The spatial ring sat comfortably on his finger, the earnings inside already exhausted. Theresa had her notes folded and secured. Her coat was on.

They were all set to leave.

Wobbly sat near the door, then bounced onto Dominic’s shoulder in one eager motion.

He tested the bond while she adjusted her coat. Becoming aware of the connection the way he’d learned yesterday. It was there. Steady and warm, easier to access now.

He looked up.

Theresa’s attention had already shifted to the door. Whatever crossed her face smoothed out too quickly for him to catch more than the fact that it had been there at all.

"Ready," she said.

"Yeah."

---

He spotted them at the junction two blocks from the guild district.

A cluster of people standing with the aura of ill intent. Attention angled toward the approach from two directions, distributed too evenly to be accidental. He’d spent three days learning to read exactly this kind of arrangement. It had kept him alive.

"Theresa," he said quietly.

"I know. I see them."

They didn’t slow.

The group saw them and came fast. Six of them. The same kind as before. Hired muscle. Closing in on what they took for easy targets.

The Brawler went for Theresa first. Moving her out of the way was the practical opening.

She stepped forward to meet him.

He reached her.

A force push threw him off his feet. He crossed approximately fifteen feet of street before landing. The impact cracked the cobblestones under him in a shallow radius and extinguished the mana lantern on the wall behind where he’d been standing.

The rest of the group lunged.

She used a binding spell to hold three of them simultaneously without visible effort. They froze mid-charge. With the binding locked in place, she walked past them the way you walked past furniture, then ran a low voltage lightning through the binding to their bodies. They foamed at the mouth. They wet themselves. They passed out.

Dominic had drawn on the bond reflexively.

His awareness found the warmth and the steadiness flowing in, and his body responded without requiring instruction. He moved differently now that he had strength to match his skill. Years of academy training finally showing fruit.

The two who’d broken toward him met the version of him that was different from the version they’d almost killed.

The first went down from an elbow across the jaw. It landed with considerably more than his own weight behind it. The second caught a shoulder and hit the ground. Before he could regain his composure, a punch with considerable force behind it landed cleanly on his chin. He went still.

The sixth turned and ran before anyone addressed him specifically.

Dominic stood in the street. Theresa beside him. The city moved around what had just happened with a certain Caldmore nonchalance, born from desensitization to adventurers and their messes. Someone on the far side of the junction glanced over, then went back to their business.

Wobbly had relocated to Theresa’s shoulder.

"They definitely weren’t expecting that," Dominic said.

The bond still hummed faintly under his skin, warm and steady, like Theresa’s presence had settled into his bones.

"Yeah," Theresa said. "Not so strong when they aren’t picking on the weak."

Dominic glanced at her with a resigned look. The corner of her mouth curved, faint and satisfied, before they continued toward the guild.

***

Alina clocked them the moment they crossed the entrance. She’d been instructed to always guide them in. She was already at the inner door before they reached the middle of the hall.

Frank was waiting in his office.

He looked at Dominic. Then at Theresa. His eyes moved across them both with a quick professional assessment, noticing the little details that others would have missed.

"Welcome in," he said, gesturing them to sit. "You walk like you were fighting on the way here." It came out almost as a joke.

Theresa set her notes on his desk.

"We’ll get to that in a minute," she said. "First, we have the report on the mission."

Frank looked at her for a moment. Then he sat back and folded his hands and listened.

She walked him through it from the beginning. The fog. The patrol patterns. The timing and the consistency that implied direction rather than wandering. The two entry points and why she’d chosen the mausoleum. The underground structure, its ceiling height and stone. The carvings she’d reproduced in the margin of her notes, which she turned toward him now.

He looked at them as she continued.

The alarm systems and how she’d read each one. The threshold she’d stopped at and why. Then the chamber.

She described it without embellishment. The scale. The ceiling lost in the miasma. The chimeras assembled from parts that had no natural relationship to each other. The piled corpses along the far wall. The miasma pulling toward a point deeper in the structure she hadn’t reached.

Frank went very still somewhere in the middle of the chamber description.

Dominic watched the older man’s face carefully. He’d seen that look before. The moment someone realized the problem was bigger than they thought.

Frank stayed that way until she finished.

Then he sat back.

"I need to report this to the capital," he said.

Then Dominic spoke.

