Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 16 – Registration

It's been a while since I posted chapters of this, but I was a busy boy this weekend. So, you get multiple chapters of this today. Enjoy! ~Eric

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“Wait,” said James as Sig led him away from the practice area. “Aren’t we going to practice those spells?”

Sig snorted and said, “Not anywhere where you might injure someone or, worse, infuriate someone a lot stronger than you. There’s a place outside the city where we can do that later. First things first, though, you need to register.”

“Register what?” asked James, who couldn’t quite shake the idea of car registrations.

“Not what. Who. The who being you. At the Adventurer’s Guild. We can’t take you with us to hunt monsters or enter a dungeon until you do.”

James felt like he should have known that was coming. There was always an Adventurer’s Guild or some thinly disguised carbon copy in those isekai manga and anime series that Maggie kept trying to get him to love. He just hadn’t heard anyone talk about it directly. That meant he handn’t connected the only somewhat subtler clues, like people talking about their parties or their ranks, with the existence of an actual organization. James felt that the sheer volume of weirdness he’d been forced to endure recently ought to entitle him to a pass for missing that one. Even so, he’d have to be a little more conscious about those kinds of oblique references in the future. Otherwise, some more important thing might escape his notice and then literally bite off his head someday.

Sig talking about him registering at the Adventurer’s Guild almost forced his attention to the blue glow in the corner of his eyes. He knew for a fact that there were a staggering number of notifications waiting for him there. There was that status window that he’d also been ignoring on both general and mental health principles. All of his excuses for not looking at it were starting to feel like excuses, even to him. Yet, every time he thought about just ripping off the bandage and looking, his stomach knotted up and his heart started to race. He’d started wondering if that’s what a panic attack felt like.

That box and those notification had taken on a symbolic power to him. Once he opened them, he was committing himself to this new life. Knowing that there wasn’t a way to go back home should have made the decision easier for him. There wasn’t a choice to be made. Not a real one. This life in a strange, magical world filled with monsters and demons and a million other things he didn’t understand would be his only life. Part of him even understood that delaying that acceptance wasn’t healthy. I might even prove dangerous for him.

The rest of him, which was still filled with rage at what had been done to him and Maggie, wanted none of it. It was like those two parts of him kept going to war with each other every time he tried to make himself look at those notifications or examine that status screen. Up until that moment, it had all felt like something he could keep pushing off. Now that he was being led directly to the Adventurer’s Guild, he wasn’t sure he could keep putting it off. What if they asked him questions that he could only answer with information from that damn status box? Surely, they’d want to know what his class was. What was he supposed to say? He hadn’t looked.

“Are you feeling well?” asked Chrosan. “You’re kind of pale.”

The fact that he’d completely missed the fact that Chrosan had tagged along told him just how distracted he’d become. Finding his throat dry, James swallowed hard a couple of times.

“I’m fine. Just thinking,” he croaked.

“About what?”

Chrosan was staring at him with big, puppy dog concern in his eyes. James considered just telling the guy what was bothering him but swiftly rejected that impulse. It would mean getting into things that he didn’t want to ever discuss with Chrosan again. Things like how much he’d like to go back to the palace and scream obscenities at the king and princess. Well, maybe not the princess. She really did remind him too much of his little sister to let him glean any enjoyment from being mean to her. That would just open the door to another naïve lecture about heroes and duty. James was pretty sure he’d rather perform a root canal on himself than deal with that again.

“Nothing worth talking about,” muttered James as he stared at the ground.

“We’re here,” said Sig.

That made James snap his head up in shock. So fast? How long were we walking? It hadn’t felt that long to him, but a search of his recent memories came up almost completely blank. He had a blurry impression of passing buildings and not much else. Those knots in his stomach made themselves known again. As they walked up the steps, he could feel his heart thundering in his chest. I don’t think I can do this, he thought frantically. But, when he tried to say that, his mouth didn’t move. He felt locked inside of himself. It was as if he was being carried along in Sig’s wake by some kind of terrible, zombie autopilot. The next thing he knew, he was staring across a counter at a cheerful brunette girl with bright blue eyes. Sig was explaining things to her.

“We need to get this guy registered. He’ll be joining our party.”

“That’s fine,” she said before turning a professional smile toward him. “Name?”

“James C.—” he managed before the panic choked off the last word.

“Very good,” she said as she wrote on a sheet of paper.

Next, she held out a dull black sphere of what looked like it might be obsidian.

“Take this please,” she commanded.

James reached out and grabbed it almost on reflex. Then, he almost dropped the black stone when it started to take on a dull shine. That went on for about thirty seconds as the glow grew brighter and the sphere of strange rock grew uncomfortably warm in his hand. Then, as abruptly as it started, it ended. The shine vanished and the heat dissipated faster than nature would have allowed back where he’d come from. He was still staring at the rock when slender fingers plucked it from his grasp. He looked up to find the brunette staring down at the black rock with an odd expression on her face. She peered hard at the rock, and then at him, and then back at the rock. Finally, she shook her head.

