Akira's POV
The Stoner Guild building did not look like what I had pictured. I had built an image in my head over the four days I'd spent waiting on discharge papers, something carved from the book and shaded in by the previous Akira's secondhand memories.
Stone walls maybe. Banners. Some kind of architectural statement about strength.
What I got instead was a squat, practical building wedged between a noodle stand and a shuttered pharmacy, the kind of structure that had clearly been renovated more times than it had been designed, each addition solving a problem the last renovation had created.
The sign above the door was simple. STONER GUILD, in block letters, with a smaller line beneath it that had mostly worn off. I could make out REG and the ghost of an ST that might have once said REGISTRATION or might have said something else entirely.
Nobody had bothered to repaint it. I got the sense that nobody here cared much about appearances.
I stood outside for a moment longer than I needed to.
This was the first official step. Discharge papers in one pocket, the A rank dagger wrapped in cloth and shoved into the other because I didn't have a sheath yet and walking around with an unsheathed blade had seemed like a bad first impression to make on an organization built around managing violence.
My mother had wanted to come with me. I had told her no, gently, and then less gently when she'd tried twice more, and she had finally let it go with the specific look of someone filing the argument away to revisit later.
I pushed the door open and walked in. The inside was busier than the outside suggested. A waiting area to the left with mismatched chairs, half of them occupied by people who looked like they'd rather be anywhere else.
A bulletin board covered in mission postings, layers of paper stapled over older paper, the kind of organic chaos that builds up in any place people actually use.
A long counter ran along the back wall, and behind it, a woman was reading something on a tablet with the specific stillness of someone who had perfected the art of looking unbothered while clocking everyone who walked through the door.
I walked up to the counter. She didn't look up immediately. Let me stand there for three full seconds before her eyes lifted, and when they did, they didn't do the thing most people's eyes did when they looked at me now, this body, this face.
No double take. No flicker of recognition or confusion. Just a flat, assessing pass, the kind a buyer gives livestock.
"New registration?" Her voice matched the look. Efficient. Uninterested in wasting time on pleasantries that didn't move things forward.
"Yes."
"Name."
"Akira."
She typed without looking at the screen, which told me she'd done this enough times that her hands knew the motions better than her eyes did.
"Last name?"
I hesitated for exactly as long as it took to remember that I had one now, inherited along with everything else. "Renshi."
"Akira Renshi." She said it back like she was testing the weight of it, then typed it in and looked up again, properly this time.
"You're already in the system. Discharge three days ago, Eastside Medical, gate incident." Her eyes narrowed slightly.
"Solo entry, F rank, goblin engagement, three weeks unconscious recovery."
"That's me."
"That's a stupid way to almost die."
"I've been told."
Something in her expression shifted, not quite warmth, but the edge of acknowledgment that I wasn't going to waste her time arguing with an accurate assessment of my own poor decision-making. She turned the tablet toward me.
"Confirm your details. Then we move to classification."
I read through it. Name, age, rank, the address of the ramen shop listed as my residence, which sat strangely on the page even though it was, now, simply true. I confirmed it.
"Follow me," she said, already moving before I'd finished nodding, "Vanessa handles new registrations personally when there's a flag on the file. You've got a flag."
I didn't ask what the flag was. I had a reasonable guess.
The back of the guild was less waiting room and more functioning organism, hallways branching off into rooms I didn't have names for yet, people moving with purpose in directions that meant something to them and nothing to me.
We stopped outside a door with a plain plaque. LaRoy. No first name. No title. The door was already open.
The woman behind the desk inside did not look up when we entered, which I was beginning to understand was less a personality trait and more an institutional habit, something everyone here had absorbed from the top down.
She was writing something, pen moving in short, decisive strokes, and she finished the line before her eyes came up to meet mine.
Vanessa LaRoy looked exactly like someone who ran a guild that processed people like me on a regular basis and had stopped being surprised by any of it years ago. Dark hair pulled back hard enough that it read as a decision rather than a style. A face built for assessment, sharp at the edges, unhurried in the way it moved across a person.
She didn't smile. I got the sense she rationed that the way I used to ration everything else.
"Renshi." She said my name the way the receptionist had, testing it, except hers carried an edge of something closer to recognition. "The goblin kid."
"That's becoming a permanent descriptor, apparently."
"You earned it." She gestured at the chair across from her desk without standing. "Sit."
I sat.
She didn't waste time working up to it. "Solo entry at F rank into an active gate with no backup, no team clearance, and from what the hospital report says, no functional combat technique. You understand that's the kind of decision that gets people killed."
"I'm aware."
"Are you." It wasn't really a question. "Because most people who survive a mistake like that walk in here either defensive or performing humility they don't actually feel. You're doing neither. That's either good instinct or you haven't processed it yet."
I considered that honestly before answering.
"Probably both."
That got something close to a flicker at the corner of her mouth, gone before it became anything I could call a real reaction.
"Fine. Let's get the paperwork out of the way and then we'll talk about what you're actually walking around with, because the report flagged something else."
"My weapon."
"Your weapon." She held out a hand, palm up, the gesture economical and expectant.
I unwrapped the cloth and set the dagger across her palm.
