Lymur almost walked straight past it.
That was the embarrassing part. The answer to two full days of stressing about money had been sitting in the middle of the city this entire time, and Lymur had walked past it at least twice without knowing what it was.
He'd been in the library reading about the adventuring system and even talked to the Twin Horns about their work for an entire evening. He had, at some point, watched a group of armed and armored people walk into a large building with a crossed-blades emblem above the door and thought absolutely nothing of it.
It was only when a second group passed him on the street and turned toward that same building that something finally connected.
He stopped walking.
They stared at him as they passed, the same way everyone stared at him, and pushed through the guild doors. Lymur was dumbfounded on the street and stared at the emblem above the entrance. He had been sitting next to the answer for two days and only just noticed.
"Yeah, of course. Obviously, of course. Why didn't I ever think of this?"
Questioning his ability to think of obvious solutions to problems, he turned and walked straight in.
The hall was loud and full of people. Long tables filled the lobby, most of them occupied. A large board covered most of one wall, layered with job postings. People turned to him, as usual, and he crossed the hall to the reception counter while feeling quite awkward about all the attention.
The woman behind the counter was working through a stack of documents. She looked up when he reached the counter, and the document in her hand stopped mid-flip.
"Uh, hello," Lymur said. "How do I register?"
She set the document down after two seconds of admiring his face. "Normally, applicants fill out an application and present identification," she said, professionally. "Then we inspect the mana core and conduct a series of practical examinations." She folded her hands on the counter. "There is one exception — if you're sponsored by a higher-ranked adventurer, the process simplifies considerably. The sponsor vouches for the applicant and the applicant need only fight a mock duel with one of our examiners."
I have no friends, much less a sponsor, though...
Lymur nodded along, and inside his head, he was desperate for a solution.
Identification. He had none.
Mana core inspection. He didn't have one of those either, or at least not in any form this world would recognize.
Application. He had nothing to put on it. He had a name, a face, and the coins Lara had given him, and that was the complete inventory.
He kept his expression neutral. He found out earlier on that he was fairly good at that when the situation called for it.
"Sir? Is there a problem? Do you happen to have — "
"Ah."
The voice came from his left.
A man with glasses and slicked hair had stopped a few meters away, apparently mid-way toward the exit. Dark hair, a long sword at his hip, a decently lean pyhsique. He was looking at Lymur with a face that was friendly on the outside but probably probing underneath. Lymur noticed immediately.
The receptionist straightened before giving a small bow. "Guildmaster Kaspian Bladeheart."
Kaspian Bladeheart?
Kaspian gave her a small nod, but his eyes stayed on Lymur for a moment longer. Then he smiled. "This one will be sponsored by me," he said. "And I'll conduct the test personally."
The receptionist blinked. Around the lobby, several nearby chatter stopped completely.
Lymur turned toward him. "Huh? Wait — what? Is that even allowed?"
"Sponsorship means a mock duel with an examiner is the only thing needed instead of the standard exams," Kaspian said calmly like he was explaining something obvious. "In this case, I'm both your sponsor and examiner." He pointed toward the back of the hall. "Simple enough."
Lymur looked at him. Then at the receptionist. Then back at Kaspian.
"...Sure," he said.
The whispers started immediately behind them as they walked.
"Who is that hotshot?"
"Did Bladeheart just sponsor a walk-in?"
"Has he ever done that before?"
"Is he from the academy?"
Lymur followed Kaspian through the hall and didn't pay much attention to any of it, mostly because he was still quietly relieved that the identification problem had resolved itself before he'd had to figure out what to do about it.
The truth of the matter was that Kaspian had been on his way to get lunch.
That was it.
He'd finished the morning's paperwork, told his secretary he was stepping out, and was making his way toward the exit when he walked past the reception counter and felt this sort of instinctive unease that moved up his spine and stopped him on the way, sourceless and specific at the same time.
He'd looked over.
There, he found an awkward young man who looked to be in his late teens at the counter, red eyes, weird blue hair, new clothes, asking the receptionist how to register. Nothing about it was obviously wrong. He looked like a student, maybe. Someone's younger sibling, probably. He was the sort of person you'd forget ten minutes after leaving the room — except for that face, which was impossible to forget.
