Terry stopped the cart in front of the Adventurer’s Guild, only to consider it dubiously. He’d have to leave everything outside to fetch Analina. He did not imagine she would thank him for dragging a bloody, dripping, makeshift sack filled with wolf heads across the mostly clean floor inside. Of course, that meant abandoning the head sack outside. He shook off the worry that someone was going to make off with his prizes. Analina knew he was coming in with them, so she’d be very suspicious if someone else appeared with them. He satisfied himself with tying the cart to one of the stone pillars that supported the banister that flanked either side of the steps up to the door. He blinked at that. Had there been banisters before?

He thought back and couldn’t rightly remember for sure, but he had the vague impression that they were new. That’s odd, he thought and then shrugged it off. Everything in Chinese Period Drama Hell was odd. Why should architectural details be any different? He climbed the steps, opened the door, and walked inside. As usual, there was a smattering of people sitting at the tables. A few of them looked familiar to him, but one group stood out. Four armored men sat around a table, three of them looking surly. The last one appeared to be both in pain, based on the way he kept touching his chest and wincing, and forlorn as he held a badly misshapen breastplate. Terry frowned.

“What the hell are they doing here?” he grumbled under his breath.

Deciding that ignoring them was the best course of action, he walked over to the counter where Analina was giving him an expectant look.

“I expected you’d have some dire wolf heads,” she said.

“I do. They’re outside. You’ll understand when you see them,” he assured her. “Before that, though, what are those four idiots doing here?”

He nodded in the direction of the table with the four guards he’d chased off his property. Analina looked at the men, who were all glaring at Terry, and a gentle crease appeared between her eyebrows. She looked back and forth between them a few times before she answered.

“They’re adventurers.”

“Seriously?” asked Terry.

“Yes, seriously. They’re pretty good ones, too, for this area at least. All of them are rank three’s, bordering on rank two.”

“You’re overestimating them. Also, is it normal for adventurers to also be guards for some nobleman’s lackey?”

The crease between Analina’s eyebrows deepened when she said, “No, it isn’t. Not without a guild contract anyway. Why?”

“Well, that’s what those four were doing earlier today when they came out to my house and tried to attack me.”

Analina’s expression went flat when she said, “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, really. The one who looks like he’s about to cry over that damaged piece of armor. I hit him with a rock.”

“Did anyone else see them out there?” asked Analina.

“Sure. Haresh, Ekori, and Jaban were all there when it happened.”

“I see.”

The usual overly-friendly demeanor that Analina wore had vanished and been replaced with something far colder. She marched out from behind the counter and went directly over to the table where it was her turn to glare at the four, who all suddenly looked very guilty. They’re not very good actors, thought Terry.

“Guild identifications. On the table. Now,” said Analina.

The men all flinched and reluctantly complied. She spoke a few words that Terry couldn’t quite make out, and then there were four sharp cracks as the guild badges on the table snapped in two. All of the men at the table let out sharp cries of pain and grabbed at their right hands. Terry winced as he could hear flesh sizzling.

“You’re all banned for life,” said Analina, as she stabbed a finger at the door. “Get out!”

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A couple of them tried to raise a weak protest and were cut off almost instantaneously.

“No!” said Analina. “No more excuses. I’ve looked the other way more than once for you four. But taking jobs off the books and then attacking another adventurer at his home. You better just hope that I don’t decide to put out a guild contract for your heads.”

The four men shrank back from the brief tirade and then went sickly pale at the mention of a guild contract for their deaths. Their protests died on their lips, and they rushed out the door. Terry watched all of this with a sense of confused amusement. He didn’t know exactly what was happening, just that those guys had apparently crossed one line too many for Analina’s good nature to tolerate. He was, admittedly, curious about the story there. However, he decided that he’d just settle for having seen the almost instant karma play out in front of him. He’d ask for the story some other time when the question would be less likely to draw a damn trope down on his unsuspecting head. After all, even he knew that it was not wise to question an angry woman about, well, about anything really.

