Chapter 192: The Abyss Watchers
The objective was still on the wall.
Unite the Guilds of Mythal. Progress: 0%.
Everyone was looking at it.
Elden broke the silence. "Before we start convincing other guilds of anything, we need to build ours first."
Everyone nodded.
He drew a circle on the page in front of him. Inside it he wrote a number. 120.
Kai looked at it. "Why 120?"
Elden set his pen down. "Large enough to cover the city properly. Small enough that every member can actually know every other member." He looked at the number. "Once an organization gets past a certain size, the people at the top stop knowing the people at the bottom. Standards slip because nobody is watching closely enough. 120 keeps it manageable."
Kai tilted his head. "Enough for the whole city?"
Elden nodded. "Not every district needs twenty hunters."
He sketched a rough map of Mythal.
"The residential districts need visibility."
His pen moved.
"The guild district needs investigators."
Another mark.
"The gate districts need rapid response teams."
Another.
"The commercial district needs patrols."
He looked around the table.
"One hundred and twenty lets us rotate shifts, cover emergencies, investigate incidents, and still leave enough hunters available for dungeon assignments."
Lily looked over the calculations. "...That actually works."
...
Lily opened to a new page. "A small organization is easier to monitor." She started writing and talking at the same time. "Background checks on every applicant. Psychological evaluation before acceptance. Regular performance reviews. Incident reports that go to a central record. Scheduled inspections of each member’s conduct."
She looked up. "If one member abuses their authority, we need to know within days, not months."
"And if someone targets one of our members," Sera said, "we need to know that just as fast."
Lily wrote that down too.
Raze leaned forward. "Equipment." Everyone looked at him. "One hundred and twenty hunters. That’s a number we can actually work with. We can properly equip all of them. Not city-average gear. Good gear. Train them consistently. Make sure nobody falls behind while we’re focused on something else."
He looked at Kai. "I’m good at judging people. I’ll help with selection."
"I’d appreciate that," Kai said.
Elden was writing again. "Training structure. Not just combat. That’s the easy part." He looked at Lily. "Can you help design the curriculum?"
"Already started," she said.
She turned the notebook to show the beginning of a list. Investigation procedures. Negotiation. Relevant law and city regulations. Emergency response. Dungeon dispute protocols. Conflict mediation. Civilian interaction standards.
Mira smiled. "People trust professionals. If every member of this organization looks and acts like they know exactly what they’re doing, guilds will take them seriously before they’ve even done anything."
"The reputation has to be built from the first interaction," Sera said. "Not the tenth."
"Yes," Mira agreed.
...
Mira folded her hands on the table. "Recruitment isn’t going to be the hard part."
Everyone looked at her.
"Convincing guilds to let their best hunters leave and join this instead," she said. "That’s the hard part."
Everyone laughed.
"I’ll handle the negotiations," she said. "Titan Forge already trusts me. The other guild leaders know who I am. I can open those conversations in a way that doesn’t feel like a takeover."
She looked at Kai. "The pitch needs to be that this is good for every guild, not just Authority. If guild leaders think we’re pulling their best people to serve Kai’s interests, they’ll resist. If they think we’re building something that protects their interests too, they’ll cooperate."
"Is that true?" Raze said.
"Yes," Mira said. "A neutral organization that resolves conflicts protects every guild from the situation where a dispute becomes a war. Everyone benefits."
Raze nodded. "Good pitch."
...
Kai looked at Sera. "You and I handle the procedures."
She nodded.
"Not combat training," Kai said. "The things that happen after. Arrest protocol if it comes to that. Evidence handling. How to conduct a neutral investigation without taking sides. How to talk to civilians who aren’t hunters and aren’t used to dealing with people like us."
Sera said, "Basically how not to make things worse when you arrive."
Kai laughed. "Exactly."
Mira looked toward Kai. "Then there’s one more rule."
Everyone looked at her. "Abyss Watchers don’t belong to themselves." She paused. "The moment one of them starts thinking they’re above the city... they stop being an Abyss Watcher."
Silence.
Sera nodded first. "Agreed."
Lily wrote it down immediately.
Elden circled it.
Raze smiled. "That’s a good rule."
Mira continued. "The next thing is training is judgment," she said. "Not technique. Knowing when to step in and when to let something resolve on its own."
"That’s what the selection matters for," Kai said.
"Yes," Raze agreed from across the table. "You can teach procedure. You can’t teach instinct. That’s why we pick carefully at the start."
...
The room was quiet for a moment. Everyone had their piece. The framework was taking shape.
Then Sera blinked.
"Wait," she said.
Everyone looked at her.
"What’s it called?"
Silence.
Raze scratched his head. Elden looked up from his notebook. Lily slowly lowered her pen.
"We skipped that," Elden said.
"We really did," Lily confirmed.
Kai sat back and thought about it.
The name needed to mean something. Not something aggressive or hierarchical. Something that communicated what the organization actually was. Watchers. Something that observed, that stood between, that was present without being a combatant unless it had to be.
"Abyss Watchers," he said.
Silence.
Everyone considered it.
Raze nodded first. "I like it."
Mira smiled. "Simple. Clear."
Lily wrote it down at the top of her page.
Elden nodded. "Fitting."
Sera said, "Abyss Watchers." She said it the way she tested things, hearing it once before deciding. "Yes."
...
Kai looked around the table. "Do we recruit from our own guilds first?"
Mira said, "Absolutely."
Elden agreed. "Those hunters already trust us. We know their records, their character, how they operate under pressure."
Raze said, "And we already know who’s actually reliable versus who just has a good ranking."
Lily said, "Starting with people from each of our guilds also demonstrates that this isn’t favoritism toward any one organization. We’re all contributing."
Sera said, "It sets the tone from day one."
Kai looked around the table.
Every notebook was different.
Every plan was different.
Every person was trying to solve a different problem.
A few months ago...
They would all have gone in different directions but today they were building the same thing.
He smiled. "Let’s make sure nobody in Mythal ever has to fear hunters more than monsters."
Everyone nodded before standing.
Kai looked at the projected objective on the wall one more time. Unite the Guilds of Mythal. Progress: 0%.
"First we build the Abyss Watchers," he said. "After that we’ll worry about the rest."
He looked at everyone.
"Let’s start."
...
They left the building together.
At the entrance they split without ceremony, each one already moving toward the part of the city where their work was.
Mira turned toward Titan Forge. She walked with the particular pace she used when she had already decided what she was going to say and just needed to get to the person she was going to say it to.
Elden went a different direction, toward the district where his current guild operated, where he had relationships that predated Authority and that he would now use for something larger than guild business.
Lily went toward the Research Guild. She was reading her own notes while she walked, which was a habit Kai had observed across multiple dungeons and had accepted as simply how she moved through the world.
Raze was already on his phone, talking to someone, the specific tone of someone who was issuing a request they expected to be fulfilled quickly.
Sera walked beside Kai for a moment before their paths would diverge.
"Strange," she said.
"What is," he said.
She looked at the street ahead. "Every other time we’ve split up leaving a building, it was to go into different gates."
Kai looked at the street. At the people in it, going about the ordinary work of a morning in a city that did not yet know what was being built in its name.
"Same idea," he said.
She looked at him.
"Find what’s wrong," he said. "Figure out how to fix it. Do the work."
She smiled. "The dungeon is bigger."
"The dungeon is bigger," he agreed.
She turned toward her destination.
He turned toward his.
The city was the same city it had been yesterday. Same streets, same buildings, same people.
The work had changed.