He kept it clean and direct. Capital involvement meant royal officials and bureaucracy and paperwork moving through channels that took weeks. It meant credit going to whoever would finally supervise the operation rather than to the branch that had done the actual work of identifying the threat. Frank keeping it contained meant the reputation of having found and handled something of this scale stayed in Caldmore. That was worth considerably more long-term than one commendation from a capital office that would file it and move on.

Frank pushed back. The scale of what Theresa had described was beyond what he was comfortable authorizing without oversight.

Dominic held his position. They weren’t going in blind. They had the alarm system layout, the patrol patterns, and the underground map as far as Theresa had reached. That was more preparation than most official expeditions started with. And most official expeditions didn’t have what Theresa had.

Frank was quiet.

"I have three conditions," he said.

Dominic listened.

"You don’t engage beyond what you can handle without backup. The moment the situation exceeds your own capability, you pull out and I involve the officials. Regardless of what you want at that point."

"Understood."

"You set a time with me before you go in. If you’re not back above ground by that hour, I report. No exceptions and no extensions. Whatever you want at that point is irrelevant."

"Agreed."

"If the threat assessment changes, the capital option stays on the table. That’s not negotiable and I won’t revisit it."

"That’s reasonable," Dominic said.

Frank nodded. He reached for the paperwork. He gave them fifteen gold advance. Thirty-five on completion. He made and signed the commission, then pushed it across the desk.

Dominic looked at the number. Fifty gold total. He kept his face steady and picked it up.

Frank was still reaching for the next form when Theresa spoke.

Her voice stayed level. Precise. Controlled. Deliberate.

She acknowledged the arrangement was new. She understood they hadn’t had his support in place yet. And while she had spent four days in a graveyard on his private mission, Dominic had spent those same four days being hunted through the city by a bounty that had spread through the lower city and lured by a quest set by the guild. All of it happening within the operational range of this branch. All of it happening without Frank knowing.

Including this morning. On the way to his guild. In broad daylight.

She asked how they were supposed to have confidence in an arrangement that required his support if he couldn’t even be properly informed about what was happening two streets from his own desk. Or even his own establishment.

Frank said nothing for a moment.

The silence had a specific quality to it. Like he had just been handed a picture of his own blind spot and was looking at it directly for the first time. A guild he’d run for years, in a city he thought he’d had a complete grasp of. And yet he hadn’t known.

That meant either someone in his corner had been compromised, or he’d been running this branch too comfortably for too long. Or both. The possibilities sat in front of him. None of them was acceptable.

"You’re right," he said, turning to Dominic. "I apologize."

He meant it. He didn’t defend himself or look for justification.

"Going forward," Frank said, "I’ll personally make sure you’re not moving through this city without eyes on you." He looked at Dominic. "As of now, our arrangement is in order."

Dominic nodded.

Frank stood. Extended his hand and Dominic shook it.

Frank walked them out through the corridor and into the main hall and to the entrance himself. Several adventurers looked up as they passed. The same ones who’d noticed last time.

Outside, the guild district moved around them. Theresa adjusted her notes back into her coat.

The system opened quietly.

[QUEST ACCEPTED: INTO THE HOLLOW — GRAVEYARD FULL ENGAGEMENT]

[OBJECTIVE: INVESTIGATE AND NEUTRALIZE THE THREAT BENEATH THE GRAVEYARD]

[REWARD: +120 GT TOKENS ON COMPLETION]

[CURRENT GT TOKENS: 200]

[NOTE: SURVIVE FIRST. LOOT SECOND. IN THAT ORDER.]

He closed it and kept walking.

***

The apartment was quiet that evening. The kind of stillness that comes when the plan is set.

Maps and alarm and trap diagrams were weighted down on the table. He traced the route multiple times, committing the turns to memory. In the kitchen, Theresa stored up their kit: two intermediate healing vials, a length of rope, some concealment potions. Everything in its place.

Wobbly had found the corner of the underground map again.

"Leave it," Dominic said.

Wobbly left it, wobbling away slowly, relocating to the center of the table. Attempting to bask the team in its presence.

Theresa ran the sequence in her head. Dominic sat back and pulled at the bond, triggering the amplification and holding it. They spent the next hour cycling through the sync, grinding down the friction until it felt seamless. Everything needed to be second nature before the mission.

The apartment that night was quiet and ready.

And that was enough.