When the White Wings entered the Altane Guild, the bustle, gossip, and noise slowly faded away, to be replaced by stares and silence.
Rex tiredly nodded to himself. If this was him on the other end of things, he would likely have stared too. After all, the White Wings were tattered, both physically and mentally.
Jenna was still shivering, muttering to herself. Liam's look of confidence had completely caved. Piotr, while he was the healthiest looking of the three, still had dead fish eyes, even as he helped the other two, and Rex...
...Everyone knew Rex. Rex had been a mainstay of the guild for a long time, around 12 years. So to see Rex looking grim made everyone's hackles rise.
Something had happened. And everyone was wondering what had caused such a collapse.
Moving forward, painfully aware of the gazes (except for Jenna, whose eyes were unfocused), Rex slowly pulled out his storage bag, and began placing items for the receptionist to take and appraise. Normally, he would ask questions, talk about whether a floor was feeling dangerous. But he unpacked everything in silence, and, when he was finished, he quietly spoke.
"I would like to make a report to the Guild Mistress."
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Guild Mistress Leanne looked at the four seated across from her. While the White Wings were by no means the best party in Altane, they were a reliable party, made moreso by the addition of Rex. But she saw none of that now. They'd mostly managed to calm down, and she simply waited, smoking her pipe, as they slowly sipped at their tea, and the second cups she poured for each. But, looking at them, they weren't going to get any calmer than this, not without rest.
"How bad?" Her words were blunt, and to the point, but Rex smiled faintly. Leanne's reputation for toughness and a short manner was mostly ill deserved. She just didn't like wasting time, and she wasn't good at expressing herself. He took a deep breath, and took the items he hadn't given to the receptionist, placing them on the table.
Everyone except Leanne and Rex flinched at the sight, and Leanne took a deep drag of her pipe, staring down at what would otherwise be a perfectly ordinary body, not worth taking out of the dungeon.
Her next inhale, however, stopped halfway, and her fingers reached toward the broken blade. Turning it over in her fingers. Testing the tip. Peering at it with her sharp, green eyes.
"You want this, in particular, to be appraised?"
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Rex shook his head, and Leanne cocked hers.
"Just that. The other is only important because of the thing you're holding right now."
And, with that, he began talking.
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Halfway through, Leanne sent everyone except Rex out of the room, calling a pair of receptionists to guide them to the guild's clinic. They were useless. They might end up useless. And Leanne could certainly understand why.
Living Dolls, while weak, are troublesome enough. They're hard to see, they always seem to go for tendons, throats, eyes, and they never willingly attack on their own. It's a blessing that, when they are seen, they can't run away, stumbling as they try. And they die almost as easily as Slimes.
But what Rex described, what Rex surmised, was something that would require a hunt. A strong party, forewarned and well equipped. And Rex, uncharacteristically, refused to lead them.
What he said was that he would hold a party back, but the truth was clear in his glances, in the brief, brief moments his mask slipped.
He was scared. No, he was terrified.
A Living Doll is bad enough. But it's slow. This one moved in leaps, flashes, and it seemed to have quickly run rings around a party.
A Living Doll can talk, in a sense, but there's no real sense of intelligence, just a strange, instinctive sense of how to make people feel unnerved and disgusted. This one clearly gauged its opponents, ambushed, played an emotional war, not just a physical one.
A Living Doll is predictable. This one attacked other monsters, and, judging by the description, removed their magic cores to some unknown end. Rex even made a tentative guess that it ate them. He wasn't sure. He didn't give himself the opportunity to check. But as he explained his reasoning, as he mentioned the brief moment is showed claws, not just its knife, Leanne leaned towards his opinion. It could, reasonably, have gained the power to leap from the warhound. Same with its claws. Living Dolls can be ambushed from far away, but this one avoided them, to the point it wasn't seen except at the beginning... And the very end.
Considering how badly morale had crumbled, Leanne felt that it was a small miracle that they'd returned. They had been fresh until then, Rex reported. But on the way back, they made mistakes. They jumped at things that weren't there, and were distracted by their own thoughts to be ambushed by things that were. They made more noise than necessary. They wasted heals and spells.
They both waited for the guild's sole Appraiser, and Rex sipped his third cup of tea, staring at Leanne.
"You know how I say that there are few, if any rules in the Altane Dungeon?"
Leanne smiled faintly. "You say it a lot, and I believe you. There's never been a stampede, but there's often been signs of one, so we always act as if it's going to. The monsters don't make sense, the environment can change within a floor..." She leaned forward. "Where's this leading, Rex."
He looked down at his cup, seemingly staring at his reflection. And his voice was quiet, almost inaudible.
"For the first time, I felt like I was looking at the embodiment of that."
Nothing more was said. It didn't feel like more could be said. And Leanne knew that reaching out a hand wouldn't do any good. Rex didn't need comfort. He needed confirmation, so he could at least know that what he saw was real.
When the Appraiser arrived, the results were as they both expected. While it didn't have a name, it had a space for it. It had the potential for it. And it had some of the skills of a Warhound.
A Unique Monster.