The Guild’s contract board updated at dawn every Thirdday, which ant that by the ti most Hunters arrived to review postings, the best opportunities were already spoken for. Amaron had learned this in his first life through the accumulated frustration of arriving late and finding only the contracts no one wanted — the ones with poor commission rates, inconvenient locations, or reputations for bureaucratic complications that made them more trouble than they were worth.
In his second life, he arrived forty minutes before the board opened.
He was not the only one. Three other Hunters were already waiting in the Guild hall’s entrance corridor when he got there — two D-ranks he didn’t recognize and a woman in her thirties who had the patient, worn quality of soone who had been doing this long enough to know exactly how the ga worked. They nodded at each other with the brief acknowledgnt of people who shared an understanding but not a conversation. Then they waited.
The board official arrived at precisely the sixth hour, unlocked the hall doors with the chanical efficiency of soone performing a task they had perford a thousand tis, and stepped aside. The small crowd moved forward with practiced coordination — not rushing, but not wasting ti either, each person heading directly to the section of the board they needed.
Amaron went to the auxiliary contracts. Low-rank support work. The kind of thing F-ranks were permitted to take without supervision.
— ◆ —
The postings were standard: rift monitoring in the outer districts, equipnt inventory for returning expeditions, docuntation assistance for Guild administrative reviews. He scanned them with the thodical attention he gave to everything that might matter, cross-referencing what he saw against what he rembered from his first life and what he knew about the next three months of the original tiline.
Most of the contracts were noise — work that needed doing but carried no strategic value. He was looking for sothing specific: a position that would give him access to information, proximity to events that mattered, or both, without placing him anywhere he’d be expected to demonstrate capability beyond his registered rank.
He found it on the third posting from the bottom.
Rift monitoring contract. Grade 1 rift in the fifth district, newly manifested, requiring continuous mana pressure readings and structural stability assessnt over a two-week period. Solo assignnt. Lodging provided. Commission: standard rate plus equipnt stipend.
It was perfect for three reasons.
First: solo assignnt ant no witnesses to how he worked. Second: continuous monitoring ant he’d be on-site long enough to fully map the rift’s internal structure, which would be useful reference data for understanding how Grade 1 rifts behaved — information his mory Index had in general terms but not in the granular detail that ca from direct observation. Third: the fifth district bordered the location where a significant incident would occur in roughly eight weeks, and having a legitimate reason to be in the area would be useful when that ti ca.
He took the contract slip to the processing desk.
— ◆ —
The clerk was a man in his fifties who had been working the Guild’s administrative side longer than Amaron had been alive in either life. He took the slip, scanned it without apparent interest, and pulled up Amaron’s file on the desk terminal.
"Volg, Amaron. F-rank. Cartographic survey specialization." He looked up. "This is rift monitoring. You have monitoring certification?"
"Yes," Amaron said. "Completed the auxiliary course last month."
The clerk checked the file, found the notation, and nodded. "Grade 1, so it’s within paraters. You understand this is a fourteen-day continuous assignnt? You’ll be living on-site. Food and lodging provided, but you’re not permitted to leave the monitoring zone except for supply runs."
"Understood."
"Equipnt check-out is in the basent. You’ll need a standard monitoring kit, a pressure gauge, and a personal beacon in case of structural failure. Report to the site supervisor by eighth hour tomorrow." He stamped the contract slip and handed Amaron a copy. "Don’t die out there. Paperwork’s terrible when solo contractors die."
This was delivered without particular emotion — not callousness, just the flat observation of soone who had in fact dealt with that paperwork and found it terrible. Amaron took the slip and did not comnt on the Guild’s approach to occupational safety ssaging.
He had fourteen days, alone, in a low-risk environnt where he could work without observation. It was exactly what he needed.
— ◆ —
He spent the rest of the day preparing.
The equipnt check-out process was straightforward — a monitoring kit that included mana detection instrunts, structural assessnt tools, and a logbook for recording observations, plus the pressure gauge and beacon the clerk had ntioned. He signed for everything, confird the serial numbers against the manifest, and packed it into the field bag provided.
Then he went back to his room and packed a second bag.
This one held things the Guild did not provide and would not have approved of if they knew: a set of lightweight training weights he’d acquired the previous week, a compact manual on mana circulation theory he’d copied from the Guild library, his notebook with its cipher entries, and a small knife he’d sharpened to an edge considerably finer than anything a cartographer’s assistant would reasonably need.
He was not planning to do anything dangerous with the knife. But the fifth district bordered territory that had, in his first life, developed a problem with low-rank bandits during certain seasonal windows, and while he could handle bandits easily enough, doing so without a plausible reason for having the capability to handle them would create questions he preferred not to answer.
A knife was plausible. An F-rank support contractor, alone in the outer districts for two weeks, carrying a knife for basic self-defense was the kind of reasonable precaution that no one would question.
He packed it at the bottom of the bag and covered it with spare clothing.
— ◆ —
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