The ambient chatter of the bustling Silver Sieve Guild hall seemed to register at a lower frequency the moment Lisa took action.
Her polished armor clanked softly against the mahogany counter, drawing a sharp, synchronized focus from the entire rookie squad.
Lisa rolled her eyes playfully, a small smirk breaking through her tough exterior as she stepped aside, gesturing to the group behind her.
“Anyway, meet my new gang.”
The casual warmth of the room evaporated in an instant.
Flair’s eyes narrowed, her amiable expression instantly shifting into a strict, highly analytical gaze.
She slowly leaned over the counter, scanning the trio with an intense, unblinking eye.
Karen and Kaelen immediately grew uncomfortable, stiffening under the weight of her evaluation, fully expecting a harsh, system-level judgment.
Suddenly, Flair’s face lit up in absolute ecstasy.
“Oh my good Lord, Lisa!” Flair squealed, clapping her hands together.
“You are the luckiest girl in the entire world!
You’ve got an elf, a legendary familiar, and a rogue bandit in your ranks!
This is going to be one heck of a party!”
Kaelen’s executive composure instantly cracked, his hand slamming onto the counter as he intervened.
“Hold it!
I know it’s all good and all, but with all due respect, I am not a bandit.
I am not.”
Flair blinked innocently, tilting her head.
“Oh!
I’m so sorry, I didn’t know…
Mr.
Mercenary Guy?”
Kaelen’s veins practically throbbed against his temple, his anger spiking.
“I am not a mercenary either!”
“Oh,” Flair tapped her chin.
“Then…
what exactly are you?”
“I’m Kaelen,” he snapped, crossing his arms.
“I am Kaelen.”
Flair blinked, her face looking completely oblivious as she tilted her head to the side.
“You’re a Kaelen?
What’s that, some sort of rare clan or an ancient race?
Where exactly do Kaelens originate from?
Are you from the Northern continent, or the Western continent, perhaps the Southern continent or—”
Kaelen’s executive composure completely detonated, his face turning a dark shade of crimson as he boiled with pure anger.
“NO!
NO!” he yelled, his voice echoing off the guild’s high stone walls as he threw his hands up in absolute frustration.
“Kaelen is not a race or a certain kind of people, okay!
It’s my name!
My name, you hear me?!”
Flair immediately bowed her head in an elaborate, deep apology, though a tiny mischievous spark glinted in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Kaelen!
I honestly thought you were a high-risk mercenary because of that dark, mysterious cloak you’re wearing.
My bad!”
“It’s fine,” Kaelen muttered, looking aside with a sharp huff.
Lisa sighed, stepping in to formalize the introductions.
“Flair, officially meet the squad.
The one with the glasses, yes, the shy cute one standing right there, our half elf, is called Karen.
The rogue mercenary in a bandit cloak is Kaelen—”
“Heyyy!” Kaelen interrupted, glaring at Lisa for reinforcing the mercenary label.
Lisa immediately got flustered, her hand flying to the back of her head as she let out a mischievous, playful chuckle at his annoyance.
Shaking it off with a grin, she quickly cleared her throat and continued:
“—and last but not least, the cat sitting on Kaelen’s bag is—”
CRASH!
Before Lisa could finish the data stream, a loud, shattering sound echoed across the reception hall.
Pixel had spotted a tiny tavern rat sprinting along a nearby shelf and had initiated a high-velocity pursuit, completely knocking over a beautifully decorated ceramic jar.
“Pixel!” Kaelen and Lisa shouted in perfect, terrified unison.
The cat froze on the shelf, a live mouse pinned firmly under her paws, its tiny body squirming frantically in a desperate bid for freedom.
Her tufted ears fell completely flat against her head, her face twisting into a look of absolute, unadulterated guilt.
“You don’t even eat rats anymore,” Kaelen sighed in a thoroughly frustrated tone, crossing his arms as he stared up at the shelf.
“C’mon.”
Oh…” her telepathic voice drifted sheepishly into Kaelen’s mind, completely stripped of its usual aristocratic status.
Pixel slowly lifted her front paws, deliberately looking anywhere in the room except at Kaelen.
Beneath her pads, the terrified rat instantly scampered away to run for its life— squeaking consecutively in a high-pitched tone, as if it was loudly protesting the entire ordeal—as it scrambled frantically until it disappeared into a hole in the wall.
Pixel watched it vanish, her tail giving a single, rigid twitch.
She nervously tucked her front paws under her chest, sinking low into the shelf as she offered a tiny, forced feline squint.
“I was merely…
testing my high-velocity tracking metrics, Master.
