The Deputy Liaison's office was in a building adjacent to the guild complex, connected by a covered walkway that someone had decided to decorate with engravings of famous monster clears. I looked at them on the way through. None of them were recent. The most recent was forty years ago.

  The bar for famous is high and old, I noted. That's fine. That's good, actually. It means nobody expects the troll to end up on a wall anywhere.

  The office itself was clean, well-lit, unremarkable. Two chairs across from a desk. A window with a view of the guild courtyard. Papers organized with the precision of someone who used their space as a tool rather than a statement.

  The woman behind the desk was maybe twenty-five. Dark hair, practical clothes that could have been expensive but weren't trying to look it, a small pin on her collar that I'd seen in a book — the royal family's personal seal, not the administrative one. She had the particular stillness of someone who was genuinely interested in you and not performing it.

  That's not the Deputy Liaison, I thought immediately. That's someone using the Deputy Liaison's office.

  She stood up and extended a hand.

  "Park Junho," she said. "My name is Elara. I've been looking forward to meeting you."

  Oh, I thought. Oh, that's a problem. That's the princess.

  I shook her hand because not shaking it would have been worse. "The letter said Deputy Liaison."

  "It did. That was deliberate." She gestured to the chairs. "Please sit. I'll explain."

  I'm sitting across from the crown princess of Valdros, I thought, sitting down, in a guild meeting room, two months after her father threw me out of a palace with fifty gold coins. This is my luck stat in action. This is exactly what a three looks like.

  "The ministry letter was genuine," she said, sitting. "The C-rank assessment opportunity is genuine. I arranged both." She folded her hands on the desk. "I've been monitoring the Millhaven guild branch since eight months ago when a specific skill variant was flagged in a regional mana survey."

  "A mana survey flagged Minor Enhancement," I said.

  "Not the skill itself. A mana signature consistent with unstacked enhancement passes on a high volume of scroll and elixir items in a specific location." She paused. "Enhanced items produce a faint residual signature. A high concentration in a small area suggests either a very active standard Enhancer or something else. When the survey came back, I asked a contact at the Millhaven branch to watch for the source."

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She's been looking for me since before I arrived, I thought. Not me specifically. The skill. The signature. She found the signature in the survey and then I walked into Millhaven and started enhancing everything in reach and she followed the light.

  "Kelvin," I said.

  "He agreed to flag unusual enhancement activity. He didn't know why." She looked at me carefully. "I want to be clear: I wasn't watching for you. I didn't know who you were or where you'd come from. I was watching for the skill."

  "How did you know the skill existed?"

  "I didn't. I knew there were historical references to unstacked Enhancement variants — three documented cases in three hundred years of guild records, all pre-dating the current classification system. All three were recorded as significant." She picked up a thin folder from the desk. "When the troll clear report came in with an F-rank party registration, I read the full report. Your name was in it."

  The room was quiet for a moment.

  "You know who I am," I said.

  "I know you were assessed in the throne room and dismissed." Her expression didn't shift but the quality of the stillness changed. "I was not in the throne room that day. I would have asked different questions."

  Is that an apology? I thought. Or an explanation? Or both?

  "What do you want?" I said, because dancing around it wasn't going to help either of us.

  "I want to understand the skill's ceiling," she said. "Officially. With documentation and testing and proper records that don't exist yet." She opened the folder. "The sixty days Hadric gave you was at my request. I wanted this conversation before that report was filed." She slid a paper across the desk. "This is a research designation. It reclassifies Minor Enhancement as an unstudied variant pending investigation, which pauses the standard reporting obligation and routes any skill documentation through my office instead of regional channels."

  I looked at the paper. This keeps the skill data out of broader circulation while research is ongoing, I thought. It also puts her office as the gatekeeper for that data, which is either protection or control depending on how you look at it.

  "For how long?" I said.

  "As long as the research is active. Which is up to you."

  "What do you want in exchange?"

  "Your cooperation with documented skill testing. Access to the enhancement records your mage has been keeping. Nothing that limits your party's work or income."

  That's a light ask for significant protection, I thought. Which means there's a longer view here that I can't see yet, or the protection is less than it looks, or she actually just wants the data and hasn't decided what to do with it.

  "I want Sera's notes to stay with Sera," I said. "She documents, she retains originals. Copies to your office."

  "Agreed."

  "The party's work is ours. Not directed by your office."

  "Agreed."

  "And I want the C-rank assessment to be clean. No adjustments based on this conversation."

  She looked at me with something that might have been approval. "I was going to suggest that myself."

  She's smart, I thought. She's careful and she's smart and she was looking for this skill for eight months before I showed up, which means she's been thinking about it longer than I have, which means she's about three steps ahead of me on implications I haven't reached yet.

  "I'll agree to the research designation," I said. "With those terms."

  "I'll have the formal document ready this afternoon."

  I stood up. She did too.

  "One question," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "The throne room assessment. If you'd been there — what would you have asked?"

  She was quiet for a moment. "I would have asked how many passes the skill permitted."

  Yeah, I thought. That's the right question.

  "So would I," I said, and left.