There is a particular kind of quiet that happens when a room full of armed people decides you're funny.
Jin heard it start about four seconds after he opened his mouth.
He hadn't gone to the food. He had gone to the counter, because a thousand years teaches you a few things, and one of them is that you ask for directions before you get lost, not after.
The clerk behind it was a woman of about forty with ink on her fingers and a ledger open in front of her. She had the eyes of someone who'd been answering stupid questions since sunrise and had a few more in her before supper. Beside the ledger sat a crystal the size of a man's head, cloudy and blue.
"Licence?"
"I don't have one."
"Name?"
"Jin."
"Hand on the stone, Jin."
He put his hand on it. It was cool and smooth, and it hummed faintly against his palm, the same static as the rest of the town.
It stayed dark.
The clerk looked at it, then at him, and closed her ledger halfway, the way you close a door on a draught.
"What can the guild do for you?"
"I'd like to know what happened," Jin said. "In the last five years."
That was when the quiet started.
Then a man at the nearest table laughed. He was big in the way that takes years of work, wrapped in steel plate that had been polished until it shone, and the tag around his neck had a C stamped into it. He laughed with his whole chest, and he turned round on his bench so the room could share it.
"Did you hear that? The blank wants to know what happened." He spread his arms. "Where've you been, friend? Under a rock?"
In a manner of speaking.
The hall laughed with him. Not cruelly, mostly. The way people laugh at a dog that walks into a door.
* * *
"He's with me."
Doyun had come back from the far end of the counter with his bounty purse in one hand, and he put himself between Jin and the big man without seeming to think about it. He was a head shorter. His tag said E.
The C-rank looked down at him. "Collecting strays now, Doyun?"
"He's been out in the wilds. Lost his people on Gate Day, by the look of him." Doyun's voice was easy, but his shoulders weren't. "Leave it."
For a moment it could have gone either way. Then somebody across the room called out that Doyun had paid for half their drinks last winter, and somebody else said leave the lad alone, Garrik, and the big man shrugged and turned back to his beer as if he'd lost interest a while ago.
Jin watched Doyun's hand unclench from the strap of his spear.
He's outranked, and he knows it. He knew what that man could do to him. He stepped in anyway.
Daewon would like him.
* * *
The stew was brown and thick and full of something that might once have been a root, and Jin ate it like a man who had been starving for a thousand years, because in a way he had.
He hadn't meant to. He'd meant to be careful, to sit like a normal person and eat like one. But the first spoonful hit his tongue and something in him just gave up. Salt. Pepper. Fat. Bread that was warm in the middle. He tore it in half and the steam came out and he had to stop for a second and look at the ceiling.
Bread.
I forgot about bread, too.
Doyun watched him with the face of a man who's just watched someone cry over a sunset. "Goddess. When did you last eat?"
"A while ago."
"Have mine." He pushed his bowl across. "Go on. I'll get another."
So, between bowls, Jin found out what had happened.
The first gate's survivors had walked out of the forest a day after it opened, filthy and half dead, and reported what they'd seen. Within a month there were gates everywhere. Within a year the Empire had built the Hunter Corps around the four of them and put their faces on every wall in the country.
"And the war?" Jin asked.
Doyun snorted. "Stalled. Hard to march on another kingdom when a gate opens in your own barracks. Nobody signed anything. Nobody calls it peace. Everyone's just too busy."
Two years of fighting a war that was a lie, and in the end it didn't even finish. It just got bored.
Then Doyun lowered his voice and leaned in, the way people do when they're about to tell you something they half believe.
"And then there's the other side."
"The other side of what?"
"Of the portals." He glanced around, as if the walls might object. "Three years back, things started opening that weren't gates. Doors. Onto another world. My cousin knows a man who went through once, licensed, all proper. Says there are towers there made of steel and glass, taller than the cathedral in the capital. Carriages that run without horses. Lights that burn without crystals." He shrugged. "Only a few people are allowed through, and nobody tells the rest of us much. That's where the guns came from, they say."
Jin turned his spoon over in his fingers.
A thousand years in a dead village, and the world went and got bigger without me.
Fine. I've got time.
