Ch.14
The pharmacy was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. Tucked between a weapons repair shop and a boarded-up storefront on the west side of the main avenue, Miach Familia's place had a hand-painted sign that was starting to peel and a front window displaying potion bottles on a cloth that had been washed until the color gave up. The door was propped open with a brick.
The shop smelled like herbs and something chemical and sharp. Shelves along the walls held rows of healing potions, mind potions, antidotes, stamina supplements. Most of them were labeled in a careful hand that didn't match the state of the shop.
The girl behind the counter was asleep.
Brown hair, dog ears flat against her skull, chin resting on her palm. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was slow and even and she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with one sleeve longer than the other, covering her right hand completely. A bell on a string had jingled when I walked in. She hadn't moved.
"I need healing potions."
One purple eye opened. Looked at me. Closed.
"Three of them. If you're selling."
Both eyes opened this time, slow, like the effort of consciousness was costing her personally. She straightened up from her lean and blinked at me with drowsy deliberation.
"Welcome to Miach Familia Pharmacy." Her voice was flat and dreamy. "How can Naaza help you."
The period was audible.
"Three healing potions. What's the price?"
She looked me over. White hair, red eyes, practice bruises on my arms, dried sweat on my collar. A Level 1 who'd been training hard and needed medical supplies. Her dog ears lifted.
"For an adventurer of sir's caliber..." She reached under the counter and produced three bottles, standard size, blue-green liquid. She was already arranging her face into a mournful, pitiful expression while she set them down. "Eight hundred valis each."
I picked up the nearest bottle and held it to the window light. Standard healing potion. Decent quality, clear color, good consistency. Five hundred valis on the open market.
"The potion's worth 500." I set it back on the counter. "You're charging 800." I looked at her. "The sad eyes are good, though."
The mournful expression froze mid-formation. The sleepy droopiness was still there but the manipulative sweetness underneath had locked up.
"Sir..."
"Five hundred's fair. I'll take three."
She stared at me. Her dog ears had gone stiff, pointed straight up instead of the relaxed droop. Nobody called her out on the markup. They either paid it out of guilt, feeling sorry for the small Familia in the run-down shop with the peeling sign, or they haggled with frustration. Nobody stood there looking entertained.
She put the three bottles on the counter. "Fifteen hundred." Her voice had lost the dreamy quality. Flat. Direct. She took my money and counted it with precise fingers, the left hand doing the work while the right stayed tucked against her body under the long sleeve.
"One more," I said. "At eight hundred."
She stopped counting. Looked at me.
"For the performance." I put the extra coins on the counter. "It was almost convincing."
Her purple eyes were fully awake now, no trace of the sleepy act, and she was staring at me with a focus that had nothing drowsy about it.
"Who does that?" she said. It came out before she meant it to.
"Bell Cranel. Hestia Familia." I picked up my potions. "I'll be back."
She was still standing behind the counter when I reached the door. Her right hand, the one hidden under the long sleeve, had come up to rest on the counter's edge. The sleeve shifted. Silver at the wrist, a glint of metal joints, before she tucked it away.
Outside, the morning was getting busy. Adventurers were filtering toward the Dungeon entrance and street vendors were setting up carts along the avenue. I pocketed the potions and headed for the Guild. My arms ached from training and the bruises Ais had given me were starting to stiffen under my sleeves. The jaw bruise had settled into a dull throb that pulsed when I chewed.
I passed an armor stall where a dwarf was polishing a chestplate and muttering numbers to himself. A cat-girl sitting on a barrel was braiding another cat-girl's tail.
Eina was at her counter when I got to the Guild. She saw me and held up one finger without stopping her conversation with the adventurer in front of her. The finger said: don't go anywhere.
I waited by the wall. Misha walked past carrying an armful of ledgers, her pink hair coming loose from its tie.
"She's been waiting for you," Misha said, tilting her chin toward Eina. "She has a whole folder."
"A folder?"
"A folder. With tabs." Misha grinned and kept walking.
When Eina finished, she waved me over and led me to one of the private booths along the side wall. She pulled the curtain closed behind us. Small table, two chairs, a lamp that needed oil.
She sat down and opened a folder on the table between us. It had tabs. Misha hadn't been kidding.
"Bell." She adjusted her glasses. "I've compiled your Dungeon submission records over the last month."
"You compiled?"
"I compiled." She turned the folder toward me. Charts. Numbers. Exchange totals plotted by day in her handwriting, small and precise. Floor progression mapped against a timeline. A separate page comparing my growth rate to average Level 1 benchmarks.
"Eina, did you make graphs?"
"The data warranted visual representation." She said it with a straight face. Her pen was on the table beside the folder, the cap still off. She'd been adding notes before I arrived.
I looked at the charts. My curve went up and to the right at an angle that no Level 1 had any business hitting. The benchmark average was a gentle slope. Mine was trying to leave the page.
