All that remained was the written test. This trial Ray had to face entirely on his own, unsupported by any of us, whatever came of it. He was led into a quiet room away from the main hall and left there to wrestle with a pencil, an hourglass, and two sheets of questions. A hundred questions in all, sixty minutes, and the minimum of ninety percent correct answers. Daunting, perhaps, when put that way, but the questions were indeed quite plain.

In the meantime, I had the clerk sign a quest card for me.

If you accepted a non-combat quest for a private client, you usually couldn’t bring back anyone’s body parts to prove the work was done. Neither was the Guild free enough to run around asking if the person they had dispatched ever showed up. Instead, the Guild would give you a small card, on which you got your contractor’s signature when the task was done.

As part of his bizarre “adventurer-raising”-pet project, the Emperor habitually filed any outdoor excursions we had as “quests” to the capital’s bureau. Even when we traveled to Empress Margarita’s family home in Lombaria last summer, his majesty had passed the trip through the guild as an “escort request” for me, as though I were an adventurer hired as a bodyguard. Despite the fact that my participation was mandatory, and we had a platoon of actual bodyguards with us. My duties were not at all different from usual. Our sovereign was such a morally suspect character.

He would even include additional conditions, such as “no noble blood may be spilled on the way,” or “the quest taker must not be badly injured,” or “the princess’s smile must be protected!”, which made the Guild increase the difficulty rating. Thus, my rank steadily improved, and I received a bonus to my salary on the side. The honest part in me silently condemned this flagrant misuse of power, but it was out of my hands. And an adventurer must take what she gets.

Escorting the hero had also been framed as a request like that. The Guild stamp and the clerk’s signature on the card proved I had brought Raymond to Argento. With that, all that was left was to return home to report the deed.

I went to join Corporal Thiselt at a table in the corner of the guild hall, where we waited for our hero’s (hopefully) triumphant return and watched the established adventurers pick up their assignments from the billboard and leave one by one. An hour before noon, the bureau had gone quiet.

“So, you remember the ring that goblin was wearing?” the corporal chatted. “The fancy gold one with the tiny stones? Apparently, it belonged to a man from a big merchant family, who went missing last year. The relatives had asked to get at least the ring back, ‘cause it had been in the family for I forget how many generations. They’d put up a bounty of two hundred silver marks for it! Can you believe that? For one bleeding ring!”

“I see.”

I was not that impressed, having seen a certain Empress fork out 600 silver for a pair of slippers on a casual afternoon stroll. But two hundred was more than the average annual salary of a guardsman. Value was relative.

“Think he’ll do well on the test?” the corporal asked then and looked at the mechanical clock on the hall wall, a little uneasy.

“He will do fine.”

The young woman glanced at me and smiled impishly. “Imperial maids must keep it cool at all times, huh? No matter the situation.”

What did my job have to do with anything?

“Guess I’m the one with most reason to be worried,” she continued a touch insecurely, fiddling with her short bangs. “The only reason I’m here is because of my marksman score. Because of a bunch of numbers. A country pumpkin like me, sent out to take down the Dark Lord alongside the big hero himself? Makes you want to laugh, right? If there really are gods out there watching over us, they have a crazy sense of humor.”

Her low self-esteem caught me by surprise. Thiselt talked a lot, but rarely about herself. Had she harbored such thoughts the entire way?

“Do you honestly think so?” I asked her.

“Well, do you really disagree?”

“I do. Personally, I believe you could be the one most suited to be an adventurer among us.”

Corporal Thiselt blinked her round eyes at my assessment.

I didn’t say it only to flatter her, though, or to lift her spirits. I thought it was an objective evaluation.

“There aren’t many women in the army,” I explained. “But you didn’t try to compete with the men directly and prove yourself in melee, as some are wont to do. Those numbers of yours aren’t any trick of the gods, or a matter of luck. You chose a tool you intuitively knew would serve you better than any other, and made the most of it. You had the ambition to apply to the Imperial Guard and earned acceptance through genuine effort. Those are qualities indispensable to surviving in the wild. It was your own work and choices that brought you here today. Because you beat the others to it. It is fine to be proud of it.”

For a moment, the corporal made no reply. Then she quickly flushed and laughed brightly and embarrassedly.

“Wow! You were watching me that closely this whole time? Geez, I had no idea! I don’t know what to say! I didn’t think an imperial maid would be that interested in someone like me!”

What was she on about?

“I believe what I said was only self-evident, and didn’t need a very deep analysis.”

“Is that so?” she purred. Snidely smiling, the young archer drew closer and bumped her shoulder against mine. “When you said the most suited among us, did that also mean I could one day be better than you?”

“No doubt about that,” I admitted outright. “I am only an adventurer in name, for duty’s sake. Before anything else, I am a maid, and aspire for nothing beyond my station.”

At my sincere words, the corporal burst into another bout of unbridled laughter.

“I already thought you were this stone-cold witch without heart or tears,” she said, wiping her eyes. “But you’re really just absurdly earnest, aren’t you?”

Was that supposed to be a compliment? I couldn’t tell.

Before we knew it, the hour had passed, and the hero returned to us from his lonely academic battle. It would take a while for the clerk to check his answers, during which we sought to obtain his personal impressions.

“Well? How did it go?” Thiselt asked Ray.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Easy-peasy,” he answered with a haughty smile and a dismissing wave. “The only real problem was how to sit still for a whole hour!”