* * *
The clerk came over herself, later, with a jug and the look of a woman taking her first break of the day. She sat down at the end of their bench without asking.
"So," she said. "The blank who missed Gate Day. Anything else?"
"The First Gate Survivors," Jin said. "Where are they?"
"Why?"
"I served with them."
Garrik heard it from three tables away, and the laughter that came out of him that time shook his plate.
The clerk didn't laugh. She just looked tired, and a little sorry for him, which was worse.
"Love," she said, "half the drunks in the Empire served with Captain Daewon. Last month one of them told me he was Captain Daewon. Had the beard and everything."
I could prove it. I could tell you that the captain snores like a dying bull, that Takumi cheats at cards and thinks nobody knows, that Elise hums when she's nervous, and that Shaun once fell off a horse that was standing still.
None of that would mean anything to you. And I don't have time.
"Where are they?" he said again.
Something in the way he said it made her stop smiling at the joke. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she shrugged, pulled a gate posting off the board behind her, turned it over and started drawing on the back.
"Hunter Corps headquarters. The capital." Her pen went down the page in a long line. "South road, all the way. Two weeks on foot if your feet are good. Ask anyone once you're inside the walls; you can't miss it, it's the one with the flags."
"Won't do you any good, mind," someone said from the next table. "After today? Corps'll send the First Gate lot north to hunt this Overlord, you watch. Who else would they send? Only the kid'll be left minding the capital."
The kid.
Shaun.
* * *
He waited until the hall had found something else to laugh at.
Then he asked the clerk about his village. He said its name quietly, the way you'd say the name of someone who'd died.
She knew it. He could see it in her face before she said anything.
"Gate Day," she said. "It was one of the first. A gate opened right on top of the place, near the river. I'm sorry, love."
Jin didn't say anything.
"Most of the ones who got out were sent to the camp outside the border city," she went on, more gently. "Three days east on the river road. Tents, mostly. There's no proper lists, not from those first weeks. People came in from everywhere. But if your people got out, that's where they'd be."
If.
He sat with that for a while.
They were alive, maybe. His mother, his father, Min-jun, Hana. Three days away. He could cover three days of road before Doyun finished his second bowl of stew, if he stopped pretending.
He thought about it. He thought about it very seriously.
Then he thought about the window that had opened over every head on the continent that afternoon. About Garrik's laugh, and the reward notice on the chapel door, and the priest in white shouting about crowns. About a stranger walking out of the border forest the day after the Overlord appeared, straight to one family's tent in a refugee camp.
Every hunter in the Empire would know which tent by nightfall.
And then what? "Hi, Mum. I died. I got better. Please don't ask what I am, because I'm not sure, and neither is the System."
Daewon will know what to do. Daewon always knew what to do with me.
I'm not walking into my mother's tent until I know what I can tell her.
It was the right choice. He was nearly sure of it. It still felt like swallowing a stone.
* * *
"I'm coming with you," Doyun said, later, in the cramped room upstairs he'd paid for with his thornback money. Two cots and a window that didn't shut.
Jin looked up. "To the capital?"
"Capital pays better. Gates are bigger, bounties are bigger." Doyun pulled his boots off and lined them up neatly at the end of his cot. "And the roads are going to be crawling with every idiot in the Empire looking for this Overlord. You've got no mana, no licence and a sword older than me. You won't last a day out there." He paused. "No offence."
"None taken," Jin said.
Some taken.
"Good." Doyun blew out the lamp. In the dark, after a while, he added, "Besides. You'd only get lost."
Jin lay on his cot and listened to the town settle around him: a hundred hearts slowing down, a dog two streets over, the night watch changing at the gate, the river a mile away. Somewhere in all of it, Doyun started to snore.
Like a dying bull.
Huh.
* * *
They left at dawn.
The road split just outside the town gate, the way roads do when they want to make a point. One branch ran south, toward the capital, broad and busy even this early. The other ran east along the river, narrower, toward the border city and a camp full of tents.
Doyun was already a few steps down the south road, talking about breakfast.
Jin stood at the fork and looked east for a long time.
Then he turned south.
I'm sorry, Mum.
Not yet.