The last thing Kurogane Ren remembered was the sky.
Not the battle. Not the eighty-seventh man going down on one knee in the dirt, sword arm finally giving out after four hours of this. Not the sound the crowd of villagers made when they realized the ronin was still standing. He remembered the sky because he had looked up at it right before the eighty-eighth blade came, and it was that particular shade of late afternoon gold that made everything look like it was already a painting of itself. Already past. Already finished.
Then the blade.
Then nothing.
Then this.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling he didn't recognize. Stone. Old mortar between the blocks, the kind of work that took patience. He was on his back on something that wasn't a futon. His hand found the grip of his katana before his brain fully caught up, the motion so practiced it happened below thought.
He sat up.
The room was small. A wooden table, two chairs, a window with shutters half-open. Through the gap: a street. Buildings across the way made of stone and timber in proportions that were not right. Not wrong, exactly. Just not right. The rooflines were too steep. The signs hanging over the doors used letters he had never seen.
Ren stood. His body assessed itself without being asked. Left shoulder, stiff from the forty-third opponent, the one who had gotten around his guard and put a shallow cut along the muscle. Right knee, sore from four hours of footwork on uneven ground. The cut on his neck from the eighty-eighth blade: not deep, already drying. He would live.
He went to the window.
The street below was busy. People moved through it in clothes that were not Japanese. Not Chinese either. Not anything he had a word for. Some of them had weapons strapped openly, swords and other things, in a way that suggested it was normal here, which told him something about the nature of this place before he had a single conversation with anyone in it.
A child ran past below, chasing a dog.
Ren watched this for a while.
His instinct said: find a way out of this building before anyone knows you're awake. His instinct was usually right. He filed it under noted and stayed at the window anyway, because leaving without information was just moving the problem somewhere else.
The city, because it was clearly a city, smelled like bread and something burning at the edge of it. The streets were paved with flat stone. The people spoke in a language he couldn't follow, the words coming in shapes his ear hadn't been trained for.
Not Japan.
Definitely not Japan.
He looked down at himself. Same clothes. Same katana. Same chip near the base of the blade that he'd been meaning to address for three months.
Whatever had happened, it had taken him as-is.
He heard footsteps in the hall outside the room. Measured, professional, someone who moved like they were used to moving quietly. The footsteps stopped at his door.
A knock. Two. Polite but not tentative.
"You're awake." Male voice, other side of the door. Young, maybe early twenties. Slightly out of breath, like he'd climbed stairs fast. "The healer said you'd probably sleep until tomorrow, so. You broke her prediction record. She's upset about it."
Ren said nothing.
A pause.
"I'm going to open the door," the voice said. "Not coming in. Just opening it. That okay?"
Still nothing from Ren.
The door opened anyway.
The young man in the doorway was lean, brown-haired, wearing the kind of practical clothing that suggested he worked for something official. A badge on his chest, metal, embossed with a symbol Ren didn't know. He looked at Ren standing at the window, fully dressed, hand on his sword, and to his credit his expression didn't change much. Just a slight adjustment around the eyes.
"You're, uh." He checked a paper in his hand. "You're the one they found in the road outside Kelvar. The border town."
Ren looked at him.
"Okay." The young man folded the paper. "So you don't speak Common. That's fine, we have a translator, she'll be up in about ten minutes." He held up both hands, the universal gesture for I am not a threat, which Ren assessed and filed as probably true. "I'm Davan. Adventurer's Guild. You know the guild?"
He didn't.
Davan seemed to realize this from the quality of Ren's silence. "Right. Okay." He rubbed the back of his neck. "So this is going to be a longer conversation than I thought."
The translator's name was Mira, and she arrived in eight minutes, not ten, which Ren noted as a small data point in her favor. She was middle-aged, practical-looking, with the kind of face that had stopped being surprised by things a long time ago. She sat across from Ren at the table. He had not sat down. She looked at this, decided it wasn't her problem, and opened a small book.
"I'm going to ask you some questions," she said, and Ren understood her, which was the first truly strange thing that had happened since waking up. Not Japanese. Not any language he knew. But he understood it perfectly.
He filed this under: deal with later.
"Name," she said.
"Kurogane Ren."
She wrote it down. "Where are you from?"
"Japan."
She looked up. "I don't know that place."
"I know."
She studied him for a moment, then wrote something down. "Age?"
"Thirty-one."
"Class?"
He didn't answer. Not because he was being difficult. He genuinely didn't know what the question was asking.
Davan, hovering near the door, leaned forward. "Like, are you a fighter? A mage? A ranger? What's your, you know." He made a vague gesture. "Your thing."
Ren looked at him.
"I use a sword," he said.
Davan blinked. "Yeah but what's your class."
"I use a sword."
A silence settled over the room. Mira wrote something in her book. Davan opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. "Okay. So. You haven't registered with any guild, you're from a place that doesn't appear on any map we have, you were found unconscious in the middle of the road outside Kelvar during an active dungeon evacuation." He counted these on his fingers. "And you've apparently never heard of the classification system."
"Correct," Ren said.
"How is that possible."
Ren didn't answer that one.
Mira flipped a page in her book. "We'll need you to complete a registration form. Guild ID, class designation, stat assessment, emergency contact if applicable."
"No."
She looked up. "No to which part?"
"All of it."
Another silence. Davan made a face that suggested this was not how intake forms usually went. "I mean, you kind of need the registration to operate legally in Valdris. You can't just clear dungeons without it."
Ren picked up his katana from the table where he'd set it, slid it into his belt, and moved toward the door. Davan took one step sideways before stopping himself, because something in the way Ren moved suggested that stepping sideways was a smart choice.
"The dungeon," Ren said. "The one in Kelvar."
Davan straightened. "What about it?"
"Is it cleared."
A beat. "No. The evacuation was still in progress when they brought you in. The team is staging for entry tomorrow morning, they need to wait for two more members, the grade is D-class but it's in the middle of the market square so there are civilians still in the radius, there are protocols, you can't just."
Ren was already in the hallway.
"Hey," Davan said, following. "Hey, you can't just walk out. You haven't completed the intake form."
Ren found the stairs by logic, two turns, and went down.
"There's a form," Davan said, from the top of the stairs. "It's a standard form. It has fields. The fields need to be filled in."
The front door opened and closed.
Davan stood at the top of the stairs holding his clipboard.
Behind him, Mira was still at the table. She finished her sentence in the notes book, capped her pen, and said without looking up: "Write 'unregistered' in the class field. I've seen his type before. He'll fill it in eventually."
She sounded like she didn't believe that.