Chapter 437: Immeasurable
Chapter 437: Immeasurable
The soft, steady glow that had run through the sphere for Theron and Kael did not stay soft and steady for Bruce...
While the guy was speaking It suddenly surged. The light flared up through the orb all at once, bright, far brighter than it had been for the others, and kept climbing, the whole sphere blazing brighter and brighter until the clerk took an instinctive half-step back. The display above the orb scrambled, the letters of the talent-class grade forming and breaking and forming again, unable to settle on a value.
The orb was trying to grade Bruce’s talent and could not. The number it wanted to show kept climbing past where the display had room to put it, the light pulsing in hard fast waves, the air around the pedestal humming faintly.
The brightness held for a few seconds. Long enough for several nearby hunters to glance over. Long enough for the brisk clerk at the main counter to look up.
Then the orb’s light dropped back down to its normal soft glow, all at once, as if it had given up trying.
The display above it showed nothing for the talent class. No grade. No letter. Just a blank where a value should have been, not because Bruce’s talent was low, but because the orb had been unable to measure it. It had reacted to something far past its scale and then defaulted to silence.
There was a small pause.
The young clerk by the pedestal looked at the orb. Then he looked at Bruce. He opened his mouth, closed it, and frowned, clearly working out what to do with a result that was not a result. Bruce kept his own face carefully neutral. He had felt the surge come up through his hand, felt the orb strain against whatever it was reading in him, and he had a fairly good idea of what it meant. He did not say it. He did not say anything at all.
The clerk decided, after a moment, not to make it a problem. Bruce could see him decide it, see the small shrug of a man who processed dozens of registrations a day and had long since learned that the occasional weird one was not worth the trouble.
"Orb glitched," the clerk said, with the flat tone of someone choosing the simplest explanation on purpose. "We get that with some of the Ascendants. The rank read throws it off, and then it can’t get a clean talent grade either." He scribbled something on Bruce’s slip. "I’ll log your talent class as unranked, pending re-test. You can come back and get a proper grade once your soul’s settled and your rank reads clean. Doesn’t stop you registering. What’s the talent itself?"
"Writer," Bruce said.
The clerk wrote it down without comment. Writer. A talent that the orb had nearly blown itself out trying to measure, logged as Writer, unranked. Bruce was, privately, perfectly happy with that. The less the Guild’s records said about him, the better.
"Right," the clerk said. "All three of you, back to the main counter. Give them your slips. They’ll finish you up."
The rest of the registration was paperwork, more or less, paperwork done in soul-light slips and spoken records rather than ink and paper, but paperwork all the same.
Back at the main counter, the brisk older clerk took their three slips and read them. She raised an eyebrow at the two SSS grades. She looked at Bruce’s unranked, pending re-test for a moment, glanced up at him, glanced at the testing alcove where the younger clerk gave her a small don’t ask shake of the head, and then she let it go too. The Guild, Bruce was learning, had a very practical attitude toward things it could not immediately explain. It logged them and moved on.
She walked them through the rest. The Guild rules, recited quickly. Hunters kept what they killed, minus a small Guild cut on anything sold through the exchange. Contracts were posted on the board — bounties on specific beasts, clearing jobs for specific portals, escort and gathering work — and a hunter could also simply hunt freely in the open dungeon portals without a contract and sell whatever they brought back. F-rank hunters were limited to F-rank and E-rank portals until they ranked up; the higher portals were sealed to them for their own safety, the seals tied to the soul-point system and the Guild registration. Disputes between hunters were handled by Guild arbiters, not by killing each other in the streets, that she said with a hard look at Kael, who put on his most innocent expression. Healing services were available at the Guild infirmary, for points, though the cheapest healing was simply to eat well and rest.
She had them each press a thumb to a registration slip, the slip drinking in a small thread of their soul-light, binding the record to them, and then she slid three small tokens across the counter. Each token was a flat disc of pale soul-stone, etched with the half-beast symbol of the Guild and, beneath it, a single letter: F.
"Your hunter tokens," she said. "F-rank, certified. That’s your proof of registration, your portal access key, and your identity in the Guild system all in one. Don’t lose it. The portals read it. The exchange reads it. It ranks up with you as you climb. Understood?"
"Understood," the three of them said.
"Then you’re hunters." She was already looking past them to the next soul in line. "Board’s over there. Portals are out the back and through the city. Eat before you go out if you can afford it, which you can’t, so go kill something and eat that. You can confirm the locations on the marked map on the walls... Welcome to Xiltra. Next."
And just like that, it was done.
The confirmed what she said
An hour after they had walked through the Guild doors as three hungry, cracked, pointless newcomers, Bruce, Kael, and Theron walked back out as certified soul hunters, F-rank tokens in their hands, the rules of the trade in their heads, and a clear path in front of them to food, to points, to a room to rest in, and, beneath all of it for Bruce, to the long, long climb toward SSS.
The three of them stopped on the Guild steps, in the warm gold light, and looked at their tokens.
Theron turned his over in his good hand, the F catching the light. "Hunters," he said quietly. There was something in his voice, not quite happiness, but the next thing to it. A person who had been a tax clerk, who had died of a fever at thirty-two, who had run screaming through grey mist for hours expecting to die a second time, now stood in a city of light holding a token that said he was someone, with a job, with a way forward. "We’re hunters."
"We’re hunters," Kael agreed, slinging an arm around Theron’s narrow shoulders, careful of the bad one. "And in about an hour we’re going to be hunters who’ve eaten. Bruce. Where’s the nearest F-rank portal?"
"Let’s just go with the best which is what we choosed..." Theron said from the side. "I wonder how this soul realm dungeons are going to be..."
Bruce tucked his token away. He looked out over the city — the warm streets, the moving glow of a thousand souls, the pale towers, the strange beautiful place he had landed in — and, somewhere far underneath everything, he felt the thin thread that still connected him to a still body in a labyrinth, and to a wife sitting beside it, waiting.
The climb started here. With ten F-rank points and a hungry soul and two strange men he had known for less than a day.
It was as good a place to start as any.
"Let’s go find out," he said.
And the three of them went down the steps and into the city, hunting.
The directions to the nearest F-rank portal were simple enough. Out the back of the Guild district, three streets east, look for the green lanterns. Xiltra’s streets, Bruce was beginning to notice, were laid out with a working logic, the Guild district sat near the gateways for a reason, since hunters going out and coming back needed quick access. The streets between the Guild and the portals were wide, well-kept, and full of the kind of soul-traffic that came with the trade.
Souls in hunter’s gear moved past them in both directions. Some were going out, eager and clean; some were coming back, scuffed and bloody-glowing, carrying parts of things in slings or in carts that floated behind them on small disks of pale frost.
Theron stared at one of the returning hunters as he passed, a tall woman with a thin curved sword strapped to her back, walking with the easy tiredness of someone who had done a good day’s work, with what looked like a haunch of glowing meat slung over one shoulder. The meat steamed faintly.
"That’s what we’re going to bring back," Kael said, following Theron’s gaze. "Something big enough for us to take out. We can start with that..."
"Well I can work with that," Theron said.