Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 11: Chapter 11 — Provisional

The badge felt heavier in his pocket than its actual weight should have allowed.

Arlen walked out of the guild hall with his new journal tucked carefully under one arm, the small guild badge pinned to the inside of his shirt where it wouldn’t catch on anything, and a distinct, disorienting sense of now what. He’d spent eight years imagining the exact moment of registration, turning it over in his mind so many times that the reality of it had already started blurring into memory before he’d even made it out the door. What he hadn’t spent nearly as much time imagining was the morning after — the part where a Rank F adventurer with no gear, no training, and no coin to spare had to actually become one.

He stood in the square outside the guild hall for a moment, watching the flow of foot traffic, and made himself take stock honestly.

He had a knife, decent for cutting rope and preparing food, useless for much else. He had the traveling cloak Bram had given him, patched but sturdy. He had his money belt, considerably lighter now than it had been yesterday, and he had eight years of careful observation that had taught him a great deal about watching adventurers and remarkably little about actually being one.

"You look like a man who just realized wanting something and being ready for it are two different problems," said a voice behind him.

Arlen turned to find an older woman leaning against the wall near the guild’s side entrance, arms crossed, watching him with the particular amusement of someone who’d clearly seen this exact expression on a hundred new faces before his. She wore a leather apron dusted with what looked like metal filings, and a guild badge of her own pinned high enough on her collar that Arlen couldn’t quite make out its color.

"Is it that obvious?" he asked.

"Painfully." She pushed off the wall. "Smith’s District is two streets that way, if you’re looking for gear and don’t want to get robbed blind by the shops closer to the square. Tell them Rennick sent you, they’ll knock a little off the price out of spite for me sending them business they didn’t ask for."

Arlen blinked. "Why help me?"

"Because you’ve got that look," Rennick said, already turning to go, "like you’re going to actually make something of the badge instead of getting yourself killed with it in the first month. I like backing that particular kind of bet." She waved a hand without looking back. "Smith’s District. Go."

He went.

The Smith’s District turned out to be a cramped, noisy tangle of streets a short walk from the guild square, lined with forges and leather-workers and secondhand shops selling gear that had clearly seen better days but hadn’t yet been deemed worthless. Arlen spent the better part of the afternoon there, moving carefully from shop to shop, doing the same kind of careful mental arithmetic he’d been doing with coppers since he was ten years old — except now the stakes were considerably higher than whether he’d eat well that week.

The first shop wanted more than he had for a full set of leather armor. The second had armor he could afford, but it was worn thin at the joints in a way that made him think of Old Maren’s warnings about false economy — cheap now, expensive later, when it failed you at the wrong moment. He kept walking.

He found what he needed at a narrow shop tucked at the end of a side street, run by a heavyset man with burn scars along one forearm who introduced himself simply as Torv and didn’t ask many questions once Arlen mentioned Rennick’s name.

"Rank F, first gear-up?" Torv asked, already moving toward a rack of secondhand leather armor pushed into the back corner.

"That obvious too?"

"You’re standing like you don’t know what to do with your own shoulders yet. Happens to everyone." Torv pulled a set of boiled leather armor off the rack, checked the stitching with a practiced tug, and held it up against Arlen’s frame with a critical eye. "This’ll do. Previous owner outgrew it more than wore it out — good bones left in the leather. Won’t stop a serious hit, but it’ll take the edge off a scrape or a low-rank claw, which is honestly all you need for what you’ll actually be doing your first year."

Arlen tried it on. It fit awkwardly at first, stiff across the shoulders in a way that made him feel like he was wearing someone else’s skin, but Torv adjusted the straps with quick, efficient hands until it settled into something closer to comfortable.

"Sword?" Torv asked next.

"I don’t really know swords," Arlen admitted.

"Nobody does, their first time." Torv disappeared into the back and returned with a short sword, plain-hilted, the blade a little dull but honest. "This one’s forgiving. Balanced toward the hilt, so it won’t overcommit you into a swing you can’t recover from if you miss. Most rookies buy something flashier and heavier because it looks more like what the veterans carry. Bad idea. Buy the sword that matches the fighter you are right now, not the one you’re hoping to become."

Arlen turned the blade over in his hands, testing the weight of it — lighter than he’d expected, a plain, unglamorous length of honest steel that nonetheless felt, in that moment, like the single most significant object he’d ever held.

"How much for both?" he asked.

Torv named a price. It was more than Arlen wanted to spend, and considerably less than he’d feared, and after a moment’s hesitation — the old, careful instinct to hoard every copper warring briefly with the understanding that some coin existed specifically to be spent on exactly this — he counted it out.

"Rennick send you?" Torv asked again, almost idle, tucking the coin away.

"She did."

"Good. Means you’ll probably survive long enough to come back and buy better gear later, which is honestly the only kind of customer worth discounting for." Torv wrapped the sword in a strip of cloth and handed it over. "Take care of the leather. Oil it when it starts drying out, don’t let it sit wet after a rain. Gear lasts as long as you’re willing to look after it, same as most things."

Arlen left the shop with the short sword belted at his hip and the leather armor settled, still slightly stiff, across his shoulders, and stood for a moment in the narrow street just breathing it in — the weight of it, the reality of it, the strange, solid feeling of finally looking, even a little, like the adventurers he’d spent eight years watching from a distance.

He caught his reflection, briefly, in a shop window as he passed — leather armor, short sword, traveling cloak, guild badge pinned at his collar — and barely recognized the shape of himself in it.

Not there yet, he thought, turning the reflection over the way he turned over most things, honestly and without flattery. But closer than I was yesterday.

He walked back toward the guild hall as the afternoon light began turning gold over the rooftops, already thinking ahead to the quest board, to whatever small, unglamorous task might be waiting there for a Rank F adventurer with a new sword he barely knew how to use and eight years of patient watching finally about to be put to the test.