The corridor felt different with Alina leading them through it.

"This way, please," she said, professional and unhurried, clipboard still tucked under her arm from the dungeon. She didn’t look at the main hall. Didn’t acknowledge the corner table or the voice that said something about Kane showing up again or the laughter that followed it.

Dominic didn’t either.

Theresa walked beside him, her boots making no sound on the worn stone floor.

Alina stopped at a door midway down the corridor and opened it. Plain room, wide table, good lighting, assessment tools along one wall—weights and lenses and a spectral reader that hummed softly in the corner. "Wait here. I’ll bring someone to look at what you have."

She left. The door closed with a quiet click.

The room was still.

Wobbly bounced off Dominic’s shoulder with a soft plup. It looked around the assessment room, found nothing worth eating immediately, and wobbled toward Theresa.

She looked down at it.

It looked up at her.

She picked it up without comment and held it in the crook of her arm the way you’d hold a cat. Wobbly made a contented noise and went still, completely satisfied with this arrangement.

Dominic watched this from the corner of his eye and said nothing.

The assessor arrived two minutes later. Middle-aged, efficient, with the detached professionalism of someone who had appraised a thousand hauls and expected this one to be no different. He looked at the table, then at Dominic, then finally at the spatial bag.

"Let’s see what you have," he said.

Dominic opened the bag.

What came out took a while to come out.

Core after core after core, organized by floor during the raid and now emerging in that order. The table filled. Then overflowed—cores rolling slightly before settling against each other with soft clicks. The assessor started processing them with automatic speed, picking up each one, reading the color, density, and size with practiced efficiency.

White cores from floors one and two. Small, pale, low concentration. Common but plentiful, the sheer volume of them covering the first section of the table in a carpet of faintly glowing white.

Then the floor three cores arrived and the assessor’s hands slowed.

These were different. Dark violet, deeper in color than anything from the previous batch, some of them trending toward deep purple at their centers. Dungeon affinity concentrated into crystallized mana, the dark substrate of the Caldmore dungeon pressed into physical form by creatures that had fed on it for years. The assessor held one up to the light and turned it slowly between his fingers.

"Floor three?" he asked.

"And below," Dominic said.

The assessor set it down carefully. Picked up the next one. That one was darker. The one after that was nearly black at its core with a rim of deep violet, dense enough that it sat heavier in the hand than its size suggested.

He set his tool down and stepped outside without a word.

The assessor returned with a second assessor—older, greyer, wiping his hands on a cloth. The second one looked at the table, said nothing for a long moment, and then both of them started working together. The scratch of their pens and the soft clink of cores being sorted filled the room.

Outside the assessment room, through the closed door, the adventurers in the main hall had no way of knowing what was happening. But a second assessor being called in was unusual. The hurried footsteps. The low murmur of voices behind the counter. A clerk walked past the assessment room door, glanced at it, and walked faster.

The final figure landed on the assessment sheet.

One hundred and fifty gold, after taxes.

The assessor read it back to confirm. Dominic confirmed. The guild’s standard cut was taken, documented, and receipted—the kind of formality that appeared when the numbers got large enough to warrant it.

Then Dominic set some gold coins aside.

"For the spatial bag," he said. "I took it on credit before the test. Fifty gold, agreed with your purchasing desk."

He counted it out on the table. Fifty gold coins, clean and precise, the same spatial bag that had made this entire haul possible now paid off in full from the haul itself. The assessor checked the credit record, confirmed the amount, stamped the receipt with a heavy thunk.

Roughly one hundred gold remained.

"Can I get the rest in a standard adventurer ring?" Dominic asked.

"Of course," the assessor replied.

He picked up the receipts and folded them carefully. The ring came across the counter—simple, functional, now holding eighty gold coins. Theresa was still holding Wobbly. Wobbly appeared to be asleep, making a tiny burbling sound with each breath.

Alina appeared at the door. "Ready to go?"

They followed her back into the main hall.

Frank Castle was already there.

He was standing near the counter with his arms crossed, and something in his posture made the nearby adventurers give him space. The branch manager did not make appearances lightly. His presence was usually reserved for urgent matters or important figures. Today, however, he stood waiting in plain sight, for an F-rank adventurer and the companion beside him. A man at the corner table set down his mug and didn’t pick it back up.

Frank looked at Dominic. Then at Theresa. Then back at Dominic. His expression was carefully neutral, but something behind it was working—the look of a man who had read a report he didn’t quite know how to file.

"Whenever you’re both available," he said. "The card will be ready. Come back and we’ll talk." A pause. "The both of you."

He held Dominic’s gaze one moment longer.

Dominic understood. The report had reached him. Whatever Alina had written in that clipboard had already changed something about how Frank Castle was thinking about the situation.

Frank looked like he wanted to say more, but he turned and walked back toward his office, the door closing behind him with a measured finality.

The main hall filled with low whispers.

The F-rank they’d been laughing at minutes ago had walked in with a guild receptionist, disappeared into the back, caused an unusual staff reaction, summoned a second assessor, and just had the branch manager come out personally to speak to him.

Dominic turned and walked toward the exit. Theresa followed, Wobbly still settled in her arm, eyes still closed.

Neither of them acknowledged the whispers they left behind.

Outside, the air was warm. Mid-afternoon now, the city moving around them in its usual rhythm—a cart loaded with barrels rumbling past, two women arguing over the price of fabric, a dog trotting down the street with a stick in its mouth.

"Next is the merchant quarter," Dominic said, and started walking.

Theresa fell into step. "What for?"

"Since we have the money for it, we need somewhere permanent to stay."

She considered this. "Purchase."

"Yes."

"Any reason why?"

