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

Chapter 23: Chapter 23 — The Long Walk Back

The return journey took two full days rather than one, the party moving at a more relaxed pace than the eager, purposeful march that had carried them out. There was no more surveying to do, no boundary left to reach — only the comfortable, unhurried business of retracing their steps through terrain that had already surrendered its mystery.

Arlen found he didn’t mind the slower pace. If anything, it gave him room to actually absorb what he’d seen, rather than simply cataloguing it in the rush of the moment.

"You’ve been quiet," Reya observed, falling into step beside him on the first afternoon of the walk back, the outer forest’s more familiar canopy beginning to reassert itself overhead as they put distance between themselves and the boundary.

"Just thinking."

"About the greatstag?"

"About all of it, really." Arlen adjusted the pack on his shoulders, still heavier with unused supplies than he’d have liked, though the extra weight barely registered against the weight of everything else he was carrying back with him. "I spent years imagining what was past the outer forest. Turns out I wasn’t even imagining big enough."

Reya laughed, not unkindly. "That’s usually how it goes. First time I saw the boundary — a little over a year ago, before you’d even registered — I remember thinking the exact same thing. And I’ve heard from adventurers who’ve gone considerably further than that boundary that the feeling doesn’t really go away. You just get a little more used to being humbled by it."

"That sounds almost comforting."

"It is, in its way. Means the world doesn’t run out of things worth seeing just because you’ve gotten stronger." She glanced sideways at him. "You’re planning to go a lot further than most people, aren’t you. I could tell, back at the Emberroot patch. Most rookies want to prove themselves. You want something else."

Arlen considered how to answer that honestly. "I want to see everything," he said finally. "Not just prove I can survive it. Actually see it."

"That’s a good want to have," Reya said, after a moment. "Rarer than you’d think, around here. Most people who come through the guild are chasing coin, or reputation, or running from something back home. Not many are just... curious, the way you seem to be."

They made camp that evening at the same site they’d used on the way out, and dinner was a livelier affair than the first night had been — the tension of approaching unfamiliar territory replaced now by the easy, companionable relief of a job completed without incident. Fennis, once again surprising Arlen with her willingness to talk when the mood struck her, told a long, meandering story about a previous expedition that had gone considerably less smoothly, involving a swarm of Rank 2 stinging insects and Dorn’s memorably undignified retreat into a shallow pond.

"It was strategic," Dorn insisted, to general laughter around the fire.

"You screamed," Fennis said flatly.

"I vocalized. Tactically."

Even Yorin, usually as reserved as Fennis in his own way, offered a small, dry smile at that, and Arlen found himself laughing along with the rest of them, struck by how easily he’d been folded into the rhythm of the group over these few days — not quite a full member of the party, not yet, but no longer entirely an outsider either.

"You did good work this trip," Petra told him quietly, later that evening, while the others settled in around the dying fire. "Camp ran smoothly the whole way. That matters more than people realize, on an expedition like this. Nobody remembers good logistics. They just remember when logistics fail."

"Thank you," Arlen said, and found he meant it more than the simple words probably conveyed.

He took second watch again that night, and used the quiet hours to finally sit down properly with his journal, filling in the gaps he’d been too tired or too overwhelmed to capture fully the night before. He wrote about the greatstag’s antlers, the pale flowers growing from them, the particular quality of green light filtering down through a canopy taller than anything he’d imagined a tree could grow. He wrote about the mana-touched fungus Petra had shown him, and the number four sitting in his mind like a marker for everything still ahead of him.

He also wrote, more slowly, about the people he’d traveled with — Reya’s easy confidence, Dorn’s steady good humor, Fennis’s rare and therefore valuable warmth, Yorin’s quiet competence, Petra’s careful attention to detail. Not adventurers he’d only watched from a respectful distance anymore, the way he had Iron Vanguard, but people he’d shared a fire and a job with, however briefly.

I think this is part of it too, he wrote. Not just the places. The people you see them with. I didn’t expect that to matter as much as it apparently does.

They reached Greyhaven’s western gate on the evening of the second day, the familiar shape of the city walls rising up ahead of them as the light began to fade, and Arlen felt a strange, dual sensation settle over him — relief at the sight of something familiar, mixed with a quiet, persistent restlessness that hadn’t been there before this trip, a sense that the walls he’d once thought marked the edge of everything worth knowing now felt considerably smaller than they had a week ago.

The party dispersed at the guild hall, everyone eager for a proper bed and a hot meal after five days on the trail. Reya lingered a moment longer than the others, watching Arlen shoulder his gear toward the registration counter to log the expedition’s completion.

"You did well," she said. "Better than well, honestly. Petra mentioned it too, if that means anything to you."

"It does," Arlen said. "Thank you. For asking me along."

"Told you, I still owed you for the Emberroot." Her sharp smile returned, briefly. "Keep growing the way you have been, and it won’t be long before you’re the one leading expeditions like this instead of managing the camp for them."

Mina processed the assignment’s completion at the counter without complication, counting out the full 15 silver reward along with a small, official-looking notation in his file — cartography support credit, formally logged, the first entry of its kind Arlen had ever earned.

He walked back to the guild’s inn that evening with his coin purse heavier and his journal considerably fuller than either had been five days earlier, and lay awake a while longer than usual once he’d settled into his bunk, staring up at the familiar low ceiling and thinking about the vast, green, humbling scale of everything he’d seen past the outer forest’s edge.

Rank 4, and that’s still just the boundary, he thought again, the same words he’d written days earlier, though they felt different now, settled into him properly rather than simply observed. There’s so much more than I understood. I think there always will be, no matter how far I go.

He found, drifting toward sleep, that the thought didn’t frighten him in the slightest.

If anything, it felt like exactly the promise he’d made himself, all those years ago, in a slum bedroom on the other side of these same city walls — finally, properly, beginning to come true.