Many thoughts were racing through his head like 'How did I get myself into this situation?' or 'Why is she looking at me like that?' and 'How long have I been sitting here?'
After following her up the first flight of stairs, they entered an elevator that took them to the top of the building. He didn't know how many floors there were, but he spent 5 minutes going up so he assumed that it must have been a lot.
Through the years he had spoken with a lot of relatively important people, but never on the scale that she was. A gang leader or a mob boss could never compare to a guild master, especially not one of the top guilds in their country.
Now he was sitting on a rather comfy chair that sat across from her separated by a large glass table. She was staring at him intently and he again thanked himself for buying a mask because he looked like he was about to burst.
No matter how mature he may seem, he was still a 15 year old teenage boy, and with such a beautiful woman with a mature charm sitting not that far away from him, he had to try his hardest to control his wild thoughts and keep focused on the situation at hand.
After a few more minutes sitting in silence, she was the first one to break it.
"There is no need to hide behind such a cheap mask. Mr. Hart. There is no one here that is out to get you." She said with her killer smile.
"Wha…"
"No need to be confused. If I intended to spend any money, little as it may be, on someone I'd at least do a background check. And you didn't make it especially difficult. Your pc isn't set to hide your personal information, and even if it was, I know a lot of people that would make finding out easy." He blushed at his stupidity and quickly noted it down to find and change that setting.
"I don't know what you are talking about, I'm here because you said that you wanted to see the method of using mana that I discovered." He was sweating bullets and coupled with her soul piercing eyes, he was stuttering quite a bit.
"Higan Ray Hart. 15 years of age. Attends the Ardwin Awakener Preparatory High School. Recently awakened as an F-rank, and because of a hunting accident 9 years ago, is an orphan that lives alone in the Theophile Apartment Building."
"I…"
"And you have worked in quite a few… let's just say shady businesses. The red snake gang, the black tiger gang, the hidden lion organization, ooh that's a big one, and many others that I don't care to mention. That's an impressive track record. I must say that I am impressed. Did I get everything right, Higan?" Not even breaking eye contact, she started to list the various gangs that he has worked for in the past as if it was common knowledge.
No longer fighting to hide his identity, he took off the mask dejectedly to reveal his, while handsome, still very childish face. "You got one thing wrong, I got expelled after my awakening results."
"Expelled? Because of your results?" She looked at him confused. "Legally no school is allowed to expel a student because of the result of their awakening. Schools get paid based on the ratio between good and bad results. If they were allowed to just get rid of the lower scores, then they are cheating the system."
"Well I'm just going off of what I was told, The day of my awakening I was sent a message stating that I was practically expelled."
"So 4 days ago huh. Those sly bastards. If a student doesn't show up to class 3 days after the ceremony then they are allowed to punish said student however they please, expulsion included. And with the results needing to be submitted a month after the ceremony, they needed to find a reason very quickly."
He had a rather sad look on his face as he learned of the reason that he was told to not come to school. He wasn't even properly expelled, he just gave them a reason to do so. "But wouldn't that be against the rules?" he asked.
"Yeah, so? No one is going to go after such a high standing school for a measly F rank"
He felt insulted to be referred to like that but he understood where she was coming from. Filing a complaint took a lot of time and effort and no one would listen to him. That means that someone of high enough rank had to find out about it, care enough to do something, and go through all that effort, just to force a school to allow a random F rank, that has nothing to do with them, to go to school for a few more years. Not a very likely thing to happen.
"But, if the thing that you are claiming is true, then you wouldn't even need to go to that school."
"Why? And why do you believe me when I say that I can?"
"Because there are a lot of people in very powerful positions who have tried, are trying, and will continue to try to achieve what you claim to have. And from your description of what happened I could confirm if you were truthful or not and with the background check I knew that you weren't some old bastard with a new pc."
"What, why? It doesn't seem that special." He didn't see his new found method that valuable. Even the way to get higher rank and more powerful spells from lower rank books didn't seem that good. If one had enough money, like the people that she claimed to be researching this has, then you would just buy a higher ranked book.
"Don't worry about that for now, before I continue here I'd like to confirm that you actually know how to do it. I'd like to see it."
Before he could reject, stating that he needed to be paid first, 3 million appeared in his balance. It might not have been that 7 million that was agreed upon, but all he was doing was prove that he could do it. Plus he wasn't going to complain about it in front of her face.
He pulled back the sleeves of his black robe to show his skin, and controlled his mana to be slightly agitated. The veins under his skin started glowing blue and the rate of absorption skyrocketed.
"Fascinating, truly fascinating." She was too shocked to even say a full sentence as she looked at his glowing arm.
"You didn't mention the vein thing." At her level, she could sense the mana in the room moving strangely and rapidly towards him and didn't need to see him to confirm her suspicion, so the glowing veins were truly a surprise.
"I discovered this yesterday." He said while calming down his mana, causing the absorption to return to a normal level and his arm to stop glowing.
"Join my guild." She looked at him dead pan in the face and didn't beat around the bush in anyway