Chapter 23 - 22 — Licensed
**POV: Jace**
---
It had been one day since the mine, and the room did not feel the way it used to.
Bria had her hands flat on the table and had not moved them once, and Idris was watching the door rather than any of us.
Nia sat very still, and Tomas, who had filled every silence at the armoury and every silence on the bus, was letting this one sit.
Nobody had said the thing that was actually in the room, which was that the ten of us had walked into that compound yesterday morning and the Bureau had spent the night deciding whether we were going to be a number in a report.
We were not the same people who had argued about weapons in an armoury.
The senior official came in with a bound report under one arm and five sealed cases stacked on top of it.
"I’ll give you the finding first," he said. "The Gate you entered underwent an abnormal rank increase after entry. It was correctly classified Green on two separate scans, and it became an Orange Gate while you were inside it."
He set the report down.
"The investigation found no negligence on the part of any registered member of your party. Nobody is being sanctioned for continuing deeper, and nobody is being sanctioned for departing from the assessment instructions, because the assessment stopped existing the moment the classification changed."
"And the response team?" Bria said.
"Entered at the twenty-two minute mark. By that point the boss was dead and the dungeon had already begun destabilising."
He looked along the table. "You cleared it before we could reach you. That is not a thing the Bureau plans for, because unlicensed rookies are not supposed to be in a position where it is required."
He started sliding the cases out, one to each of us.
"Your provisional cards were issued on the morning of the twentieth. These are the finalised licences, held pending the outcome of the investigation, with the clear recorded against them."
The case opened along a seam with a small click.
Inside, the card sat in moulded foam, and it was heavier than the provisional had been, with a darker face and the Bureau’s seal pressed into the corner so it caught the light when I tilted it.
> **[PLAYER LICENCE]**
>
> **Name:** Jace Nolan
> **Player Rank:** SSS
> **Class:** Mage
> **Registered Clears:** 1 (Orange)
Yesterday morning I had held the provisional version of this card in a room with nine other people who had all just found out what they were.
The first time I lived through this month, I never received one at all. I stood in a stadium and watched a sphere stay clear, and everything that came afterwards followed from that.
I turned the card over once and put it back in the foam.
"Compensation next," the official said. "Failed-assessment compensation is standard and identical for all five of you."
"Then there is payment for the recovered materials, which is not identical, and the clearance reward for an Orange Gate, calculated on the classification at the time of the clear rather than at entry."
"Not identical how?" Idris said.
"Under the standard formula it would not be identical. The Bureau records the Manticore’s killing blow to Jace Nolan, and the default split weights the material payment heavily toward the recorded kill."
He turned the tablet around so the table could see it.
"That is not what is happening here. Your party filed an equal-division agreement at the compound before the materials went to the lab. Five shares, five names, no disposal without unanimous consent."
He looked at me over the top of the screen.
"A filed agreement overrides the default formula. By my arithmetic you signed away a little under forty percent of your own payment when you said that, and you said it before anyone knew what the stone would appraise at."
"I remember."
"Then procedure obliges me to ask you once, on record, whether you wish to withdraw it before the transfers go out."
"No."
"Then it stands, and the five shares are equal."
Idris looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable and then looked back at the table.
"The clear itself is registered to all five named members regardless," the official went on. "The Bureau’s reconstruction shows the creature could not have been killed by any one of you."
"That is the finding," he added. "Not a courtesy."
Nia let out a breath that she had clearly been holding since the door opened.
"One thing you all need to hear clearly," the official said. "Clearing an Orange Gate does not grant you access to Orange Gates."
Tomas made a small noise. "That feels like a technicality."
"It is not. Your licences reflect the levels you actually hold, and the Bureau grades access on records and demonstrated capability rather than on one extraordinary afternoon. You build a clearing record through Gates appropriate to where you are, and access follows."
That did not bother me at all, and I think he expected it to.
Green Gates still hold monsters, and monsters still hold EXP, and every creature that kills me is three cards I do not currently have.
Walking into something capable of ending me before I had taken everything the weak ones could give me would be the stupidest possible use of a second life.
The four of them took the news in four different directions.
Tomas read the compensation figure twice and then said a number out loud that made the official pretend not to hear it. Idris had the Bureau’s Gate listings open on his phone before the man had finished speaking.
Bria simply put her case in her bag and closed it.
And Nia did not touch hers for a long moment.
She sat with both hands in her lap and looked at the sealed case, and I knew what was in her head, because five people had walked into that Gate expecting a training exercise.
Then she picked it up.
Afterwards, in the corridor, we exchanged numbers.
Nobody proposed a team, and nobody promised anything about the next Gate, because we were not friends.
We were five people who had been in the same room when it went wrong and had come out of it because of each other.
That was worth a phone number. It was not worth a contract.
---
The reporters were waiting on the steps.
It had taken one night for the story to find its shape, and the shape it had found was that Christopher Nolan’s SSS-ranked son had walked into a Green Gate assessment three days after awakening and walked out of an Orange one.
"Jace! Can you confirm you killed the boss?"
"Five of us killed it."
"The Bureau summary names you on the final strike."
"It names four other people on the same page. None of us would have got within reach of that thing alone."
