I
The doors were heavier than they looked, and Nivlac had to put his full weight into the push before one of them budged, swinging inward with a groan that suggested the hinges hadn’t seen oil in some time.
The noise inside hit him first — a wash of overlapping conversation, the scrape of chairs, someone laughing too loudly near the back, and the general low roar of a room full of people who all had somewhere urgent to be and were, for the moment, mostly standing around instead.
It reminded him, with an unexpected pang of nostalgia, of the call center floor on a particularly chaotic morning shift.
II
The hall itself was cavernous, lit by tall windows along one wall and a scattering of hanging lanterns that gave the space a warm, slightly smoky glow.
A long counter ran along the far end, staffed by several people in matching vests, each handling their own small queue of visitors.
Behind them, an enormous board took up most of the back wall, papered edge to edge with notices — some yellowed with age, others crisp and clearly new.
Off to one side, a cluster of freshly judged transmigrators had gathered around a returning party still in travel-worn gear, peppering them with eager questions about what lay beyond the town’s borders.
Nivlac caught fragments as he passed — something about a swarm of territorial geese two farms over, something else about a merchant caravan that had gone quiet on the eastern road — the ordinary, unglamorous texture of a town that ran on commissions rather than grand quests.
A serving girl wove between clusters of people with a tray of drinks balanced with practiced ease, calling out names that didn’t match any face currently paying attention to her, being ignored with equally practiced patience in return.
Nivlac drifted toward the board first, curiosity outweighing whatever instinct might have told him to find an official queue and wait his turn like a reasonable person.
III
Up close, the notices resolved into a chaotic patchwork of requests, each written in a different hand — some barely legible, others formatted with the crisp efficiency of someone who clearly did this professionally.
Wanted: Tank, must be able to hold aggro on multiple targets.
Wanted: Assassin, discretion required, ask for details in person.
One notice, pinned slightly askew, offered an alarming sum for anyone willing to relocate a “moderately aggressive” swarm of hive-insects away from a family orchard — the word “moderately” doing an enormous amount of unconvincing work.
Another, considerably more cheerful in tone, simply requested help carrying furniture for an elderly couple moving house: payment negotiable, tea definitely included.
The sheer range of what apparently qualified as guild business struck Nivlac as oddly reassuring.
Not every problem in this world required heroics, which meant, perhaps, that not every solution required them either.
He scanned further, looking — out of a professional habit he couldn’t quite suppress — for any posting related to his own newly acquired class.
It took a while.
Most notices didn’t mention Support at all, as though the category were simply assumed irrelevant.
When he finally found one that did, tucked into a lower corner of the board where it had clearly been for some time, it read: Support wanted (Dark-element preferred).
Light-element need not apply.
IV
He stood in front of that particular notice for a moment longer than it probably deserved, turning the phrasing over.
There was something almost admirable, he decided, about its bluntness.
No hedging, no false encouragement, no vague suggestion that “all applicants would be considered.” Just a clean, unambiguous statement of exactly where he stood in the local hierarchy of usefulness.
It was, in its own way, more honest than half the rejection emails he used to help draft for his old company’s HR department — the kind stuffed with phrases like “not the right fit at this time” when what they actually meant was closer to what this board had managed in six blunt words.
V
“First time here?”
Nivlac turned to find a young man about his own age — or whatever “age” meant for someone freshly reincarnated — looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and cautious sympathy. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
The stranger’s eyes flicked briefly to the notice Nivlac had been studying, and something in his expression shifted into recognition.
“Let me guess,” the stranger said, not unkindly.
“Support.
Light-element, specifically, judging by how long you’ve been staring at that one.”
“That obvious?”
“You get a feel for the face people make,” the stranger said with the weary authority of someone speaking from firsthand experience.
“I make that face myself most mornings.”
Nivlac studied him properly for the first time — plain clothes, no visible weapon, no aura of the confident swagger he’d seen radiating off the newly minted Warriors back at the temple.
Whatever this man’s class turned out to be, Nivlac suspected it wasn’t one that got celebrated with golden flame.
“What’d you get?” Nivlac asked, deciding that directness seemed to be working reasonably well for him so far in this new life.
The stranger’s mouth twisted into something between a smile and a wince.
“Buckle in,” he said.
“It’s a good story.
Well — bad story.
Good telling.”