Chapter 57: A Hunter That Brings Change
The scene wasn’t just cordoned.
It was fully surrounded. Barrier tape strung between pedestals, a proper perimeter. Hadn’t been there last night.
The crowd behind it was maybe forty deep now and growing, pressed up against the line with their phones raised like an offering. That low, blended frequency of public spectacle — overlapping voices, the click of shutters, someone narrating into a camera in a hushed, reverent tone.
"Is that actually a gate —"
"Manifested overnight, apparently —"
"Oh my god, they responded so fast —"
David slowed without stopping. His eyes moved over the scene in quick, automatic passes.
The tape. The security personnel stationed at intervals along it — not police, Hunter Association liaisons in dark vests — actively pushing the crowd back, redirecting phones, keeping the line from buckling. Standard crowd management for a site manifestation, but the density of it was off. There were too many of them for a gate that hadn’t even been ranked yet.
He filed that and kept looking.
Hunting parties operated by protocol. Gate discovered, gate reported, Association logged it, ranked it, assigned a party based on rank designation. Simple.
The party size scaled to the threat: a C-rank gate drew a standard clearance team, six to eight hunters, bread-and-butter work that barely warranted paperwork. A-rank gates — something the Association actually took seriously — pulled full raid composition. Up to twenty hunters, a party lead with the credentials to match, and a ranking disclosure locked inside Association infrastructure that the public never saw.
You’d find out what rank the gate was when the hunters came out the other side. That was procedure. That was how it had always worked in the lower district, where gates appeared and got handled and the upper city occasionally sent a cursory follow-up memo.
So what David was looking at didn’t track.
Because the party assembled on the other side of the tape was not a standard clearance team.
He could see that without the numbers — he could see it in the equipment, in the way they held themselves. That was not six to eight hunters. That was closer to twenty, and the gear they were wearing didn’t come from the Association’s standard issue catalogue.
Then a voice.
"Gear check, now. We’re not doing this in front of an audience."
Not loud. That was the thing — it shouldn’t have carried the way it did. But the crowd parted around it like it had physical weight, and David’s eyes moved toward it without deciding to.
One man. Black hair, slender build, fitted tactical gear that sat close to the body without announcing itself.
The kind of equipment that had stopped needing to look impressive. He wasn’t performing anything — he was simply standing there and the area around him had reorganized accordingly.
The response from the crowd behind David was immediate and slightly unhinged.
"Oh my GOD —"
"Is that — is that Alex Stormborn?!"
The name hit the crowd like a dropped glass. Two people grabbed each other’s arms. Someone screamed — actually screamed, a short, overwhelmed sound. Phones that had been pointed at the gate swung hard in his direction.
A-rank. One of maybe eleven active A-ranks in the country.
’Here,’ David thought. ’For this.’
He turned it over. An undesignated gate, unranked as of last night, in the lower district, before sunrise on a Tuesday — and they’d sent Stormborn. Not assigned to him, presumably.
A-ranks didn’t get assigned to undesignated clearances. They had rosters of B-ranks and mid-tier specialists specifically so that A-ranks didn’t have to show up to things like this. There were entire bureaucratic layers between an A-rank hunter and a gate that hadn’t even been classified yet.
His scan moved past Stormborn, tracking down the line of the assembled party, reading equipment and posture as his observation peaked.
However, it stopped as his eyes landed on Leon.
Geared up. Fitted in tactical kit David had never seen him wear, standing easy in the line the way you only did if the weight of it was familiar. He looked comfortable. He looked like he belonged there.
But, right then-
The response from the crowd was immediate and slightly cutting through David’s distortion.
Then the women started.
"Alex — Alex, over here —"
"Please, just one look —"
"I love you, Alex, please —"
David adjusted his headphones.
’The dignity,’ he thought. ’Just gone. Packed its bags. Left without a note.’
He genuinely couldn’t tell if they heard themselves. One of them was crying. Actually crying. Over a man who did not know she existed and was currently checking the strap on his tactical vest.
Stormborn, for his part, had not reacted. He moved through the eruption like it was weather, attention already distributed across his party, running through gear checks with the efficiency of someone who had learned long ago that crowds didn’t require acknowledgment to eventually calm down.
They didn’t calm down.
"ALEX —"
"Look this way —"
"PLEASE —"
He let it run. Then, maybe thirty seconds in, he stopped. Exhaled once. Turned around.
The crowd short-circuited. The chanting cracked into something breathless and incoherent. Phones lurched upward like a single organism.
Stormborn’s expression was easy. Not warm — more the particular confidence of someone who’d simply stopped having reasons to be anything else.
"I know this looks unusual," he said. Quiet. Still audible.
"An A-rank response to an undesignated gate down here." A pause that wasn’t really a pause.
"The truth is simple. There’s a movement — and it’s gaining ground — that says the lower district deserves the same standard of protection as anywhere else. That the lives here are worth the same urgency, the same resources, the same response time."
Something shifted in his tone, not softer exactly, just more direct. "We’re here because someone made that happen. His name is Elias Cross. He runs the Cross Foundation, and he funded this mobilisation. If you want to thank someone —" a faint tilt of the head, "— thank him."
He turned back before the crowd could respond, back to his Hunting party.
"Let’s go."
They moved. Clean, immediate — twenty hunters folding into formation and crossing the perimeter in seconds, Stormborn at the front, the gate swallowing them one by one until the last of them was through and the barrier tape was just barrier tape again.
The crowd erupted anyway. Cheering at an empty threshold. At the idea of something.
David didn’t move.
Elias Cross.
He didn’t know the name. Didn’t recognise it from anything — not the news cycles he half-followed, nor the Association’s public communications he’d read front to back more times than was probably healthy.
Somewhere to his left, a news crew had already set up. A woman in a blazer was talking into a handheld mic, her camera operator panning slowly across the gate site.
"— and there you have it, folks. It seems the lower district has found itself a new benefactor, and his name is Elias Cross —"
David looked at the empty space where twenty hunters had just been standing.
He thought about the response time. The party size. An A-rank on site before sunrise for an unranked gate in a district that usually got the follow-up memo three days later, if at all.
Someone had decided this place mattered.
The thought landed quietly. Not excitement — something more settled than that. The feeling of something clicking into place he hadn’t realised was loose.
’If there’s actually someone who gives a damn about this side of the city,’ he thought, ’then this journey about becoming a hunter isn’t just about getting out of the lower district anymore.’
The crowd noise moved around him. He let it.
A slow smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
’It means...I could actually help make the world...a better place. I could actually bring change.’
However, little did David know that this encounter would be the leading factor that would change his entire future.
