Something had gone strange in his body over the past few days, which Hajin had been careful not to test anywhere people could count it.
Nothing about it hurt, since he was faster and steadier on his feet even with the ring nowhere in sight, so the trouble was entirely in how that would look to anyone paying attention.
'In Shard terms, where do I even rank?' he thought, adjusting his grip on the man still hanging off his hand.
'If anyone sets that beside the ring,' he thought, 'the word they reach for will be forbidden.'
The thought took him back to the person who had just come through the guild doors.
He knew her on sight without ever having spoken to her, because everyone in the capital learned the top names of the guild whether they wanted them or not.
Yenna, the Frost Fang, sat in the top five of the whole adventurer roster, so the hall rearranged itself around her without anyone giving an order.
She did not need any height for it.
Height had stopped mattering somewhere around the point where the crowd near the entrance began stepping aside before she reached them.
Her feet clicked over the floor in a steady rhythm until she stopped a few paces short of him, at which point the skin on the back of his neck crawled.
'Fuck, this could turn into a bad spot,' he thought, keeping his face still, 'I should have expected one of the top five to be in the building.'
Her eyes went across the room once, over the cracked pillar, the man pinned under his hand, Juna with the blanket still around her shoulders, then the crowd doing its best to look uninvolved.
"What is the meaning of this whole scene in the guild?" she asked, her voice carrying without any effort behind it.
The man Hajin had by the throat found his voice first.
Panic makes stupid people faster rather than smarter, which was the only explanation for what came out of him next.
"Y-Yenna, this bastard attacked me for no reason," he said, dragging air through a bruised windpipe, "I was just talking to the girl, that's all."
Her eyes moved onto him, then the rest of whatever he had been building fell apart in his mouth.
'So that is the temperature in here,' he thought, watching the man wilt, 'I have to defuse this before it gets messier.'
"Did I ask you for your version first?" she asked, without turning her head toward him at all.
"N-no," he said, staring at the floor between her feet.
"Then keep your mouth shut until somebody asks you to open it," she said, turning those blue eyes onto Hajin, "you, let him go."
Hajin opened his hand at once, then took a step back while the man folded onto the floor and started coughing.
'Yeah, no,' he thought, watching him hold his own throat, 'fighting an idiot is one thing, a ranked adventurer is a different kind of stupid.'
Nobody in the hall said a word.
He kept his face level under a pressure that had nothing to do with how much room she took up.
'Cooperate for now,' he thought, since arguing with the top five led nowhere he wanted to stand, 'it is the cheapest exit here.'
"Well? What happened here?" she asked, letting her attention rest on him without any hurry in it.
Before he could answer, careful fingers caught the back of his torn shirt from behind.
Juna had moved in against him while nobody was looking at her, so she was using his body as a wall now.
'She is hiding behind me,' he thought, keeping the surprise off his face, 'which is the last thing I expected today.'
The trust in that was worth more than every problem it was about to cause, though he put his attention back on Yenna before the pause turned into an answer of its own.
"That piece of trash put his hands on my friend," he said, tipping his head toward the man on the floor, "then priced her like something on a shelf."
Her eyes went to the cracked pillar, then back down to the man, who was rubbing his throat while glaring at a spot on the floor that had done nothing to him.
"I see," she said, and nothing at all moved in her voice, "there is always one of those in a hall like this, forgetting where he is standing."
"I have dealt with worse than him in this room," she said, straightening one glove without looking down at it.
'So she gets it,' he thought, feeling his shoulders come down half an inch, 'that is one problem smaller than it was.'
"But," she continued, and the single word put every muscle across his back on notice, "you damaged guild property doing it, so how do you intend to cover that?"
She tilted her head at the pillar, where broken pieces of it lay scattered around the base.
'Right, the pillar,' he thought, looking at damage he had genuinely forgotten about, 'of course there is a price hanging off it.'
"I will pay for the damages," he said, meeting her eyes without any of the flinching she was used to, "and I apologize for the size of the scene."
That answer moved something in her face, small enough that he only caught it because he had been watching for anything at all.
"You will pay," she said, looking at him the way people look at a coin that rang wrong, "really?"
"Yeah," he said, glancing at the pillar, "I threw him into it, so that's on me."
She studied him a while longer, then let a breath out slowly through her nose.
"Structural repairs run fifty silver," she said, pressing two fingers against her forehead, "and given what happened in here today, you have a week to settle it."
'A week is more than I need,' he thought, already sorting the order of it, 'card first, then whatever pays by the day.'
"Understood," he said, with a short nod she did not return, "I'll settle it inside the week, and thanks for not making this bigger than it had to be."
She gave him a look that made it clear the week was not a favour to him, then turned toward the counter without a word.
He took that as permission to leave before anyone worked up the courage to ask about the ring.
Reaching back, he caught Juna by the hand before she could decide anything about it, then walked for the doors while the crowd was still watching him go.
She stumbled a step behind him, off balance from how quickly he had moved, though her fingers stayed shut around his the whole way out.
The street took the noise back over once they were clear of the entrance, so he let his grip loosen, though she did not take her hand away.
'Fifty silver in a week,' he thought, glancing back at the guild once, 'so I need that adventurer card today.'
"You said you would pay her," she said, letting go at last to hold the blanket closed at her throat, "with what?"
"With money I do not have yet," he said, checking the street both ways out of habit, "so I get the card today and start pulling work off the board."
"Because of me," she said, and it did not come out as a question at all.
"Because I threw a man into a pillar," he said, looking down at her, "you were not the one holding him."
She walked most of a street before she said anything else.
"Thank you," she said, so quietly that a passing cart almost took the words out of the air.
"Do not thank me yet," he said, steering her around a woman with a loaded basket, "the guild gets fifty silver out of me first, so save it until then."
Inside the hall, Yenna had not moved from the counter, because her eyes were still working on the door he had gone through.
She kept coming back to the moment she told him to let go, when a ring of light had turned once around his wrist before it went out.
Half the hall had been staring at it before she arrived.
She had seen it well enough to be certain of the shape, a golden circle sitting exactly where a Shard had every right to be.
'No, that cannot be right,' she thought as the noise of the hall came back around her, 'Shards are the only manifestation of awakened power anyone has recorded.'
'So what exactly did I see,' she thought, drumming one finger against the counter.
She turned away from the door and started for the request board, letting the matter sit where it was, since it would keep.
'Someone interesting has turned up in the capital,' she thought, taking a posting down without reading a line of it.