Sweating and out of breath, Vee helped his friend into the office and tumbled to the floor. He gasped, doing his best to catch his breath. The adrenaline that had been surging through his body was fading now, and with its absence came his own sensations of pain. His knees felt as if they’d been sanded, and when he tried bending his right wrist back, he almost cried. Making a trip to a [Healer] jumped up several spots on his to-do list.

[Might +1]

Well, that was something, at least. More of a tin lining than anything, but heck, Vee would take it. Sitting up, he looked over at Alforde. The armorsoul was sitting next to Dheart and looked tired, but he gave Vee a reassuring thumbs up with his intact gauntlet.

“Stop looking at me like I’m about to die,” Alforde said with a laugh. “I’m not made out of glass, Vee. I’ll be fine. My arm doesn’t even really hurt anymore.”

Sure enough, the black smoke coming out of Alforde’s stump had slowed to a trickle and looked like it would soon stop completely.

“How bad is the injury?” Reginald asked.

“Other than the obvious, I can’t say for sure,” Alforde said. “It’s hard to tell how severe the cracking to my upper arm is just by looking at it. I think I’m going to need to use [Armorsoul Diagnostics].”

“How long do you think you’ll be out?” Vee asked. [Armorsoul Diagnostics] was a special skill that sent an armorsoul into a trance-like state while they assessed the extent of their injuries. Vee hadn’t ever seen Alforde use it, but he’d read in the histories of the Old Mad King – who’d been the first to summon and bind armorsouls to do his bidding over five hundred years ago– that the diagnostic process could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

“It shouldn’t be too long,” Alforde said. “The damage is serious but it’s pretty localized. I don’t have to worry about examining like my legs or anything like that. Hopefully I’ll be done in a couple hours.”

“Take as long as you need,” Vee said. “In the meantime, Reginald and I will discuss what to do about the dungeon.”

Alforde nodded, and his eyes vanished into his helmet as he activated his skill. His body slumped a little bit, and every now and then a strange wheezing sound fluttered out of his wounded arm.

Vee looked up at Reginald and saw that the hat was staring at him. “What’s on your mind, boss? It looks like you’ve got a bone to pick.”

“I don’t want anything like this to ever happen again,” Vee said. As he talked, he found that his words started coming faster and he clenched his fists. “I knew that Norog was bad news, and I wanted Alforde to forfeit, but you talked me out of it.”

“No, I explained why forfeiting was a bad idea and you agreed with me,” Reginald said. He spoke slowly, with the tone of a parent explaining something to a child for the thousandth time.

“Same difference,” Vee said. “I would have kept the fight from happening if you hadn’t warned me off it.”

Reginald’s gaze darkened into a glare and his voice changed once again. The next time he spoke, he sounded much older.

“Are you seriously trying to blame this on me? Gawain’s balls, Vee, you’re such a child! Allow me to explain how the world works. My job as your [Majordomo] is to tell you about things that you might have missed or not considered properly, and that’s what I did. Your job as [Dungeon Master] is to take what I say into account and overrule me if necessary if its what’s best for Crestheart. If you’re serious about preventing something like this from happening again, you’re going to have to get more comfortable with doing that. A leader who doesn’t take responsibility is no leader at all.”

An angry retort jumped to the tip of Vee’s tongue, but he bit it back. Reginald was right. He should have overruled him and made Alforde forfeit the fight. Or, barring that, he should have prevented the battle from starting once he saw that neither combatant had taken the SSB. As crappy as it felt to admit it, both of those were things he could have done and the consequences for failing to do either rested solely with him.

He wrestled with that realization, trying to find a way to ignore it the way he’d ignored dozens – if not hundreds – of similar thoughts over the years, but came up short. Maybe that was a good thing.

“You’re right,” he finally said, and that was that.

[Guts +1]

For once, Reginald didn’t start crowing or gloat at all. He simple twitched his brim and changed the subject to how the dungeon was going to operate while Alforde recovered.