"Proximity to you and the academy, since I can’t bring you to the dorms. Privacy. And a proper base of operations."

She nodded, finding his answer satisfactory as they continued walking.

***

The merchant guild was three streets into the merchant quarter. Cleaner than the adventurers guild, more quietly decorated—polished brass fixtures, thick rugs that muffled footsteps, the kind of building that dealt in significant money and didn’t feel the need to advertise it. A clerk assessed them both with trained neutrality and led them to a property agent.

His name was Bernard. Compact, precise, with the eye of someone who had been doing this long enough to know within seconds whether a client was worth his time.

He looked at Dominic.

He looked at Theresa, who was still holding Wobbly. Wobbly opened one eye, looked at Bernard, and closed it again.

"Do you have any requirements?" he asked.

"Two bedrooms minimum," Dominic said. "Ground floor access. Between the merchant quarter and the academy road. Private. Secure."

Bernard made notes. He looked at Theresa. "Anything to add?"

She thought about it with genuine consideration. "A study," she said. "With good light. East-facing if possible."

Bernard looked at her for a moment. Wrote it down.

They were shown three properties. The first was too open—windows facing a busy street, a shared wall with a noisy-looking tavern. The third was too far from the academy road. The second one was right.

It was mid-sized, stone-built, set back slightly from the street with a small walled courtyard at the front—a wrought-iron gate, a few overgrown herbs that had once been a garden. Upper middle-class area, quiet but not isolated. Two bedrooms with enough separation between them. A functional kitchen. Storage. And on the east side of the building, a study with two large windows that caught the afternoon light in warm golden panels across the bare floorboards.

Theresa walked into that room and stood in it for a moment. The light fell across her face. She didn’t say anything.

They went back to Bernard’s office to handle the contract. Forty-five gold for the purchase, outright. Dominic read the contract like someone who didn’t trust words, his finger tracing each line, while Bernard waited with the patience of a man who had seen far stranger clients.

It was during the reading that Dominic caught something from the corner of his eye.

Bernard had a paperweight on his desk. Heavy glass, hand-sized, the kind that caught light from multiple angles and probably cost more than it looked. Wobbly, who had transferred from Theresa’s arm to the desk at some point, was regarding it with focused and specific intent.

Theresa had noticed.

She was watching Wobbly as it made its move. Wobbly nudged the paperweight experimentally. It rolled. Wobbly followed it with enthusiasm—a soft wrrp of discovery. The paperweight rolled toward the edge of the desk with increasing confidence.

Theresa’s hand moved. Two fingers, smooth and unhurried, redirecting Wobbly gently away from the edge while her other hand settled the paperweight back in its original position. Wobbly made a noise of profound disappointment.

It looked at Theresa. Then wobbled directly into her hand instead.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she let it stay there.

Dominic had seen all of it. He signed the contract.

Bernard looked between the three of them and made the professional decision not to ask.

The furnishing commission took another hour. Dominic covered the essentials—bedroom furniture, kitchen basics, storage, decent lighting throughout. Theresa added three things quietly and specifically: a reading chair for the study, better lighting fixtures for the east windows, a low shelf near the entrance.

Eight gold for the furnishing. Total spent: fifty on the spatial bag, twenty on the ring purse, forty-five on the apartment, eight on furnishing. The remaining coin in his ring was more than he had ever held in one place in his life, and he was already thinking about what it needed to do next.

They walked back through the merchant quarter toward the inn as the sun began to set, the sky going orange above the rooftops.

***

At the inn, Dominic paid for one more night and counted out twenty silver coins onto the table between them.

"Two days of good meals and anything that comes up," he said. "The apartment should be ready by then. Frank wants us both, so we go together when I’m back."

Theresa looked at the silver. Then at him. "Heading to the academy?"

"Yes. I need to be there before tomorrow. I also need to collect my things and handle whatever needs handling."

She nodded. Wobbly had climbed from her hand to her shoulder at some point and was sitting there as if it was its place now.

Dominic looked at it. Then at Theresa.

"Keep Wobbly with you," he said. "It’s more useful than it looks."

Theresa glanced at Wobbly. Wobbly looked back at her with uncomplicated happiness.

"I’ll manage," she said.

He picked up his bag. He was at the door when she said his name.

"Dominic."

He stopped.

It was the way she said it. It made him feel like his name mattered. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.

"This is just a start," she said. "I expect that you have a plan for the coming days."

He looked at her for a moment.

Nodded.

Then he left.

***

The carriage back to the academy road took forty minutes through the evening city. Dominic sat with his bag between his feet and watched the merchant quarter give way to wider streets and then the long academy wall in the distance, lit at intervals by iron lanterns that cast pools of orange light across the cobblestones.

He reached into his coat and took out his crest card.

He looked at it for a long time. The weight of it. The familiar size of it. Three years of carrying this card and knowing exactly what it said on the back.

He turned it over.

[E - RANK. SUMMONER.]

He stared at it. One rank upgrade. The smallest possible increment, but an increment nonetheless.

[CREST CARD UPDATED: E-RANK REGISTERED]

[EXP GAIN FROM SUMMONED HEROINE ACTIVITY: RECORDED]

[NEXT PULL AVAILABLE NOW]

[COST: 500 GT TOKENS]

[LIMITED BANNER "FALLEN CIVILIZATIONS" STILL ACTIVE — +30% SSS-RANK CHANCE ON NEXT PULL]

He sat back in the carriage seat and looked out at the academy walls getting closer in the evening dark. The dungeon floor. The system text hanging in the air above him while the cold reversed itself. Theresa forming out of the light. An apartment, his apartment, being furnished in the city.

The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.