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

Chapter 6: Chapter 6 — Beyond the Walls

The best days, as far as Arlen was concerned, were the ones when an errand took him anywhere near the western gate.

It wasn’t the gate itself that interested him — a squat, unglamorous structure of gray stone manned by a rotation of bored guards who mostly cared whether you had business being there. It was what came through it. Twice a week, sometimes more, caravans rolled in from the outer villages loaded with grain and timber, and mixed in among them, drifting through on their own schedule, came the adventurers.

He was eleven now, tall enough that Old Maren had started grumbling about how fast he was outgrowing his one good shirt, and he’d gotten very good at finding excuses to linger near the gate whenever his errands allowed it.

That particular afternoon, the excuse was a delivery of mending thread to a seamstress two streets past the gate district — the kind of task that could, if a boy were clever about it, be stretched to take considerably longer than strictly necessary.

Arlen perched on his usual low wall, thread bundle balanced on his knees, and watched.

A party of four came through first, mud-caked to the knee, moving with the loose, unhurried gait of people who’d been walking for days and had long since stopped caring how they looked. Their leader — a broad-shouldered woman with a shortsword strapped across her back — carried a satchel that clinked with the particular sound of coin, while behind her, two of her companions hauled a covered cart between them.

Whatever was under the canvas had a strong smell. Not rotten, exactly, but wild and sharp, something between wet fur and scorched hide. Arlen leaned forward without meaning to.

"Boar," said a voice beside him, amused.

He turned. An old man had settled onto the wall a few feet away — one of the retired dockhands who liked to spend his afternoons watching the gate traffic same as Arlen did, though presumably for less complicated reasons.

"How can you tell?" Arlen asked.

"Smell. Boars smell like that when they’ve been dead a day or two — sharp, like the wildness in ’em curdles once the heart stops." The old man nodded toward the covered cart. "Ironhide boar, if I had to guess. See how the cart sits low? Heavy hide. Adventurers only bother hauling the whole carcass in when the hide’s worth something."

Arlen filed that away carefully, the way he filed away most things these days. Weight tells you about the material. Smell tells you about the type.

"You always watch the gate this close?" the old man asked.

"Most days I can."

"Thinking of joining up someday?" There was no mockery in the question, just idle curiosity.

"When I’m old enough," Arlen said.

The old man made a considering sound and didn’t argue, which Arlen appreciated more than he let on. Most adults, on hearing a slum boy’s ambitions, either laughed or offered some well-meaning warning about how dangerous the forest was, how many young adventurers never came back from their first expedition. Arlen had heard both often enough that he’d stopped expecting anything else.

A second group came through not long after — smaller, just two people, and different enough from the first party that Arlen sat up straighter to watch them properly. One was clearly human, lean and quick-eyed, but the other was not, not entirely. Her ears rose to a delicate point beneath a fall of pale hair, and she moved with an unhurried grace that made the mud and dust of the road look almost incidental, like weather that simply hadn’t gotten around to touching her yet.

"Elf," the old man said, following Arlen’s gaze. "Don’t see many out this way. Mostly stick to the forest villages, or further north."

"What are they like?" Arlen asked. "Elves."

"Couldn’t tell you much. Long-lived, from what I hear. Patient in a way that makes the rest of us look flighty." The old man shrugged. "You’d have better luck asking her yourself, if you ever get the nerve."

Arlen didn’t get the nerve that day. But he watched her all the way until she and her companion disappeared into the guild district, filing away the details — the quiet economy of her movements, the strange, silvery quality of her hair in the afternoon light — the way he filed away everything now, quietly convinced that someday all these small observations would matter.

He’d started keeping a mental list, these past several months, of all the things he didn’t understand yet. Elves and their patience. The exact meaning of the badges pinned to different adventurers’ cloaks — he’d worked out that the colors seemed to correspond to rank, but not which color meant what. The names of the various monster materials that passed through the gate in sacks and covered carts, half of which he could only guess at by smell and weight, the way the old dockhand had taught him without quite meaning to.

Someday, he thought, he would know all of it. Not from a wall, watching from a careful distance, but from the inside — walking through that same gate himself, mud on his own boots, some strange creature’s hide slung over his own shoulder.

The thought didn’t frighten him. If anything, it settled into his chest with a warmth that felt almost like impatience, though he’d trained himself, these past months, not to let impatience get the better of him. Seven more years. He could wait seven more years. He’d waited through worse.

"You’ve got that look," the old dockhand said, studying him with mild amusement.

"What look?"

"The one my boy used to get, watching ships come in at the harbor. Like he already knew he was going to be on one of them someday, and was just waiting for the world to catch up to him."

Arlen considered that. "Did he? Get on one?"

"Aye. Twelve years back now." The old man’s smile turned faintly wistful. "Writes when he remembers to. Says the world’s bigger than either of us ever guessed, growing up in this city. Different food in every port. Different customs. Says there’s whole islands out there where they don’t even speak a language he recognized, not at first."

Something in Arlen’s chest tightened pleasantly at that, an old, familiar ache that had nothing to do with hunger.

"I want that," he said, quiet enough that it was mostly to himself. "Not just the forest. All of it. Every port, every island, every strange language nobody back here’s ever heard."

The old dockhand looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way adults rarely bothered to look at slum children — and then nodded slowly, as if Arlen had said something worth taking seriously.

"Then you’d best start saving your coppers, boy. The world doesn’t come cheap, whatever direction you’re headed."

"I know," Arlen said. He thought of the small cloth pouch sewn into his shirt, heavier now than it had been a year ago, growing heavier by careful, deliberate degrees. "I’ve already started."

Above them, the last of the covered carts rolled through the gate, trailing the sharp, wild smell of the forest behind it, and Arlen watched it go with the particular, patient hunger of someone who had already decided, long before he had any right to, exactly where his life was going to lead.