One Letter

Day six was the last day the rule allowed, and the Guild Master went in himself.

Cha Min-gyu had not been inside a gate in two years. He climbed the scaffolding over Sangmun Bridge at four in the morning in a jacket with the three slanted lines on the sleeve and nothing else to mark him out, and the column went quiet behind him the way a room goes quiet when the oldest person in it stands up. Baek Ji-won stayed on the bridge with her folder, because the Vice Master's job was to be the one who came back if nobody else did.

"The heart's unguarded now," the Guild Master said at the treeline, where the bowl of bare rock lay empty under the red sky. "The Stalker was the lock. The gate's heart is a knot of mana at the bottom of that bowl and a gate is closed by cutting the knot. It is simple. It is also the part that kills people, because the heart knows when it is being cut and it does not like it. First wave on the rim. Tae-sung, Ha-eun, you take me down."

Oh Tae-sung set his shield. Seo Ha-eun walked on the Guild Master's left with her spear up, and her husband walked on his right, and the three of them went down into the bowl where Kang Il-woo had died two days before.

Dae-ho stood at the treeline with Mi-rae beside him. She had come. Nobody had told her she could, and nobody had told her she could not, and she had climbed the scaffolding in her father's jacket, which was too big in the shoulders, with his lantern on her belt. Seo-jin stood behind them both with a hand not quite touching Mi-rae's back.

The heart, when the Guild Master reached it, was a thing like a fist of red glass sunk in the rock. He put his hand on it and the whole gate screamed. There was no other word for it. The pines bent. The sky went from the colour of old blood to the colour of new, and every hunter on the rim went to one knee.

Dae-ho let his Mana Sense out without thinking, and under the scream he felt the knot. He felt where it was thin. It was thin on the side nearest Tae-sung's shield, the side the Guild Master was not cutting.

"Left!" He was shouting across the bowl. "Guild Master! It's thin on the left, under the shield!"

Cha Min-gyu did not look up. His hand moved left. The scream stopped.

The red sky went grey, and then went white, and then was not a sky at all but the inside of a boundary folding in on itself, and the hunters on the rim were standing on the middle span of Sangmun Bridge in the cold of a Seoul dawn with the river under them and the Gate Office floodlights still burning. The pines were gone. The bowl was gone. Forty hunters stood on a bridge that had been a hillside a second before.

"Closed," the Guild Master said. He was on his knees on the tarmac. "The Red Gate is closed. Day six. Log it, Ji-won."

Baek Ji-won, at the cordon, wrote one line and closed the folder.

Blue text came across the inside of Dae-ho's eyes while people were still shouting.

He read it twice. Gloam Sense. Rare. Not Common, like his one skill had been for six years. Rare was the middle of the three grades, and in the whole of the Ashline Guild he knew of four hunters with a Rare skill, and the Guild Master was one of them.

Seo Ha-eun found him at the rail. She had a hand on her husband's shoulder, and Oh Tae-sung was leaning on his shield with his eyes shut and was, for once, not arguing with her. "Twice," she said. "In the bowl on day four, and just now. Both times you called a position nobody else could see." She did not make it a question. "The Vice Master's booking you for assessment. Today. You're going whether you like it or not."

"I don't mind going."

"Good. Because I'd have carried you."

The Gate Office assessment hall in Yeouido had not changed in four years. The same grey corridor, the same six doors, the same machine behind the sixth door that looked like a dentist's chair and asked you to hold a steel ring while it decided what letter you were. The assessor was a bored man with a Gate Office badge who read Dae-ho's file aloud before he started.

"Yoon Dae-ho. Ashline Guild, Member. Awakened at nineteen. Assessed E-rank at twenty, D-rank at twenty-one. Held at D-rank at the twenty-three assessment. Not assessed since. Currently D-rank." He looked up. "Hold the ring."

Dae-ho held the ring. The machine hummed for the length of a slow breath and then stopped.

The assessor looked at the readout for a long time. He ran it again. He looked at it again.

"C-rank," he said, finally. "Re-assessed. D to C. Congratulations. I'll stamp it." He stamped it. "Mid-sized guild, D-rank for four years, and you walk in here off an A-grade gate and jump a letter. You know what that normally means?"

"No."

"It normally means somebody put the wrong name on the file." The assessor handed him the card. "I checked. It's your name. Go away."

He went away. He stood in the grey corridor with a card that said C-rank and let the blue text come, because it had been waiting, and he could feel it waiting.

Fifteen. Thirty-three, thirty-nine, twenty-five. The numbers from the bowl, plus nothing, because the gate had given him a skill and not a level. And the letter had moved, finally, to match them. Four years at D. Six days at an A-grade gate. One letter.

The Guild Master was waiting in the lobby, which Dae-ho had not expected. Cha Min-gyu did not wait for Members in lobbies. He was sitting on a plastic bench with his hands between his knees and he looked, for the first time Dae-ho could remember, like a man who had been inside a gate.

"C," Dae-ho said, and held up the card.

"I know. The assessor rang Ji-won before you were out of the chair." The Guild Master stood. "Walk with me."

They walked. Outside the hall the Yeouido streets were full of ordinary people going to ordinary jobs, and the Red Gate that had hung over the river for six days was a line in a Gate Office folder.

"Two position calls," Cha Min-gyu said. "One on the Stalker, one on the heart. I've been a hunter for fourteen years and I couldn't feel either. Ha-eun couldn't. Tae-sung couldn't. Il-woo could, for three seconds, and it cost him everything he had." He stopped at a crossing. "I'm not going to ask you how. Not today. But I want you to know that I'm not asking, which is a different thing from not noticing."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Kang Mi-rae is sitting in the guild hall in a dead man's jacket and she's going to ask you how, and she's not going to be polite about it." The light changed. "She's a Member of Ashline. So are you. So was her father. I'll say this once and then I'll never say it again. The guild buries its own and the guild pays for it. That is the only rule of mine that matters."

They crossed. Dae-ho walked beside the leader of the Ashline Guild with a C-rank card in his pocket and a Gloam Stalker core against his ribs, and the thing that had been bothering him since day one came up again in a new shape and would not go back down. It was not only why the blue text had chosen him, a D-rank nobody, three weeks ago. It was what the text was. A voice that wrote in windows and handed out skills and had known the name of a monster the Office had never catalogued. It had a plan for him. He had just not been told what the plan was for.