Adventuring guilds are, by nature, loud. It's a universal law, right up there with gravity and the fact that mimics are absolute bastards. The guild hall in the capital of Valoria was no exception. It was a place where the three primary food groups were cheap ale, over-roasted meat, and wildly exaggerated stories. The very air was thick with the smell of sweat, spilled alcohol, and the ozone tang of a recently cast cantrip. In one corner, a party of freshly-minted C-Class adventurers were loudly recounting their heroic battle against what was, by all accounts, a slightly angry badger. In another, a grizzled S-rank squad bemoaned their recent finances.
"I'm telling you, Gorn," the leader, a woman with a magnificent scar across her nose, groaned, "the repair bill for my armor alone was three Veyl! The beast just kept regenerating. It was unnatural." Her companion, a massive brute of a man, just nodded grimly into his mug. An S-rank quest, the pinnacle of mortal challenge, and their main takeaway was crippling debt. The capital was alive, thriving on the spoils of courage and conquest, even if that courage sometimes resulted in a net financial loss.
Then, the noise began to falter. It started near the heavy oak doors, a wave of silence spreading like frost, smothering the laughter and shouts one table at a time.
A lone figure stood in the doorway, framed by the bright morning sun. She wore a simple white cloak, the hem hovering just off the polished stone floor, and a longsword was sheathed at her hip. To Riko, the scene was a chaotic symphony. Her Kokugan perceived the world as a 360-degree map of pure black, populated by the glowing white outlines of people, tables, and mugs. The noise wasn't just sound; it was a messy storm of overlapping vibrations that she had long ago learned to filter into background static. The smells, however, were harder to ignore. The ale was a sour note, the roasting meat a pleasant one, the sweat... well, that was just part of the job.
It was her eyes, however, that were the true source of the silence for the people of the guild. A pale, milky white, they held no focus, no recognition. They were the dead eyes of a porcelain doll. This was Riko Akari. The Muganome.
Yet, she navigated the chaotic room with an eerie precision that defied her apparent blindness. Her steps were silent, her head held perfectly straight as she moved between tables and patrons without the slightest hesitation, her Crest feeding her a constant stream of spatial data.
From a table near the hearth, a burly adventurer named Borin, made brave by ale and a deep-seated need to impress his friends, let out a snort. "Look at this one," he slurred, gesturing with his mug. "Probably another C-lister here to brag about killing a slime." His companions chuckled nervously, aware of the pin-drop silence that had fallen. Borin, however, was oblivious. With a smirk, he hefted his heavy stone mug and hurled it directly at the back of the woman's cloaked head.
A collective gasp sucked the remaining air from the room. The mug hurtled end over end, a clumsy projectile set to collide in a brutal, messy crash. To Riko's Kokugan, a new line of intent had appeared in her perceptionâa sloppy, arcing trajectory born of drunken arrogance. Her head didn't turn. Her posture didn't change.
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Just before impact, her left hand snapped back in a motion too fast for most to properly track. The expected, sickening crunch of stone on skull never came. There was only the deadened thud of the mug meeting her palm, snatched from the air an inch from her hair.
The silence in the room was now absolute, suffocating. Borin's smirk had vanished, replaced by a pale, sweaty mask of shock. Riko held the mug for a tense second. The outline of the man who threw it was a frantic, terrified scribble in her vision. Then, still without turning her head, without a single glance in his direction, she cocked her arm back. With a fluid flick of her wrist, she hurled the mug with impossible, pinpoint accuracy. It didn't hit the man, but it exploded against the stone wall an inch from his ear, spraying him with stale ale and stone shrapnel. The sound of its destruction was like a thunderclap in the tomb-like hall.
As if nothing had happened, Riko continued her silent walk to the guild desk. She placed a heavy, burlap sack on the counter with a dull thud. The guild assistant, a young man named Elam whose primary job duties usually involved refilling inkwells and trying not to stare at the A-Class mages, felt his heart trying to escape his chest. He cautiously opened the sack. Inside was the skull of the S-rank ogre, the one from the quest that had been sitting on the board for three weeks, collecting dust and dire warnings. It was severed from its spine with a single, unnaturally clean cut.
Riko finally spoke, her voice quiet but carrying with unnerving clarity through the still room. "I've completed the S-rank quest. The payment was five Veyl, correct?"
Elam's job description did not include 'processing the remains of legendary monsters for terrifying, potentially blind women'. He fumbled with the coin pouch, his hands shaking slightly as he slid the five heavy coins across the counter. Riko gracefully slid them into her own pouch. It was enough to cover a room and meals for a week with a little left overâa decent payout for most, but a pittance for the danger of an S-rank beast. As she turned to leave, Elam found a brief, idiotic surge of courage.
"Hey! Why did you even take that quest? Not even the Gilded Gryphons would touch it. If you had waited, the reward would have gone upâ"
Riko stopped. She turned her head just enough for her black hair to shift, revealing the strange, vacant white eyes that now seemed to bore right through him. "I don't do this for money," she said, her voice devoid of pride or anger. It was simply a statement of fact. "A quest needed to be done. It sat there for weeks. So I did it."
She turned and walked out of the guild hall, the five Veyl coins clinking softly in her pouch. The silence held long after she was gone, leaving a room full of Valoria's strongest adventurers to wonder whatâor whoâhad just walked among them. The S-rank leader with the scar looked from the still-smoking hole in the wall, to her own party's hefty repair bills, and then back to the door Riko had just exited. She took a long, slow drink from her ale. Borin, meanwhile, was quietly checking to see if he needed a new pair of pants.