The guild logged the troll clear on a Tuesday.

  By Thursday, every adventurer in Millhaven knew about it. By Friday, three of them had tried to recruit Rena away from us with offers I won't repeat because they were offensive. By Saturday morning someone had written "PALE COIN" on the guild board under the heading Notable Clears — This Month, which was a board I had not previously known existed, and I was standing in front of it with my morning tea going cold in my hand thinking about how much I did not want this.

  I don't want a reputation, I thought. Reputation means expectations. Expectations mean people watching. People watching means the next time Torvin charges something without telling me and Sera misses and Yua gets us lost on the way out, there are witnesses.

  "You're staring at the board," Rena said, appearing next to me.

  "I'm aware."

  "It says our name on it."

  "I can read."

  "Most people would be pleased."

  Most people didn't have a plan to stay invisible long enough to build something real before anyone started paying attention, I thought. I had six more weeks before I wanted this kind of notice. Six weeks to get the skill to level six, build the scroll stock up, maybe get Torvin's axe technique to a point where he could theoretically damage something that wasn't made of soft tissue.

  "I'm not most people," I said.

  "No," she said, and the way she said it wasn't an argument.

  The problem with reputation, I discovered over the following week, was that it attracted both the useful kind of attention and the inconvenient kind, and they arrived in no particular order.

  Useful: Two B-rank adventurers hired me to enhance their full gear loadout before a mid-ring contract. The rate I charged them was the highest I'd set yet. Neither negotiated. I made in one afternoon what took three days of goblin camps. I went back to my room afterward and updated the price sheet upward.

  Inconvenient: A man named Darro introduced himself as representing a merchant consortium in Valorheim that had been purchasing enhanced scrolls through intermediaries and wanted to discuss a direct supply arrangement. He was well-dressed, smelled like money, and had the specific energy of someone who had come to offer me something that was slightly less good than it sounded.

  I met him in the guild common room with Rena sitting two tables away pretending to eat.

  "The consortium is prepared to offer a standing contract," he said. "Fixed monthly quantity, fixed rate per scroll grade. Guaranteed income, no need to find individual clients."

  That sounds convenient, I thought. Which means there's a clause I haven't seen yet.

  "What's the exclusivity arrangement?" I said.

  He paused for a fraction too long. "The contract would require your enhancement services be directed primarily toward consortium clients."

  Stolen novel; please report.

  "Primarily."

  "With some flexibility for—"

  "Define primarily."

  Another pause. "Eighty percent of your monthly output."

  There it is. "No," I said.

  "The rate we're offering—"

  "Isn't the issue. Twenty percent output for individual clients means I can't take care of my own party's prep, can't maintain my current guild relationships, and can't take on work that pays better than your fixed rate when it comes up. The answer is no."

  He looked at me with the expression of someone recalibrating. "We could adjust the percentage."

  "To what?"

  "Fifty."

  That's actually more reasonable, I thought, and then immediately: No. The consortium buys scrolls to resell them. If my enhanced scrolls start appearing in Valorheim markets, someone with more resources than this man is going to start asking where they came from, and I am not ready for that conversation.

  "I'll think about it," I said, which meant no but I wanted him to leave feeling like the door was open.

  He left. Rena came over.

  "Consortium?"

  "Valorheim. Scroll resale."

  "You said no."

  "I said I'd think about it."

  She looked at me. "You said no."

  "I said no," I confirmed.

  She went back to her food. The conversation was over in the way that conversations with Rena always ended — at the point where everything necessary had been said and she saw no reason to continue past it. I had come to find this deeply efficient and occasionally frustrating, and I wasn't sure that ratio was ever going to shift.

  Soobin came back two weeks after the first visit.

  This time it was midday and I was in the middle of an enhancement session with three grey scroll pouches spread across the tavern table and my MP at about sixty percent. He sat down across from me in civilian clothes again, hood down this time, which either meant he was more comfortable or he'd decided the people of Millhaven weren't going to recognize a Hero candidate on sight.

  He looks less terrible than the last time, I noted. Still tired, but the specific carrying-something-heavy tired is a little lighter.

  "I heard about the troll," he said.

  "It was a troll."

  "A B-rank troll. Six years uncleared. With a Minor Enhancement party."

  "We had a plan."

  "Junho." He said my name in the tone that meant he was trying to say something real and hadn't worked out how yet. I kept running enhancement passes and let him find it. "I heard about it and I thought — I should have been there. Not to help, I know you don't need—" He stopped. "I should have been tracking what you were doing. From the start. I should have been paying attention."

  That's a different thing than I'm sorry, I thought. That's closer to right.

  I set down the scroll. "How's the sword?"

  He blinked. "What?"

  "The Holy Sword. Have you manifested it yet or is it still in the skill?"

  "I—" He looked slightly thrown by the pivot. "Partial. I can manifest the blade but the holy attribute isn't stable yet. The court wizard says it needs more training before the full manifestation."

  "How's the training going compared to last time?"

  "Better. I've been putting in extra hours in the evening after the formal drills."

  He does that, I thought. When something matters to him he goes at it until it's done. That was always true. "Good," I said. "Keep doing that."

  "Are you—" He looked at me carefully. "Are you giving me training advice?"

  "I'm telling you the thing you already know so you can hear it out loud."

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he almost smiled, and this one made it all the way. "You're still annoying."

  "That's baseline. Not a character flaw."

  We ate lunch. He paid, which I allowed, which was its own kind of statement between us — he knew I had money now, I knew he knew, the paying was an apology in a form that didn't require either of us to reopen the one from last time. We talked about the training, about Hyunwoo's continuing accidents, about Mirae advancing faster than anyone expected and being politely insufferable about it. We didn't talk about the exile. We didn't need to, today. Today was just lunch.

  When he left he said "I'll come back in two weeks," not as a question.

  "I'll be here," I said, which was not a forgiveness but was something adjacent to it, and we both knew the difference, and it was enough for now.

  I went back to my scroll stock.