And yet Kaspian's instincts, which he had spent many years learning to trust, were saying something he couldn't quite understand. Not imminent danger exactly, more like standing near the edge of something very deep and not being able to see the bottom.
He'd decided then that lunch could wait.
The arena was a circular platform surrounded by tiered seating, maybe a third of it occupied by adventurers watching the day's examinations. A duel had just wrapped up when they arrived, both participants stepping off the platform as Kaspian led Lymur in. Several people in the seats clocked them immediately — clocked Kaspian, specifically, since he wasn't usually the one walking onto the floor.
Kaspian stepped forward. "This applicant is next," he said, to the room. "I'll be conducting the assessment."
The examiners exchanged a look. One of them opened his mouth.
"My decision," Kaspian said, without particular emphasis.
Nobody said anything after that.
They faced each other across the platform. Kaspian drew his sword and settled into a stance, watching Lymur across the space between them. The young man had his hands loose at his sides, posture relaxed to the point of looking bored, red eyes calm and slightly curious.
That feeling was back. Stronger here, in the open, with nothing between them.
What are you... Kaspian thought, and kept it off his face.
The signal came.
Kaspian moved first with his years upon years of swordsmanship, guildmaster and AA-class fighting acumen, and speed that made any other adventurer flinch before they could even process what they were seeing. He was exactly two steps in when he heard a sound like paper tearing, and then his sword was gone.
The pieces were already on the ground, a dozen of them spread across the stone, and there were thin lines across his cheek and the back of his hand and his forearm, which took a moment to start bleeding, and a moment longer to sting.
"What?" Kaspian couldn't hold back the bewilderment at this point.
He hadn't seen Lymur move. He wasn't aware of anything except the tearing sound, which came far too late.
Kaspian was frozen in the arena with a dozen cuts in his skin and an empty sword hand as he looked at the pieces of his weapon and understood the situation very clearly. The cuts were shallow, but they didn't have to be. He knew, as a man who had spent his life reading fights, that the same person that had reduced his sword to pieces could have taken his head off instead, and that the choice not to had been exactly that — a mere choice.
The arena had gone completely silent.
Lymur looked around at the quiet crowd. Then at Kaspian. His face was genuinely, earnestly uncertain.
"Hey, so... uh, what's up? Did I win?"
Kaspian had never seen someone so cluelessly unaware of his mockery.
He breathed in slowly through his nose. His hand wanted to shake but he didn't let it. His experience also taught him how to stand still when everything in him wanted to step back, and he called on that now and smiled, trying to appear completely in control of a situation he was absolutely not in control of.
"You did," he said. He folded his arms, thinking fast. "But the guild still needs to classify you."
The unknown slicing ability was extraordinary, clearly (seeing as it easily cut through steel), but building a classification around it was probably the wrong move. He needed something measurable, something he could put a clean number on without revealing to the entire hall that he'd just been comprehensively taken apart. "What kind of adventurer were you thinking of becoming, eh? In terms of specialty."
It was a desperate last act of a man trying to protect his pride.
Lymur, meanwhile, just looked genuinely uncertain. "Hmm... I hadn't really thought about it."
"You look like a swordsman," Kaspian added.
"Ah, that's it! Sure, sure, that sounds right."
"Wonderful!" Kaspian turned to the nearest staff member, relieved. "You. Bring him a sword."
One was handed to Lymur, who took it and turned it over once in his hands, testing it a little. Kaspian picked up a replacement from the weapons rack and told himself, while he settled back into his stance, that this was recoverable. He was one of the finest swordsmen in Dicathen. Whatever that first fight had been, pure swordsmanship was a different matter. This he knew.
The signal came for the second time.
What followed then was a minute and fourteen seconds that Kaspian was fairly certain he would have nightmares about for the rest of his life.
The boy was so extraordinary that it was emotionally offensive. He wasn't just fast, not just powerful — though he was both — but prodigiously refined. Every single attack and parry stripped down to exactly what it needed to be and nothing else. His swordsmanship was so beautifully, painfully ordinary that it was completely unpredictable. Kaspian threw everything he had and Lymur moved through all of it with a relaxed pace that Kaspian, about forty seconds in, recognized for what it was.
He wasn't trying to finish it.
He wasn't trying at all.
Lymur seemed like he was more curious for what came next than interested in winning.
