Kael’s POV Reiss left the folder on my desk without any comment, which was exactly how he handled things he thought I needed to read alone.
I looked at it for a while before I opened it.
‘Akira Renshi.
D rank.
Main guild transfer, effective this week.
A rank dagger.
Bonded Beast: Celestial dragon’ That much I already knew.
What I didn’t know was what I wanted to find out and was exactly what existed in the folder in my arms.
It was thorough, the way Reiss’s work always was; cross-reference and layered with the kind of background reconstruction that required pulling from sources that didn’t naturally talk to each other.
Hospital records from the original admission.
All gate incident logs from the Stoner Guild’s intake.
Akira’s academic file, his mother’s business registration, the ramen shop’s operational history.
And underneath all of it, something that required more than standard access to find: a fragment record from the gate system itself, the kind of data that only existed in a deep archive and that only a handful of hunters in the world had the clearance to read.
I had that clearance.
Being an S rank hunter came with privileges such as peripheral visibility into gate records, a capability that had never been formally documented because there had never been a sufficient sample size to document it from.
I decided to become the sample size.
Who wouldn’t with the status and influence I commanded?
The fragment record was partial.
Gate records at that depth always were… they simply captured event signatures rather than the full narratives, impressions rather than details.
What this one showed was the moment of entry: a soul signature arriving through the gate system from an external origin point and settling into an existing biological frame, the gate recording it the way it recorded everything; dispassionately, in the language of mana signatures and energy transfer.
Akira Renshi had not simply survived a gate incident and woken up.
Something about who he was now was different from who he had been.
The mana signature in the hospital’s initial assessment didn’t match the signature in the Stoner Guild’s registration.
It was not dramatically but the difference was subtle enough that it had passed through two separate medical reviews without being flagged once.
But it was there, and once I had seen it I couldn’t bring myself to unsee it.
And neither was I going to pretend I understood the mechanism in question or that I had tge slight idea of what was going on.
I didn’t.
Gate systems could do things that nobody had fully mapped or understood, and whatever had happened to Akira Renshi on his way through it was something outside the existing documentation.
And a story only he seemed to know.
If he actually knew and would be willing to talk about.
I could speculate.
I had enough pieces to build a reasonable shape from them, the kind of shape that held together even if I couldn’t prove the specifics.
What I kept coming back to wasn’t the mechanism.
It was something simpler.
The previous Akira, the one whose file existed before the gate incident had been unremarkable.
Decent grades, no particular athletic record, no guild registration, no indication of the kind of person who walks into dungeons alone.
Quiet.
Kept to himself.
The school records used the word withdrawn, which was the institutional language for someone the institution hadn’t known what to do with.
The Akira I had met in the training yard was not withdrawn.
He was contained which was different.
Contained was a choice.
Withdrawn was an absence.
The person I had watched correct his grip and refuse to explain the dagger and tell me honestly that he didn’t know his own name for four minutes despite my best guess was someone who had decided at some point, exactly how much of himself to put in a room and was operating from that decision rather than from habit or uncertainty.
That was not a quality you developed before you turned nineteen.
That was a quality you developed through something.
And then there was the specific detail that kept surfacing no matter how many other parts of the file I read.
The original incident that had put the previous Akira in the hospital for three weeks.
A gate in the east building corridor of his school.
Three other students were involved, two younger and one older but smaller.
The hospital report on the previous Akira noted defensive wounds consistent with having placed himself between the gate event and the others in the vicinity.
That incident could have more or less gotten him killed, essentially, standing between something dangerous and people who couldn’t protect themselves.
Scratch that, even I would have been dead with that force of impact.
But then… But then he had woken up and the first thing he had done, within seventy-two hours of discharge, before he had any real understanding of what being a D rank hunter meant or what goblins could do was walk back into a dungeon alone.
I simply closed the folder.
Then sat down to process Al this information.
Previous Akira had been dull, meek, withdrawn and would rather distance himself from the world than be involved in it.
Placing himself between two kids and a gate might simply be the only brave thing he had ever done.
This Akira on the other hand, was observant.
Albeit he was still a novice, he had the senses of someone who had passed through a phase.
But what exactly did he pass through?
That seemed to be what I worried about the most.
And the impact it left on him.
I looked at the window for a while.
The city was doing what it always did in the late afternoon, the light going amber and the traffic thickening and the gate monitors on the east horizon running their standard checks.
I thought about the ramen shop.
About the specific quality of the way he had moved through five hours of service without once performing ease.
Just doing the work because the work was there and he was capable of it and those two facts were, for him, apparently sufficient reason.
I thought about him crouching in front of Gleam and saying: ‘I am not going to pretend I’m what you’re looking for’.
I thought about the training yard and the four minutes and the way he had adjusted the grip without making it into anything.
I didn’t have a clean word for what I was feeling.
There was something in the pattern of him that I kept reaching toward and not quite finding the edges of, something that made the background hum of my attention catch every time I thought I had accounted for it.
He was strange in a way I couldn’t locate precisely, and I had spent a long career being able to locate things precisely, and the inability was sitting with me in a way I wasn’t entirely used to.
He had potentially died protecting someone smaller than himself.
He had also potentially woken up and was doing it again, with different stakes and a different face and no apparent awareness that there was anything remarkable about the consistency.
I picked up the folder and put it in the drawer and went back to the rest of the evening’s work.
But I thought about him.
I thought about him more than the folder warranted, and I was honest enough with myself to know it, and I did nothing useful with that honesty except sit with it in the way you sit with things that don’t have an action attached to them yet.
I thought about his scent which was slowly turning into an addiction.
I thought about him in the way I had seen my father worry or think about my mother whenever she wasn’t close to him.
I thought about him in a way a child would think of their favorite toy and wouldn’t wait a second more to sink their hands into it.
Plus I was trying my possible best to listen to all the warning signs in my head that would make me not go to him.
I also wondered what he was doing.
Would he be helping his mother out in the Ramen shop?
Or would he still be training in their back yard?
I opened my drawer and gazed at the layout of the new building I had personally mapped out.
Taking him to my home wouldn’t have been a problem.
But the person in question was nothing but a stubborn mule.
So I needed a different route.
A route I was slowly working on.
Once I was done, I focused my gaze outside and slowly watched the city go from amber to grey outside the window.
I had a council briefing in the morning and a gate survey in the afternoon and a schedule that ran full through the rest of the week without a gap.
I looked at the schedule.
Then I looked at the drawer.
Then I opened the schedule and put Thursday afternoon on hold for reasons I didn’t specify to Reiss, who would not ask.
I simply went back to work.
With only one boy in the back of my mind.