The hobgoblin camp job paid eighty silver.

  Split two ways — Rena took sixty percent as the registered contract holder, which was standard, so I walked away with thirty-two silver on top of my expenses. Not bad for two days. Not great either, but the math was moving in the right direction.

  I was doing the math at the guild notice board when someone walked into me from the side and spilled an entire ink pot down my sleeve.

  "Oh! Oh, I'm so sorry — here, I have a cloth—"

  I looked down at my arm. Then up. The person who'd hit me was maybe twenty, slight, round-faced, with a healer's staff slung across her back and the expression of someone who causes accidents and has come to a kind of peace with it.

  "I'm so sorry," she said again, dabbing at my sleeve with a cloth that was somehow making it worse. "I didn't see you. I was reading the board and I just — here, let me—"

  "It's fine," I said, because it was ink and not blood and I had bigger problems.

  "It's really not, your whole sleeve—"

  "It's fine," I said again, and went back to reading the board.

  She stayed next to me. I glanced over.

  "Were you looking at contracts?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "Are you a party?"

  "Technically no."

  She looked at the board for a moment. "I'm trying to get a field assignment. The branch master keeps telling me I need a party recommendation to go above G-rank field work, but there aren't any parties taking healers at my rate."

  Not my problem, I thought. This is not my problem. I have thirty-two silver and a plan and I don't need—

  "What rank?" I said.

  "C. In healing magic." She said it quietly, like she knew it sounded impressive and felt weird about that.

  C-rank healing magic at what looked like seventeen, maybe eighteen. I looked at her status stone callus — the faint mark on the wrist from regular screen access. Fresh, still forming. New to field work. But C-rank output was C-rank output regardless.

  A C-rank healer, I thought, would mean the party survives things it currently shouldn't.

  "What's your name?"

  "Yua. Yua Brightwell."

  "Junho. Park Junho." I pulled the board contract I'd been considering — D-rank Thornwood mid-ring scouting, minimum three people. "Can you navigate?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "In a dungeon, under pressure, without a map."

  "...mostly."

  Mostly, I thought. She said mostly.

  "Are you afraid of goblins?"

  "I've never seen one."

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "That's not a no."

  "It's not a yes either."

  I looked at her. She looked back, steady. Whatever else she was, she wasn't pretending to be something she wasn't.

  "I'm going to introduce you to someone," I said. "If she approves, you're in. If she doesn't, you're not."

  "In what?"

  "I'm not calling it a party," I said. "It's a professional arrangement."

  Rena was at a corner table with food and a very clear aura of wanting to be left alone. She looked up when I arrived with Yua in tow. Then she looked at Yua. Then at me. Then at Yua again.

  "C-rank healing," I said. "Looking for a field assignment."

  "Why is there ink on your arm."

  "Unrelated. What do you think?"

  Rena assessed Yua the way she assessed dungeon rooms — quickly, thoroughly, without expression. Yua stood there and didn't fidget, which I suspected cost her something.

  "Cast something," Rena said.

  "Here?"

  "Small. I want to see output control."

  Yua looked around the tavern — half full, nobody paying attention to us — and lifted one hand. A soft gold light gathered in her palm, held perfectly steady, then dispersed without spilling so much as a flicker outside her fingers.

  Rena looked at me.

  "Fine," she said.

  "She's in?" Yua said.

  "You're in," I said.

  "I have a condition," Yua said.

  Already, I thought. We're doing conditions already.

  "I won't heal anyone who ignores direct medical advice." She said it like she'd had to say it before. "If I tell you to stop using a limb and you keep using it, I won't reset the injury. I'll treat what I can treat and leave the rest."

  Rena and I looked at each other.

  "That seems reasonable," I said.

  "It's extremely reasonable," Rena said. "Agreed."

  Yua nodded. Then smiled, sudden and warm, and it was a little alarming coming after the very professional statement she'd just made.

  Torvin found us.

  I don't know how else to say it. We were leaving the guild after signing the contract update and he was standing outside, enormous, with a caved-in shield and a cheerful expression that did not match the caved-in shield.

  "You're the enhancement guy," he said to me.

  Oh no, I thought.

  "I heard about your scrolls from Deval. And I heard about the swords from a guy who heard from Rena. And I was wondering—"

  "What happened to your shield?" I said.

  He looked at it. "B-rank dungeon spider. It hit the shield instead of my face, which is good, but now the shield is like this, which is bad, because I need the shield for my face."

  He's a half-orc, I thought, looking at the stats I could roughly estimate from his build and the wear on his equipment. High STR, high DEF, probably A in both. HP pool would be enormous. If I could enhance his equipment—

  "Show me the shield," I said.

  He handed it over. It was heavy — solid iron, well-made originally, now bent at the top edge where the spider had hit. I ran an enhancement pass. Felt the metal. It was good quality underneath the damage.

  Three passes. The dent hadn't reversed — I couldn't reshape metal, only push its properties — but the structural integrity came back fully. Whatever had bent it couldn't bend it again without significantly more force.

  I handed it back.

  Torvin held it. Pushed on the damaged edge with his thumb. His eyes went wide.

  "How much," he said.

  "You join the party," I said. "That's the rate."

  What am I doing, I thought, in the same moment. I'm building a party. I said I wasn't building a party. I have a healer and a dual-blade scout and now I'm recruiting a half-orc tank and I explicitly said I wasn't doing this.

  "Done," Torvin said immediately, like I'd offered him something great.

  "You don't know what the split is. You don't know the conditions. You don't—"

  "You enhanced my shield in thirty seconds better than the guild enchanter did in an hour last week," he said. "I've been looking for a good enhancement mage for two years. Done."

  I looked at Rena. She shrugged.

  Fine, I thought. Fine. It's a party. We're a party. Four people, one of whom can't fight, one of whom freezes if the plan changes, one of whom will charge things without being asked, and one of whom said 'mostly' when I asked about navigation.

  "One rule," I said, looking at all of them. "Nobody does anything without me calling it first. Not a charge, not a spell, nothing. We talk before we act. If something goes sideways we fall back and regroup. Are we clear?"

  "Clear," said Rena.

  "Absolutely," said Yua.

  "Yes!" said Torvin, with so much enthusiasm that I already didn't believe him.

  This, I thought, is going to be a disaster.

  I was right. I was also, though I would not have admitted it for anything, glad I was wrong about the other thing — the part where I thought I'd be doing this alone.

  "Let's go get Sera," Rena said.

  "Who's Sera?" I said.

  Rena's expression did something complicated. "The mage. She's been following you for three days trying to ask about her staff."

  I turned around. Forty feet back, standing behind a post and very unconvincingly pretending to read a notice board, was a young woman with a cracked staff and a notebook.

  Of course, I thought.

  "Fine," I said. "Get her."