Chapter 67: What C-Grade Cannot Buy
Chapter 67: What C-Grade Cannot Buy
It took me a day and a half to understand what I was actually looking at, and the badge was the answer to all of it.
Everyone wore one. Not just guards — everyone who’d awakened a class, on the left shoulder, colour-coded and impossible to miss. Grey for unranked and D. Blue-grey for C. A deeper blue for B, which I saw maybe one time in thirty. Red for A, which I saw four times in two days, and each of those four times a small quiet space opened around the person wearing it.
And ordinary people — the ones who’d never awakened anything, who were most of the city — wore nothing at all.
The system was not announced anywhere and nobody had to explain it, which is how you know a thing has become normal.
I watched it work at the market. A grey-badged man and I asked the same trader for the same forty rounds within about ninety seconds of each other. He was quoted eleven cores. I was quoted eight, and the trader threw in a cleaning rag, and called me sir twice.
I watched it work at the lodging office, where a C-grade could take a room in the second district with a lock and a window and hot water three days a week, and where the same clerk explained to a woman with no badge that the outer district had a bunkhouse.
I watched it work outside the medical building, where the queue had two lines, and the shorter one wasn’t shorter because those people were sicker.
I want to be fair about it, because my instinct after Eastbridge was to see a boot on a neck, and this wasn’t that. Nobody was in debt. Nobody’s food was conditional. The grey-badged man got his forty rounds; he just paid more for them. And when I asked around, the logic came back the same from four different people: the awakened take the contracts, clear the territories, and hold the wall when something comes down the valley, and the city pays them in preference because preference is cheaper than wages.
It’s a normalised, functioning, entirely legible arrangement, and everyone in Greyhaven has agreed to it, and standing in the middle of it with a badge I hadn’t earned I found it deeply unsettling in a way I couldn’t have justified out loud.
Eastbridge put a number on my wrist. This place put one on my shoulder and everyone treats me better for it.
I’m not certain which of those I trust less.
I found the archive on the second afternoon.
It was a real building — three storeys of stone off the main square, with a portico and a proper door and a sign that said GREYHAVEN RECORD and, underneath, in smaller letters, Class · Skill · Territory · Bestiary.
I went in with my heart going.
The ground floor was open and busy and better than anything I’d hoped for: long tables, oil lamps, and shelf after shelf of bound folders. Bestiary on the east wall. Territory reports and route conditions on the west. And, running down the centre, the general class registry — everything Greyhaven knew about what classes existed, sorted by grade band, in a hundred and forty hand-copied volumes.
I spent four hours in the D and C sections and learned a great deal about a world I’d been living in blind. Summoner-type classes exist and are not especially rare. Beast Callers, mostly, and two entries on people who bind spirits, and one Level 22 woman in a settlement south of here who can call a single specific construct and has been doing it for a year.
Nothing about dimensions. Nothing about permanence. Nothing about contracts.
I went to the desk at the back and asked the question the way I’d rehearsed it, which was carefully.
"I’m looking for the rare-class records," I said. "Specifically anything on summoner variants, and anything on how classes evolve — how somebody goes from a temporary ability to a permanent one."
The clerk was maybe fifty and entirely unbothered.
"Second floor," she said. "That’s the awakened archive. Everything the general registry can’t take — rare classes, evolutions, verified skill trees, the whole grade-boundary material." She didn’t look up. "You’ll want to speak to Master Oren, he does the summoner-adjacent stuff. Tuesdays and Thursdays."
Something in my chest actually lifted.
"Where do I—"
"Badge?"
I put my shoulder forward.
She looked at it for the first time.
"Ah," she said. "No. Sorry. Second floor’s B and above."
"...Right."
"It’s not personal, it’s the charter. General registry is C and up, awakened archive is B and up." She turned a page. "The material up there’s expensive. Half of it’s the only copy that exists and the other half is what people died finding out, and the board’s position is that if you’re not carrying a B you’ve not got the standing to be trusted with it." A small shrug. "You can apply for supervised access if a B-grade sponsors you in writing. Or you can re-test when your grade moves."
"How does a grade move?"
"Assessment. There’s a schedule on the wall." She finally looked up, and not unkindly. "It won’t help you. Grade’s not level, it’s your class grade, and that’s fixed at awakening for most people. If you came up C you’ll die C, unless yours is one of the ones that evolves, and if it evolves you’d know."
I said thank you. I meant it, actually — she’d told me the truth in about forty seconds, which is more than most people manage in a week.
Then I stood on the steps outside a building I could see into and not enter, and did the arithmetic.
I had come four days north-east on a promise. Somewhere on the second floor of that stone building was the only body of collected knowledge I’d ever heard of about rare classes and how they change — the exact shelf that might contain a line about permanent contracts, or about what an EX-grade Dimensional Summoner becomes when it stops being temporary. Master Oren, who apparently studies summoner-adjacent classes, was on that floor twice a week.
And the badge on my shoulder was the reason I was standing on the steps at all.
The lie had worked flawlessly. It had got me through a checkpoint that would have flagged the truth in one sentence. It had earned me a discount, a room with a lock, respect from armed men, and the assumption that I was an ordinary competent professional not worth investigating.
It had also told this city, in writing, exactly how far up the building I was allowed to go.
I could fix this in about four seconds.
I could. That’s the maddening part. Walk back to that desk, open my status, and share the interface the way a woman in white robes taught me — and the clerk would see EX where the grade goes, and there is not a charter in the world with a rule for that. They’d take me upstairs. They’d take me anywhere I wanted.
And then eleven thousand people would know that the man with the concealment skill can pull living beings out of other worlds, and I would never again be somebody nobody looks at twice.
No.
So the door is B, and I’m C, and my grade doesn’t move.
I sat down on the archive steps in the late sun with my hands between my knees and started thinking about the other two words the clerk had said.
Supervised access. Sponsor.
Somewhere in Greyhaven there were people with deep blue badges, and one of them, eventually, was going to want something a very patient man with a rifle could get for them.