"Urg... my head."
Ronin groaned, clutching his skull as he stirred awake on the hard floor of his apartment. Judging by the numbness in his legs and the cold sticking to his cheek, he must've passed out the moment he got back. Bottles, clothes, and wrappers littered the ground around him—an impressive mess even by his recent standards.
He sat up slowly, his head pounding like a war drum, eyes barely adjusting to the sunlight leaking through a torn curtain. With a grunt, he began crawling through the wreckage of his apartment, moving junk aside in search of his phone. He finally found it wedged under a broken picture frame and a crumpled hoodie. The screen lit up—blinding at first—and he squinted at the most recent message:
"Remember, we meet at Havenfield clearing."
His brain churned slowly through the haze, piecing it together. What the hell is Havenfield—wait... right. Shit. His eyes snapped open. That was today.
He scrambled to his feet, barely managing to pull on a mismatched set of clothes he yanked from the floor. No time to shower, no time to fix the mess he called hair. Just boots, pants, a shirt, maybe a jacket. Good enough. He bolted out the door.
The message was for a job—his first one in weeks. He hadn't taken on a gate since the last string of failures. Getting pummeled in raid after raid had left his motivation in the dirt. But after what happened at the Reapers Guild celebration... after Lyra... something in him refused to keep sitting on the floor of life.
When he arrived at Havenfield clearing, a handful of people were already waiting near the gate. A purple shimmer pulsed lazily in the air behind them—the dimensional rift, the job site.
"Oh great. Now it's a homeless guy," one of them said loudly. The speaker was a brawny man in his 40s with short black hair and chainmail armor. Ronin didn't even bother responding.
Another voice chimed in with a light chuckle. "Calm down, Paul. He's the E-rank. Probably just down on his luck." This one came from a man with slicked-back blonde hair and pristine gold armor—clearly the "main character" type.
Ronin quietly cursed the guy in his head but couldn't really argue. His beard was untrimmed, his hair a tangled mess, and his outfit looked like it lost a fight with a thrift store bin.
The man in gold stepped forward. "Name's Leroy. I'm team lead for this run."
Ronin nodded wordlessly, taking stock of the rest of the group. Besides Leroy and Paul, there was a woman with black hair who looked half-asleep, a guy who didn't even lift his eyes from the ground, and another girl with brown hair glued to her phone.
Leroy launched into a brief rundown of the gate—standard E-rank dangers, monster classifications, extraction procedures. Then came the introductions.
"I'm Paul. D-rank," the older man grunted, arms folded.
No one else said a word. After an awkward silence, Leroy cleared his throat. "Alright, forget intros. Just make sure you don't die in there."
With that, the group began filing toward the portal in no particular order. One by one, they vanished into the shimmer.
Ronin stood still for a moment, watching the violet light ripple.
Why am I still doing this?
He didn't need to anymore. There was no debt. No glory to chase. Lyra was gone, and she wasn't coming back—especially after what happened at that event.
I'm being a damn idiot, he thought, stepping toward the portal.
He made a quiet promise to himself right then.
This is the last one.