“We can just run as a two-floor dungeon for a while,” Vee said. “Unless there’s an easy modification we can make to the champion’s arena to turn it into some sort of trap or puzzle room.”

“Well, if that’s an option I could challenge adventurers to a trivia battle down there. I know all sorts of random crap!” Reginald said. His voice had returned to normal, and Vee had to smile at the silliness of his suggestion.

“I don’t think many adventurers would go for that,” said Vee.

“Probably not, boss, but it’s an idea, right?”

When Alforde woke up a few hours later, he announced that the damage to his arm was bad enough that it’d take almost two months for him to heal on his own. That was more time than they were willing to lose – even without the looming specter of repaying Sacre – so the trio decided to head to the armor and weapon shop where Alforde had originally bought Hammy and see if they’d be willing to sell Alforde a replacement forearm and gauntlet.

The shop was small and cramped, but Vee couldn’t help but like it as he followed his friend inside. The sound of hammering was coming from the back of the room, but it wasn’t loud enough to be distracting. If anything, it was oddly satisfying. Clink, clink, clink!

Things were stacked tightly together, but they were well organized: swords and shields were on the left wall, polearms and other weapons were on the right, and full suits of armor were neatly arranged near the back.

A tall man with brown skin and silver hair looked up from the counter and smiled at the sight of Alforde.

“Mister Alforde! It’s lovely to see you again! How’s that hammer treating –“

He stopped when he saw the armorsoul’s injury. “You’re going to want Glenda,” he said. Turning his head to the back of the shop, he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Honey, there’s a customer here for you!”

“Just a second!”

A few minutes later, the sound of hammering stopped, and a woman dressed in sooty clothes came out front. She was slightly darker than her husband, and her muscular shoulders and arms were covered with geometric tattoos.

After Alforde showed her his wounded arm, she directed the armorsoul to sit down on a small stool near the counter, and went back the forge to retrieve a magnifying glass.

“Well, now, it’s been almost nine years since I last worked on one of your kind,” she said as she started her examination. However, it soon became obvious that the years hadn’t caused her skills to get rusty in the slightest. Like a bee traveling between flowers during a nectar flow, she gracefully moved from one spot after another. Occasionally, she touched some part of Alforde’s arm, rubbing her thumb and index finger across the metal, or jotted down notes in a small pad beside her.

Though Vee had no idea how, the examination took almost twenty minutes. Alforde’s arm wasn’t that big!

“I can see why you want a replacement,” Glenda said. “But in my professional opinion you’re better off going all the way up to the pauldron. Some of the cracks run up that far anyways. Damage like this doesn’t just happen randomly. What exactly were you doing?”

Alforde explained his battle with Norog, and both Glenda and her husband – whose name was Jared – swore and spat at the end.

“What a vile creature,” Glenda said as she shook her head. “May he have a thousand years of bad luck! So, what do you think? Full arm replacement?”

“Hmm. That’d be nice,” Alforde said slowly with a look at Vee. “But that’s probably more fleurs than we—”

“Don’t worry about the cost,” Vee interrupted. He met Glenda’s eyes and nodded. “We’ll pay whatever it takes to get him fixed up.”

“That’s good,” she said as she stood back up. “Do you have any ideas about what you want? I know it’s not the way you would have probably liked to do it, but this is a perfect chance to get an upgrade if there’s one you’ve had your eye on.”

Alforde looked at Vee again. The [Dungeon Master] waved his hand.

“Well,” Alforde said. “I was thinking that I’d like to maybe try some frostnickel…”

Leaving Alforde, Glenda and Jared to work out the details of the armorsoul’s new arm – his tolerance for matters of metal was woefully sparse – Vee decided to go to the adventurer’s guild. His knees were burning with every step as his scraped skin rubbed against his pantlegs, but he grit his teeth and moved on. The [Armorer]’s curse had given him an idea.

After taking a number and waiting to be seen, Vee walked up to the [Receptionist] and put his hands on the counter.

“How can I help you?”

Vee leaned forward. “Is there a way to file a complaint against an adventurer?”

