Four weeks after the troll clear, he called me into his office and put a form on the desk.
"Pale Coin is operating at D-rank average," he said. "Troll clear puts your combat achievement above that. I'm initiating a formal assessment for party rank advancement."
I looked at the form. This is not something I asked for, I thought. This is him deciding something without consulting me, which is technically within guild protocol, which means I can't object to the process, only to the outcome.
"What does the assessment involve?"
"Combat evaluation, skill demonstration, contract history review. Takes about two hours. If you pass, the party rank moves to D. Individual ranks stay where they are until personal assessment."
D-rank party would mean access to higher-paying contracts, I thought. It would also mean higher-rank guild scrutiny, which means more people paying attention, which is the thing I've been trying to avoid. But we've already got the troll clear on record so the scrutiny is coming regardless.
"When?"
"Tomorrow. Morning."
Not a lot of notice. "Who conducts it?"
"Guild assessor from Valorheim. Regional office sends one quarterly. He's here for the week." Kelvin's expression was neutral in the specific way of a man who had arranged something on your behalf and was waiting to see if you were going to be grateful or annoyed. "He specifically asked to see Pale Coin after reading the troll report."
Of course he did, I thought.
The assessor's name was Hadric and he had the manner of a man who had assessed a lot of adventurers and was no longer surprised by anything, which I respected, and the eyes of a man who was currently fairly surprised by several things, which I found amusing.
He watched our combat demonstration with a group of training dummies the guild used for assessments and wrote things down. He watched Rena run a solo drill and wrote more things. He watched Torvin's Fortress Stance hold a weighted impact test and wrote things with slightly more urgency. He watched Sera's enhanced Fireball hit the marked target three times in a row, precisely, and stopped writing for a second.
Then he looked at me.
"Enhancement demonstration," he said.
I enhanced a grey scroll in front of him. Three passes, visible improvement in the mana density when he tested it with his assessment stone.
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"Again," he said. "Different item."
I enhanced a dagger from my belt. He tested the edge with his stone. Wrote things.
"And your rank is F," he said.
"Correct."
"Your skill level is five."
"Correct."
He looked at the dagger. Looked at his assessment stone's reading. Looked at me. He's doing math, I thought, and the math isn't coming out the way the classification system told him it should.
"Minor Enhancement has a standard ceiling of approximately thirty percent improvement at skill level five," he said.
"Does it."
"The edge improvement I'm reading on this dagger is approximately eighty percent above base material quality."
"Interesting."
He looked at me with the expression of a professional who had just identified an anomaly and wasn't sure what to do with it yet. "The stacking mechanism," he said.
He's heard about it. "The skill has no cap," I said. "Multiple passes compound. I've documented the rate progression if you want the data."
"I want the data."
I gave him Sera's notes. She had been keeping meticulous records since week two. He read for four minutes without speaking, turned a page, read four more minutes.
"This should be in a report to the regional office," he said.
"Is that required?"
"It's strongly recommended."
That is not a no. "I'd rather it wasn't," I said. "At least not yet. We're still in the early stages of understanding the skill's ceiling."
He looked at me over Sera's notebook. "You're asking me not to report an undocumented skill variant with potentially significant combat implications."
"I'm asking you to delay until we have complete data. Which Sera is generating. Which she will share with the regional office when it's ready." And when I've had time to figure out what the implications of that report are before anyone with more resources than Hadric starts making plans around my skill. "The report will be more useful with complete information."
He thought about it longer than I expected. Then he closed the notebook and handed it back. "Party rank assessment result: D. Pending formal report on skill documentation within sixty days." He stood up. "Your mage's Fusion technique is also underdocumented, for what it's worth. You might want to get ahead of that one too."
I looked at him. He's giving me sixty days as a professional courtesy, I thought. He's assessed enough to know what this is worth and he's choosing not to step on it before it's fully developed.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me. Get me the report in sixty days."
D-rank party. I told the group that evening over the worst beer Millhaven had to offer, which was the only kind it had.
Torvin made a sound like a victorious horn and knocked over his drink. Yua righted it without looking up. Rena allowed herself a very small expression that was adjacent to satisfied. Sera updated something in her notebook.
D-rank, I thought, looking at them. We're a D-rank party. Two months ago I was killing magic rats for twenty copper.
I opened my status screen quietly under the table so nobody would see me being sentimental about it.
Level: 8
HP: 260 / 260
MP: 200 / 200
INT: 22 (E)
SKILL: Minor Enhancement Lv.5
RANK: F
LUK: 3 (F)
Still F, I thought. D-rank party, F-rank registered member. Still F.
I closed it.
"Next round's on the party fund," I said, because Torvin was going to suggest it anyway and preempting him was the only way to control the damage.
He looked delighted. Everyone looked at me.
Don't get sentimental, I told myself.
I already was. That was becoming a permanent condition and I had mostly stopped fighting it.