Chapter 129: The First Discussion
Three days passed and the B-rank gates did not move.
They stood exactly where the beams had placed them, silent, not producing visible activity, not expelling anything from their interiors.
No monsters at the perimeter.
The silence was worse than activity would have been. Activity meant information. Silence meant imagination. Kai was in the coordination cafeteria on the third morning when Dorn arrived and immediately made his position clear.
"The answer is not me," Dorn said, pointing at himself. "Just to be absolutely clear."
Rin looked up from her coffee. "Nobody asked."
"I felt it was important to establish."
"You don’t have limits."
"That’s hurtful."
"It’s accurate."
Kei was looking at the news broadcast on the cafeteria screen. Lina had a map of the gate locations pulled up on her tablet and was cross-referencing it with something.
Sera was reading through reports that the guild coordination office had distributed to high-rank hunters.
The reports all said the same thing.
Nobody knew what was inside.
Everyone who got close described the same feeling.
Something was wrong.
The television broadcast cut to live footage of one of the gate locations. The reporter stood with the gate visible in the background, which required her to be positioned at a distance that put her at the edge of what the camera could capture clearly. Even at that distance the gate had a visual quality that the C-rank and F-rank gates had not had. The space immediately around it looked different from the space five meters further out in a way that was difficult to specify but was immediately visible.
"The city continues requesting volunteers for initial scouting operations," the reporter said. "At this time no official entry teams have been confirmed."
A hunter three tables over made a sound that communicated unsurprise.
Nobody disagreed with the sound.
On the other side of the city, in the room that Mayor Ko used for the conversations he did not want to be formal meetings, the actual question was being asked with less performance attached to it.
Lily Blue had been at the table when the Mayor arrived. She had asked for the session and had brought the reports that the coordination office had compiled from the three days of gate observation, the environmental readings and level projections and the casualty estimates that multiple modeling teams had produced. She had read all of them before the meeting and had her own read on the numbers.
Mayor Ko looked at the reports spread across the table.
"Can we clear it," he said.
Lily had been waiting for the question to be asked in that specific simple form since the gates appeared. She gave it the silence it deserved.
"Maybe," she said.
The Mayor’s expression moved. "That’s not confidence."
"No." She looked at the report in front of her. "It’s honesty."
Three days of observation hadn’t answered the important questions. Nobody knew the monster count.
Nobody knew the boss.
Nobody even knew the dungeon layout.
"The strongest hunters in the city are inside the recommended range," Lily said.
Mayor Ko nodded. Kai at fifty-two. Sera higher after the Sky Fortress and Thunder Peaks clears. Raze recovering and back in the low fifties. Elden at comparable levels. Mira still building back from the Abyssal Clock injuries but functional.
"Recommended doesn’t mean safe."
The room went quiet.
"It means possible."
Mayor Ko had been in enough planning sessions to understand what that distinction meant in practice. "And if everything doesn’t go correctly."
Lily looked at the casualty projection. "Then we need to know what we’re dealing with before we send the city’s best hunters in."
They talked for another twenty minutes.
Nothing changed.
The Mayor did not push on this. He had seen enough of how hunters operated to understand that the hesitation was not cowardice. It was the same quality he had watched in the period before each Mythical gate clear.
Top hunters waited for information, and when no information was available they waited for the moment when the waiting produced more risk than the entry.
That moment had not arrived yet.
Back in the cafeteria, Dorn had moved on from his official position statement and was now reading the public discussion boards with the expression of someone who had discovered something they found deeply entertaining.
"Listen to this one," he said, and read something aloud that was several hundred words of confident speculation about B-rank interior mechanics from someone who had not entered any rank of dungeon in the last three weeks.
Rin listened without expression. "Why are you reading that."
"I find the certainty impressive."
"It’s inaccurate certainty."
"The most entertaining kind."
Kei looked at the screen. "The problem is that without any actual interior information, all of these are exactly equally valid."
"Mine too?" Dorn said.
"Do you have one?" Lina asked.
"Not specifically. But in principle."
Kei thought about this. "Then yes. Yours too."
Dorn looked satisfied.
Kai set his coffee down.
"What we know," he said, and the table went quiet in the specific way it went quiet when he was processing something out loud rather than making small talk, "is the level range and the gate size and the atmospheric quality at the perimeters. That’s it."
"That’s very little," Sera said.
"It’s nothing useful," he said. "The level range tells us the system expects hunters in the fifty to seventy bracket to be relevant inside. Atmospheric effects at the perimeter suggest the internal scale is larger than the C-rank gates were. That’s the complete information set."
"Not enough to plan with," Lina said.
"Not enough to plan with," he confirmed.
Nobody knew anything.
That didn’t stop people from arguing.
By afternoon, everyone was waiting for somebody else to go first. But where the resolution required a first step nobody was taking. The gate countdown that the system had initially indicated had already passed. The gates were open. The system was waiting.
The city was waiting for someone to go first.
Then the announcement appeared on the guild district boards and the coordination office channels simultaneously.
A team had volunteered.
Kai read through the notification when Sera passed it to him across the table. Six hunters. Levels ranging from forty-two to forty-five. Names he recognized from the city’s mid-upper tier, people who had been active through the Mythical phase at the C-rank level and who had solid records and had not been first-rank hunters but had not been unknown either.
They were not close to the recommended range of fifty to seventy.
They knew that.
The notification made clear they knew that. The stated goal was not clearing. It was entry, basic environmental assessment, and exit. Intelligence gathering, not combat progression.
Sera looked at the volunteer announcement. "That’s below the recommended range."
"Significantly," Kai said.
"They might not come back."
"They know that."
She looked at him. "Why go then."
He looked at the announcement. The team’s stated reasoning was the same thing the city had been circling around for three days without being able to resolve.
No information meant no planning. No planning meant everyone was paralyzed. Someone going in and coming back with any data at all broke the paralysis, even if the data was minimal. The announcement spread through the city faster than the system’s notifications had.
It had a human quality that the system text did not have, which made it land differently in people’s responses. The comments and reactions that followed had a different tone from the fear that had dominated the previous three days. Something had shifted.
The team held a brief public interview that evening outside the guild coordination building. A crowd gathered. Livestream coverage started. A reporter asked the question that everyone in the crowd already had.
"Are you afraid?"
The team leader thought about it. Then he laughed in a way that was not dismissive. "A little," he said.
Nobody laughed or mocked him and just listened.
"We’re not entering because we’re fearless," he said. "We’re entering because somebody has to."
Kai watched the broadcast from the cafeteria window. Beside him Sera had the same quiet attention she brought to things she was thinking through rather than simply observing.
"The city seems better," she said.
"It has a direction," Kai said.
She nodded. That was what had shifted. Not the danger level, which had not changed. Not the information, which they still did not have. Just the fact that something was moving forward rather than standing still.
The team was going in tomorrow.
Whether they came back depended on factors nobody in the city currently had information about.
What they brought back would determine what came next.
Kai looked at the distant blue pillar visible through the cafeteria window.
Tomorrow would tell them something.
The city just hoped the team came back.