Analina stalked over to him with the four mangled Guild identifications squeezed in one of her hands. She went behind the counter, all but threw the IDs on the ground, yanked out a ledger, and slammed it open.

She didn’t even look at him when she asked, “Anything you want to ask me about?”

“Nope. Not a single thing,” said Terry as he worked very hard to maintain a calm and respectful tone.

She did look up at him then. There was a tense moment or two where he expected a volcano of misdirected anger to spew boiling hot rage all over him. Then, Analina snorted, and some of the fury bled away from her eyes. She spent a couple of minutes checking things in the ledger before she snapped it shut and put it away. Sighing, she collected the four IDs and disappeared into the back for a couple of minutes. When she returned, the anger was gone entirely, having been replaced with a look of weariness. She gave a halfhearted gesture at the door.

“Let’s go see what you’ve brought me.”

Terry led the way outside to the cart that, he was happy to discover, had been left undisturbed. It had only occurred to him as they were stepping outside that those four had seen him with the cart earlier. If they had wanted to screw with him, messing with the contents of the cart or just taking it outright would have been a great way to get it done. He swiftly untied the big blanket and let it fall open. Then, he had to grab one of the heads that fell off the top of the pile. He managed to snag it by an ear before it landed on Analina. Not that she seemed to have noticed at all. Her mouth was hanging open a little as she just stared. She shook her head a little and seemed to recover her equilibrium.

“I see why you didn’t bring them inside. Thanks for that. It would have been a mess.”

“Yeah.”

“This is—” she trailed off. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. I mean, you told me. So, I knew, but I didn’t really understand.”

Terry tried to consider the mound of death in the cart with fresh eyes. He’d mostly been thinking of it as a pile of money, but this was different than coming in with one monster head. One monster head was interesting but swiftly dealt with. This heap of decaying monster parts couldn’t be called interesting. It was just grotesque. But it was still a pile of money, and Terry wanted that money.

“It’s a lot,” admitted Terry.

It took close to half an hour for Analina to catalog the heads. There wasn’t an active contract for them so there was none of that slapping a paper on the heads business. They were, however, dangerous monsters, which meant that there was an open bounty on them. Analina did some things with a ledger and something that looked like a pencil. She had to take a blood sample from each beast and enter it into the ledger. After they finished all of that, she had him pull the cart around to the back of the Guild hall. It turned out that they had a device in a back room for disposing of monster parts that had no value. The contraption reminded Terry of an incinerator, except that it didn’t bleed heat. Analina made him toss the heads into the device. He suspected that this was normally her job, but he decided it was a small enough price for a big payday.

“There’s no escaping that rank two designation now,” she said after he tossed the last head into the device.

“Why is that?” he asked.

It was idle curiosity rather than any true interest. He was mostly resigned to the new rank, even if he hated all the annoyances it was bound to bring into his life. If he could have gotten it changed back immediately, there might have been some hope. By now, his status had to have been updated in whatever master ledger or magical database the guild used to keep track of people. If he’d been tasked with setting up a similar system in his old life, he would have made it so that an alert went to a senior guild member the second anyone advanced to rank two or rank one. So, he expected that important people already knew about him. That particular cat had escaped its bag captivity.

“A lone dire wolf is very dangerous. A pack this size could have wiped an entire town off the map. We just got lucky that they didn’t get hungry or angry enough to come here. A lone adventurer killing them all isn’t something that happens. When it happens, it’s never a rank three. This is going to get noticed by the guild.”

Terry sighed. That almost certainly meant that whatever passed as executives at the Guild were going to show up to bother him. There was no taking it back now.

“Terrific,” grumbled Terry. “Well, can we at least settle up for these things?”

“About that,” said Analina with an embarrassed flush to her cheeks.

“No, don’t tell me!” groaned Terry.

“I don’t have enough gold on hand to pay this out completely.”