The town was called Duskreach.
Nara knew this because Rhen had told her, and she knew Rhen had told her because she had asked, and she had asked because the Grimoire's Zone 2 regional map listed seven settlements in this area and she needed to know which one this was before she decided what to do about it.
She had read about towns.
The reading and the reality had a gap between them wide enough to fall into.
She crouched at the treeline and looked.
The market district ran along the main road — stalls on both sides, canvas awnings in faded colours, people moving between them with the particular purposeful shuffle of people who had somewhere to be and were mildly annoyed about it. Lanterns were being lit as the afternoon tipped toward evening, one by one down the row, and the light they made was warm and yellow and ordinary in a way that Nara found difficult to process.
The levels were the strangest part.
Everyone had one.
Floating above each head, visible to anyone with enough System-sight to read it: a small numerical display, colour-coded by tier. The woman at the bread stall: Level 4, green. The man arguing with her about the price of a loaf: Level 6, green. Two children chasing each other between the stalls, laughing — Level 1 each, barely registering, their displays flickering with the instability of someone who'd only recently crossed the Zone 1 threshold.
In Zone 0, there were no displays. No one had a level worth displaying.
She looked at her own bar in her peripheral vision. Grey. Flat. The number beneath it: 0.
She looked back at the town.
Catalogue, she told herself. Look at it like data.
Three entry points from the main road. Two guard posts, low-level — Level 5 and 7, bored, not paying attention to the treeline. The market ran for approximately two hundred meters before the road narrowed into what looked like a residential district. Stone structures, Zone 2 standard. A guild board visible on the eastern wall of what she assumed was the local administrative building — too far to read from here, but the format was standard, the Grimoire had described it.
The bounty board would be there.
Her face would be on the bounty board.
She had arrived at this conclusion before Rhen had said it, and she had stayed in the treeline before he'd suggested it, because the grey bar above her head was not subtle. Anyone above Level 5 — and there were at least thirty people visible in the market who cleared that threshold — would see it the moment she stepped onto the road. A grey bar meant undead. Undead outside registered zones meant unlicensed, which meant illegal, which meant the guard post to her left would have a legal obligation to engage.
And then there was the matter of Pip on her shoulder, Stone a step behind her, and the wolf circling her left flank.
She was, she acknowledged, not built for casual civic navigation.
"Stay," she said.
Pip looked at her.
"I mean it. All three of you. Here. Don't move unless something comes."
Pip made a sound that conveyed deep personal injury at being left behind.
"I know," she said, and sent Rhen into town alone.
She used the time to read.
The Grimoire's Zone 2 entry was detailed — Kael had been thorough, she'd give him that. She read the section on regional hunter contracts, the section on guild board posting protocols, and the short appendix on bounty escalation timelines. Standard procedure: a Traveller-class complaint filed in Zone 0-1 border region would propagate to Zone 2-4 boards within six hours of filing. Reward amounts were set by the complainant and could be modified upward after posting.
She had been in Zone 2 for less than twelve hours.
She did the math and did not enjoy it.
Stone settled beside her without being asked. Its weight shifted the earth slightly and a handful of leaves fell from the branch above. She glanced at it — the troll's broad face was turned toward the town, tracking movement with the patient focus of something that had been standing guard for a very long time and was not troubled by the waiting.
She went back to the manual.
The wolf circled once, twice, and then lay down across her feet. She did not comment on this.
Pip had found a beetle and was examining it with the focused attention of a creature with nothing better to do and no interest in pretending otherwise.
She read until Rhen came back.
His expression told her before he opened his mouth.
She had been cataloguing his face for a day and a half — not intentionally, the Jealousy Engine did it without being asked, filing small data points about the way his jaw set when he was processing something and the particular stillness he got when the thing he was processing was bad. She recognised the stillness now.
"Bounty board," she said.
"Yes."
"My face."
"Clear likeness. Better than I'd expect for a field sketch."
"How much?"
He said the number.
She had been expecting the doubling. She closed the Grimoire and put it in the bag and pulled the strap over her shoulder. "We need to move faster."
"I know." He crouched beside her and spread a hand-drawn route sketch on the ground between them — he'd done it while he was in town, she realised, a small impressed note filing itself somewhere. "There's a secondary road northeast of here. Bypasses the next two checkpoints. Gets us to Zone 3 border in two days instead of three."
"What's on the secondary road?"
"Less traffic. Higher monster density."
"I have Stone and the wolf."
"I know."
"Then it's the secondary road."
He began to fold the sketch. He'd also brought food — wrapped bread, something that smelled like salted meat, a small clay bottle of something. He set it between them without comment. She picked up the bread and ate without pausing because she had not eaten since yesterday and the undead state did not remove hunger, just made it quieter.
"The board had three other notices next to yours," Rhen said. "Standard missing-persons and monster-sighting reports. But there was a fourth." He paused. "Guild-level advisory. Red band. New posting — within the last two hours."
She looked at him.
