The capital was bigger than I remembered.

  I'd been here exactly once, for about four hours, on the day I was exiled. I'd spent those hours on a bench with my status screen open and my school uniform slowly attracting stares. The city had been background noise that day — cobblestones and market stalls and medieval smells, all of it filtered through the specific fog of someone who has just been publicly rejected and is doing triage on their situation.

  Coming back as the leader of a D-rank party on a royal ministry invitation was a different experience.

  It's still cobblestones and market smells, I thought, looking at the gate entrance from the back of the cart. But I have silver in my pouch and a price sheet and an assessment appointment and the troll clear on record, so at least I have relevant context now.

  Torvin had his head out the side of the cart the entire last hour of the trip looking at the approaching walls. Yua had her eyes closed and was, I suspected, mapping the route mentally in a way that would serve her zero purpose because she would still get lost inside the city the moment we departed from a straight line. Sera was writing. Rena was watching the road with the alert stillness of someone who had been ambushed leaving a capital city before and had opinions about city gates.

  "Inns first," I said, as we came through. "Guild branch registration. Assessment isn't until tomorrow."

  "Food," Torvin said.

  "After registration."

  "Can registration be food?"

  "No."

  "I just think—"

  "After," I said. "Torvin. After."

  He subsided. The city swallowed us in the particular way that large cities swallow things — the noise, the crowd, the specific smell of too many people and their animals in a walled space. The guild branch was near the center, massive compared to Millhaven's, with a queue of adventurers out the door that suggested this was a normal Tuesday here.

  I need to not run into anyone I know until I understand what's happening with the ministry letter, I thought, as I stepped off the cart. I need us registered, settled, and briefed before anything else happens.

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  We walked into the guild.

  Jang Hyunwoo was standing at the main desk.

  Of course he was, I thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone who had a LUK stat of three and had made the mistake of forgetting it for a moment.

  He was in partial armor — training gear, not field equipment — with the guild's combat evaluation stamp on his sleeve that meant he was here on official Hero training business. He looked up from the desk at exactly the wrong moment and his eyes landed on me and went through approximately four emotions in two seconds.

  He settled on something I didn't immediately recognize because Hyunwoo's face did not historically produce that expression. It looked like discomfort with a side of something that was trying to be embarrassment and hadn't quite gotten there yet.

  "Park Junho," he said.

  "Jang Hyunwoo," I said.

  Rena appeared at my shoulder. Torvin appeared behind her. Sera appeared with her notebook already open. Yua had drifted two feet to the left and was examining the guild's notice board with slightly too much focus, which I recognized as her way of pretending to be somewhere else.

  The queue moved around us.

  "You're the troll party," Hyunwoo said. He said it with the tone of someone who had processed this information before arriving at the desk and was still processing it.

  "We are," I said. "Pale Coin. You've been following guild reports?"

  "Everyone's following guild reports." He said it quickly, which meant the Heroes had specifically been following our reports, which meant someone had told them to, or they'd started on their own after word of the troll got around. "You cleared a six-year—"

  "Troll. Yes."

  A pause. He looked at Rena. At Torvin, who was taking up a significant amount of space just by existing. Back at me.

  "How," he said.

  "Skill and preparation."

  "With Minor Enhancement."

  "With Minor Enhancement." I held his eyes. "Were you expecting a different answer?"

  He looked away first. That was new. Hyunwoo had never been the type to look away. I filed it away without making anything of it, because making something of it right now in a guild queue with four people watching was not the situation I wanted to have whatever this was going to eventually be.

  "The training's going well," he said, to the middle distance between us.

  "Good," I said. "Excuse us. We need to register."

  I moved past him to the desk. The party followed. I didn't look back.

  That, I thought, is going to come up again. I don't know when. But that expression on his face was the beginning of something, and I'm going to need to decide how I want to handle it before it arrives.

  I gave the desk clerk our party name and appointment details.

  "Pale Coin," she said, checking the register. "You're flagged for priority intake. Deputy Liaison's office confirmed your arrival slot for tomorrow."

  Priority intake, I thought. So she knew we were coming today. Knew specifically.

  "Thank you," I said, and felt the large moving thing get a little closer.