A true apex predator must keep her sensory grid calibrated.
It was a strictly administrative capture, I swear.”
Kaelen’s face flushed in a flustered panic as he turned back to the desk.
His voice cracked slightly, losing its usual calculated composure as the words tumbled out in a high-velocity, anxious rush.
“I am incredibly sorry about that!
She’s usually more disciplined—I can assure you this is an anomaly in her system parameters—” He practically choked on his own words, his throat tight with the terrifying realization of what an administrative penalty for property damage might cost them.
Flair’s dead eyes lingered on the destruction for a fraction of a second before a faint smirk played at the corner of her lips.
The cold facade cracked just enough to reveal a gleam of pure mischief.
She immediately saw an opportunity to completely shatter the stoic boy’s remaining sanity and tease him into oblivion—and she decided to seize it with absolute relish.
In that instant, Flair’s face had gone completely, utterly strict.
The playful aura vanished, replaced by a cold, terrifying administrative authority.
She looked at the shattered pieces of the expensive jar on the floor, then at Pixel—who was desperately avoiding all eye contact, her ears pinned completely flat as she tried to shrink her entire feline frame into the shadow of the shelf—and finally locked her dead eyes straight onto Kaelen.
“You…” Flair said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register that seemed to sap the very warmth out of the reception lobby.
The bustling ambient chatter of the surrounding guild hall instantly died down, as if the nearby adventurers had collectively sensed a lethal apex predator locking onto its prey.
“That jar was an incredibly rare, imported historic artifact,” she continued, her words cutting through the heavy silence like steel.
“It cost exactly five gold coins.
Your cat broke it.
‘Sorry’ is not going to cut it, Mr.
Kaelen—you are going to have to pay for that damage in full.”
The sheer weight of the financial penalty hung in the air like a physical suffocating fog, dropping their rookie squad’s collective status straight down to absolute zero before their journey had even officially begun.
Kaelen’s mouth literally dropped open, his brain processing the massive financial deficit.
“Five…
five golden what?!”
Lisa stepped up beside him, her face grim as she added the economic metrics.
“Five gold coins, Kae…
that is equivalent to a full year’s salary if one is working full-time as a Rank E adventurer.”
But as she spoke, Lisa’s sharp eyes caught the microscopic twitch of a smirk on Flair’s lips.
She instantly picked up on the receptionist’s tease.
Recognizing a golden opportunity to knock her overly serious rookie down a few pegs and humble his calculating ego, Lisa decided to play along without missing a beat.
She turned her head toward him, her expression deadpan and heavy with mock despair.
“We are talking about hard labor, Kaelen.
Sleep deprivation.
Debt bondage.
They might make you scrub the guild toilets with a toothbrush for the next fifteen months just to break even.”
Realizing she had completely ruined their logistical budget and functionally enslaved her master to a lifetime of corporate toilet duty, carrying heavy crates for elite adventurers, scrubbing stained potion cauldrons, and running endless humiliating coffee errands across the city for free, Pixel slowly crept backward on the shelf.
Her ears were pinned so flat they merged with her skull as she attempted to hide her entire body behind a large glass bottle, her wide, yellow eyes staring out in sheer horror.
Kaelen’s entire profile instantly turned black and white, frozen in absolute, monochrome animation despair.
His brain completely short-circuited under the weight of the astronomical pickle his cat had just put him in, the cold, calculating Architect persona entirely erased by financial ruin before he could even register his first quest.
Suddenly, Kaelen’s legs completely gave out under the crushing weight of the imaginary debt.
His knees hit the hard floor with a dull thud as he collapsed forward, barely supporting himself with his trembling hands.
The room around him seemed to blur into a dark vortex of financial ruin.
Five gold coins…
the words echoed like a death knell inside his hollow chest.
That is really a lot of money.
I couldn’t even make that much even if I worked eight months nonstop without a single break…
The sheer terror of the thought completely broke his spirit.
Images of endless, unpaid, grueling labor flashed before his eyes.
The horrific idea of scrubbing disgusting guild toilets with a tiny brush, running mundane errands for condescending senior adventurers, and risking his life on high-stakes, endless missions for absolutely zero profit was too much for his mind to handle.
His high-tier strategic vision had been reduced to a life sentence of manual labor before his career could even launch.
He stared blankly at the floorboards, his posture entirely defeated as his lips trembled.
Suddenly, Flair burst out into a loud, ringing chuckle, slapping her hand against the polished counter so hard the remaining paperwork rattled.
“Gotcha!
Hahaha!” Flair laughed, leaning over the desk and pointing a finger straight at Kaelen’s frozen, colorless face.
