Chapter 104 — The Cost

Chapter 104: Chapter 104 — The Cost

The celebration, muted as it was by exhaustion and injury, didn’t last long before Priya’s urgent voice cut through it.

"Garrick’s not right," she said, moving toward him with quick, professional concern. "Sit down. Now."

Arlen, still catching his breath near the clearing’s edge, turned to see the Guild Master swaying slightly where he stood, one hand pressed against his side, his weathered face gone considerably paler than it had been even moments earlier.

"I’m fine," Garrick said, though the strain in his voice undercut the claim.

"You’re bleeding internally, unless I’m badly mistaken," Priya said, already guiding him toward a relatively clear section of ground. "That last exchange cost you more than you’re letting on."

Garrick allowed himself to be seated, which told Arlen more about the severity of the situation than the Guild Master’s own careful deflection managed to hide.

"An old injury," Garrick admitted, once Priya’s hands began glowing with restorative magic against his side. "Took a wound decades back, fighting something considerably above my station at the time. Never fully healed properly — the kind of damage that settles into a person permanently, regardless of how well the surface wound closes."

"And using your full strength reopens it," Maren said, her own exhaustion evident but her attention fully on Garrick now, having recovered enough from the purification to properly assess the situation.

"Something like that," Garrick admitted. "A-rank output demands considerable strain on the body, even without old damage complicating matters. I don’t call on it often, for exactly this reason."

Arlen absorbed that with a quiet, sobering weight, understanding for the first time exactly what the earlier display had actually cost the man who’d delivered it so effortlessly in the moment.

"How serious is it?" Ilyana asked, kneeling beside Priya to better assess the situation herself.

"Manageable, with proper rest and continued treatment," Priya said, though her tone carried genuine caution. "But he needs that rest. Pushing further without it would be genuinely dangerous."

"Understood," Garrick said, some of his usual composed authority reasserting itself despite his evident discomfort. "I don’t intend to push further today, regardless of what remains ahead of us."

They made camp early, the exhausted party settling into a long, necessary period of rest and recovery, and Arlen found himself, once the immediate crisis of tending everyone’s wounds had settled, sitting near Halvard with the accumulated weight of everything he’d witnessed still settling properly into his understanding.

"I keep thinking about what he did," Arlen said. "I’ve never seen anything like that. Not even close."

"Few people have," Halvard said. "A-rank’s not just a number above B. It’s an entirely different category of what a person’s actually capable of."

"How does it actually work?" Arlen asked. "The ranks, I mean. I know Awakened is the beginning, and I’ve heard people mention things like Explorer or Veteran, but nobody’s ever properly explained the whole structure to me."

Halvard considered the question, clearly weighing how much he actually understood well enough to explain properly. "It’s not something I’ve studied deeply myself, honestly — more a warrior’s practical grasp than a scholar’s. But broadly, from what I understand: Awakened is simply the beginning, same as you already know. After that comes Novice, then Explorer, then Veteran, then Elite, and it keeps climbing from there — Master, Grandmaster, further still, though I couldn’t properly name every tier beyond that with confidence."

"And Garrick’s an A-rank guild classification. Does that map onto one of those tiers directly?"

"Loosely, from what I understand. Guild rank and personal power tier aren’t identical, but they tend to track together at the higher end — you don’t reach A-rank without genuine, substantial power behind it. I’d guess he sits somewhere in the Master or Grandmaster range, though I’ve never asked him directly, and I doubt he’d volunteer the specifics even if I did."

Arlen turned that over carefully, understanding, with quiet clarity, exactly how much further the true shape of strength in this world actually extended beyond anything he’d personally experienced. "I’m still just Awakened. Haven’t advanced at all, in whatever that proper structure actually measures."

"Most people haven’t, at your age, with your time in the guild," Halvard said, not unkindly. "Advancement past Awakened takes considerable, sustained effort — proper instruction, understanding of what the tiers actually demand, not just raw strength. Frontier branches like Greyhaven don’t always have the resources to teach that properly. Capital does."

Arlen filed the observation away alongside everything else he’d learned this day, the accumulated weight of Kess’s earlier comment and now Halvard’s more detailed explanation settling into a clearer, if still incomplete, understanding of exactly how much remained for him to properly discover.

He found Garrick later that evening, resting near his own small section of camp, Priya’s healing work having stabilized him considerably though his weathered face still carried the pale strain of the earlier exertion.

"Can I ask you something?" Arlen said, settling nearby.

"You usually do," Garrick said, a tired but genuine smile touching his expression.

"That old injury. What happened?"

Garrick was quiet a long moment, his gaze drifting toward the darkening treeline beyond the camp. "Years ago, before I ever became Guild Master here. I was younger, considerably more reckless than I’d admit to most people. Took on a threat above what I properly understood, the way ambitious young adventurers often do. Survived it, though barely, and the cost settled into me permanently. I’ve carried it since."

"Does it get worse? Using your full strength like that?"

"Some," Garrick admitted. "Manageable, most days. Today asked more of me than most days do." He studied Arlen a long moment, something quietly appraising in his tired expression. "Why the sudden curiosity?"

"I keep thinking about what I watched today," Arlen said honestly. "How much power actually exists in this world, beyond anything I’ve personally experienced. I don’t fully understand my own place in that scale yet. Feels important to at least understand the shape of it, even if I’ve got a long way to go before it means anything practical for me."

"That’s a wise instinct," Garrick said. "Understanding the scale of what’s actually out there, before you’ve reached it yourself, keeps a person properly humble. I’ve watched too many talented adventurers overestimate their own capability precisely because they never bothered learning what genuinely stood above them." He studied Arlen a moment longer. "You’ll learn the proper structure eventually, in more detail than I can offer secondhand. The capital branch teaches it thoroughly, once you’re there."

"I intend to go, eventually," Arlen said. "This expedition’s only strengthened that."

"Good," Garrick said, and something in his tired, weathered expression carried a weight Arlen wouldn’t fully understand the significance of until considerably later. "I’m glad, genuinely, that you’ll get to see it properly."

Arlen wrote briefly in his journal that evening, the day’s accumulated weight settling into careful, reflective words.

Garrick’s injured — an old wound, decades old, that his full strength reopens whenever he calls on it. I hadn’t understood, watching that fight, exactly what it actually cost him to save us all so decisively.

Learned more today about the proper power structure than I have in this entire past year combined. Awakened, Novice, Explorer, Veteran, Elite, and further still — a whole ladder of advancement I haven’t even begun climbing, despite everything I’ve built so far. Garrick himself sits somewhere in the Master or Grandmaster range, by Halvard’s estimate, though even that feels like an inadequate label for what I actually witnessed today.

I don’t know exactly what this means for my own path forward. I only know, more clearly than ever, that the world holds a scale of power I’ve barely begun to properly understand, and that reaching the capital, learning this structure properly, has become something considerably more urgent than simple curiosity now.

He closed the journal, the camp settling into its exhausted, recovering quiet around him, and found himself, despite everything the day had cost, genuinely grateful — for survival, for the people who’d fought alongside him, and for Garrick’s hard-won, quietly offered wisdom about exactly how much further this remarkable journey still had left to carry him.