"This line here," she said, pointing to a dotted line she'd drawn across the chart. "That's the fastest recorded Level 1 progression in the last decade. A Ganesha Familia adventurer who had support from his entire Familia and mentorship from the captain. He reached Floor 10 in three months."
"And me?"
"You reached Floor 10 in twenty-four days. Solo until recently. With a one-person Familia and no captain." She pulled out a second sheet. "I also cross-referenced your exchange records with the Guild's monster-stone density tables. The volume of stones you're bringing back per hour is consistent with a high-D-rank Agility adventurer, minimum. You registered as I-rank."
She'd done a lot of work on this. The folder had weight to it, physical weight, pages of analysis and comparison. Eina working late at her desk, building a case she didn't want to build.
"People are going to notice," she said. "People who pay attention. Guild supervisors. Other Familias. Gods." She tapped the chart where my curve separated from the average. "Right here is where your haul exceeded the top 5% of Level 1 adventurers. That was ten days ago. You've doubled it since."
"I know."
"You know." She looked at me. Her emerald eyes behind her glasses were steady and worried and tired. "Do you know what happens to adventurers who attract attention before they're strong enough to handle it?"
"They get recruited. Or pressured. Or targeted."
She closed the folder. Rubbed her eyes.
When her hands came down, her glasses came with them. She set them on the table between us, and for the first time I saw her face without them.
Her features were the same but without the glass and the frames, she looked younger. Softer. The professional architecture that the glasses built on her face was gone and what was left was a woman with tired green eyes and a crease between her brows from worrying about adventurers who kept going deeper than they should. She rubbed the bridge of her nose where the frames had been sitting. There were small red marks where the pads had pressed into her skin.
In the booth's dim light, with the curtain drawn and the Guild noise muffled behind it, she looked tired in a way that the glasses had been hiding. Her half-elf ears were bare without the frames beside them. She was close enough across the small table that her knee was an inch from mine.
"I'll be careful," I said.
She looked at me. Without the glasses, the look landed differently. Her eyes were greener than I'd realized, a lighter shade near the iris that the lenses had been muting this entire time.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it."
She held my gaze. Then she reached for her glasses and put them back on, and the professional composure resettled across her features. But her cheeks were pink, and she picked up the folder and pressed it against her chest. Both arms wrapped around it.
"I'll hold off on submitting the report for now," she said. "But Bell. Please. Slow down."
"I'll think about it."
"That's not the same as saying yes."
"No. It's not."
She made a small sound through her nose. Her ears were pink at the tips. She gathered the folder and stood up and pulled the curtain open, and the Guild noise flooded back in. She straightened her uniform. Adjusted her glasses one more time. Professional.
"Your next advisory session is Thursday," she said. "Don't miss it."
"I won't."
She walked back to her counter. I watched her go. The folder was still pressed against her chest.
The Hostess was half-full when I came in for dinner. Anya was running plates. Chloe was leaning on the bar watching a group of adventurers at the far table. Syr waved from behind the counter and saved me a seat.
Ryuu served me.
She set the plate down with her usual precision and stood beside the table for a beat longer than the delivery required. Her eyes moved across my arms, my jaw, the darkening marks visible below my rolled sleeves.
"You have new bruises," she said.
"Training."
"With whom?"
"Ais."
Ryuu went still. Her face didn't change. But her eyes sharpened.
"She doesn't train people," Ryuu said.
The words carried the weight of someone who knew exactly what it meant for the Sword Princess to make an exception, who understood what Ais Wallenstein giving her time to a Level 1 she'd met a month ago said about both of them.
"She trains me," I said.
Ryuu looked at my bruises. At the one on my jaw where the reverse grip had connected. Her lips pressed together and released.
"The bruise on your jaw. That technique is a close-range finishing strike. She wouldn't use it in teaching."
"She stopped holding back today."
Ryuu was quiet for a moment. Her sky-blue eyes were steady and assessing and old, and for a second the Level 4 adventurer showed through the waitress uniform. The woman who'd killed her way across Orario's underworld and knew what combat at Ais's level actually looked like.
"Be worthy of it," she said. Then she turned and went back to work.
I ate my dinner. The stew was good. Syr refilled my water once and her fingers touched mine on the cup and stayed a beat too long. Anya stole a roll off my plate. A drunk dwarf at the corner table was telling the same story for the third time and nobody was stopping him.
The bruises on my arms were darkening and the evening was warm and somewhere in my head, behind the stew and the noise and the Hostess's familiar clatter, I kept seeing Eina's face without the glasses. The lighter green. The younger look. How the professional mask came down when the frames went on and how it hadn't quite settled back the same.
I paid my tab and walked home through streets that smelled like cooking fires and rain that hadn't come yet.