In hindsight, the guild was not the best choice.
In his defense, it had looked - at two in the morning, from the outside, in the dark - like a storage building. Solid walls, no animals, a side door with a lock that was technically locked in the sense that the mechanism existed but practically unlocked in the sense that it opened when he pushed it with moderate confidence.
Inside had been dim, quiet, and full of the comfortable smell of old wood and something that burned in lanterns. He had found a corner behind what appeared to be a large notice board - cork, covered in papers he couldn't read in the dark - spread his jacket as a ground layer, and been asleep inside four minutes.
He had not, in the dark, registered the guild crest above the door.
He had not read the sign.
He had noticed the large table in the center, the benches, the bar along one wall, and classified all of these as tavern-adjacent, probably fine and gone to sleep.
This was the chain of decisions that led to his current situation.
Sol became aware of her first.
This was, in the hierarchy of how mornings in Haruki's life now worked, typical - Sol ran the passive monitoring overnight and processed new arrivals to the environment before Rax was fully operational, which gave Sol approximately ninety seconds of graceful handling time before Rax came online.
On this particular morning, ninety seconds was not enough.
"There is a person," Sol reported, in his pre-dawn monitoring voice - quiet, precise, the tone of a system noting a thing. "Approximately one meter in front of the host. Female. Mid-teens. Standing still. Has been standing still for-"
Rax came online.
The specific quality of Rax coming online was something Haruki had gotten used to - a kind of brightness in the background hum of the dual system, like a second light turning on. Usually it was accompanied by a moment of orientation and then whatever Rax's first thought of the day was.
His first thought of this day was immediate and unfiltered in the way that only a Chaos System operating at six in the morning without full processing capacity could produce.
"WHAT," said Rax.
"Good mor-" Sol started.
"WHAT IS THAT."
"That is a person, as I was just-"
"WHY IS SHE-" Rax stopped. Processed. Continued at a slightly different angle. "Sol. Sol. What in the actual—why is she blocking the entire view with her-I mean what in the actual-those are enormous-"
"Rax," Sol said, with great weariness.
"I'm just NOTING-"
"You are noting with considerable volume for someone whose host is still asleep-"
"THEN WAKE HIM UP BECAUSE-"
"I was attempting to handle this gracefully-"
"GRACEFULLY," Rax said, as if the word had personally offended him, "THERE IS A GIRL STANDING OVER HIM IN THE DARK AND SHE HAS ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS-"
"Rax."
"-HAIR. She has very large hair. It's very voluminous. Good for her."
"...That is not what you were going to say."
"It absolutely is."
"It absolutely is not."
"Sol," Rax said, with dignity, "I am a Chaos System and I maintain complete-"
The girl crouched down and reached out and poked Haruki's shoulder.
Both systems said "HEY" simultaneously.
Haruki woke up.
Waking up for Haruki was a specific process - not the dramatic snap-to of someone startled, more the gradual surface of someone whose body had decided it was done sleeping and was informing the rest of him in stages. Eyes first, taking in ceiling. Then the awareness of the floor under him, the jacket under that. Then the corner. Then the notice board.
Then the girl crouching approximately thirty centimeters from his face.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
She was - his brain processed this in the objective way of someone doing an inventory — roughly his age, with dark hair that was indeed somewhat voluminous, wearing practical clothes that were somewhat at odds with her general presentation, which was the kind of presentation that tended to precede a lot of unnecessary attention. She had the expression of someone who had been trying to wake someone up for a while and was relieved it had finally worked.
"Master," she said.
From somewhere in the back of his consciousness, both systems said "Hell no" in perfect unison, with a harmony that suggested they had not coordinated it and had simply arrived there independently through completely different reasoning.
Haruki looked at her.
"Go away," he said.
This was not his most eloquent moment. He acknowledged this privately. He had been asleep on a guild floor forty seconds ago and his social capacity had not fully reconnected to his mouth yet.
She did not go away.
She sat down cross-legged in front of him with the settled energy of someone who had made a decision and intended to be present for its consequences.
He sat up.
Reached for his water bottle - outer pocket, always - and drank. Stretched his neck left, right. Rolled his shoulders. Reached his arms above his head with the unselfconscious thoroughness of someone working through a morning routine that had been the same since he was fourteen.
His jacket fell open.
The shirt under it had, over three weeks of Grey survival and active system training, lost the structural integrity of its lower hem, which had torn at some point and been roughly trimmed rather than mended because he hadn't had the right thread color and it had bothered him aesthetically.
This meant that the stretch revealed approximately six inches of midriff.
