Rick watched Mazevale turn to a scalding hell. The sky was red and angry; smoke billowed from the Guild’s adventurer statuette til it collapsed and sunk half through the dome. The townspeople ran frantically like disturbed insects all the while.

Rick himself was at a distance, back against a tree that was about a thousand paces from town. The rivers and canals that dotted Mazevale would be enough to slow the fire, and blazes from fire magic like Matt’s burned clean. The smoke wafting towards him stung but did not suffocate, and it would not cloud his racing thoughts.

He lowered himself onto the damp grass, and lay there limp, like a drunk. His body and mind were both intact, but he wished they were shattered, for then he could be spared the hellish din and the understanding that came with it. That he had partly caused this, and that he was powerless to make it stop.

He had left Constance tied up in the room. There was no point in taking her anywhere because the Mazevale jailhouse had burned down, along with Cure’s armor shop, along with the weaponkeeper’s store, along with the Morning Lark, soon. And along with the Four-Leaf Inn.

Everyone would get away with their lives, but their livelihoods—all gone. A valiant speck-townsperson took a bucket and splashed at the fire, but though the water shrank the flames they did not sputter fully out.

“That’s a fire mage’s A-Rank skill for you…”

The townspeople could do nothing, and neither could Rick; all he could do was watch or run away. So he punished himself with the former, and hoped that when the townspeople learned what had happened they wouldn’t think too harshly of the “Failure Adventurer.”

So preoccupied was he with the crackling and the screams that he failed to notice a sound that came from the gravel far closer to him.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

It was a girl. She wore white armor, but it was streaked instead of shining. It fit well, and had been prepared with extra heatproof and waterproof layers. And on the bottom she wore combat shorts that tightly snugged her thighs, though that didn’t make him feel much better.

“You some kind of angel? You have to be, since I’m feeling pretty dead.”

“Shut up!” said Pern. “That’s a cliche. You know perfectly well who I am.”

“You’re as pretty as one. Just saying.”

“If it’s angels you’re looking for, I’ll kick you straight into heaven,” said Pern, though she didn’t move. Rick didn’t either. He just kept lying down in the damp wet grass.

“You shouldn’t be here. You should be flying down the road to Caer Princips.”

“I did leave. Just for a little bit.” She looked away. “Then I thought… it would be a little bit lonely… and I’d rather travel with a strong Adventurer who can protect me. A strong, solid Rank C.”

“So, not me.”

Rick nodded listlessly, and Pern flicked a card into his hands.

RICK ZWEITHANDER

C-RANK ADVENTURER

“A double promotion— all writ, filed, and archived at the Mazevale Guild, pretty much set into stone. We finished our first quest together, and nothing can ever take that away.”

Sss. An ember looped in the wind, touched the receipt, and the badge burned away through her fingertips.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“About that…” Rick said.

Meanwhile, the Guild building’s statuette had turned into a half-melted torso with burning toes, and the Guild Hall’s walls were pillars of fire. Its documents had in all likelihood gone to the great archive in the sky.

“Pern, did you at least fetch the letter?”

“No,” Pern said. “That’s all gone—but—I’ve got some supplies for us, you know. They’re in a wagon a bit away from the South Gate. Caer Princips might be out, but we can go to Caer Centralis, or Caer Aqua. A city with lots of Adventurers and one that’s not very loyal to the King. I understand that he’s the one who wanted to kill me.”

These words were strings of definitions spoken in an arbitrary order. The Adventure Badge and its cremation was also just so much powder, fittingly colored a bland chalk gray.

Rick would be strong enough to stand again. But not now, not yet.

Just a little while longer. Just a little while more.

“We’ve got to leave, Rick,” Pern said gently.

“They say that if you fall down seven times, get up eight. But what if you fall seven hundred times? What seven thousand? Seven million? What then?”

Rick stretched a hand to the sky and flopped it back down.

“The truth is, I’m a very selfish person. I retired to this village and decided to help others because kindness is easy; while being competent is hard. You can never fail at being kind.

“But sometimes, kindness isn’t enough. People need someone to protect them, to lead them, or someone who can provide. And I can’t do that. I’m the Failure Adventurer. When it counts I’m just not enough,” Rick muttered.

“It’s true that there’s some failures we can’t come back from,” said Pern. She joined him, and lowered herself onto the damp. “Even I know that.”

There was silence, but it wasn’t truly empty because Pern was there. She waited a long time for his reply, and when it didn’t come she tried again.

“I used to be an E-Rank Adventurer. The worst. I was registered under a different name, Bernie ‘the Line’ Arienette, and it took me a long, long time to get where I am now. There were times when I thought that being someone like ‘Pern’ would have been impossible.”

Rick snorted. “Are you saying that every failure is just another bump on the path to success? I’ll tell that to the corpses and cores of the bandits we killed.”

“Let me finish!” Pern said. “As Bern, I could never do anything right. I could see that in the eyes of the receptionist, the words of the party members, the strategies that tacticians gave me that always put me on the sidelines. Those things didn’t change even when I began to learn from my mistakes.

“I was only taken seriously, and could take myself seriously, when I started again as Pern. You’re not a failure, Rick. You might have failures in your past but that doesn’t have to be you.”

“So. I’m not a failure. Even someone with many failures can still have a success, though the failures don’t help. Is that it, Bern?”

The clouds in the sky drifted slow. The wind skimmed Rick’s face. The smoke crawled out from thatched roofs.

“Mhmm.”

“So you’re saying that I should be a gambler rather than a lech.”

“Huh? But I never said that?”

“Ha!” Rick said. “Can’t believe I got cheered up by a charity case.”

“Huh? Charity case! Charity case! Just because I got a Thunder skill stone and a sword from some random man named Card —ah!”

Rick hugged her.

“Ah. Ah!” Pern said. “Ah, ah, ah! Already—ah! Why like this! Ah ah ah!”

As an S-Rank Adventurer she was obliged to counter, so she simply embraced him harder than he held she. They could neither look one another in the eye nor stand quite straight when they were done, and Rick kept his smile as he ambled down a light dirt path.

When Rick had retired, he had given away his weapon, his offensive skills, and had even changed his name. He still remembered the shocked look the Guild receptionist had given him when he instructed her to give its lowest-ranking member his sword and Thunder S.

But at the time, this ludicrously generous gift had always made sense to him; it was far better to give those armaments to someone who was willing to try against all the odds. Though he had spent a long time searching for skill stones as a rookie, he no longer had any will to fight; he became the type of Adventurer to cut and run. Rick remembered all these things as walked faster and faster along the path.

“Where are you going, Rick!?” said Pern. “Our wagon’s the other way! I mean, it’s okay to make mistakes, so don’t worry about it, but—”

“This is no mistake,” said Rick. “There must be something that can be salvaged, even if everything’s up in flames. We’ll return to Mazevale and find what’s left”