That single realization washed over Kaspian like cold water, and he spent the remaining time being played with and not being able to do a single thing about it except see his defeat through to the end.
And the end finally came when Lymur stepped inside his guard through a gap, was simply suddenly somewhere he hadn't been a half-second before, and the sword came down and stopped a few centimeters from Kaspian's eye as his back hit the stone platform.
He stared at the blade.
It was perfectly still.
Lymur looked down at him like he genuinely enjoyed the exercise and was already thinking about what came next.
What kind of monster, Kaspian thought as he broke out in cold sweat. He was lying on the floor of his own arena and took stock. He had never been this overwhelmed in a clash of pure skill before.
After a moment he said, "That will do," and Lymur stepped back and offered a hand. Kaspian took it, stood up, and brushed off his coat.
He turned to face the examiners. The entire hall was watching. He could feel it without looking.
He kept his voice level.
"Record the result."
An examiner had his pen ready.
"Applicant Lymur." Kaspian let it sit for exactly one beat. "Rank: AA."
For a second, nothing happened. Then chaos erupted.
"AA?!"
"He walked in off the street — just walked in — "
"Bladeheart's never assigned AA, I've worked here three years and he's never — "
"Did you see that second test? He had him the whole time, he was playing with him — "
"Who is he? Where did he come from? Does anyone know him?"
"Those eyes — did anyone catch those eyes — "
"AA, they actually said AA — "
Lymur turned to Kaspian. "Is that a good rank?"
Kaspian looked at him for a moment. "...Yes," he said. "That's a very good rank."
"Great!" Lymur looked back out at the hall. "So... what do I do now?"
◢◣◢◣◢◣
Lymur stepped out of the guild hall and felt, for the first time, genuinely good about his situation.
He turned the metal plate over in his hand as he walked. It had his name and rank engraved cleanly into it. He looked at it for a moment, then closed his fingers around it and slipped it into his pocket.
Two days ago he'd been wandering these same streets with empty pockets and no idea how anything here worked. Now he had identification, a rank, and a deposit from the guild that was far more than he'd expected when they handed it over. He'd stared at the money long enough that the clerk had asked if something was wrong.
Nothing was wrong.
As a matter of fact, everything was surprisingly right.
"All's well that ends well~" he said to himself with a smile as he stretched his arms. "Tonight calls for a celebration!"
He happily turned down one of the broader streets and started thinking about what came next. Finding a place to stay was the practical priority — he'd been putting it off since arriving because the money situation had made it feel abstract, but now it was concrete and he could actually do something about it. After that, food. Something good, he'd decided, and he was prepared to spend a reasonable amount of the guild deposit making that happen.
And maybe something sweet after! He thought. Because why not?
A fancy food stall in the corner had a small queue of people waiting in front of it. Lymur slowed down, considered it as an appetizer before looking for a restaurant, and joined the back of the line. The woman ahead of him glanced back, did the thing everyone did, and quickly faced forward again.
When Lymur reached the front, the man looked up, took a half-second, and recovered.
"What'll it be?"
Lymur looked at the options. "That one," he said, pointing. "Two."
He paid, received two skewers of something that smelled considerably better than anything he'd ever eaten, and stepped to the side to eat while the next person in line moved up. The first bite confirmed the decision was, in fact, correct.
Yes, yes. This ain't bad, he thought. Not bad at all.
"Ahahaha, I really wish Veldora was here to enjoy this with me~" he took another bite and exclaimed in delight — until he realized. "Hm? Veldora? Who's that?"
He finished the second skewer and was genuinely confused by his own behavior and about who this Veldora person was when an explosion occured.
It came from somewhere northeast. An explosion that rattled the nearest shutters and sent a column of dust and debris rising above the roofline, visible from where he was standing. People on the street immediately stopped, their heads turned.
He stood where he was and looked at the smoke rising in the distance.
Seriously?
He looked down at his money, then back at the smoke. The smoke continued rising, unhelpfully, without any indication that it planned to resolve itself.
The honest truth was that he could walk the other way. Find an inn, find a restaurant, have the evening he'd been planning for half an hour since leaving the guild. Whatever was happening over there had knights, presumably, and adventurers, and the entire infrastructure of a functioning city. It didn't specifically need him.
