The Hunter Dream was easier to identify than he expected. It occupied a wide, two-story structure built from the same dark stone as everything else in the city, but someone had gone to the trouble of hanging light crystals along its exterior in a way that made it glow warmly against the surrounding corridors.
A carved relief of a hunter mid-stride decorated the stone above the entrance — worn smooth by years of passing hands but still recognizable. Beside it stood a strange silver tree with deep red leaves, entirely still in air that had no wind.
It looked, against all odds, like a place that took itself seriously.
Daemon pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The interior was large and well-lit, with low ceilings that somehow didn't feel oppressive. A long counter ran along the far wall, behind which a broad-shouldered man in his fifties worked through a ledger with a bored expression. He was someone who had long since stopped finding any of this magical shenanigans interesting.
Beside him moved a woman roughly ten years his junior, equally broad-shouldered, she moved between tables occupied by handful of Awakeners in various states of exhaustion — some eating, some talking in low voices, a few simply staring ahead towards Daemon, but they sure were different from the ones outside the Tower, they were people who had been underground long enough to stop pretending, they were normal.
The noise level was comfortable. Not the frenzied pitch of the city outside, but the steadier hum of people who had found somewhere to put their guard down for a few hours.
Daemon approached the counter.
The old man behind it looked up from his ledger, and set his pen down. "First time here?"
"First time in the city," Daemon said.
"Room and full board. Five stones." He said it the way people stated facts that were not open to negotiation.
Daemon placed thirty-five Unranked Magic Stones on the counter. The man swept them into a drawer without counting them and produced a key.
"Room eight. Second floor, end of the corridor. Dinner is being served for another two hours. Bathing room is next to the stairs — you'll need to request hot water separately," He had said almost disinterest. "Anything else?"
"Seven days," Daemon said.
"Yes, I counted them." The old man looked at Daemon and said calmly. "I have been in this business for a long time."
"Then food first," Daemon said. "Then the bath."
The man pointed him toward an empty table near the wall without another word and returned to his ledger.
The food was not as good as the steak he had eaten that morning — a morning that felt like it belonged to a different person's life entirely — but it was still the second best thing he had eaten in his seventeen years. It was good, it was hot, and it was abundant.
Thick stew with actual meat, bread soft enough in the middle to still feel fresh, and a warm drink that was slightly sweet and entirely unidentifiable. He liked it more than the coffee but not quite as much as the Coca-Cola.
He ate slowly, making a deliberate effort to savor it rather than finish it. Old habits pushed at him — the ingrained urgency of someone who had spent years eating quickly before circumstances changed — and he pushed back. No one in this room was interested in his food.
As he ate, his thoughts turned over quietly.
The situation outside was manageable, for now. No one knew what he looked like. His name had gotten out — the accomplishment notifications had seen to that — but so what a name without a face was limited information. The mask gave him the option to wear a different face entirely if it came to that, which meant he could move through the city without being immediately identified. That gave him time, and time was what he needed most.
He checked his status out of habit.
Name: Daemon
True Name: N/A
Traits: N/A
Titles: [The Courageous Fool] | [Doubtless] | [Inconceivable Victory]
Race: [Human]
Level: 2 [EXP: 0/300]
Age: [17]
Classes: N/A
Talent: [Divergent of Error]
Talent Rank: A
Talent Ability: [Eyes of the Epigone]
Attributes: [Light; Darkness]
Stats
INT: 45
END: 55
STR: 46
DEX: 46
PER: 47
SPR: 72
MAG: 41
Free Points: 2
Equipment: [Blessing of an Abomination]
The obvious priority was his class. He was sitting at level two, and the Tower should have presented him with class options the moment he hit his first level.
But like everything else since he had entered the Tower, the expected thing had not happened. When he opened the class icon, the options were there — but the Tower had not recommended a single one.
It had simply left the choice entirely to him, with no guidance whatsoever.
"Why is this happening to me? Why can't things go normally for once? Is that really too much to ask?" said Daemon at his wits ends.
He needed to get class, the officer's advice about taking the Tower's recommended class was still sitting in the back of his mind, and he had no reason to disregard, despite being incredibly wrong when it came to the what-meat "manageable trials" but he could not blame him entirely, as it seemed the continuously shenanigans are have more to do with the Tower.
He needed information — about classes, about what was available to someone with his talent and attributes, and about why the Tower was behaving differently toward him than it apparently did toward everyone else.
But that was a job for tomorrow.
He left the free points alone as well.
His SPR was his highest stat by a significant margin — the result of the titles more than anything else and until he knew what his class would demand of him, allocating points felt premature. He would wait until the picture was clearer.
Beyond that, there were the four dungeons. Four solo-kill accomplishments waiting to be claimed. Each one worth +1 to all core stats, which was modest individually but substantial together. More importantly, he was apparently operating at a level that made them achievable — the Corpse Golem had been the hardest thing in the Spire's underground, and he had walked away from it. Whatever the four known dungeons held, he had reason to believe he could handle them.
The guilds and clans remained a problem without a clean solution. The frenzy outside would either exhaust itself or it wouldn't, but either way he needed a position before someone put the pieces together.
The mask helped. His appearance helped more than he had expected. But a masked, unaffiliated Awakener wandering the city while every major organization searched for a prodigy was not, in any meaningful sense, invisible.
He would need to move carefully.
He finished the stew, mopped the bowl clean with the last of the bread, and drained the warm drink. Then he sat for a moment with his hands flat on the table.
He closed the status window and went to request the bath.
The bathing room was small and functional, a stone basin, a drain, a hook on the wall. The old man brought the hot water himself, poured it without ceremony, and left without comment.
Daemon lowered himself into the water and stayed still for a long time.
The heat worked through his sore muscles that had been forced past their limits for hours, and the particular kind of exhaustion that eroded at his consciousness was slowly going away.
When he noticed he was beginning to lose awareness, he made himself stand up and get out.
His hands, he noticed, had stopped shaking at some point without him registering it.
He tried the mask. It wouldn't come off in the usual sense — but the moment he thought clearly about removing it, it dissolved into his skin and settled there, invisible, ready to re-form whenever he intended it.
He looked at his reflection in the cooling water. Without the mask he looked exactly like himself — The black eyes, his silver hair, and lean features looked better than normal, it was a stark contrast when he thought about everything that had happened to him today and the stress he had gone through.
He decided he didn't mind either version. It was strange, but strange things came with the territory.
He bathed efficiently, dressed, found room eight at the end of the second-floor corridor exactly where the old man at the counter had said it would be, and lay down on a bed that was, by any objective measure, ordinary.
Yet to Daemon, it was the best bed he had ever been in.
He was asleep before he had finished forming the thought.