"Hunter activity flagged in Zone 2-3 corridor. High-level contract. Target profile listed as: anomalous undead entity, Level 0 classification, unknown class, multiple undead companions." He met her eyes. "No name. No face. But the description is specific."
"Someone with more information than Kael posted it."
"That was my read."
She considered this. Kael's complaint had her face, her level, the theft and assault charges — a Traveller's formal grievance, specific and personal. This advisory was different. Someone else had filed it, someone who knew about the undead companions, which meant someone who had been watching more recently and from close enough to count.
Someone with System Authority access to the guild relay network.
She filed this under: problems with faces I haven't seen yet.
"How long do we have before the hunters in this zone start moving on it?"
"If they're reading the board tonight? Dawn, maybe. If they're good, before dawn."
"Then we leave now."
She stood. Stone stood. The wolf stood. Pip abandoned the beetle.
She looked at the town one more time.
Two hundred meters of warm lantern light and the smell of bread and people going about their evenings. A child had sat down in the middle of the market path and was refusing to move while a parent negotiated, and someone was laughing from inside one of the buildings, and a man was closing up a stall by stacking crates with the automatic efficiency of someone who had done it ten thousand times.
The world was so full of ordinary things.
She turned away.
They were forty meters into the treeline when Pip grabbed her collar.
She stopped.
Pip held up one finger.
The wolf went low.
One finger. One person, approaching. Direction — Pip pointed south, toward the road they'd just left.
She raised her fist: halt. Everyone stopped. Stone's footfall went silent. The wolf was already motionless, grey fur blending into the undergrowth with an ease that still mildly unsettled her.
She listened.
Footsteps. One set, steady, not trying to be quiet. Professional quiet — the kind that came from training rather than effort.
Pip raised a second finger.
No — a third. Three people, Pip corrected, the second and third moving parallel to the first, flanking through the trees to the east and west. She hadn't heard them. They were better than the first.
She looked at Rhen. He had his sword half-drawn, eyes tracking the western approach.
She looked at Stone and pointed to the north, back toward denser cover. Stone moved — silently, which was impressive for something that weighed as much as a small building. The wolf slipped east to come around behind the flanker on that side.
She pulled Pip off her shoulder and set it on the ground. Pointed: circle, stay low, watch.
Pip gave her a look that clearly communicated its opinion of being used as a scout rather than a combatant, then vanished into the undergrowth so completely that she immediately lost track of it.
Good. That was the point.
She settled her back against a tree and waited.
The first figure appeared between the trunks — male, Zone 2 gear, the blue-green indicator of Level 8 floating above him. He was scanning the undergrowth with a handheld crystal, the kind that pinged undead signatures.
The crystal was pointing directly at her.
He stopped. Looked up. Found her eyes in the dark.
"There," he said.
The other two came in from the flanks. Level 6 and 7 — younger, less settled in how they moved. Bounty hunters, not guild-contract professionals. Opportunists who'd read the board tonight and moved fast.
Fifty shards, she thought. Doubled to a hundred.
People did a great deal for a hundred shards.
The Level 8 raised his crystal. "Unregistered undead, Zone 2 border region. You're coming with us."
She looked at him.
She looked at the crystal.
She looked at where Stone was standing very quietly in the shadows behind the Level 8, having circled around in the time she'd been keeping the man's attention on her face.
"No," she said. "I'm not."
Stone's hand came down on the hunter's shoulder.
The hunter made a sound and went down. Not dead — Stone had learned, somehow, to calibrate. He was simply very thoroughly sitting with Stone's full weight behind the instruction.
The Level 6 to her left turned toward Stone and Pip came out of the undergrowth directly into his face, all claws and outraged goblin energy, and he went over backward into a root cluster with a crash that startled a bird somewhere above them.
The Level 7 to her right hesitated.
The wolf stepped out of the shadows behind him.
He made a sound. Then he ran.
Nara watched him go.
She looked at Pip, who was sitting on the chest of the Level 6 with the expression of a creature that had won an argument. She looked at Stone, who had the Level 8 pinned with a mildness that bordered on apologetic.
"Tie them," she said to Rhen.
He was already moving. She went through the Level 8's pockets while Rhen worked — took the crystal, a route map, a communication stone, and a belt pouch with eleven shards in it. She left the rest.
She stood. Looked at the Level 8, who was conscious and furious and not going anywhere.
"Tell whoever's watching the board," she said, "that I move faster than the advisory accounts for. It'll save them time."
She picked up her bag.
They moved northeast, into the dark.
Behind her, Pip trotted at her heel, then jumped back to her shoulder.
She did not look back at the lantern light.
She had looked at it once. That was enough.
She pulled out the Grimoire and opened it to the Zone 3 entry without breaking stride, reading by the thin moonlight filtering through the canopy.
Level requirement: 1. Monster density: moderate. Primary hazards: dire wolves, cave crawlers, occasional Zone 4 spillover near the eastern ravine...
She read as she walked.
There was a great deal to learn.
She was going to learn all of it.