It quickly became apparent that the [Receptionist] couldn’t answer Vee’s question, but she referred the [Dungeon Master] to a higher ranking employee who could.

This man, a thin and spindly fellow wearing a white shirt with red sleeves, listened to Vee’s tale with a serious expression – and the added benefit of [Detect Lie] and [Detect Falsehood] – before sighing heavily at the end. He reached up and rubbed the bridge of his thin nose, and Vee couldn’t help but notice a few prominent hairs sticking out of the left nostril.

“That is extremely disappointing,” he said. “Refusing to adhere to the rules of a champion battle is a serious offense, as is intentionally causing such harm to a [Dungeon Champion]. I want to assure you that the guild takes this type of thing extremely seriously. It might be a day or two, but I promise you that we’re not going to just let this pass.”

“What are you going to do?”

“As much as we can. Since we’re not his home office, our options are slightly limited, but Norog Stonegief won’t be allowed to take any jobs from our board for the next year. I’m sure the other branches in the area will agree to do the same. I’ll also write a letter to the branch at New Sally right away and ask that they sanction him officially.”

“What does that mean?”

“Should they choose to do so, an official sanction would prevent the adventurer from completing any formal dungeon runs for a period of three years.”

Vee whistled through his teeth. A year of no adventurer work in the area and possibly three years of not being allowed to enter official dungeons seemed like a good place to start, but he heard the caveat in the man’s words. Should they choose to do so.

“Is that unlikely to be the case?” he asked.

The man shook his head and steepled his fingers. “Sadly, the guild branch in New Sally has been…disorganized lately. There are rumors of staff discontent and managerial incompetence. Sadly, I don’t know if there’s any truth to them, but I will admit that there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll ignore our request.”

Drumming his fingers on the desk, Vee nodded. “Well, if that’s the case, I might have to consider other options then.”

This earned him a pair of raised eyebrows. “Other…options, sir? Surely you aren’t thinking of doing anything…rash, are you?”

“Rash? Certainly not,” Vee said as his mind started racing a mile a minute. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

The man’s voice turned to nothing but garble as Vee sank into his thoughts. He was going to make Norog pay, even if it took years. Nobody hurts my friend like that.

He politely waited for the droning voice to pause, and then held up his hands.

“If the guild branch in New Sally won’t take action in this matter where it’s obvious that an adventurer has violated the rules, then I’ll have no choice but to take matters into my own hands,” Vee said. “There’s nothing rash about that, is there?”

When the man couldn’t answer, Vee thanked him for his time and left.

As he walked back towards the armor shop, Vee started to come up with a plan.

[Plotting +1]

[Congratulations, you are now a Guy-Who-Takes-Things-WAY-Too-Far Level 4!]

“Hardly,” Vee said. “If anything, I have the opposite problem.”

Main Character Sheets:

Vee Vales:

Primary Class: Ghost Maestro (Locksmagister University), Level 22

Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 11

Tertiary Class: Guy-Who-Takes-Things-WAY-Too-Far (Self), Level 4 (+1)

Might: 9 (+1)

Wit: 28

Faith: 18

Adventurousness: 6

Ambition: 9

Plotting: 14 (+1)

Charisma: 5

Devious Mind: 15

Leadership: 12

Guts: 7 (+1)

Intimidating Presence: 6

Citizenship: 5

Alforde Armorsoul:

Primary Class: Hammer Afficionado (Self), Level 17

Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vales), Level 10

Tertiary Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), Level 10

Additional Class: Clunker (Vee Vales), Level 3

Might: 24

Wit: 10

Faith: 23 (+1)

Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vales): 7

Endurance: 11

Intimidating Presence: 7

Heart of a Champion: 2

Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 3

Vigilance: 4

Reginald:

Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???

Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 36

Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vales), Level 7

Additional Class: Announcer (Vee Vales), Level 3

Might: 1

Wit: 27

Faith: 8 (+1)

Ambition: 24

Greed: 21

Deceptiveness: 30 (-2)

Manipulat#$%@: &8

F%^*#@: ~

[*#&$#*#&$--#@$--]

Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 2