The Association's re-evaluation office smelled of bleach and bureaucratic resignation.
Liu Yun sat in a plastic chair in the waiting room and filled out the re-evaluation request form, checking the box labeled 'Significant Ability Change' and leaving the box labeled 'Nature of Change' deliberately vague. He wrote: 'Mana affinity type reclassification.' It was technically accurate. It was also profoundly insufficient, but he wasn't prepared to advertise the specifics to a government office that reported to Director Voss's administration.
The evaluator was a tired woman named Officer Henna who had been administering Hunter assessments for eleven years and had seen enough edge cases that she had developed a face that expressed permanent mild skepticism as its default state.
She ran the standard mana output test first. Liu Yun allowed his Void Core to remain passively suppressed, which the system called 'Void Concealment,' a natural property of his inverted mana type, and the reading came back at its usual E-rank-adjacent value.
'That's consistent with your file,' Henna said.
'Try the secondary protocol,' Liu Yun said. 'The Void Resonance scan. It's in the supplemental equipment manual, page forty-seven, section three point two.'
Henna looked at him. 'Most Hunters don't know that exists.'
'I've had time to read.'
She retrieved the secondary scanner from a cabinet at the back of the evaluation room. It was older equipment, less frequently used, covered in a light layer of shelf dust. When she pressed it to his wrist and activated it, the display climbed to eight hundred before something in the machinery made a grinding sound and she hurriedly withdrew it.
'That's' She looked at the reading. Back at him. At the reading again. 'This equipment reads to a thousand.'
'I'm aware.'
'It stopped climbing because it hit the ceiling, not because you stopped.'
'Also aware.'
Henna typed something into her workstation with the careful deliberateness of a person writing something they know will start a paperwork avalanche. She printed a form, stamped it three times with three different stamps, and slid it across the desk.
'Provisional B-rank,' she said. 'Pending full panel evaluation with the Senior Assessment Board. You'll receive a notice in five to seven business days.'
He looked at the provisional rank card. Two weeks ago he had been Null Morrow. Now he held a B-rank provisional in his hand and the machine that had measured him had given up before it finished.
'That's all?' he asked.
Henna looked at him with eleven years of muted professional affect and said: 'For today, yes. Whatever you've got going on in there, Mr. Morrow, I'd suggest keeping it quiet until the panel evaluation. The Association has particular protocols for ability types they haven't classified before, and those protocols tend to involve a lot of meeting rooms and very senior people asking questions.'
He thought of Director Voss's billboard face and the words VERAMORE IS SAFE.
'Understood,' he said, and pocketed the card.
He spent the next week training.
The system's quest structure provided the framework: daily objectives that targeted specific aspects of his abilities, ranging from physical conditioning drills that boosted his base stats to shadow soldier command exercises that improved his tactical coordination with the Register. He completed every quest each day, sometimes twice when the reward included a Void Affinity increase.
He worked out where he should be. Not at the Association gym, where other Hunters might observe his sessions and ask questions about why his training shadow manifested as thirty-plus entities moving in coordinated formations. He found an abandoned warehouse in the industrial district, its windows boarded, its steel frame solid enough to survive a firefight. He cleared it, claimed it informally, and began.
Shadow tactical drills. Direction of multiple units simultaneously during simulated combat scenarios. He built obstacle courses from scavenged industrial debris and ran his soldiers through them, learning their individual capabilities, calibrating the command latency, the time between his intent and their execution. The Fenrir Shadow proved to be an entirely different order of magnitude from the other soldiers. When he deployed it in the warehouse, it filled the space completely, its void-mouth alone the size of a van, and the floor cracked under its non-weight.
He named it Fenris. The Shadow Sentinel he made his personal escort he named Shade.
On the fourth day of training, a system notification appeared that he had not been expecting:
[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED - VOID SIGHT][Passive. Allows the host to perceive the soul-substance of all living creatures within a range determined by Void Affinity. Soul-substance appears as a colored aura. Underworld creatures appear in red. Humans appear in white. Void-type entities appear in violet. Concealed or mythologically significant entities appear in gold.]
He activated it in the warehouse and the world became a painting. Shade burned violet at his side. Through the warehouse walls he could see the white auras of pedestrians three streets away, dim and warm and thoroughly unaware of what was watching them. Above the city, in the sky, he could see the red pulse of Gate fractures where Underworld energy pressed against the barrier between worlds.
And to the north, far away, barely visible even with the Void Sight's extended range, something gold.
One gold aura. Moving slowly. Too large to be human. Too controlled to be a Gate breach.
Something ancient was walking in the direction of Veramore.
He filed that information away and continued training.