The main hall was loud like always, but none of that noise made it up into the guildmaster’s office.

Allen sat behind his desk with a cup of tea he’d let go cold, a stack of reports shoved off to the side that he had no real intention of reading.

The only thing in his hands was a single sheet of parchment, the assessment for the unranked gate, and the spot where a shard rating should have been was just blank.

A knock hit the door, then it swung open before he said anything.

"You wanted me?" Garret asked, walking in.

He was a broad man with a short grey beard and a scowl that never really went away. As the Vice Guildmaster, he handled the boring half of the job, which was most of it, and right now he looked like that half had finally pushed him into coming upstairs.

"Sit," Allen said.

Garret didn’t sit, coming up to the desk, crossing his arms, and staring down at the parchment with clear distaste.

"So the rumor’s true," he said. "You handed the unranked gate to that rookie. Just his party."

"Just his party," Allen replied. "Yes."

Garret exhaled through his nose.

"I want it on the record that I think this is stupid," he said. "We don’t have a single reading off that thing. It could be a four-shard zone, it could be another Beast King waiting to happen, and you’re throwing one party at it like it’s a routine clear."

"After the last gate, sending a normal party in waves is what gets people killed."

"After the last gate is exactly why we follow procedure," Garret shot back. "We rank it, post it, then send people in stages. That’s been the way for forty years, and it’s kept the death count from doubling every season."

Allen reached for the tea, looked at it, and set it back down without drinking.

"Procedure measured that beast king gate at four shards," he said. "It turned out to be seven, maybe worse. Our whole system is built for gates that behave how we expect, and that one didn’t. I doubt this one will either."

Garret finally dragged the chair out and dropped into it.

"You’re betting the branch’s name on a boy who’s been a Ranker for what, a week?" he said. "If he dies in there, the King is going to want to know why his sponsored pet got tossed into an unknown gate with no backup. That question lands on us, not him."

"He won’t die," Allen said it flat, without a single hedge in it, and Garret looked up.

"You can’t know that."

"No," he folded his hands on the desk. "But I’ve been doing this long enough to tell what dies in a gate and what doesn’t. That boy isn’t the dying kind, I have known it since his exam."

Garret’s brow pulled together, "the ranker exam?"

"I changed the format this year. You signed off on the repair bill, so you remember." he gave a tired smile, then it faded. "I put a ten-shard dragon core on the pedestal and told fourteen rookies to scratch it. One scratch, that was the whole task. It was supposed to be impossible. The entire point was to fail every last one of them and knock the arrogance out of a fresh class."

"And they failed," Garret said.

"They cracked it."

Garret blinked, not sure he’d heard him right.

"Split the thing almost in half," he went on. "Four of them struck it at the same instant, perfectly synced, with the boy anchoring the middle. That’s not even the part that stuck with me, though. When the barrier rebounded and started cooking all four of them alive, he reached out and pulled the mana straight into himself, draining a whole ten-shard dragon core in front of my face like he was tipping out a bucket of water."

"That’s not in the report," Garret said slowly.

"No, it isn’t."

Allen picked the tea back up, drank it this time, then grimaced at how cold it had gotten.

"There’s more I left out," he said. "His mana registered at twelve hundred on the measuring device, solid for a rookie, nothing worth a second glance. I was standing two feet away when he did it. He threaded his own mana into the machine and shaped the number until it gave him the exact reading he wanted. We calibrate that device against every Ranker in the kingdom, and he fooled it without breaking a sweat. A boy who can do that isn’t a twelve hundred. He’s whatever he feels like being that morning."

Garret sat with that for a moment, his scowl loosening into something closer to unease, "then what is he?"

Allen didn’t answer right away, his mind drifting to all the smaller things instead. The kid wore a golden ring on his wrist where every other person alive carried shards, which on its own should have been flat-out impossible.

Pressure that dropped seasoned veterans to their knees just slid right off him. The beastkin who trailed after him wasn’t a real beastkin at all, just a summon wearing a person’s shape, sentient in a way no summoning record allowed for.

And half the time the boy stood there talking to thin air, his eyes following something across the room that nobody else could see.

And then there was the rumor. It was about some two-shard gate the boy had cleared, supposedly gone the moment he walked back out of it. Allen had brushed it off as a tall tale when it first reached him, but lately it kept circling back to the front of his mind.

He had kept that suspicion to himself. He wasn’t sure what it meant yet, and a guildmaster who went around chasing ghosts didn’t keep the title for very long.

"I don’t know what he is," Allen finally said. "But the rules bend around him. I built that exam to weed everyone out, and he treated the impossible part like it bored him. That raid should have been a funeral, but he came home from it with a noble title instead. Every box we put him in, he just climbs out the other side, and he doesn’t even seem to notice he’s doing it."

He tapped a finger against the parchment.

"So no, I’m not worried about the gate. I’m curious to see what walks back out of it." His eyes lifted to Garret. "Something always does with that one, and it’s never the thing we expected."

Garret stayed quiet for a few seconds, then shook his head and pushed himself up out of the chair.

"You’re enjoying this," he said.

"A little," Allen admitted.

Garret made it to the door before he stopped, one hand resting on the frame.

"And if you’re wrong?" he asked. "If he’s just lucky, and this is the gate that finally eats him?"

Allen looked back down at the assessment, at the empty space where a shard rating was supposed to sit.

"Then I’ll have been wrong about a person for the first time in twenty years," he said, "and we’ll have a lot worse than paperwork to deal with."

Garret grunted and walked out, the door clicking shut behind him.

Allen leaned back until the chair took his full weight, the parchment still loose in his fingers. He wasn’t the only one watching the boy, and he knew it.

The King had his own reasons for keeping that golden thread close, and the Great Families were already sharpening their knives over a stretch of land none of them thought a commoner had any business owning.

He dropped the assessment on top of the reports he still wasn’t going to read.

"Surprise me again, kid," he muttered to the empty office.