And yet...
He stayed there for a minute, having an argument with himself, and lost.
Why, he thought, turning toward the smoke and starting to walk, Why do I feel like I can't just leave this alone?
He genuinely didn't know if it was something like conscience or just the act of knowing that this kind of unusual accident in the middle of Xyrus was going to complicate the rest of his evening regardless of whether he got involved or not. Probably the second one, he reasoned to himself.
He picked up his pace and the scene became clearer as he got closer. Knights formed a loose cordon at the end of a street, several of them shouting instructions at civilians to clear back. Windows along the block had cracked or shattered outward. A cartload of produce had been overturned across the cobblestones, and a merchant was standing next to it with a thousand-yard stare, likely processing a major financial loss.
Lymur stopped a bystander at the edge of the crowd. "Hey. What happened here?"
The man was still visibly shaken. "A monster — they brought something enormous back from the Beast Glades for research, and it was supposed to be dead but it just... it, well, it started moving again."
"Moving?"
"Like a corpse." The man shuddered.
A woman nearby had apparently been waiting for someone to ask. "They were in the middle of dissecting it when it came back to life. Three researchers apparently died."
"Right. Thanks. You guys get to safety."
Lymur once again moved through the crowd toward the cordon.
He found a gap and looked through.
The creature was large. It was scaled, wolf-shaped, larger than a carriage, and clearly dead in every visible way, evident by the massive hole in its stomach. It slammed a foreleg into the pavement, reoriented without any logic, slammed the other one. The knights circling it were keeping distance and doing very little else, and from the way they were positioned, Lymur could tell they were waiting for someone stronger to come.
He watched it for a moment and activated Theosophy and Calculation Domain. Information about the dead beast then came to him. He let it sit there while he kept watching, and in the meantime, his mind started doing something else.
If I walk out there now, he thought, everyone watching is going to notice.
That was just a fact. There were probably sixty people behind this cordon, plus the knights, plus whoever was watching from the windows of the buildings along the street.
And when they notice, they're going to wonder who I am. The mysterious stranger walking in when everyone else is standing back.
He was watching himself make this narrative and doing nothing to stop it.
And then, when I handle it, they're all going to be trying to figure out who I am!
He imagined the scene fairly well. He, walking through the space the knights had left, the monster turning toward him and the crowd watching from behind the cordon.
"Who is that?" someone would say.
"I don't know, I've never seen him before."
And then after, when the monster is down, the street quiet — he'd stand there and the crowd would realize what had just happened and—
"He saved us!"
"He actually just—"
"Who is he?"
But he'd already be turning to walk away, nochalantly, not waiting for the reaction, the evening light doing its job behind him, his new jacket sitting exactly right—
Lymur blinked.
He was still standing at a cordon in front of a zombie monster with a completely made-up scenario playing out in his head in detail. He never even realized he fantasized about coming out of this hailed as a hero before he even stepped up.
He cleared his throat.
That, he told himself firmly, is not why I'm doing this.
He wasn't here for attention, he clarified to himself. He was here because there was a dead monster rampaging through a city street and something in him apparently couldn't let that go. That was all. He was doing this for completely selfless and practical reasons.
He paused.
Every man probably imagines something like that at least once, right? he thought. Completely normal, then.
"Let's do this."
He cracked his knuckles, moved past the cordon, and scanned the situation for a natural entry point. There — a small group of women pressed against the wall of a building to his left, well back from the monster but in the direction it kept erratically turning. He turned his course toward them, straightened slightly, and arranged his face into something he hoped would look reassuring.
He was about two meters away when he smiled and opened his mouth.
"Ladies, rest assured—"
The monster's arm came out of nowhere and hit him directly in the face.
The force launched him backward down the street quite far. He bounced once on the stone, rolled twice, and came to rest against a barrel on its side that had presumably been left there for exactly this occasion.
Silence.
Lymur sat up. He was unharmed but he stayed sitting for a second anyway, because he needed a moment.
There's no way that just happened.
He stood back up, walked back to the scene with his face reset to neutral, and did not look at the women he'd been walking toward, who were staring at him in confusion, unsure of what he was trying to say earlier. He raised one hand in their direction without turning his head.
"Never mind," he said.
Then he looked at the monster, extended his other hand, and reached for Ruler's Authority.
