The stairwell transit pulled them from the ruined marsh into the stone corridor of Floor Two, and William stumbled forward under the sudden shift in footing, Cerberus adjusting its pace behind him without breaking stride, Reyes still draped unconscious across its back.
’Almost there. Just the surface exit left.’
The climb through the remaining floors passed in a blur of aching muscles and forced concentration, William’s mind narrowing down to the single task of keeping pace, keeping watch, keeping Reyes’s breathing steady in his peripheral awareness even as his own shoulder throbbed with every step. By the time the surface entrance came into view, pale daylight spilling down the final stretch of corridor, his legs were shaking from more than just exhaustion.
The Tower’s exit opened onto Ashvale’s outer plaza, and the first hunter stationed at the gate took one look at the scene, a bloodied F-Rank tamer stumbling out beside a massive black furred beast carrying an unconscious C-Rank hunter, and immediately shouted for backup.
"Medical! I need medical support now!" The gate hunter’s hand hovered near his weapon, eyes fixed warily on Cerberus. "That thing, is it under control?"
"It’s tamed," William said, voice hoarse. "It won’t hurt anyone. Please, he needs help, now."
Whatever the gate hunter made of a Common grade tamer walking out with what was very obviously not a Common grade beast, the urgency in William’s voice won out over caution. Within minutes Reyes was carried off the guardian’s back onto a stretcher, medical staff already working over him, and William found himself half collapsing against the plaza’s low outer wall, adrenaline finally draining out of him all at once.
Cerberus settled beside him without being asked, lowering its bulk to the ground, single head resting near William’s knee, and nobody in the gathering crowd of onlookers seemed to know quite what to make of either of them.
It didn’t take long for Captain Yuen to arrive, cutting through the crowd with the same brisk efficiency she’d shown at the outpost hours earlier, though this time her composure cracked visibly the moment her eyes landed on Cerberus.
"That’s a guardian class beast," she said slowly, as though saying it aloud might change what she was seeing. "Mister Belforht, is that the same anomaly from the incident report?"
"Yes." William didn’t have the energy left to soften it. "I tamed it."
Yuen stared at him for a long moment, something working behind her sharp eyes that William couldn’t quite read. "A Common grade Taming Talent tamed an Epic grade guardian class monster."
"I know how it sounds."
"It doesn’t sound like anything, Mister Belforht, it sounds impossible." She glanced back at Cerberus, who returned her scrutiny with an unbothered patience that did nothing to make the situation feel less surreal. "Explain it to me. All of it."
William hesitated. He could feel the shape of the truth sitting heavy in his chest, the door that had cracked open inside him in that hollow, the voice that had spoken words no Talent should have been capable of producing. Something about it felt too large, too strange, too dangerous to hand over to an Association captain he’d met exactly once before today.
’If I tell her everything, they’ll want to study it. Study me. Every guild in the city will know what I can do before nightfall.’
"I got lucky," he said instead.
Yuen’s brow lifted slightly. "Lucky."
"It was already dying when I found it. Reyes had wounded it badly before he went down, and whatever displaced it here must have done more damage than any of us realized. By the time I caught up to it, it barely had the strength to keep fighting." William kept his voice level, forcing exhaustion to do some of the work of selling the lie. "My Talent’s always worked better on weakened targets. That’s the one thing it’s ever been good for. It just so happened this time the weakened target was a guardian instead of some vermin."
It wasn’t entirely false. The weakness had mattered. The resonance had mattered. He simply left out the part where none of it should have been enough on its own, the part where something ancient and mechanical had rewritten the rules of what his Talent could do in the space of a single desperate heartbeat.
Yuen studied him with the particular stillness of someone deciding how hard to push. "That’s an extraordinarily convenient piece of luck."
"I’ve never had convenient luck in my life," William said, and that much, at least, was true enough to sound like it. "Ask anyone who’s ever partied with me. This is the first time anything’s gone right."
For a moment he thought she might press further, might demand a more thorough accounting than a tired teenager’s exhausted deflection. Instead something in her expression shifted, settling into the practiced patience of someone who had long since learned that hunters rarely told the full truth about their first major breakthrough, and rarely needed to.
"We’ll want a full evaluation regardless," she said finally. "Talent grade reassessment, combat aptitude testing, standard procedure whenever a Hunter’s abilities shift this significantly. You understand that’s not optional."
"I understand."
"Good." She glanced once more at Cerberus, still lying calm and watchful beside him. "For what it’s worth, Mister Belforht, whatever you did down there, it saved a man’s life today. Reyes owes you a debt most hunters never get the chance to repay."
She left to oversee the medical team’s work, and William let his head fall back against the plaza wall, closing his eyes against the pale afternoon light. Beside him, Cerberus shifted closer, and through the bond he felt something that might have been approval, or might simply have been the guardian settling into the strange new shape of its existence same as he was.
’I got lucky.’ The lie sat easier in his chest than he expected, already hardening into the story he’d tell everyone from here on out. ’That’s all anyone needs to know. Not what actually happened in that hollow. Not what woke up inside me. Just... luck.’
He didn’t know yet how long that story would hold, or how many more lies he’d need to build around it before people stopped asking questions. But for now, with Reyes alive and stable a few dozen feet away, and a guardian class beast lying loyal and quiet at his side, it felt like a small enough price to pay for everything he’d walked away with.
The crowd around the plaza had begun to murmur, whispers of what they’d witnessed already spreading faster than William had the strength to control, and somewhere in that growing noise, the first threads of a legend he hadn’t asked for were already beginning to take shape.