I
Nivlac had made it perhaps halfway across the hall toward the registration counter when a voice cut through the general murmur of the room — sharp, clipped, and clearly not in the mood to be reasoned with.
“I said I don’t need a support.”
He turned, along with a fair portion of the surrounding crowd, toward the source: a young woman in sleek leather armor, a short bow and sword at her hip, standing rigid in front of one of the counter clerks with the posture of someone who had already decided this conversation was over and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
A few nearby patrons had already adopted the studiously casual posture of people pretending not to eavesdrop while doing exactly that — one man had been refolding the same cloak for much longer than refolding a cloak should reasonably take.
II
“Miss Tal,” the clerk said, in the strained voice of someone who had clearly had this exact argument before and was hoping, against all evidence, that this time might go differently, “I understand your position, but most of the commissions currently available require a minimum party size of three to four, with at least one support-capable member.
Your current party consists entirely of damage-focused classes.”
“My party,” Tal said, “has done fine without one so far.”
“Your party,” the clerk countered, with the weary patience of someone reading from a script memorized through repetition, “has been taking commissions two full ranks below what your combined skill level would normally justify, specifically because you have no healing or buff capability to fall back on in an emergency.”
III
Eight years of monitoring escalating customer calls had left him with an almost involuntary instinct for situations like this — the particular pitch and rhythm of an argument building toward either a resolution or a genuinely bad decision, and the value, always, of understanding which was which before it happened.
“Then I’ll take the risk myself,” Tal said, crossing her arms.
“I don’t need some support cowering behind the front line, contributing nothing, and getting someone killed the one time it actually matters.”
The clerk opened her mouth to respond, then visibly reconsidered, glancing instead toward two figures standing a short distance behind Tal — a broad-shouldered young man with a greatsword strapped across his back, watching the exchange with the patient neutrality of someone who’d clearly witnessed this scene before, and a leaner young man with a bow, who looked considerably more uncomfortable, shifting his weight from foot to foot as though hoping the conversation might simply resolve itself without his input.
IV
“I take it,” Nivlac murmured, mostly to himself, “there’s a story behind that particular grudge.”
He hadn’t intended to be overheard, but the archer — close enough to catch the comment — glanced over, apparently more willing to engage than his teammates.
“You could say that,” he said quietly.
“Old party.
Didn’t end well.
She doesn’t really talk about it, but she doesn’t need to.
You can kind of tell.” He said this with the slightly furtive air of someone sharing information he probably wasn’t authorized to share, glancing once toward Tal to make sure she hadn’t overheard.
That single unprompted detail told Nivlac more than an hour of eavesdropping could have.
This wasn’t simple stubbornness or class prejudice — this was scar tissue, the kind that formed after something had genuinely gone wrong and had never been given the chance to heal properly. The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
V
He’d handled enough furious calls in his old life to recognize the shape of this particular kind of anger — the sort that wasn’t really about the thing being argued over, but about some older, unresolved wound that the current situation had happened to press against.
Reasoning with Tal directly, right now, in the middle of a public argument she was actively losing to a clerk, would accomplish exactly nothing.
If anything, it would likely make things worse, giving her one more stranger to direct her frustration toward.
Better, he decided, to watch.
To understand the actual shape of the problem before attempting to become part of its solution.
The clerk, for her part, seemed to be running out of patience-preserving phrases.
“Miss Tal, without a support-capable party member, I genuinely cannot authorize you for anything above your current commission tier.
That isn’t a policy I have any discretion over.”
Tal’s jaw tightened.
Whatever came next, Nivlac suspected, was going to matter a great deal more than either of them currently realized.