“Well, I guess I have everything we need.”

“What’s with that look?” asked Sig.

“Idle curiosity,” said the brunette. “Where exactly did you find this guy?”

“The Verdant Field. Why?”

“It’s just… I’ve just never seen results quite like this before.”

“How so?” asked Sig, leaning in with curiosity burning in his eyes. “I thought the results were standard.”

“Yeah,” said the brunette. “So did I. If I didn’t know it was flat-out impossible to tamper with the identification spheres, I’d have thought you were playing a joke on me. I mean, seriously, who has a class of Vaguely Heroic with a modifier of Obstinately Reluctant?”

All of James’s panic evaporated as indignation swelled inside of him. He recalled the increasingly snarky tone of the few notifications he’d actually read. Was some god or system straight-up mocking him? James jerked a little when he noticed that the brunette, Sig, and Chrosan were all staring at him with baffled looks.

“What?” he demanded. “I didn’t tell it to say that. Take it up with the shiny rock.”

The other three traded looks before Sig said, “Well, he has a point. It’s not like he decided what the class was called.”

“True,” said the brunette sounding like she didn’t quite believe it, “but you’re not the one who has to put it on the form.”

“Aside from that, how are his numbers?”

“High,” she said. “Suspiciously high for someone who isn’t already an adventurer. His strength and dexterity are both in the low sixties. Almost C rank. Everything else is in the mid to high fifties.”

The drew more looks. This time, he knew what they were about. Chrosan had told him that improving everything in a balanced way wasn’t done. It was supposed to be too hard to maintain. Not that he could explain that he hadn’t done anything. Those numbers had just happened through some whim of the cosmos or whoever was in charge of assigning benefits to magical abductees. Instead, he shrugged and said nothing. No word were going to make things better. All he wanted was to wrap up this awfulness, collect whatever it was they handed out to mark people as adventurers, and leave.

“In a sign that there is some tiny measure of justice in the world, his mana is barely in the double digits,” said the brunette.

“That doesn’t mean anything. He only activated it today,” provided Chrosan helpfully.

Sig and James both shot him murderous glares. The brunette stared at James for an uncomfortably long time before she spoke again.

“Where in all the gods’ names did you come from that you have numbers like these but never activated your mana? It’s like having someone teach you to cook but never introducing you to forks.”

“My upbringing was unique,” said James, desperate to move them off yet another topic he couldn’t or at least had no desire to discuss with anyone.

“It must have been,” she agreed.

James wasn’t sure if they’d just crossed some strangeness threshold with the woman or if she had more work to do, but she focused on the form. She shook her head repeatedly as she wrote, but soon vanished through a door. He resisted the urge to count the seconds. She returned in what he objectively knew was a few minutes, even if the subjective experience was the length of several human lifetimes. She slid what looked like a bronze pendant across the counter to him. It had only two things engraved on it. The first and most visible engraving was the letter F.

In much smaller letters, he found the mangling of his name. James followed by the letters S, E, and A. James Sea. He thought it made him sound like some kind of nautical villain from a really bad comic book. He almost complained about it and then decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle. New world, new name, he told himself. However, he knew that for the lie it was. He might decide to go by that name in this world, but it would never be his name. He would always be James Curtis Logan. The name his parent had given him. He almost got lost in his own thoughts again, but the brunette started talking to him again.

“Since you’ve never been an adventurer, supposedly,” she said giving him a suspicious look, “you’re in a weird position. Your numbers all say you should be D rank, but I can’t make you a D rank. You have to be an F rank until you do enough quests to advance to E, and then do it all over again until you get to D. Usually there are also requirements for your stats, but that’s not going to be a problem for you. I’d normally be the one to give you a very long lecture about how not to get yourself eaten on your first quest, but you’d almost have to open your own wrists to die on a F rank quest. You’ve also got experienced adventurers to train you up on how to do things right. So, here’s my pep talk. Good luck. Don’t die from doing something monumentally stupid.”

James found that he suddenly had a lot of thoughts he’d like to share with this woman about things like customer service, but he refrained. He was far more interested in leaving and taking a very long nap than he was in chewing out someone who could probably make his life hard later. Instead, he picked up the pendant and nodded to the woman.

“Thanks,” he said in a tired voice. “I’ll do my best.”

James wasn’t sure if some of his existential weariness shone through or maybe the woman felt like she’d been too hard on him, but she softened a little then.

“Listen to your party members. They’ve all survived long enough to know what the hell they’re doing. They won’t steer you wrong.”