Chapter 79: Adventurer Guild [2]

Rael found the materials counter along the side of the main hall. An old man with short white hair sat behind it, quietly sorting a stack of documents with the unhurried rhythm of someone who had performed the same motions for decades. The noise of the guild—parties arguing over quest rankings, the scrape of boots, the low hum of overlapping auras—seemed to stop just short of his desk, as if even the building respected the small island of calm he kept there.

Rael stepped up and set the edge of his storage ring against the counter.

"Can I help you, young man?"

"I want to sell some monster corpses."

The old man’s hand paused halfway through turning a page. He glanced up, took in Rael’s age, the still-new look of his armor, and the absence of any guild badge.

"Monster corpses, huh?"

"Yes."

He leaned back in his chair and studied Rael for a longer moment. "Are you an adventurer?"

"Not yet."

"Not yet?"

"This is my first time coming to the Adventurer Guild. I don’t have a guild card either."

The old man’s eyebrows rose, then settled. A small, almost private smile touched the corner of his mouth. "First time. All right. We’ll handle registration after. First I need to see what you’ve brought." He closed the ledger, pushed himself to his feet with a soft grunt, and nodded toward a wide door at the back of the hall. "Follow me."

They left the main floor together. The roar of voices faded behind the heavy wood until only their footsteps remained. The storage and appraisal wing smelled of preservative herbs, cold stone, and the faint metallic scent of old blood that never fully left the air. Crates and tagged remains lined the walls in neat rows. The old man stopped in the center of an open inspection space and folded his arms.

"Go ahead. Let’s see what a first-timer brings in."

Rael nodded and reached for the storage ring.

A heavy, wet thud shook the floor. The Venom Spider’s corpse unfolded across the stones, legs still half-curled, carapace scorched and split in places from fire and ice. The old man’s eyes widened a fraction. He stepped closer, crouched, and ran a practiced gaze over the size, the wound patterns, the residual traces of venom sacs.

"Venom Spider. Level sixteen or seventeen, by the look of it." He stroked his short white beard, the initial surprise already turning into professional appraisal. "Tricky things. The big ones especially. Webs, poison, and they think while they hunt. Not bad for a first hunt, kid. Not bad at all."

He straightened and gave Rael a solid pat on the shoulder. The gesture carried real warmth. In more than thirty years behind this counter he had watched countless new awakeners walk through the guild doors with shining eyes and shaking hands. Most brought one corpse. The lucky or the careful brought two or three. Almost all of them treated that first sale like a ceremony, even when the coin was modest. Seeing them take the step—leaving the safety of the walls, killing something that wanted them dead, and returning to turn it into a future—was the part of the job he had never grown tired of.

He had not always stood behind a counter.

Once he had been an adventurer himself, younger and hungrier, running the outer routes with a small party that felt invincible until the day it was not. A nested dungeon that should have been routine turned into a collapse of tunnels and a tide of things that did not care about ranks or plans. He still woke sometimes with the memory of the dark and the weight of stone and the sound of someone he could not reach. When he crawled out, he put the sword away. Fear had done what no lecture could: it had shown him the exact shape of his own limit. The guild offered quieter work—appraisal, intake, the steady buying of what other people risked their lives to bring back. He took the post and never left. Thirty years later he still felt a clean, uncomplicated happiness when a new face appeared with their first real kills. It meant the wheel kept turning. Someone else was beginning the same road he had stepped off.

"You’ve got a promising future ahead of you," he said, and meant it.

Rael met his eyes without excitement or false modesty. "I have more."

The old man’s smile froze in place. "...More?"

Rael touched the ring again.

A Fang Wolf hit the floor. Then another. Then a third. He did not rush, but he did not pause either. Corpses appeared in a steady sequence—dark fur, oversized fangs, the varied wounds of blade, fire, and ice. Five. Ten. More than a dozen. The inspection space filled until the old man had to step back to keep his boots clear. The pile became a low mound of Savage-tier remains, enough material to keep the guild’s lower-tier supply lines fed for days.

The old man’s mouth opened and then closed. He stared at the growing heap as if waiting for the joke’s punchline. When Rael finally stopped, the silence in the room was thick.

"How...?"

"How what?"

The old man pointed at the corpses with a hand that was no longer entirely steady. "How did you get all of these?"

"I hunted them."

"By yourself?"

"Yes."

Something complicated passed across the old man’s face—professional assessment wrestling with simple disbelief. Fang Wolf packs were not legendary threats, but they were coordinated, fast, and unforgiving of mistakes. Experienced parties treated them with respect. Solo hunters who underestimated the pack often became the next meal the survivors shared. Yet the evidence lay in front of him in plain, cooling heaps.

He rubbed his temples. "Wait. Don’t tell me you took all of these alone."

"I did."

The old man stared at him for several long seconds, searching for the crack in the story, the missing party members, the hired help waiting outside. He found only a calm young man standing amid enough death to stock a butcher’s month.

Rael reached for the ring one last time. "There’s still one more."

"One more?"

The Alpha Fang Wolf hit the stones like a falling beam. The sound was deeper than the others, heavier. Even in death the body dominated the space—larger frame, darker fur, the long killing fangs that marked it as the leader of the pack. The air in the room seemed to thin.

The old man took one step forward, then another. He crouched beside the corpse and examined it with the careful attention of a man hoping the evidence would change if he looked harder. The wounds told a clear story: concentrated fire, ice, precise blade work, and a final decisive cut. No secondary weapon signatures. No signs of a prolonged group struggle.

"...This is an Alpha Fang Wolf."

"Yes."

He stood slowly. "You killed this?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"In the Wildlands."

"I know it’s in the Wildlands!" The words came out sharper than he intended. He reined them in at once. "I mean—did you do this with a party?"

"No."

"Then who helped you?"

"No one."

Silence settled over the storage room. The old man looked from the Alpha to the mound of ordinary Fang Wolves to the scorched Venom Spider and finally back to Rael. In thirty years he had seen talented first-timers. He had seen lucky first-timers. He had never seen a first-timer walk in with a solo Alpha kill and enough pack corpses to carpet the floor.

For a moment the weight of that fact pressed the air out of the room. Then the absurdity of it—the calm boy, the mountain of proof, the complete mismatch between expectation and reality—broke something loose in the old man’s chest. He started to laugh. It began as a disbelieving huff and grew until he had to wipe the corner of his eye.

"Hahaha! Hahahaha!"

Rael blinked, waiting.

The old man caught his breath and gestured at the Alpha with an open hand. "A new awakener walks into my guild for the first time, says he wants to sell some monsters, and then pulls out dozens of corpses—and the boss on top of them!" He shook his head, still laughing. "This has to be a joke."

"A joke?"

"I know! It’s real and that’s what makes it worse!"

He finally straightened, composure returning in uneven pieces. The laughter faded into a quieter, more complex expression—amusement, residual shock, and the same genuine warmth he reserved for every new hunter who crossed his counter, only magnified by the scale of what he had just witnessed. These monsters were not the stuff of legends. Experienced adventurers killed Fang Wolves and Venom Spiders without writing songs about it. That was not the point. The point was the boy standing in front of him had done it alone, on his first real day beyond the walls, and had walked back in carrying the proof like it was simply the natural result of the work.

The old man looked at Rael with a mixture of disbelief and something brighter.

"Kid..." He paused, searching for words that could hold both the years behind the counter and the evidence on the floor. "Just what kind of first hunt did you have?"

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