Specifically, it revealed the midriff of someone who had been passively developing an inhuman level of physical conditioning for three weeks through the biological effects of dual system integration, which neither system had thought to mention in detail because it had been happening gradually and neither of them had considered it worth raising when there were mushrooms to identify and pools to jump into.
The abdominal situation was, objectively, significant.
The girl made a sound that was not a word.
"Rax," Sol said.
"I'm not saying anything," Rax said immediately.
"You were about to."
"I was about to note, purely in the interest of host awareness, that the passive physical development from dual system integration has been proceeding at an accelerated rate and perhaps someone should have mentioned it earlier."
"You didn't mention it."
"You didn't mention it either."
"I was cataloguing it for a comprehensive report."
"WHEN WERE YOU GOING TO DELIVER THIS REPORT."
"When it was relevant."
"SOL IT IS EXTREMELY RELEVANT RIGHT NOW-"
"Will you both," Haruki said quietly, pulling his shirt down and reaching for his bag, "stop."
They stopped.
He looked at the girl, who was looking at approximately where his midriff had been with the focus of someone who had forgotten what they were doing and was trying to remember.
"Why do you keep saying master," he said.
She blinked. Refocused. The professional expression came back over her face like a curtain being straightened.
"You saved me last night," she said, in the common tongue that Sol was translating with the smoothness of three weeks of practice. "In the alley."
"I didn't-"
"The noise," she said. "Someone made a noise that drew the patrol. It wasn't random." She looked at him with the directness of someone who had thought about this carefully. "I looked around before I ran. There was no one at ground level. The sound came from above."
He said nothing.
"And then I found you sleeping behind the guild notice board," she said, "which is not where a person with legitimate business in Ashfen would sleep."
"I was tired."
"You came over the wall," she said. Not accusing. Just stating.
He drank his water and looked at her and did not confirm or deny this.
"I'm Lira," she said. "My father owns this guild."
"...Your father owns the guild."
"Yes."
"And you found me sleeping in the corner of your father's guild."
"Yes."
"And your response was to stand over me and call me master."
"You saved my life-"
"I threw a rock," he said.
"You threw it from a roof in the dark at exactly the right angle to draw the patrol without being seen and you did it quickly enough to-"
"I threw a rock," he said again, firmly.
She looked at him with the expression of someone who had decided something and found his objections insufficient.
"Master," she said.
"Please stop saying that."
"AGREED," said Rax, internally, with feeling.
The cough came from the direction of the stairs.
A large cough. Deliberate. The specific cough of a large person who has assessed a situation from a distance and has decided that a cough is the appropriate opening move before anything louder.
Haruki looked up.
The man on the stairs was built along the lines of someone who had spent decades doing physical work and had never seen a reason to stop. Wide across the shoulders, thick through the arms, with a grey-streaked beard and the deeply weathered face of a person who spent significant time outdoors. He was wearing a guild master's insignia on his vest with the casualness of someone who had worn it long enough to forget it was there.
He was looking at the scene in front of him - his daughter, cross-legged on the floor, talking to a young man who had apparently been sleeping behind the notice board - with an expression that was working its way through several stages simultaneously.
Haruki had seen that expression before. It was the expression of a parent who has walked in on something that is technically innocent but is assembled from components that, individually and in combination, require explanation.
The guild master looked at his daughter.
His daughter looked at the guild master.
The guild master looked at Haruki.
Haruki looked at the guild master.
"Rax," Haruki said internally, very calmly. "Threat assessment."
"He's angry," Rax reported. "But the anger is directed at the situation more than at you specifically. He's a protective father operating on incomplete information." A pause. "He is also very large."
"Sol."
"I would recommend standing up," Sol said. "Don't make sudden movements. Keep your hands visible."
Haruki stood up. Hands visible. Jacket closed.
"Good morning," he said, in what he hoped was a tone that communicated I am a completely reasonable person with a completely reasonable explanation for all of this.
The guild master descended the remaining stairs with the deliberate pace of a large man who was not in a hurry because he didn't need to be.
He stopped at the bottom.
He looked at Haruki for a long moment with the measuring look of someone who had spent years assessing people who walked through his door and had gotten good at it.
Then he looked at his daughter.
"Lira," he said.
"Papa-"
"Why," he said, with great restraint, "are you sitting on the floor of my guild at dawn talking to a man who climbed over our notice board in the night."
"He saved me-"
"He was sleeping behind my notice board."
"He threw a rock-"
"LIRA."
"Papa he has amazing-"
The guild master turned to look at his daughter with an expression that had moved past the restraint stage.
Lira closed her mouth.
"She was going to say amazing skills," Rax said. "Probably."
"She was not going to say amazing skills," Sol said.
"We don't know that."
"We absolutely know that."
The guild master turned back to Haruki.
