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

Chapter 9: Chapter 9 — Eighteen

The morning Arlen turned eighteen, he woke before dawn out of habit rather than necessity, and lay still for a long moment in the gray half-light, listening to the familiar sounds of the tenement stirring to life around him — a cough through the thin wall, someone’s footsteps on the stairs, the distant clatter of the first carts moving through the streets outside.

He’d expected the day to feel different, somehow. It didn’t, not at first. It felt like every other morning of the past seven years, right up until he sat up, looked at the small, worn strongbox sitting in the corner of the room, and remembered, all at once, what today actually meant.

Today, he thought, and the word settled into his chest with a weight that was equal parts excitement and something closer to disbelief. Today, if I want to, I can walk through the guild doors and register.

He didn’t get up immediately. He sat there instead, knees drawn up, and let himself simply feel it for a while — the strange, quiet enormity of a promise he’d made to himself eight years ago, finally arriving at the moment it could be kept.

He’d planned this day carefully, the way he planned most things now. He wasn’t going to rush to the guild hall the moment the sun came up, half-dressed and unprepared, the way some younger, more impatient version of himself might have. He had one more day of ordinary business to finish first — small things, mostly, but the kind of small things that mattered to him.

He spent the morning doing his last rounds through the slum district, not because anyone had asked him to, but because he found he wanted to. He brought Old Maren a bundle of firewood, more than she needed, and waved off her protests when she tried to pay him for it.

”Call it a gift,” he said. ”Considering how many bowls of stew I’ve eaten at your table over the years, I think I still owe you.”

Maren, who had gone gray-haired and slower in the years since he’d first known her, studied him for a long moment with an expression he couldn’t quite read. ”You’re leaving, then. Today.”

”Not today,” Arlen said. ”But soon. I’m registering at the guild this afternoon.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then, unexpectedly, she reached up and cupped his face in both hands, the way she might have done when he was small enough for her to still reach comfortably.

”You were a strange little thing when you first came to me,” she said. ”Quiet in the thinking way, even back then, though I don’t think I understood what I was seeing at the time. Whatever it is that’s been driving you all these years — I hope it takes you somewhere good.”

”It will,” Arlen said, and found, to his mild surprise, that his voice caught slightly on the words. ”I promise.”

He found Denna next, at the small stall near the market square where she’d been working the past year, helping an aging leatherworker who’d more or less adopted her as an unofficial apprentice. She’d grown into someone sharp-eyed and capable, quick with her hands and quicker with her tongue, and the two of them had remained close in the loose, easy way of people who’d grown up sharing the same hard childhood.

”You’ve got that look again,” she said, before he’d even said anything, wiping leather dye from her fingers with a rag. ”The one you get when you’re about to do something ridiculous.”

”I’m registering today,” Arlen said. ”At the guild.”

Denna’s expression shifted — not surprise, exactly, since they both knew this day had been coming for years, but something quieter and more complicated underneath the surprise. ”About time,” she said, and then, after a pause, ”You’ll come back and visit. Before you go running off past every mountain range you can find.”

”I’ll come back,” Arlen said. ”I promise that too.”

”You’d better.” She punched him lightly in the shoulder, harder than strictly necessary, which he understood to mean considerably more than the gesture actually looked like. ”Someone’s got to keep Old Maren from working herself into the ground, now that you won’t be around to steal her firewood chores.”

He laughed, and she laughed, and for a moment it felt like they were still the same two children who used to throw pebbles at each other over onion grass and beetles, rather than two nearly-grown adults standing on opposite sides of a door one of them was about to walk through.

He found Bram last, sitting on his usual bench outside the guild hall’s tavern, mug of ale in hand despite the early hour, watching the square with the same patient, weathered attention he always did.

”Figured you’d come find me today,” Bram said, without looking up. ”Eighteen, isn’t it?”

”As of this morning.”

Bram grunted, gestured at the empty space on the bench, and Arlen sat, the way he had a hundred times before over the years.

”You nervous?” Bram asked.

Arlen considered the question honestly. ”A little. Mostly I just feel like I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time.”

”That’s about right, from what I remember.” Bram was quiet for a moment, turning his mug slowly in his weathered hands. ”I won’t waste your time telling you to be careful. You already know that better than most boys twice your age. I’ll just say this instead.” He looked over at Arlen, and something in his tired, lined face had gone unusually serious. ”Don’t lose the part of you that sits and asks questions before you go charging into things. That part’s kept you alive this long, even before you had any business staying alive in this city. Don’t let strength, when you get it, talk you out of it.”

”I won’t,” Arlen said, and meant it.

Bram nodded, satisfied, and didn’t say anything else on the matter, which was, Arlen had learned over the years, simply how the old man expressed that a conversation mattered to him.

That evening, Arlen returned to the small room he’d called his own for the past two years, and began, for the first time, actually packing.

There wasn’t much to pack. The traveling cloak Bram had given him two years prior, patched carefully at the hem where it had worn thin. A few changes of practical clothing. The strongbox, finally emptied of its years of careful savings and distributed instead into a hidden money belt beneath his shirt, exactly the way Bram had once taught him traveling adventurers did, to avoid losing everything to a single unlucky pickpocket. A small knife, more useful for cutting rope and preparing food than for actual combat, but the only blade he currently owned.

He sat for a long moment afterward, looking around the small, bare room, and found himself thinking, unexpectedly, of a different room entirely — a small apartment in a gray city on a world that no longer felt entirely real to him, where a different version of himself had once lain awake at night, scrolling through videos of places he never got around to visiting.

I got around to it this time, he thought, and the thought settled into him with a quiet, steady satisfaction that felt, finally, completely earned.

He stood at the edge of the slum that night for a long while, looking out over the crooked rooftops toward the distant lights of the guild district, and beyond them, though he couldn’t see it from here, the dark shape of the Verdant Crown Forest waiting at the edge of everything he’d ever known.

Tomorrow, he would walk toward it.

Tonight, he simply stood there, breathing in the familiar smell of woodsmoke and rain-damp stone, and let himself feel, one last time, everything this place had given him — the hunger and the hardship, yes, but also the stubborn, patient kindness of people who had very little and shared it anyway.

”Thank you,” he said quietly, to no one in particular, and to everyone at once.

Then he turned, and went inside, and slept better than he had in weeks.