Chapter 200: The First Mission
East District: Morning.
Two guild groups had been arguing long enough that the surrounding street had reorganized itself around it. Merchants who’d been setting up their stalls had stopped. Some retreated into their doorways. A loose ring of watchers formed at a distance that showed interest without commitment.
One woman near the edge of the crowd said to the person beside her, "Shouldn’t the Hunter Association have sent someone by now?"
The other shrugged. "Probably."
Then footsteps.
Everyone turned.
Raze walked into the district. Behind him were eight hunters in matching uniforms nobody in the crowd had seen before.
The crowd looked at the eight. Then at Raze. Then back at the eight.
"Who’s that?"
"I recognize the one in front."
"That’s Raze."
"But who are the others?"
A young hunter near the front frowned. "Wait... didn’t the Mayor say Commander Kai created a new organization?"
Another hunter shrugged. "Something about keeping hunters in line?"
An older merchant scratched his beard. "No... I think they’re called—" He stopped. "...I can’t remember."
Nobody could. The organization was too new. The name hadn’t reached most of the city yet.
The two guild groups hadn’t stopped arguing, but both sides had registered the new arrivals. These two guilds were the Skyburners and Nightwings.
...
The whispers ran through the crowd quickly.
One merchant said to the shop owner beside him, "Didn’t the Mayor’s office announce something last week? A new organization?"
The shop owner thought about it. "Something like that. I didn’t read the whole thing."
A hunter near the front of the crowd looked at the eight unfamiliar faces. "They look young."
"Probably assistants," someone said.
A woman further back said quietly, "No."
People looked at her.
She was watching Raze. "He’s walking behind them."
The crowd looked again.
Raze had stopped at the edge of the scene. The eight were moving forward. He hadn’t moved to take charge. He was watching.
Nobody in the crowd fully understood this yet. But they noticed it.
One Skyburner Hunter frowned quietly. "...Raze isn’t giving orders." His companion looked again. "He’s supervising them."
"...He’s trusting them," the other said, blinking.
The thought surprised both of them. They’d never seen Raze willingly step back before.
...
Raze looked at the recruits.
"You know what to do," he said.
The lead Attendant walked forward into the space between the two guild groups.
The Soldiers from the group had already started moving before the lead Attendant said anything, creating space along the sides, gently redirecting bystanders who’d drifted too close.
One of the Nightwing members looked at the Attendant approaching him. "Do you need something?" he said.
The lead Attendant didn’t respond to that. "Nightwings," he said, looking at the group on his left. "You first. Tell me what happened."
The Nightwing member who’d made the comment looked briefly startled. This wasn’t the reaction he’d prepared for.
"What are you—"
"We were sent by Mayor Ko and Kai," the lead Attendant said. "You either deal with us or Raze."
The Nightwing member glanced over to see Raze smirking, and gulped. "Of course."
He started explaining.
The lead Attendant listened.
The guild member eventually stopped talking.
The Attendant waited.
Three more seconds passed.
The guild member frowned. "...That’s it."
The Attendant nodded. "People usually remember one more detail if you don’t rush them."
Then he turned to the other guild group. "Skyburner. Same question."
...
The crowd had been expecting a confrontation. Either the new arrivals would side with one guild, or they’d try to impose authority through volume or shown strength, or they’d fail to contain it and someone would escalate.
None of that happened.
The recruits were asking questions. Two had moved to separate witnesses from the main groups and were conducting those conversations off to the side. One was writing everything down, methodical, like documentation wasn’t optional.
An older store owner near the back said, "They’re investigating."
Someone beside him said, "As if they were the police."
A woman next to them watched one of the Attendants check a document a guild member had produced. "But better," she said.
Another person quietly said, "They’re treating everyone the same."
Nobody argued.
Neither guild had been favored.
Nobody had been threatened.
Nobody had even raised their voice.
The crowd had quieted down.
...
One of the guild hunters, the loudest one before the Abyss Watchers arrived, turned toward Raze.
"Say something," he said. "You’re Raze. Tell them to back off."
Raze didn’t move from where he stood.
"They’re handling it," he said.
The hunter stared at him.
"If I solve it for them," Raze said, "they’ll never learn."
The hunter had nothing to say to that. He looked at the eight recruits working through the scene, then back at Raze.
Raze looked at him with the calm of someone who’d already decided what he was doing today, and it wasn’t this.
The hunter looked away first.
The nearby crowd had heard all of this. Several people exchanged glances.
...
The resolution took twelve minutes.
The lead Attendant gathered what the two Attendants working the witness interviews had found, combined it with the account from the Skyburner and Nightwing members, and looked over the documentation one had produced.
A gate access record and he compared it.
He read both.
"When was this updated?" he asked, pointing at a date on the first document.
The Nightwing member checked. "Three days ago."
"This one’s from five days ago," the lead Attendant said, showing the second document. "Before the update. The system changed the access assignment on the forty-eighth-hour cycle. Neither of you received the updated notification."
Silence.
"The original gate access was correctly assigned to Skyburner," the lead Attendant said. "The update moved it to Nightwing based on the new rotation system. Both records are accurate. They just represent different points in time."
Both guild leaders were quiet.
One said slowly, "So we’ve been arguing for an hour over a notification nobody received."
"It appears so," the lead Attendant said.
Another pause.
Then the leader of Nightwing looked at the leader of Skyburner.
The leader of Skybuner looked back.
Both of them, almost at the same time, wore the exact expression of people who’d just realized they’d been very serious about something very small.
One started to say something.
Then both laughed.
The crowd around them laughed too. The tension that had sat on the street all morning released into the laughter, and the street settled back to something close to normal.
...
The Abyss Watchers started moving out.
The crowd behind them immediately started talking.
A merchant said, "So that’s the new organization."
Another said, "They’re different."
A hunter near the back said, "They didn’t draw weapons."
An older woman said, "They solved it faster than a fight would have. And nobody got hurt."
A child tugged his father’s sleeve. "Who were they? The ones in the uniforms?"
His father watched the last of them disappear around the corner at the end of the street.
"The Abyss Watchers," he said.
The name went through the crowd.
Someone further down the street repeated it as the group passed. Two shops along, a merchant who’d watched from her doorway said it to someone who’d stopped to ask what happened.
By the time Raze and the eight recruits reached the far end of the East District and turned onto the main road, people who hadn’t been there to see any of it were already hearing the name.
Abyss Watchers.
Said by people who’d watched the process and found it different from what they were used to.
Not because it was impressive the way strength is impressive. Because it had been quiet and it had worked.
That afternoon...
The story spread beyond the East District.
By evening Hunters in the South District were already asking,
"Have you heard about the Abyss Watchers?"
And before the sun set the organization Kai had imagined had finally become something the city recognized.