Two Hundred Metres

Day two started on the bridge at five in the morning with the Gate Office's floodlights still burning and the river black underneath.

Baek Ji-won met them at the cordon with the permit. The Vice Master of the Ashline Guild was a thin woman in her forties who had been B-rank for a decade and had, by her own account, stopped caring about the letter the day she started doing the guild's paperwork. She held the stamped sheet up so the Office clerk could see it and then handed it to Oh Tae-sung.

"Entry's logged. Red Gate, Sangmun, Ashline Guild, first probe. You're on the Office board as of now, so if anybody dies, the forms are mine." She looked past the Raid Leader at the rest of them. "Payout terms, since the new ones keep asking. The Office pays in mana stones, graded low, mid, and high. A hundred low stones make one mid. A hundred mid make one high. A D-grade gate pays in low. A C-grade pays in mid. An A-grade gate, if it's closed on time, pays in high stones, and the guild splits by the contract you all signed and didn't read. Cores are separate. Anything with a core in it belongs to the guild vault, and the guild sells it and pays the split after. That's the Guild Master's rule, not mine."

"How many high stones?" Seo-jun asked.

"Enough that you'll stop asking. Go in."

The boundary of an A-grade gate did not look like much from underneath. A ripple in the air, red at the edges, hanging over the middle span of the bridge like heat off summer tarmac. The Gate Office had put up scaffolding to reach it. Twenty hunters climbed in the first wave behind Oh Tae-sung and Seo Ha-eun, and Dae-ho went up with the second wave ten minutes after, behind Han Seo-jin, with Kang Mi-rae and Han Seo-jun in the same team of six.

Inside was a forest. That was the thing about gates nobody who had not been inside believed. The red gate over a bridge in Seoul opened onto a hillside of black pines under a sky the colour of old blood, and it went on for kilometres, and it had been there, in whatever sense a gate was anywhere, since before the boundary opened. The air smelled of resin and cold iron.

"Scouts out," Seo-jin said. "Seo-jun, two hundred metres, no further. You come back when I call, not when you feel like it."

"I know."

"You say you know every time."

Her brother went off into the pines, a thin shape in a grey jacket, and Dae-ho watched the siblings' faces turn in the same direction at the same moment, the way they always did. He had got them confused the first month he knew them, from behind, and had been corrected by both at once. Seo-jin was the healer, C-rank, three years older. Seo-jun was the scout, E-rank, the youngest in Ashline, and the only person in the guild who called the Vice Master "noona" to her face and got away with it.

Dae-ho let his Mana Sense out. It was the only thing the skill was good for. The boundary of the gate sat behind them like a wall of warm glass. Ahead, the forest went thin in one direction, which meant the gate's heart lay that way. He told Seo-jin. She nodded and sent it up the line to Tae-sung.

The first contact was a pack of hounds the Gate Office catalogue called ridge-dogs, D-grade monsters, the size of ponies with hides like bark. The first wave took the brunt and the second wave took the stragglers. Dae-ho put his borrowed blade through one and felt, for the first time in three weeks, that the numbers in his head might not be lying. Thirty-eight agility. He had moved faster than the dog. He was sure of it.

Mi-rae took one in the leg before Seo-jin's light closed the wound. "Don't tell my father," she said.

"He's forty metres away. He saw."

"Then don't let him talk about it."

Then the blue text came, and it came in a shape he had not seen before.

Dae-ho stood very still among the pines. Nobody else had seen it. Nobody else ever did. He had never heard the name Gloam Stalker in his life, and he had read the Office catalogue cover to cover the year he was assessed.

"Seo-jin," he said. "Does the catalogue have a Gloam Stalker?"

She frowned. "No. Why?"

"Something I heard."

"From who?"

He did not answer, and she did not get to ask again, because at that moment the line to Seo-jun went quiet.

Scouts in Ashline wore a pulse-bead on a cord, tuned to their healer, and the healer could feel it as a faint tick behind the breastbone as long as the scout was alive and inside two hundred metres. Seo-jin's hand went flat against her chest. "He's not ticking."

"Dead?" Mi-rae said.

"Out of range. He's gone past two hundred. He always goes past two hundred." Her voice stayed level. Her face did not. "I told him. I told him every time."

Dae-ho was already moving. "Which way did it fade?"

"Left. Downhill."

He went downhill, left, with Mi-rae behind him and Seo-jin's voice on the line telling Tae-sung what had happened in the same flat tone. The pines got thicker. Mana Sense gave him nothing, because a scout was not a gate boundary. He ran on legs that were faster than they had been a month ago and he knew it.

He found Seo-jun in a gully, four hundred metres out, sitting on a rock with his ankle turned under him and a ridge-dog dead across his legs. The boy had put his knife through its eye. He was white as paper and grinning.

"I was coming back," he said.

"You were four hundred metres out."

"I was coming back from four hundred metres out."

Dae-ho got him up, got the dog off him, and carried him on his back up the hill, and when they came into sight of the team Seo-jin walked out to meet them, took her brother's face in both hands, looked at it for a long moment, and then hit him on the ear.

"Two hundred," she said.

"Two hundred," Seo-jun agreed. "Sorry, noona."

"I'm not the Vice Master. Don't call me that." But she was already kneeling to fix the ankle, and the tick came back under her hand, and that was that.

The probe went another kilometre and then Tae-sung called it. Day two was for mapping, not fighting. The teams came back to the boundary in order and climbed down the scaffolding onto Sangmun Bridge in the late afternoon with the sun going orange over the river.

At the bottom of the scaffolding, Kang Il-woo was waiting for his daughter. He looked at her leg, where the blood had dried on the torn cloth, and then he looked at Dae-ho.

"I said keep an eye on her."

"I did. Both eyes. She still got bitten."

"That's fair." The older man put a hand on Mi-rae's shoulder, and she let him, which Dae-ho understood was the only kind of embrace the two of them permitted in public. "Day two," Kang Il-woo said. "Four left before it breaks. Tae-sung says we push to the heart on day four."

"Then we push on day four."

Baek Ji-won was writing in a folder by the cordon. She did not look up as they passed, but she said, "Yoon Dae-ho. Office says your last assessment was four years ago. You're due. Tell me if you want it booked after this."

"After this," Dae-ho said. "If there is an after."

"There's always an after. It's just not always you in it." She turned a page. "Go home. Sleep."

He went home. He did not sleep. The blue text stayed on the ceiling all night, patient, with the words Gloam Stalker in it, and he lay underneath it and wondered, not for the first time and not in the same words as before, what exactly was writing to him, and what it wanted him to become.