Chapter 208 — What the Guild Actually Wants

Chapter 208: Chapter 208 — What the Guild Actually Wants

The weeks folded into each other easier than Arlen expected.

He took a party job in the second week — a Floor Three subjugation contract against a cluster of Corpsecap Mimics that had been ambushing solo miners near an ore vein. The guild paired him with two Rank D adventurers he hadn’t worked with before, a blunt, cheerful warrior named Tomas and a quieter mage who mostly kept to herself.

"You’re the one who went into Region Three solo," Tomas said, on the walk down. Not a question.

"That’s me."

"Heard it went badly."

"It did."

"Huh." Tomas seemed to respect the honesty more than he would’ve respected a story dressed up nicer. "Well. This is considerably less than that. Try not to be disappointed."

Arlen laughed, more than the joke really deserved, and found the job went cleanly — the mimics disguised well enough that two of them nearly caught the mage off guard, but between Tomas’s shield work and Arlen’s own sharpened instincts, nothing actually landed.

"Good instincts," Tomas said afterward, splitting the reward. "You listen well, for someone who apparently just went and got half-killed on his own."

"Learning."

"Aren’t we all."

He took more jobs like that over the following weeks — some solo, some with hired parties, nothing that asked more of him than steady competence. A goblin skirmish on Floor Three. A supply escort back to Floor Ten and straight back up, no lingering. A modest bounty on a pair of Rockhide Goblins that had wandered from the old colony’s territory and started causing trouble near a mining crew.

He noticed his own reputation shifting, quietly, the way Reya had once told him it would — not through anything dramatic, just the accumulated weight of small, reliable work. A receptionist at the outpost desk started greeting him by name. A merchant who’d hired him twice recommended him to a friend without Arlen ever asking.

It was Ferrin Duskwatch who mentioned the bulletin.

Arlen ran into him near the guild hall’s message board on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, the old dungeon safety instructor scanning a fresh posting with the same flat, unbothered attention he brought to everything.

"You still diving?" Ferrin asked, without looking over.

"Upper floors. Taking it slower these days."

"Smart." He tapped the posting he’d been reading. "Guild flagged something odd on Floor Six recently. Wildlife’s been showing up in places it doesn’t usually range — deeper stretches of the floor that don’t normally see that kind of traffic."

"Migration?"

"Maybe. Nobody’s confirmed a cause yet. Just enough reports that someone bothered posting a notice about it." He shrugged, already moving on. "Probably nothing. Things shift down there sometimes for reasons nobody bothers explaining properly."

Arlen read the notice himself once Ferrin had gone. It was short, almost bureaucratic — unusual displacement patterns reported, Floor Six, cause undetermined, adventurers advised to note anything similar. He filed it away without much thought, the same way he filed away most things that weren’t directly his problem, and went back to the board to see what else was posted.

He took a Floor Six job himself two days later, more coincidence than curiosity, clearing a den of Sporeback Toads that had multiplied past what a nearby herb-gathering operation could safely work around. He didn’t notice anything unusual. The toads behaved exactly like toads.

Probably nothing, he thought, same as Ferrin had.

He mentioned it to Dallin over a shared meal that evening, mostly in passing.

"Heard about that too," Dallin said. "My cousin’s on a survey team, works the deeper stretches sometimes. Says a few of the usual predator territories have shifted without any obvious reason. Nothing dangerous. Just strange."

"Strange how?"

"Strange like — you know how a place has its regulars? Same wolf den in the same spot for years, same goblin camp holding the same ground?" Dallin gestured vaguely. "Some of that’s just not where it used to be. Nobody’s panicking about it. Just noting it."

"Huh." Arlen turned it over once, filed it next to Ferrin’s version, and let it go. It wasn’t his problem. Not yet, anyway.

He spent the rest of that week on ordinary work — a modest escort, a gathering job for the apothecary, a straightforward pest clearing that barely counted as combat. He found himself, more than once, simply enjoying the rhythm of it. No fissures. No creatures three times his size. Just work, done properly, one contract at a time.

He stopped by Bellwyn’s stall to sell a few materials from the week, and found her in an unusually chatty mood.

"You’re keeping close to home," she said, weighing a claw sample.

"For now."

"Good. I sell more when people bring me common stuff regularly than when someone vanishes for a month and comes back with something rare I can’t move fast enough." She named her price, fair as always. "Though I hear the deeper floors have been acting up a bit."

"You too?"

"Everyone’s heard something. Nobody’s heard the same thing twice, though, which usually means it’s not much of anything yet." She shrugged. "Or it means it’s early. Hard to tell which, this far up."

Arlen paid attention to that phrasing — this far up — more than he meant to, and then let it go the same way he’d let everything else go. It wasn’t a fire yet. Just smoke somewhere he couldn’t see clearly.

He wrote a short entry that night, mostly practical.

Good week. Party job went well, solo jobs went well, reputation’s building the slow, ordinary way. A few people have mentioned odd wildlife movement in the deeper floors — nothing dramatic, nothing anyone’s treating as urgent. Filed away for now.

I like this pace. I don’t want to rush past it just because something distant might be worth worrying about eventually.

He closed the journal, and let the evening settle into the same comfortable, unremarkable quiet he’d been steadily building for himself these past weeks — exactly the kind of ordinary he’d told himself, back at the Foxglove, that he actually needed right now.