"You," he said. "Explain."
Haruki considered his options.
He looked at the guild master. At Lira. At the door. At the notice board he'd slept behind, which he could now read, and which said - in clear letters above the guild crest - ASHFEN ADVENTURERS GUILD. GUILDMASTER: BOROS ALDANE.
He looked at Boros Aldane.
"I arrived late," Haruki said. "The tavern was closed. The door was open."
"The door was locked."
"The lock was optimistic," Haruki said.
Boros Aldane looked at him.
Looked at him for long enough that Haruki had time to wonder if he had miscalculated the tone of that sentence.
Then, from somewhere in the weathered geography of Boros Aldane's face, something moved that was not quite a smile but was in the general neighborhood.
"Optimistic," the man said.
"It had commitment," Haruki said. "Just not execution."
Another pause.
"Where are you from," Boros said.
"Far," Haruki said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the accurate one."
Boros Aldane looked at him for another long moment.
Then he looked at his daughter, who was watching this exchange with the bright attention of someone watching something they had correctly predicted would be interesting.
"Lira," he said. "Go make breakfast."
"Papa-"
"Now."
She went, with the particular energy of someone obeying while making clear they intended to hear everything through the kitchen wall.
Boros turned back to Haruki.
"Sit down," he said, and pulled out a bench at the central table and sat across from it.
Haruki sat.
"You have no registration," Boros said. Not a question.
"No."
"No guild card."
"No."
"No Dominion identification."
"No."
"You came from the direction of the wall."
Haruki said nothing.
"I've been running this guild for twenty years," Boros said. "This posting, this border town, this specific wall." He put his large hands on the table. "Three types of people come over that wall at night. Spies. Smugglers. And people who have been somewhere they shouldn't and can't explain it through the gate."*
"Which do I look like," Haruki said.
Boros looked at him.
"You look," he said, "like someone who's been in the Grey."
The word sat between them on the table.
"And you came out the human side," Boros continued. "Which means you went in the human side, or you came through." He paused. "Nobody comes through."*
"I did," Haruki said.
Boros was very still for a moment.
"How long," he said.
"Three weeks."
Silence.
From the kitchen, the sound of Lira making breakfast with the focused enthusiasm of someone who was definitely listening and trying not to make noise about it.
"Three weeks," Boros said.
"Approximately."
"Alone."
"Mostly."
The guild master looked at him with an expression that had moved fully out of the angry-parent register and into something more complicated and more careful.
"What do you want," he said. "In Ashfen. What are you looking for."
Haruki thought about this.
"Work," he said. "Something to do. A place to be that doesn't require a lot of explaining."
"You're asking for a lot in a border town."
"I know."
Boros Aldane sat back.
From the kitchen came the smell of something cooking - eggs, probably, and bread, and something with herbs that made Haruki's stomach make a decision about the conversation's priorities before his brain could weigh in.
"You can eat," Boros said, reading something in his expression. "Then we talk."
"Thank you," Haruki said.
"Don't thank me yet," Boros said. "My daughter has decided something about you and she has her mother's stubbornness, which means I'm going to be having a very long week regardless of what I decide."
He stood up and went to the kitchen.
"Rax," Haruki said internally.
"Yeah."
"The physical development from the dual system."
"...Yeah."
"When were you going to tell me."
A pause.
"We were building to it," Rax said.
"How long have you been building to it."
"...About two weeks."
"Two weeks."
"You seemed busy."
"Rax."
"YOU WERE VERY FOCUSED ON THE MUSHROOMS-"
"Sol," Haruki said.
"I have a full report," Sol said immediately. "Seventeen pages. Skeletal density, muscle fiber development, cardiovascular efficiency, mana-body integration metrics-"
"Summary."
"You are significantly stronger and faster than you look," Sol said. "The dual system integration has been building physical capacity as a baseline function. It will continue. You should probably be aware of it when interacting with people physically."
"Why didn't you lead with that."
"You asked about mushrooms," Sol said, with dignity. "I answered about mushrooms."
Haruki put his head back against the wall and looked at the guild ceiling.
From the kitchen, the smell of eggs and bread got significantly better.
"Haruki," Rax said.
"What."
"You're in a guild. With a roof. And there's food."
A pause.
"Yeah," Haruki said.
"Pretty good for someone who jumped a wall at midnight."
"Don't push it."
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
The morning light was coming through the guild's shutters in thin lines, catching the dust that the notice board had disturbed when he'd set up behind it. The town outside was starting to make its morning sounds - footsteps, a cart somewhere, a door.
He was in Ashfen.
He was inside a building.
There was food coming.
Somehow still fine, he thought.
TO BE CONTINEUD ...