She didn't react the way I expected. No sharp intake of breath, no visible surprise. She turned it once, caught the light along the blade, ran her thumb near the hilt without touching the edge, the motion of someone who had handled enough weapons that her hands moved on instinct ahead of her brain.
Then she looked up at me, and the assessment in her eyes had sharpened into something closer to suspicion.
"This is A rank work."
"I was told."
"You were told." She set the dagger down on the desk between us with deliberate care, the kind of care that suggested she didn't fully trust either of us with it yet.
"An F rank hunter, three weeks out of a coma from a goblin fight he barely survived, walks in here carrying a blade that hunters twenty years into their career would consider a career achievement. You understand why that's a problem for me."
"I can guess."
"Guess out loud."
"You think I stole it. Or that someone's using me to move it. Or that I'm not actually F rank and the system's wrong, which would be its own kind of problem." I kept my voice level. "Or all three at once."
"All three at once," she agreed. "So which is it."
I had thought about this on the walk over, turning the explanation around in my head the way I used to turn over excuses for missed shifts, looking for the version that held up under pressure without inviting more questions than it answered.
The truth wasn't an option. Died on Earth, woke up here in a stranger's body, system handed me the dagger as a reward screen wasn't a sentence I could say out loud to the person holding the keys to my entire future in this world.
"It was my father's," I said. "He's not in my life. Hasn't been since I was young. It's the one thing of his I have. I don't know how he got it, and I don't have a way to prove the story, but that's the truth as I know it."
Vanessa studied me for a long moment. Long enough that I made myself hold still and not fill the silence, because filling silence was what people did when they were lying and trying too hard to seem like they weren't.
"That's either true," she said finally, "or it's a very good lie. I don't have a way to check which, not without resources I'm not going to spend on a single F rank registration."
She picked the dagger back up, turned it over once more, then held it out to me hilt-first. "I'm not confiscating it. You earned the right to carry it the moment the gate logged you as the one who walked out instead of the goblin. But understand that a weapon like this attracts attention. People will ask questions. Some of them won't ask as politely as I did."
I took it back, wrapped it, returned it to my pocket. "Understood."
"Good." She leaned back in her chair, and something in her posture shifted, the conversation moving from interrogation into whatever came next. "Now. Your file."
She pulled up something on her own tablet, scrolled, and her eyebrows drew together slightly at whatever she found there.
"You've got a system flag I haven't seen before," she said, more to herself than to me. "Side mission, registered this morning, tied to your hunter profile." She turned the tablet toward me, though I already knew, with a sinking certainty, exactly what I was about to see.
[Side Mission Available: Bond with a B Rank Beast.]
[Reward: Immediate rank advancement to D Rank upon successful bond.]
[Note: Beast bonding is not guaranteed. Compatibility is assessed by the beast, not the Host.]
I read it and felt the now-familiar vertigo of having information delivered to me faster than I could process the implications of it.
"This isn't standard," Vanessa said, watching my face rather than the screen. "Side missions tied to specific facility resources don't usually generate for new F rank registrations. Whatever system you're running on, it wants you in the beast hall." I couldn't in no way possible reveal I had a system to anyone.
It was a rule I had learnt with all the system books I had read on Earth. So denial was best.
"I didn't request this."
"I didn't say you did." She was already standing, the conversation apparently concluded in her mind even though I had several dozen questions queued up behind it.
"But I've learned not to argue with flags I can't explain, especially not ones that offer a free rank jump for someone who clearly needs it." Though she glanced at me with something that might have been the beginning of approval, or might have just been professional curiosity about how I was going to embarrass myself next, her voice was still laced with enough suspicion to reveal she didn't believe everything I had said.
"Come on."
"Just like that?"
"You want to stay F rank longer than necessary?"
"No." I replied skeptically.
"Then come on."
She moved around the desk and out the door without checking whether I was following, the same way the receptionist had, and I was starting to suspect this was simply how the guild operated, forward motion as the default state, the expectation that everyone around you would keep pace or be left behind. I followed.
The hallway beyond her office narrowed and sloped downward, the temperature dropping by degrees as we walked, the overhead lighting shifting from the clean white of the front office to something dimmer, warmer, almost amber.
The noise changed too. Less of the brisk administrative hum from the front of the building and more of something low and layered underneath it, sounds I couldn't immediately place, not quite animal and not quite anything else.
"What's down here," I asked.
"The beast hall." She said it without turning around. "We house bonded creatures here when their hunters are between assignments. We also house unbonded ones."
"Unbonded?"
"Beasts that came through a gate as eggs, or young, before they were strong enough to be dangerous. Rare. We take them in when we find them instead of letting them grow up wild and become someone's problem later."
She finally glanced back at me, and there was something assessing in the look again, recalibrated since the office, less suspicion now and more open curiosity.
"Most of them never bond with anyone. They're picky. The ones that do choose, choose for reasons nobody's ever fully mapped."
"And you think one of them is going to choose me."
"I don't know what. I've stopped expecting to understand every flag that crosses my desk." We reached a set of heavy double doors at the end of the corridor, reinforced in a way nothing else in the building had been, and Vanessa pushed them open without ceremony.
"Here's hoping it's right about you. For your sake. D rank casualty rates look a lot better than F rank ones."
The doors swung shut behind us, and whatever was on the other side, I was apparently about to find out.