Marcus had not intended to be in the tavern that evening.
The Guild Master of the Awakened City usually avoided the rookie-heavy lower hall — too much noise, too much posturing, too many young hunters trying to impress each other with stories that grew larger every time they were retold. He'd only come down to settle a dispute over a damaged training dummy, a problem so beneath his rank that he could have sent any of a dozen subordinates instead. He told himself, afterward, that habit had simply put him in the wrong place at the right time.
What he actually walked into was the tail end of a silence so complete it had its own weight.
A thin, bloodied teenager sat alone at the end of the bar, nursing a drink he clearly hadn't wanted in the first place. The Silver Fang squad sat frozen at their table, untouched mugs sweating in front of them, every one of them looking like they'd seen something considerably worse than a ghost.
Marcus had been a hunter for over twenty years. He recognized the particular flavor of fear radiating off Kael's squad immediately — not the fear of monsters, which soldiers wore openly and almost proudly, but the fear of consequences, the kind that came from finally meeting the bill for a debt you'd hoped would never come due.
"Someone want to explain the mood in here?" Marcus asked the room generally, though his eyes had already settled on the boy at the bar.
Nobody answered. The bartender, wisely, found something urgent to do at the far end of the counter.
Marcus walked over and sat down on the stool beside Aryan, close enough to study him properly. Torn clothes. Crude bandaging that looked self-applied or applied in haste by someone with minimal training. A spatial pouch on his belt — cheap make, D-rank by the look of the stitching, but real, and real spatial storage on a registered F-Rank porter was already strange enough to be worth asking about.
What Marcus noticed most, though, was that the boy didn't flinch at his approach. Didn't posture either. Just glanced over with mild, tired acknowledgment, the way someone might glance at a stranger who'd sat too close on a bench.
"You're the porter from the Silver Fang's last dungeon run," Marcus said. It wasn't a question.
"Was," Aryan said. "I'm reconsidering my career options."
Marcus almost smiled. Almost. "Their report this morning listed you as presumed deceased. In line of duty, it said. Care to tell me how a presumed-deceased porter is sitting in my tavern, very much alive, with a Guild appraisal slip I happen to know was filed an hour ago for a Bloodfang Alpha core?"
That got a flicker of real attention from Aryan — not surprise that Marcus knew, but the small, calculating recognition of someone reassessing exactly who they were talking to.
"You read the appraisal logs personally?" Aryan asked.
"I read anything involving a boss-tier core that gets sold by someone without a Guild rank to claim it on," Marcus said. "It's a short list. Usually it means trouble. Sometimes it means something more interesting than trouble." He leaned back slightly, studying the boy with the unhurried patience of someone who'd learned, over two decades, exactly how rare this particular kind of interesting actually was. "So which is it?"
Aryan turned his mug slowly on the counter, considering the question, or perhaps considering how much of the truth a stranger had earned.
"The Silver Fang squad's detection crystal missed an Alpha-class boss hiding behind a Level 15 wolf," Aryan said finally. "They found out the hard way, panicked, and left their porter behind to slow it down while they ran. I was the porter. I killed the wolf. Then I killed the Alpha." A pause. "It wasn't graceful. I nearly didn't make it. But I did."
Marcus had heard a thousand exaggerated stories in his time as Guild Master — every hunter alive seemed congenitally incapable of describing their own kills without inflating them. What struck him about this account was the complete absence of inflation. The boy wasn't bragging. If anything, he undersold it, the way someone does when they're still privately disturbed by how close it actually came.
"Show me your status," Marcus said.
"That's a personal request from a stranger."
"I'm the Guild Master. I'm allowed to be a nosy stranger." Marcus's tone carried just enough weight to make clear it wasn't really optional, though not so much that it was an order either. "Humor me. If I'm wrong about what I think happened in that cave, I'll buy your next drink and leave you alone."
Aryan studied him for a long moment — the kind of evaluating look Marcus wasn't used to receiving from F-Rank porters, the look of someone weighing whether a man was worth trusting rather than simply obeying.
Then, slowly, he willed the status panel open and angled it just enough for Marcus to see.
[HOST STATUS]
Name: Aryan
Level: 10
Title: Giant Slayer (Minor)
Marcus had expected something. He hadn't expected a Level 10 jump from a single dungeon, on a boy who'd entered that cave as an F-Rank porter with presumably no combat levels logged at all. Boss kills granted significant EXP, certainly — but this much, this fast, on someone with a System this new, was the kind of thing that happened to maybe one hunter in a generation.
"Giant Slayer," Marcus read aloud. "That's not a common title. I've seen exactly two hunters carry it in twenty years, and both of them were already A-Rank when they earned it." He looked up, and something had shifted behind his eyes — the easy curiosity replaced by something sharper, more deliberate. "Your registered rank is F. That's not going to survive contact with reality much longer."
"I didn't come here looking for a promotion," Aryan said.
"No," Marcus agreed. "But I'd be a poor Guild Master if I let something like you walk back out that door registered as a porter." He stood, brushing invisible dust from his coat, already calculating. "Come by the Guild tomorrow morning. Ask for the Rank Re-evaluation Room. Tell them Marcus sent you personally."
Aryan considered that for a moment — the offer, the implications, the fact that an actual Guild Master was standing in front of him treating him like something worth paying attention to instead of something worth ignoring.
"And if I don't?" Aryan asked, not out of defiance, just out of habit, the reflex of someone checking whether this, too, was a choice that actually belonged to him.
Marcus's smile was thin, but genuine. "Then I imagine you'll keep killing things that are supposed to kill you, and eventually someone with considerably less patience than me will come looking for answers instead." He turned to leave, then paused. "For what it's worth — the report. The 'presumed deceased' one. I'll have it corrected myself. Quietly, if you'd rather it stay that way for now."
He left without waiting for a thank-you, the tavern slowly exhaling back into its normal noise behind him, though considerably quieter than before at the table where the Silver Fang squad sat, watching their porter being personally invited into the one room in the Guild they'd spent years trying to qualify for themselves.