Chapter 477: Watching Eyes

"How early?"

"Late morning, probably. That is the earliest a professional intermediary would show up without seeming rushed."

"Then we do a short hunt."

"Okay."

They ate breakfast quickly at the stew stall and headed for the stone portal.

Bruce chose the stone portal again. Kael did not object, because Kael understood the choice. Bruce wanted a quick controlled hunt on familiar ground, not an ambitious push into a new dungeon. Today was not a day for taking risks. Today was a day for staying warm and ready and calibrated. The stone dungeon’s F-rank interior would give them one clean cluster fight, maybe two, and then they would come back to Xiltra with plenty of time before Caelen arrived. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

He counted watchers on the walk.

Six today.

The reduction from yesterday had reversed. The three-core alpha kill had moved through the city overnight, and more watchers had been dispatched to observe the party. Not fewer. More. The pattern told Bruce that the political layer was accelerating its interest, not just from Elenora Vessa’s side but from every other side that was watching. Yesterday’s kill had made him significantly more interesting to the observers who had been on the fence.

He kept walking. He did not signal.

Kael, halfway through the walk: "Six today."

"Yeah."

"They come back."

"I noticed."

"It seems the movement of information overnight has convinced more employers that they should be watching us. The number will keep climbing for a few days. Then it will stabilize as employers make their moves, recruiters, patrons, brokers. After the moves are made, the watchers will drop again, because their employers will have gotten what they wanted or given up."

"So the next few days are the peak of the watching."

"The next few days are the peak of the watching. After that we settle into the political layer at whatever position the meetings have placed us. Which is why the Elenora meeting matters. Elenora is the first meeting, and the first meeting sets the frame for all subsequent meetings."

"You have thought about this a lot."

"I have had a career of thinking about who is watching me and what they want. It transfers."

Kael accepted this with a small nod.

The B-rank guard at the stone portal saw them coming and had, Bruce noticed, straightened her back slightly from her usual leaning posture.

She was expecting them today.

Word had moved. She had gotten the same reports as the senior clerk yesterday, and probably a follow-up overnight. She now knew, formally, that the party of three E-rank hunters she had been waving through her portal for the past few days had taken a three-core alpha yesterday afternoon. She was adjusting.

She held out her hand for tokens.

"Short hunt today?" she asked.

"Yes," Bruce said.

"Meeting scheduled?"

Bruce paused for a beat.

He had not told her about the meeting. She was asking without having been told. Which meant she had inferred it, from the pattern of who moved through her portal and how, from the reports the Guild circulated, from her own reading of him. She had put it together on her own.

Or she had been told by someone in the network she was part of.

"How did you know?" he asked her.

She smiled slightly. "You’re the kind of party that takes a three-core alpha the day before it goes to a meeting. The pattern is not subtle."

"That’s fair."

"Elenora?"

"You know her."

"I know of her. Everyone at my rank knows of the Nonagon members. I have voted for her in the informal polls we hold at the B-rank guard hall three times. She is a good vote."

"You vote?"

"Informally. It doesn’t count. But we track our preferences and share them with each other, so we know where the working-rank sympathies land. Elenora usually wins them. Ashen Carr usually loses. That is not a formal number that matters to the Nonagon, but it is a number that matters to us."

"Ashen Carr?"

"Another Nonagon member. Spire-district, older money, generally opposed to Elenora on most matters. If you take Elenora’s meeting, expect Ashen Carr to have questions about you within a month."

Bruce filed the name.

"Thank you for telling me."

"You asked plainly the first time. I gave you a plain answer. I am giving you plain answers now for the same reason." She waved them through. "Good hunting today. Short. And good meeting."

They passed through the portal.

The stone dungeon was familiar and quiet.

They cleared two crab clusters and one small roller pack in the first hour and a half. The pace was deliberate. Bruce was not pushing for volume today, just for practice. He used the three seals he had memorized plus two new ones he had committed from the manual overnight, drift, which produced a small sustained pull on a target’s motion, and root, which anchored a target to the ground it stood on for a few seconds.

Both seals worked. Root was particularly satisfying. The second crab cluster he used it on found their whole formation frozen to the stone floor, unable to shift positions, and Kael and Theron cleared them with almost no risk.

Kael tested his layered fire on the roller. The technique worked well. The outer heat dissipated on contact with the roller’s spine-plates and the inner heat continued through to the joint, doing damage after the roller thought the fire was gone. The roller uncurled a half-second later than it should have because its own body was confused about whether it was still burning, and Theron took it in the delay.

Theron himself was doing something new with the scythe.

At middle-E, the scythe was subtly more responsive. But that was not what was new. What was new was that Theron was, Bruce noticed, using the back of the blade for something. He would swing the scythe through a cut and then, on the recovery, pass the back of the blade over the fallen beast in a small deliberate motion, and the small wisp of pale essence that came out of the beast would follow the back of the blade directly, cleanly, without any waste.

Bruce watched him do this three times before he asked.

"Theron. You’re pulling the essence with the back of the blade after the kill."

Theron looked up. "Yes."

"Have you always done that?"

"I started this morning. I woke up and it was, obvious to me. Like I had always known how, and just hadn’t tried until today. The blade takes essence on the cut. The back of the blade collects essence that’s already leaving the body. It’s more efficient. Less essence is lost to dispersal."

"How much more efficient?"

"I think, maybe thirty or forty percent? It’s hard to tell without measuring. But my absorption per kill feels significantly higher than it did yesterday."

"That is a real advancement of your talent."

"I know. I don’t know what to make of it."

"Make of it that you have a talent that keeps finding new capabilities as you rank up, and that you should stay open to what it teaches you. That’s what to make of it."

Theron nodded slowly.

They finished the hunt at just under two hours. Their haul was solid, not an alpha day, but a good regular day for middle-E hunters. Each of them would clear another four hundred points at the Guild.

They came out of the portal in the late morning.

The B-rank guard nodded to them as they passed. She did not say anything. Bruce noticed she had a small piece of soul-paper in her hand that she had not had when they went in. She had been writing while they hunted, writing what he did not know, but writing.

He filed this and walked on.

They sold the haul at the Guild at the senior clerk’s table.

The senior clerk was normal today, no rising from his seat, no queue-jumping, but he processed them efficiently and paid out fairly. When Bruce closed his window afterward:

[Soul Points: 2,209]

Two thousand and two hundred. He had a real reserve now. Enough for a larger ring. Enough for the second and third books at the small quiet stall. Enough to keep them in the rooming house for a month with margin. Enough to walk into the meeting with Caelen, and whatever the meeting produced, without money being a concern.

He did not spend any of it. He wanted the full number for tonight.

They walked out of the Guild in the middle of the day and stood in the main square for a moment. Bruce checked the position of the sun. The Soul Realm had no sun, but the pale luminous sky had its own daily pattern of brightening and softening, and Bruce had come to read it accurately. It was around noon-equivalent. Caelen was expected in the late afternoon, if he came at all.

That gave Bruce four or five hours.

"Old soul’s for a midday soup?" Kael asked.

"No. Let’s do something different. I want to talk. Not in the room. Not at the stall. Somewhere quiet where we can think."

"Where?"

Bruce looked around the square.

The main Guild square had four entrances. Souls moved through it in the ordinary busy pattern of the middle of the day. Along the east side of the square, up a small flight of soul-stone steps, there was a small elevated terrace with three tables set out on it, a small quiet café Bruce had noticed on previous days but not visited. The café was elevated enough to be above the flow of the main square, quiet enough for a conversation, and public enough that no one could listen without being visible.

Bruce pointed. "That high ground is the perfect spot."

With that they went up.