The beast lurched in the middle of a swing and stopped, legs leaving the ground, rising into the air. The knights who had been circling it scrambled back, one of them catching another's arm to stop him falling.
"What — "
"Who — "
Lymur closed his hand.
The Authority tightened. He could feel the mass of the thing, the density of it, and he pushed past all of that. The creature then folded inward on itself with a sound that was deeply unpleasant and then increasingly less audible as less and less of it remained at a useful size.
Blood sprayed in every direction. There was no real way to have avoided that — it was a physics problem, not a carelessness problem — and within a few seconds the enormous rampaging monster corpse had been compressed into something roughly the size of a basketball, which Lymur caught in one hand.
Blood dripped from his sleeve.
He turned to face the street, expecting a gratifying scene of people cheering for him and thanking him, but—
"Eh?"
It was very quiet. The knights had stopped moving. The crowd at the far end of the street had also stopped moving. Several shopkeepers were also standing in front of their stalls looking with dead eyes at their products, which were now thoroughly covered in gore.
Nobody said anything. No one was cheering. No one was calling him a hero.
Lymur became aware that he was still holding the ball, and that he'd started spinning it on one finger like an actual basketball at some point, possibly out of reflex from the superhero fantasy he'd been imagining earlier. He stopped.
"...Ta-da?" he tried.
The man with the vegetables sighed. It looked cool but apparently did nothing to improve the situation. If anything, several people looked more disturbed.
A long silence followed. Then, from somewhere to his left—
"Good job, sir!"
Lymur turned to the voice. It was a young knight recruit, probably newer to the job than anyone else present, entirely bald. He was giving Lymur a thumbs up with complete sincerity.
Lymur looked at him for a moment.
"...Thank you," he said. And meant it, genuinely, more than he probably should have for a thumbs up from one person while sixty others stared at him in various states of displeasure.
Now that's a real homie.
He took a breath, looked at the remains in his hand, and let the embarrassment go. There was something here that actually mattered, so he focused on it.
He turned toward the nearest knight — a senior one, by the look of him — and held up the compressed remains. The knight stepped back in disgust, but Lymur paid it no attention.
"You should inform whoever is responsible for this specimen," Lymur said. "That there's a mutated fungal organism in the brain tissue."
The knight's eyes moved from the ball to Lymur's face. "...M-muta— what?"
"It's a fungi, bro. It burrowed into the skull while the creature was dying — maybe just before or in its final moments." Lymur turned the remains over in his hand, though there wasn't much to see from the outside anymore. "Instead of getting normal cellular shutdown, it colonized the nervous system and sustained motor function in the host."
Another knight had come closer, listening. "So it was... controlling the body?"
"Yes, yes. The body. Not with any intelligence, though. It was just keeping it moving to spread spores before the host tissue became unusable. That's why it was rampaging rather than fighting. It probably wasn't trying to survive or attack anything specifically."
A third knight spoke up. "When our adventurers first engaged it in the Glades, they reported it was behaving strangely. More aggressive than usual. Like it had lost its mind."
"That would be consistent with the fungus taking hold before death, then. It was already in partial control. The killing blow just got rid of the last hindrance."
"How did you figure all this out," the senior knight said. "A-and, who are you anyway? Regardless of the reason, it's prohibited to use magic—"
Lymur smiled pleasantly, cutting the knight off by raising one hand. "I have good eyes, ya see," he replied, proudly pulling his newly acquired adventurer card. "And I'm an AA-Class adventurer."
The knight stared at him, understanding dawning on them.
"You should have your researchers examine the remains," Lymur added. "If there are more specimens from the same area, it's worth checking them before dissection. Just saying."
The knight took it with both hands, but his face looked like he was accepting something he hadn't entirely agreed to accept. "...Yes. Thank you."
Lymur nodded, wiped his hand on tissues given by the bald knight from earlier, and looked around at the aftermath of the street. The crowd was slowly coming back to life, voices starting up again, people assessing the damage to their stalls and belongings.
He thought about the restaurant he'd been planning to go to, which was now somewhat blood-spattered, and the room he still needed to find, and the evening that had taken an unexpected detour but was theoretically still salvageable.
Alright, he thought, turning away from the scene and heading back up the street. Where was I?