Free Web NovelChapter 2: At Least Now I Have a Card
The receptionist was reading the newspaper when Nathan walked back in.
She didn’t look up.
He leaned on the counter with one elbow, tilted his head slightly to one side, and examined his nails with a smile.
It was a smile he’d been mentally constructing the whole way back from the alley, and he was fairly satisfied with the result.
She turned the page of the newspaper.
Nathan waited.
She kept reading.
Fine. That’s fine. I can wait.
He waited a little longer.
She folded down a corner of the page with absolute calm.
"Ahem." Nathan made a small noise. Discreet, the kind of sound that’s normally enough to signal human presence in a shared space. But this woman kept ignoring him.
Nothing.
She turned another page.
"Eh-hem."
Nothing.
Really? Right now? Really?
He exaggerated. He constructed the most elaborate noise he could, a combination of a cough, a throat-clearing, and something that didn’t constitute a word in any language.
She yawned.
She folded the newspaper the other way to read the column below.
Nathan looked at the newspaper. Looked at the woman. Looked at the newspaper again.
He took it with one hand and flung it across the counter.
The newspaper flew in a clean arc and landed on the floor three meters away with a satisfying and definitive sound.
The receptionist looked up.
She looked at him with an expression containing, in perfectly equal proportions, annoyance, disbelief, and fatigue.
"What do you want this time?" she said.
"A Hunter card," Nathan replied, with the same smile as before.
"We already talked about that."
"Yes." He gestured with his eyes toward his right wrist. That look that says look here without having to say it out loud.
She looked at the wrist.
The mark was there. Dark, sharp, with that door shape that didn’t match any seal that existed in any book, on any wall, in any temple of any of the seventeen gods of the Pantheon.
The receptionist frowned.
"Is that a tattoo?"
"It’s real."
"Seals don’t just appear like—"
"It’s real," Nathan repeated.
She looked at him for a second, calculating how much time this was going to cost her.
Then she reached across the counter and took Nathan’s hand with a brusqueness that suggested manners were a luxury reserved for her days off. She pulled a small device from under the counter, little bigger than a wax seal, and passed it over the mark.
The device beeped.
Then a light.
Then a second beep, different from the first. Higher pitched.
The receptionist looked at the device’s little screen. Then at Nathan’s wrist. Then at him.
"It’s real," she said.
That’s what I said.
"Can I have my Hunter card now?"
A long pause.
"Well, since you—" she murmured, and pulled a blank form from under the counter without enthusiasm. Then a pen, and she looked at Nathan with disinterest.
She picked up the pen.
"Name."
"Nathan Voss."
"Age."
"Twenty-two."
"Year of birth."
Nathan gave it. She noted everything down with that mechanical efficiency of someone who’s filled out the same form thousands of times, without looking up from the paper.
Then she reached the sponsoring deity field, and the pen stopped for a moment over the paper.
She looked up.
"What kind of god gave you that mark?" she asked. And then, with a small, very specific smile: "The god of doors?"
Ah. Sarcasm. There it is. How predictable.
"Maybe," Nathan said, completely calm, "a god so powerful he can destroy the balance of things and make the other gods try to kill me."
She looked at him.
"Yeah, sure." She went back to the form. "And I suppose now you have an SSS-Class."
"Look, cut the jokes and give me my card."
Another silence.
Then she finished the form, pressed the device against a blank card to transfer the data, and slid it across the counter.
Nathan took it.
Nathan Voss. Registered Hunter. Rank F.
F for Phenomenal.
"You know," said the receptionist, just as he was turning to leave.
Nathan stopped.
"Before you go. A piece of advice." She looked him up and down with the clinical gaze of someone appraising livestock at a fair. "When you earn some money, the first thing you should do is buy clothes."
Nathan looked at his clothes.
"What’s wrong with them?"
She took a breath with the infinite patience of someone who’s been at this a long time.
"The jacket has three loose seams and a burn on the left shoulder patched with thread of a different color. The pants are fine except the right hem that’s starting to fray. The boots—" she paused "—are doing their best under the circumstances, but that effort isn’t enough. And overall the complete combination communicates very strongly the message that you are someone who can be ignored without consequences."
Which, Nathan thought as he listened, may or may not already be a problem specifically mine. Although coming from someone who ignored my noises for a full two minutes, maybe she has a point.
"Alright," Nathan said, raising a hand. "I get the point."
"Good afternoon, Mr. Voss."
"Good afternoon."
---
Nathan walked out of the guild.
He took exactly four steps from the door.
And then he jumped.
It wasn’t a calculated or dramatic jump.
"Wow!" he said, in a voice probably too loud for the public square.
A couple of people looked at him.
He ignored them completely.
I have a card. A Hunter card. I have a Seal, I have a Class, I have a card, and I can earn money and eat something that isn’t whatever was left at the bottom of my travel bag.
He looked at the mark on his wrist.
The door with nothing on the other side.
Although, he told himself, dialing back the internal celebration a little, I do need to learn how to use this first. I don’t have the slightest idea how this Class works in practice. I don’t know what Soul Sense really does beyond what the description says. I don’t know how Soul Pulse activates in real combat. I know absolutely nothing about how a Grim Reaper operates.
I should be careful. I should plan this calmly.
I should go take a mission.
Nathan turned toward the mission board visible at the back of the guild and started walking with renewed direction and purpose.
He made it to the corner.
He stopped.
"Shit," he said.
He hadn’t taken any mission.
He’d gone in, gotten the card, listened to the whole speech about his clothes, walked out the door, jumped with excitement in public, and had completely forgotten the step that was the reason he’d returned to the guild in the first place.
He stood on the corner for a full second.
Nobody else has this happen to them. Only me.
He turned around and went back inside.
The receptionist looked up from the new newspaper she’d retrieved from the floor.
She looked at him.
"I forgot to take a mission," Nathan said.
She pointed at the board with her pen without saying a single word.
"Thanks."