“Oh, you!”

As expected.

We put the test quickly behind us and moved on to planning where to have lunch. Soon enough, the clerk called us over.

“Mr Hero and friends!”

We gathered at the counter, braced for the results. Did he get full marks?

“Congratulations, Raymond Reed,” the clerk announced without much zeal and lazily clapped her hands. “You passed the test! You are now officially an adventurer. And here are your F-rank tags. Try not to lose them. And here, you can have the answer sheet back too! Keep it as a treasured memory of this glorious day—or use it to start a fire. Your choice. Welcome aboard. Protect the rules and don’t get into any trouble, will you?”

More than glad for Ray’s success, the clerk looked relieved to get rid of us.

“Hey, thanks!” Ray clutched his tags without further ado and hung the chain around his neck. “Alright! How do I look?”

“Like a skinny kid with iron chips under his neck,” the clerk answered.

“Nice. By the way, I didn’t catch your name, Miss. We’re about to go out for lunch now, you want to come along? Or maybe dinner later tonight? I’m staying in the town till tomorrow, so maybe…”

The furian gave the talkative hero one very world-weary look.

“You’re going to have to kill something bigger than a troll, before I’ll take you up on that, sonny.”

While Ray was clumsily flirting with the clerk, I took the bundle of papers on the desk. The results were marked in the upper right corner. When Ray saw my look, the cocky smile faded from his lips.

“You had nine questions wrong,” I notified him, most mortified. The score was one cross away from failing. Was having to always cut it so close some kind of quirk heroes had to have? “You have no time for dates. We will be reviewing thoroughly before lunch.”

“Uh, I passed, didn’t I? The result is what matters, right? I got the tags, eh. Mercy?”

“No.”

For this one day more, I’d still play the role of his mentor.

Our business in the bureau finished, we left to regroup with the soldiers at the markets, which by now had grown very lively. The me of five years past would have been swept away by the broad, colorful range of wares, the vendors’ pushy invites, and bargains that beggared belief. But having seen the imperial markets at the height of the harvest season rush, that collection of sunburned stalls and their dingy owners inspired more pity in me than awe. There was nothing there I particularly needed, or wanted without a need.

Then I noticed a peculiar pairing standing in the corner of the plaza.

An old man and a young girl—at a glance, you might have mistaken them for a grandfather and his progeny. But as we drew steadily closer, I could see the two were clearly not related by blood, and indeed, the closer we got, the more their differences stacked, until the amount had risen to comical heights.

The old man was very tall, leaning on an even taller, bumpy, knotted staff that could perhaps double as a club in dire need. His hair was long and white, which gave him the air of someone ancient, but also unwashed and streaked gray by highway dust. His long, grim, beardless face was not so aged as it had seemed, only mildly creased. He looked closer to forty than eighty. A sinewy, broad-shouldered strapper, dressed in dark clothes, a gray, weatherbeaten cloak over his shoulders. He was a rather outlandish sight.

The girl next to the man was no less eccentric in her way.

If the man wasn’t as old as he looked, neither was the girl as childish as she had appeared from afar, but had an unsettlingly mature glower on her small, heavily freckled face. There was no familial love or admiration mixed in the way she looked at the old man, but rather only open animosity. Her hair was cut short and earthen red in color, and her clothes were like bands of washed-out rags wrapped around her juvenile, shapeless figure. Her ears were also oddly sharpened towards the top corner, though you couldn’t see it so well from the front, only when she turned her head.

Another figure from myths. A hauflin.

The small folk of country tales, who never grew old, no matter how many years passed, but were not immortal either, or particularly long-lived; they simply looked like adolescents till their dying day.

Our way to the inn further down the lane brought us near the odd pair, when Ray abruptly stopped to look at them and exclaimed in wonder, “Old man!”

The man looked back at the hero, not at all surprised.

“Oh, Raymond, you yet live?” he remarked. “Call me old one more time, and we may have to change that!”

The party made confused faces, save for myself and Captain Vergil. The two of us had been the only ones present at the time when Ray had first arrived in the court a full year previously. The captain courteously stepped forward to introduce the stranger to the others, while I abstained.

“Everyone, meet wizard Alhereid; the Roadfinder, the hero’s guide.”

I always thought the man looked more like an ogre than a wizard, but reality tended to disappoint.

“That would be me, yes,” Alhereid confirmed in his coarse voice and stepped up to pose in front of us with his staff. He had to be close to seven feet tall, taller even that Ser Vergil.

“The other one I don’t know,” the captain continued, nodding at the hauflin. “A new companion?”

The girl clicked her tongue irritably and looked away, while the wizard snorted.

“Ha! This runt tried to make off with my purse in Trakia. The name’s Ruvi, as I heard it. Could’ve sworn it was Quick Fingers! Took me two days to track the lass down! So to make up for her mischief, I decided she’ll be joining us on our quest. That’s what you get for getting tangled up with a wizard! Destiny will be happy to take anyone who comes knocking.”

A worldly person might have found the wisdom in this strange, but no one blessed with sense was going to question the whims of a (self-proclaimed) wizard. Indeed, it seemed a surefire way to land oneself in hot water. Not asking our names, master Alhereid surveyed the company briefly with his piercing dark eyes and then asked,

“So, who’s going to treat me to lunch?”