Chapter 65: A Message From The Cross Foundation?
David stayed on the floor a little longer than he meant to.
The ceiling had nothing interesting on it. He stared at it anyway.
’So...What’s the move?’
Silence.
’The dungeon is in seven days. I need to be sharper than I am right now. I need reps, I need consistency, and I need —’
He stopped for a moment, then came back to the thought he’d been circling.
’I need to know how this disciple thing actually works in a real situation. Not in theory, not based on what the system told me — I need to see it with my own eyes before I walk into something I can’t walk back out of.’
He stared at the ceiling.
’So. Test case. Someone I can actually bring into a dungeon and not watch die in the first thirty seconds.’
Mrs. Walbury.
He turned it over.
F-rank hunter. Which wasn’t much, objectively — F-rank was the floor, the bottom of the board, the rank that people used to describe someone who’d cleared the bare minimum to call themselves a hunter at all.
But she’d cleared it. She’d gone through the process, she’d been in a real dungeon, she knew what it felt like when the air changed and something was coming and your body had to decide in half a second whether it was going to move or freeze.
Holly hadn’t done that. Holly was a trainer. Good at what she did — David wasn’t dismissing that — but there was a difference between knowing how to build a fighter and having been one.
’If I’m testing this,’ he thought, ’if someone’s going in with me for the first time as my disciple, I want the one who’s already got field experience. I want the one who’s not going to see her first monster and lose it.’
He exhaled slowly.
’And she’s at sixty-three. She’s closer. She makes more sense on every level.’
He nodded to himself, once, the way you do when you’ve finished an argument you were having with yourself and one side finally won cleanly.
’Alright. Mrs. Walbury. Stop treating the sessions like they’re just sessions and actually work towards something with her.’
Then, after a second: ’The third criteria will handle itself.’
He said that last part with the energy of a man who was done thinking about it and had filed it under future David’s problem.
He pushed himself off the floor.
Grabbed the coffee table — which he had shifted— and dragged it back into position. Turned to the couch, walked it back from where training had pushed it, and dropped onto it with his full weight.
The cushions caught him.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then, he lifted his arm in habit and sniffed.
Pulled back.
"Ugh."
He needed a shower. He was not going to survive his own company for much longer without one. Five minutes on this couch — four, realistically — and then he was going to be a functioning adult about it.
He reached for the remote. Found it without looking. Clicked the TV on.
News channel. Lower district feed, the one that defaulted when he hadn’t changed it.
He wasn’t really watching. He was staring at the general direction of the screen, still half inside his own head, when a line of the broadcast cut through.
"— confirmed reports of a near-complete clearance of dungeon gates across the lower district, in a timeframe that has no recent precedent —"
He looked up properly.
The anchor was a woman in a dark blazer, composed, reading off her desk with the practiced steadiness. Behind her, the screen had cut to lower district footage — streets he recognised, collapsed gate perimeters, and the chants of what seemed to be, happy citizens. That was truly a first.
"What began as what many assumed were isolated incidents has now been confirmed as part of a coordinated operation running simultaneously across multiple zones. For the first time in years — some residents say the first time they can remember — the lower district is waking up to streets that are genuinely, substantively clear."
David leaned forward slightly.
*"And the organisation behind it is one that, until recently, kept a remarkably low profile in this area. The Cross Foundation. Led by Elias Cross."*
David went quiet.
He thought about Elias. The man the hunters had praised at the gate which appeared near his place.
He hadn’t just cleared one.
He’d been running the whole board. The entire lower district, simultaneously.
’Huh,’ David thought.
He meant it. He was actually, genuinely impressed.
"And for so many residents of the lower district," the anchor continued, her voice carrying the particular warmth of someone who’d grown up hearing bad news about these same streets, "it truly does feel like answered prayers."
She let that sit for exactly one beat. Professional. Then she glanced down at her desk.
"I do have one further item to address — and I want to be transparent with our viewers that what I’m about to read was submitted directly to us by the Cross Foundation, with a request that it be read in full and without editorial interruption."
She picked up a single printed page. Straightened it once against the desk. Set her shoulders and then she read.
"The Cross Foundation is tired."
"We are tired of watching the lower district treated as a place to be managed rather than a place worth investing in. Tired of watching talented hunters — men and women with real ability, real futures — drain out of these streets one by one because there is nothing here to stay for. Because the contracts aren’t here. Because the pay isn’t here. Because every guild with the resources to change that looked at the lower district and decided it wasn’t worth their time."
"That ends now."
"The Cross Foundation is one of the largest independent guilds operating in this country. We have the infrastructure. We have the contracts. We have the standard. And we have decided that standard belongs here."
"To that end, we are announcing an open hunter examination — open to any aspiring hunter residing in or connected to the lower district. No guild affiliation required. No letters of recommendation. No entrance fee. No family name. Nothing but you and what you are capable of."
"We are not interested in where you came from. We are interested in what you can become. If you have the ability — if you have the will to develop it — we want to find you. We are coming to find you."
"Preparation resources will be made available through Cross Foundation offices immediately. The examination will commence in sixty days."
"Get ready. Because we are about to find out exactly who the best really are."
The anchor lowered the page.
She looked back at the camera, and for just a moment — half a second, barely visible — something moved across her face that wasn’t professional neutrality. Something that looked a lot like hope.
"Registration opens tomorrow morning. The examination date is set at sixty days from —"
Her voice dropped away.
Not because she stopped talking. She was still talking. David could see her mouth moving, could see the broadcast continuing, the Cross Foundation logo sitting in the corner of the frame.
He just couldn’t hear any of it anymore.
He was leaning forward on the couch, forearms on his knees, hands loosely linked, staring at a point somewhere in the middle of the screen.
’Free entry,’ he thought.
No recommendations. No family name opening doors before you even walked through them. No rich guild sponsor vouching for you from the upper district while the kids from down here got sorted into the reject pile before the exam even started.
Just the examination. Just whoever showed up and what they actually had.
For the first time since gates started appearing in this city, that was actually true. For the first time, the playing field was starting from the same line for the lower district.
’This is it,’ he thought.
Not loud. Not dramatic. It landed quietly, the way the real things always did — not like a revelation, like a recognition.
He sat back slowly. Let his head rest against the couch. Stared at the ceiling.
’Dungeon in seven days,’ he thought. ’Exam in sixty.’
He breathed out slow through his nose.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t just have problems.
He had a direction.