Her name was Sera Nighthollow and she had been standing behind that post for, according to Rena, three days.
Three days, I thought, looking at her. She followed me around for three days and didn't say anything. That's either impressive patience or a serious social problem, and given that she's currently pretending to read a notice board that is facing the wrong direction, I'm going to go with both.
"You can come over," I said.
She looked up. Looked left. Looked right. Walked over, notebook clutched to her chest like a shield, staff on her back with a crack running from the grip to about a third of the way up the wood. Even from here I could see the mana bleed where the fracture was letting energy scatter instead of channel. No wonder she had control problems.
"You're the enhancement person," she said.
"People keep calling me that."
"I've been observing your enhancement process from a distance." She opened her notebook. There were diagrams. "I have some questions about the mana pathway optimization mechanism — specifically whether the efficiency gain is linear or exponential relative to pass count, and whether there's a theoretical ceiling determined by the scroll's inscription density or the enhancer's INT stat, and also whether—"
"The staff," I said.
"What?"
"Show me the staff. We can do the academic interrogation after."
She handed it over. Up close the fracture was worse than I'd thought — not just surface damage but a deep split in the core wood that had been bowing the channel pathways sideways for what looked like months. Every spell she'd fired through this had been bent four degrees off center before it even left the tip. Four degrees. Over thirty meters that's two full meters of lateral drift. That's not a control problem. That's a broken tool problem. She's been blaming herself for a broken staff.
I didn't say that out loud because it wasn't my place and also because the math for fixing it was already running and I needed to concentrate.
I ran the first pass slowly. The wood's internal structure was intricate — the staff had been well-made once, the kind of thing a craftsman had spent real time on. The fracture had sheared through three of the primary channel lines and two of the secondary ones. Stacking enhancement on it without addressing the structural problem first would just make the bent pathways more efficiently bent.
So fix the structure first, I thought. I've never done that. I don't know if I can do that. There's probably a good reason to try it on something less expensive first.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
I tried it anyway.
Second pass, slower, focused on the fracture lines — not the channel pathways but the wood itself, the grain structure underneath. I pushed the enhancement into the cellular level of the material and felt it resist and then, gradually, give. The wood didn't seal — I wasn't repairing it, the same as I couldn't repair Rena's fractured hilt. But the grain tightened around the fracture like scar tissue. The channel pathways straightened. Not perfect. Maybe eighty percent. But the four-degree drift was gone.
Third pass on the channels themselves. They took it cleanly now that the structure was sound. Fourth pass. Fifth. I stopped there — blue-grade material, I didn't want to push to degradation.
I handed it back.
Sera took it. Held it. Her grip changed before she even consciously registered why — the balance had shifted, the buzzing scatter-feeling from the mana bleed was gone. She looked at me with an expression I didn't know how to classify.
"The four-degree drift," she said slowly. "It was the staff."
"Mostly."
"I've been compensating for four degrees of drift for eight months."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she opened her notebook and wrote something. Then she looked up. "Join your party?"
She was listening to the whole conversation, I thought. Of course she was. She was thirty feet away for three days, she heard everything.
"There's a test," I said. "Rena approves new members."
Rena was already shaking her head slowly. "She fixed her own aim by handing over the staff. That's the test."
"I'm setting a precedent here," I said. "We can't just let anyone—"
"She has A-rank INT and A-rank MGC at level nineteen," Rena said flatly. "She's in."
Sera wrote that down too. I had a feeling she was going to write everything down. I had another feeling I was going to find this insufferable and also occasionally useful.
"Welcome to the party," I said. "We're not calling it a party."
"What are we calling it?"
"I haven't decided."
Torvin raised his hand. "I vote 'The Golden Fist Brotherhood.'"
"No."
"The Iron Circle?"
"Also no."
"The—"
"I will decide later," I said. "Everyone get some sleep. We're doing a full Thornwood outer-ring clear tomorrow, and I need to enhance the scroll stock tonight, and Torvin if you suggest another name I will not enhance your shield next run."
Torvin closed his mouth. That was, I was learning, the most reliable lever I had.
That night I sat with the scroll stock spread across the floor of my rented room and worked through the enhancement passes one by one. Fifteen grey scrolls, six blues. My MP pool refilling between batches with mana tonics, the rhythm of it familiar now — push, feel it settle, push again, check the texture, stop before the structure starts to thin.
Five people, I thought, looking at the finished pile. I have five people depending on this prep. If I skimp here and something goes wrong in the field, that's on me.
I did not skimp.
By the time I finished it was past midnight and my MP was scraped to the bottom. I ate the last of the dried fish I'd been keeping in my pack, drank water, and lay down on a bed that was fine for this city's standards and deeply inadequate by mine.
One month ago I was asleep on a bus, I thought at the ceiling. Now I have a party I'm not calling a party, a skill that nobody understood, and tomorrow I'm taking four strangers into a monster-filled forest.
I thought about the status screen. The LUK stat of 3.
Fine, I thought. Fine. Let's see what three luck gets me.
