive) | Mana Blade (Active)]
Level twenty three. C rank at the guild, which Carro had processed without comment but with the particular expression of a man actively choosing not to ask questions he suspected he didn't want answers to.
I had cleared the dungeon rift completely. All three floors. The thing on floor three turned out to be an Ironclad Serpent, twelve metres long, scales that deflected a regular sword strike entirely, a mana signature so dense my Mana Sense had practically shouted at me when I stepped onto its floor.
It took me three attempts over two days.
First attempt I lasted six minutes and retreated with a bruised shoulder and significantly less confidence. Second attempt I lasted twenty and figured out its movement pattern. Third attempt I went in with Mana Blade already active, hit the weak point under the jaw on the second exchange, and put it down in eleven minutes.
[Dungeon Rift Cleared.][Bonus XP awarded: 800][Level up! Level 21.][Level up! Level 22.][Rare material obtained: Ironclad Serpent Core.]
The core sat in my pocket for a week before I decided what to do with it. A mana core from a dungeon boss, dense with stored energy. The guild would pay well for it. A skilled craftsman could turn it into a weapon enhancement.
I kept it. Something told me to keep it.
Month two was about expansion.
The rift was cleared so I pushed further out. Past Greyveil's forest. Past the hunting grounds the local adventurers used. Into the stretches of wilderness between towns that the guild maps marked with the polite cartographic equivalent of here be problems.
The beasts out there were different. Bigger. Smarter in the particular way that things get smart when nothing has ever successfully hunted them. They had territories and patterns and in some cases what I could only describe as attitudes.
I respected that. I killed them anyway.
By the midpoint of month two I was B rank at the guild.
Carro called me into his office again.
He had a different expression this time. Not the careful neutrality of our first meeting. Something more considered. He had a map on his desk with several locations marked in red ink and he tapped one of them with a thick finger before I had even sat down.
"Greymaw Pass," he said.
I looked at the map. Greymaw Pass was a mountain crossing about half a day's travel north. The red marking next to it had a number beside it. Twelve.
"Twelve hunters went up there in the last two months," he said. "None of them came back."
"What's up there?"
"Best guess from the ones who got close enough to send a report before going quiet." He paused. "A Dreadhorn."
I had read about Dreadhorns. The bestiary devoted three pages to them and half of those pages were warnings. Massive, territorial, mana reinforced to the point where conventional weapons barely registered. B rank threat at minimum, some recorded specimens pushing A rank. They picked a territory and held it and killed everything that entered without particular interest in what that thing was.
"You're telling me this because," I started.
"Because you're the only hunter in this guild right now who I think might come back," Carro said. He didn't sound happy about it. "And because if it stays up there it's going to start coming down here inside of a month. Range expansion. They do it when the territory gets too small."
I looked at the map for a moment.
"What's the commission?"
He told me.
It was a significant amount of coin.
"I'll go tomorrow," I said.
Greymaw Pass earned its name.
The mountain approach was narrow, rocky, the kind of terrain that funnelled you whether you wanted to be funnelled or not. The air was colder up here and carried the particular quality of somewhere that had seen a lot of death recently. My Mana Sense picked up the residual signatures of the hunters who hadn't made it back, faint and fading, scattered across the approach like dropped coins.
The Dreadhorn found me before I found it.
That was the first surprise. The bestiary said they were territorial ambush predators that waited for prey to enter their range. This one had apparently revised its strategy. It came down the pass at a full charge, four metres at the shoulder, horns wrapped in dark mana that crackled visibly against the grey mountain air, and it was fast in the way that things with no natural predators get fast because speed is a luxury they can afford.
I threw myself off the path entirely.
It hit the rock face where I had been standing hard enough to crack it.
I landed on a ledge about three metres below, caught myself, and looked up.
The Dreadhorn pulled its horns out of the rock, turned, and looked down at me with small dark eyes that held nothing resembling concern.
Alright. So it's smart.
I pushed mana into the sword and jumped back up.
It was the hardest fight I had been in so far.
Not because of any single moment. Because of the sustained pressure of it. The Dreadhorn was fast and it was strong and it hit hard enough that even with Body Reinforcement every landed blow felt like a small disaster. It didn't tire. It didn't hesitate. It recalibrated after every exchange with the patience of something that had never lost before and wasn't entirely convinced it was losing now.
I was bleeding from two places by the twenty minute mark. My mana reserves were sitting at roughly a third. My sword arm was aching in a way that suggested the reinforcement was working harder than comfortable.
But I was learning it. The same way I had learned the Hollow Knights, the same way I had learned the Ironclad Serpent. Every exchange was information. Every hit it landed told me something. Every miss told me more.
At the thirty minute mark I stopped reacting and started dictating.
The difference was small from the outside. From the inside it felt like a door opening. I stopped waiting for it to move and started moving first, forcing it to respond to me instead of the other way around. Master Swordsman settled into something deeper than technique, something closer to instinct, and the gap between where the Dreadhorn was and where I put the sword started closing in a way that felt almost inevitable.
The killing blow wasn't dramatic. A Mana Blade thrust to the base of the throat where the hide was thinnest, full mana burst released on impact. The Dreadhorn went down mid-charge, momentum carrying it forward across the stone, and it stopped two metres from where I was standing.
Silence.
Just the wind and my own breathing and the faint crackle of residual mana dissipating from my sword.
[Dreadhorn defeated.][XP gained: 1,200][Level up! Level 24.][Level up! Level 25.][Stat Points awarded: 8][Skill Points awarded: 80]
I sat down on a rock next to the corpse and stayed there for a while.
Not out of sentiment. My legs had simply decided they were done for the moment and I respected the feedback.
Carro didn't say anything when I brought back the horn.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at my guild card. Then he updated it without a word, stamping A rank in clean black ink and sliding it back across the counter.
I was halfway to the door when he spoke.
"Knox."
I stopped.
"How old are you."
"Seventeen," I said.
He looked at the horn again. Then back at me.
"Right," he said, in the tone of a man filing something away that he wasn't sure what to do with yet.
I left before he could decide.