"What is your Ability? Can you describe it?"
"No."
"Is it inherited? Is there a connection to your father’s lightning?"
I kept walking. Aten is fire and everybody who watched that press line outside the compound already knows it is fire, and none of them are getting the rest of it, and not one of them is ever hearing the word Mimesis.
"Are the five of you forming a team?"
That one I stopped for, because it was going to be asked until it was answered.
"No. I’ll be operating alone."
The noise doubled behind me, and I got into the car before any of it turned into a follow-up.
---
My father was in the front hall when I got back to the estate.
I had spent the whole drive working out how to ask about the morning without sounding like I was asking to be praised, because I had left that courtyard certain I had failed and had been carrying it around ever since.
"Congratulations on the licence," he said.
"Thank you."
"And you moved me."
I stopped walking.
"The right shoe. About four inches, at the end." He said it the way he reads a figure off a report.
"You did not check the ground before you left, which is its own lesson. Never assume you failed because nothing dramatic happened in front of you."
Something loosened in my chest that had been tight since the barrier gate closed behind me.
"Then when do we start?"
"We don’t."
I stood there.
"I understand," I said, and I did not manage to keep all of it out of my voice.
"No, you have understood it backwards." He turned so he was facing me properly. "If you had been poor this morning, I would have you in that courtyard at six every day for a year, and it would be the correct decision."
"Then why not."
"Because you were not poor. You adapted three separate times inside two minutes, and you worked out that the instruction was to move me rather than to hit me."
"You did that while running an Ability you have owned for four days through gauntlets you had never worn, at Level Five, against a top-ten Player."
He let that sit for exactly one second and no longer.
"There are flaws. You waste mana as though it regenerates while you are burning it, and you lean on Aten’s explosive output because it works."
"It will keep working right up until it does not. And you have almost no experience fighting anything whose strength you have not already measured."
"Which is what training is for."
"It is what *Gates* are for." He shook his head slightly. "If I keep you inside this estate, I will teach you to fight like me."
"You will learn my openings, my distances and my timing, and you will be a competent imitation of a lightning Player who happens to produce fire. That is not what you have."
"You don’t need me to train you," he said. "You need to fight."
I did not have an answer ready for that.
"Clear Gates that suit your licence. Find out how you actually want to use it, because I cannot tell you that, and nobody standing in a courtyard with you can."
He started to turn away, and then did not.
"If you reach a wall you cannot get through, come to me and I will break it with you. I am not going to stand over you every morning pretending you need teaching from the beginning."
"All right."
He looked at me for a moment longer, as though he had expected more argument.
I did not have any. What I had actually gone into that courtyard for was not a training schedule. It was to stop being the thing in this house that gets protected, and he had just handed me that in front of nobody at all.
---
I spent the next several days reading.
The Tower requirements were the first thing I pulled, and I read all of them, and then I closed the page without registering for anything.
Floor One has a minimum level, a clearing record, a sponsorship or guild backing requirement, and a medical clearance, and I could probably have argued my way past two of those with my surname. That is exactly why I did not.
The Tower is where this ends.
My father spent his whole career stalled at the fifth floor with the strongest raid team in the region, and I was not walking in at Level Five with a set of borrowed gauntlets to prove a point.
I need levels, a record, control of Aten that does not cost me a hand, and more Abilities than the three I have.
So I used the licensed side of the Bureau’s platform instead.
It is a very different service once you have a card. Full Gate listings with classification history, monster records from previous clears, entry rules, party size limits, and the material rights attached to each site.
I did not go looking for one legendary Gate out of my memories.
I built a schedule instead. Nine Green Gates within travelling distance, ordered by what they would actually give me, which for most of them was EXP and money and the experience of fighting something whose numbers I could not see coming.
Then I went through my memories for the other thing.
Six years of headlines, guild announcements, Bureau bulletins and clan briefings, looking for creatures whose Abilities would sit well beside fire, forward warning, and a rewind that only triggers when I die.
I could not guarantee any of it. Gates do not always hold the same populations, and a monster I remember from a report three years from now may never appear in the one I walk into.
But an ordinary rookie picks a Gate by how close it is to his flat, and I was picking mine off six years of information nobody else in this region has.
Most of them would give me nothing but EXP.
That was fine. EXP was most of what I needed.
---
The first Gate on my list sat in a cleared lot on the eastern edge of the region, ringed by Bureau barriers, with the portal rippling in the middle of it like a sheet of green water standing on its end.
Equipment crews were hauling recovered supplies out past the line from the previous party. The air had that metallic weight to it that mana leaking into open atmosphere always has, and I could taste it at the back of my throat from thirty metres away.
I checked the fit of both gauntlets, one strap at a time.
Then my supplies, which were mine now rather than the Bureau’s, packed by me, with nothing in the bag I had not put there.
The registration official at the barrier held out his hand for my card.
He scanned it, and the reader chimed, and he read whatever came up on his screen.
Then he looked past my shoulder.
He kept looking for a couple of seconds, at the gap in the barrier and the empty ground behind me where the rest of a party would have been standing, and then he went back to the screen and checked it again.
"You going in solo?"