“Oh my gosh, you should have seen the look on your face!
It was absolutely priceless!
Your soul literally left your body!”
Karen and Lisa instantly let out a massive, synchronized wave of laughter, holding their stomachs as the immense tension in the air dissolved into pure, chaotic comedy.
Kaelen remained stiff as a board, slowly processing how thoroughly he had just been played by a receptionist and his own knight captain.
Slowly, the monochrome despair bled out of his profile, and his frozen expression shifted into one of profound, breathless relief.
His shoulders dropped as the crushing weight of a lifetime of financial slavery evaporated.
But the relief was short-lived.
A sudden, sharp pulse of pure irritation throbbed against his temple as the reality of the situation clicked in his mind.
He had been completely, utterly played.
His eyes snapped open, any remaining panic hardening into a cold glare.
Pushing himself up from the floor, he shot an icy look of deep disappointment straight at Lisa—who was still practically wiping tears of mirth from her eyes—before pivoting his gaze to lock an even frostier, dead-eyed stare of absolute betrayal right onto Flair.
“I’m just kidding!” Flair giggled, waving her hand lightheartedly to wipe away the final remnants of her terrifying act.
“It’s nothing, it’s completely okay.
The jar was just a cheap replica we put out for display because rookie adventurers knock things over every single day.
I mean, you didn’t actually think we’d put such a valuable, historic artifact right here in the lobby hall where everyone is received, did you?
The real ones are locked safely in the vault upstairs!”
Kaelen didn’t answer a thing.
Instead, he rose from the floor with an eerie, deliberate slowness.
His posture straightened into a rigid, imposing frame, completely silent as he shot absolute daggers straight at Flair.
The sheer intensity of his frosty, unblinking glare seemed to drop the temperature behind the desk by several degrees.
Flair’s triumphant smile began to falter under the weight of his stare.
Realizing her joke had crossed a line and wasn’t the least bit funny to him anymore, her giggles completely died out.
She cleared her throat awkwardly, shifting her weight as the playful atmosphere vanished.
“Right…” Flair coughed into her fist, completely sobered up as she raised her hands in a defensive, placating gesture.
“Okay, okay.
I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”
Kaelen let out a massive, trembling sigh of relief, his color returning, though his face immediately shifted into a deeply pissed-off pout for being tricked so flawlessly.
Pixel, wiping a literal drop of sweat from her furry forehead with her paw, sighed telepathically.
“Phew, my administrative survival metrics almost—oops.”
In her relief, Pixel’s paw accidentally nudged the glass bottle she was hiding behind.
Clatter…
smash!
The bottle rolled right off the shelf and shattered into a million pieces on the stone floor.
Instantly, Kaelen, Lisa, Karen, and Flair whipped their heads around, shooting a freezing, icy-cold, synchronized look of pure death straight at the feline.
“NOT AGAIN!” they all screamed in perfect unison.
From a dimly lit corner of the guild hall, an adventurer sitting at a table groaned loudly, slamming his tankard down.
“C’mon!
That bottle contained my healing potions!”
A female adventurer sitting across from him crossed her arms, glaring toward the front desk.
“This is the second time that furball has broken something today!”
“That potion cost me a fortune!” the first guy snapped, throwing his hands up in the air.
“Whose cat is this?
They’re gonna have to compensate me!”
Hearing the mounting outrage, Kaelen immediately grabbed the edges of his cloak and pulled his hood low over his face, looking straight down.
He began to casually whistle an aimless tune, entirely pretending to read the mission paperwork Lisa had put on Flair’s desk as if he were just an innocent bystander who had never seen a cat in his entire life.
Flair turned her eyes away from the broken glass and fixed them on the whistling boy, her tone entirely serious this time.
“Well…
you’re probably gonna have to pay for that, you know.”
Kaelen froze, his whistling cutting off abruptly.
Without lifting his hood, he muttered a tense, strained question.
“How much?”
“It costs about a month’s pay of an E ranked adventurer ,” Flair replied flatly.
The words felt like a literal iron nail being driven straight through Kaelen’s heart.
His brain automatically calculated the devastating logistical deficit of giving up a full month’s hard-earned income just to compensate for a liquid spill, and his face paled into a ghost-white complexion beneath his hood.
Pixel jumped back, her fur standing completely on end in pure terror as she realized she was once again the target of the guild’s collective wrath.
But seeing the cat’s genuine, wide-eyed fright and Kaelen’s instant, secondary soul-crushing despair, the entire group burst out into a massive, roaring fit of laughter.
The angry adventurers in the corner started snickering, and Lisa and Karen practically doubled over.