Chapter 35 Episode 35: Tracking

Kael’s POV

Another message came through the official guild channel at nine in the morning. Something I had been expecting since the first one arrived through the ramen shop.

Whoever this was had enough patience. Three weeks had passed between the first message and the second one. More than enough time to let the first one sit and see what I did with it. The second message was more like a response that seemed to translate to, ’I know you’re not moving but I’m going to make you do so.’ This kind of messages were brief.

’The hunter you’ve been watching is going to be in danger. The kind that deals and revolves above his current capacity. And I am sure you already know this. The question is whether you’re going to address it before it addresses itself, or after. I’d prefer before if you still want to keep your little obsession tight in your hold. I suspect you would too.’

No name and no guild seal despite passing through the official channel. The routing had been handled through a secondary account with no direct affiliation.

I read it tge second time then proceeded to call Reiss.

"The message that came through channel six this morning," I said.

"I’ve been running the routing since it arrived," he said sharply.

"Secondary account, proxied through three relay addresses. Whoever set it up knows the guild’s internal architecture well enough to use it without leaving a direct trace."

"That narrows it."

"To approximately forty people with that level of access," he said. "I’m cross-referencing against the original note’s handwriting profile and the profile of anyone who has had independent visibility into your schedule for the past three years. It’s going to take until tomorrow."

"Tomorrow is fine."

"There’s one more thing," Reiss said. "The message content. ’Above his current capacity.’ That’s a specific language for someone who shouldn’t have visibility into his development rate."

"I know."

"Which means they have a source inside the guild. Or they have monitoring capability we haven’t accounted for."

"Or both," I said. "Keep running it."

I ended the call and looked at the message again.

The hunter I’ve been watching, which meant whoever this was had been watching me watch him, and had been doing it long enough and carefully enough to understand that what I was doing was not standard guild surveillance.

The message was right about one thing, which I was going to acknowledge privately and not externally.

He was going to be in danger. This was a structure I had been piecing together from his behavioral pattern, the mission log and two months of Thursday afternoons. I had been dwelling on this for two weeks.

I had also been thinking about our moment in the corridor, but that was a separate matter.

I put the message aside and opened the procurement line I used for equipment sourcing. This one ran outside the guild’s standard supply chain and could be trusted to source things without the transaction appearing in any record.

I had used it for custom gear, for surveillance equipment, for the specific tools that S-rank operations occasionally required that the standard catalog didn’t carry.

Today I used it to purchase a phone.

The model was not and issue. It was built with a modified tech that I had commissioned for my own secure communication line, same base unit, the tracking integration running underneath the same interface as mine.

I had it paired to my own device before it arrived, the link established and confirmed, running passively and continuously on a channel I could access from anywhere.

I glanced at it when it arrived. Then looked at the mission log I had pulled on my secondary screen. He had completed a solo mission. Though there a problem.

His shoulder was injured. A part I kept returning to. A blood fiend had gotten contact and that contact had opened a wound and had given it blood to work with. Did he think so little of his life? Allowing himself to make such a mistake?

Unable to rein in tge rage that was slowly trying to blind me, I picked up the phone and went to find him.

***

The reason for my blind rage was currently on the fourth floor.

I heard him before the door opened... the rhythm of the footwork drill, the floor responding to its pattern, the clean displacement of the sequence he was practicing running at the new level it had reached over the past several weeks. I pushed the door open and he turned.

The pull to him was immediate. And maddening.

That was the only word I had for it. He was across the room and the distance between us was the length of the training space.

His shoulder was bandaged. The left one, the same one the blood fiend had gotten contact with. He was running the drill at full range of motion and the shoulder was functioning and the bandaging I could see at the collar edge was clean.

Some part of me had been quietly accounting for his physical status since I was done reading the mission log and found what I looking for, this releasing a breath I didn’t even know I had been holding.

He lowered the dagger.

"You’re here early," he said with a tone of indifference. An emotion I forced myself to overlook.

"I have something for you."

He looked at the phone in my hand. Then looked at me once again.

The expression that crossed his face was the one he used when he had identified a thing as suspicious before he had fully processed why. His eyes moved from the phone to me and back with the expression of someone running a rapid assessment.

"What?" he asked.

"A phone."

"I have one."

"You have a guild-issue device that runs on guild network." I crossed the training space toward him and held it out. "This one is different."

He looked at it in my hand again but did not move to take it. "Different how?"

I considered how much information to give him. The tracker was NOT something I was going to lead with. The honest version of why I was here with a phone in my hand, at ten in the morning was also not something I was going to start with, for different reasons.

Most of those reasons bordering on exactly how clingy I am that he didn’t have a means to contact me.

"A secure line," I said and shrugged. "Plus it’s linked to mine. Which means if something happens in a dungeon and the guild network goes down or the gate interferes with the standard signal, you can directly contact me."

He looked at me with a scary smile on his face. Making me swallow a gulp. The assessment still running.

"That’s a specific concern for someone who’s been clearing D-rank gates without incident."

"You had a blood fiend make contact on mission ten."

A pause. "The mission logs?"

"Are accessible to me, yes." I answered truthfully.

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved through his expression that was not quite irritation, two things occupying the same space in a way that was remotely familiar. He looked at the phone once again. Then at me.

"Kael."

"Yes."

"Is this about the blood fiend?"

"Partly."

He held my gaze. The training room was quiet around us and the distance I had crossed to reach him was not very much distance and I was aware of this and aware of the left shoulder and aware of the specific quality of the morning light in here that I had categorically failed to stop noticing since approximately the second week of Thursday sessions.

"And the other part?" he asked.

I said nothing.

He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he took the phone from my hand. The brief contact of the handoff... his fingers against my palm for half a second.

It was registered with the same disproportionate precision as every other instance of proximity and I kept my expression calibrated to the appropriate register which required more effort than it used to.

He turned the phone over in his hand.

"I don’t need to be tracked," he said.

The word tracked landed with precision and I looked at him.

His expression had the quality of someone who had arrived at the correct answer without being given the full information, which was entirely consistent with how he operated and which should not have surprised me and did not, precisely, surprise me.

"Your injury could have been worse if you didn’t hold back on time," I said. Allowing the vulnerability in me show for a bit.

He looked at the phone for a moment. "You’re worried Kael," he said.

"I’m trying to manage risk." I defended myself.

"You’re worried," he said again, his tone signaling finality and leaving no possible room for any argument so I said nothing.

He looked at the phone one more time. Then he put it in his jacket pocket.

"Fine," he said.

"Fine?"

"If it becomes a problem..."

"It won’t. I promise" I said.

He held my gaze for a long moment. The training room was very quiet. The distance between us was not very much

"Thursday," I said, because it was the word that moved things forward without requiring me to name what I was managing. And it was slowly becoming our very own ritual.

Something in his expression shifted that was almost... almost... and then it settled back.

"Thursday," he said.

I went to the door.

Behind me the footwork drill resumed, the floor taking up the rhythm again. I stood in the corridor outside the fourth floor and thought about neural the link running quietly between the phone in his pocket and mine. It wasn’t just a normal tracker. His phone would directly send me an SOS ping when we it sensed danger. I smiled as I thought about the tech I had used.

I took the elevator down as I watched the small dot on the phone. The link was active. Which meant that wherever he went from here I would know.

The elevator reached the ground floor. So I went back to work. Smiling at myself for successfully catching my little prey.