Chapter 73: New Official Request

"Your contribution?"

Frostbloom blinked, genuinely baffled, looking Alexis up and down. "Your stats aren’t bad, sure, but against a berserk boss you were barely scratching its defenses. What exactly were you contributing?"

"I" Alexis floundered, nothing safe to say surfacing fast enough.

I can hardly tell her I spent half that fight as a sword.

SilentDrifter caught the look on her face and apparently drew his own very wrong conclusion, because his mouth curved into something entirely too knowing.

"Ohhh. I think I get it, boss." He dragged the word out, grinning. "You handled things from the back while the big guy handled the front, and together you two really brought the house down. Teamwork."

Farshot and Frostbloom both lost it at once, laughing hard enough that Frostbloom had to brace herself on his shoulder.

Alexis’s face went dark, a vein ticking visibly at her temple. "You think you’re funny?"

"You’re hitting level 31 today," she snapped at SilentDrifter, "or you’re not logging off to sleep tonight."

"Wait, what?"

He froze, the laughter dying fast. Progression got harder the deeper into the game anyone pushed, and the gap between 30 and 31 wasn’t a gentle one.

Even riding on Kael’s coattails through the entire instance, he’d only barely scraped level 30 before the Hollowgale Tyrant’s final wind attack had instantly killed him and knocked him straight back down to 29.

Hitting 31 inside a single day, starting from that hole, bordered on physically impossible.

"Boss, come on." He gave her a pained smile, somewhere between pleading and resigned.

"You could kill me twice over and I still wouldn’t make that number today."

Alexis hummed, unmoved, and a flicker of light bloomed over her palm. She drew out the three skill tomes the Tyrant had dropped and pressed them into his hands without ceremony.

"Here. Two B-rank, one A-rank. Think that changes the math?"

SilentDrifter’s eyes went wide, breath catching as he registered exactly what he was holding. Tomes like these could shift an entire build’s ceiling overnight. ℯℯ𝑙.

"Consider it handled," he said, already grinning again, pulse visibly quickening. "If I’m not level 31 by midnight, I’ll personally make sure Farshot stays single for the next ten years.

I’ll start a betting pool. I’ll make flyers."

"I’m sorry, what?" Farshot’s head snapped around. "What does any of this have to do with me?"

Frostbloom, meanwhile, had latched onto something else entirely. "Wait those skill books actually dropped off the boss?"

"What else came out of that fight? There has to be more, right?"

When Kael and Alexis finally walked them through the full count eighteen separate items off a single kill all three went slack-jawed at once.

"Eighteen? From one boss?" Frostbloom pressed a hand to her chest, scandalized. "That thing was practically giving stuff away."

The news about the two guild-founding tokens landed even harder. Comprehension dawned across all three faces at once, followed immediately by pure, unfiltered excitement.

"We actually got one? We can found our own guild now!"

"Second guild on the entire server do you know what that means?!"

Frostbloom nearly tackled Alexis in a full-body hug, practically vibrating with excitement.

Kael watched the moment with mild, detached amusement, pulling up the game’s screenshot function on reflex and capturing the scene before it passed a small, dry habit from a life spent documenting things worth remembering, nothing more deliberate than that.

Once the celebration settled, Kael moved on to dividing the spoils properly.

Ninety percent, as agreed. The guild token alone was worth more than that cut on its own, a fact Alexis clearly understood, because she didn’t push back on a single item simply handed over the full haul and started buying back what Evertide Studios could actually use with gold instead.

Kael covered the cost of SilentDrifter’s three tomes himself, a small enough gesture against the scale of everything else that had come out of tonight.

The rest of the Legendary-grade gear, though, sat well beyond what Evertide Studios could absorb in one sitting not for lack of money, but because a roster this size simply didn’t have enough bodies to equip it all at once.

After some visible internal math, Alexis gritted her teeth and committed half a million gold, spent on eight carefully chosen Legendary pieces plus a stack of Gold-tier gear to round it out.

With the deal closed, she said her goodbyes and headed straight back toward Frostwatch, already impatient to get the guild officially founded.

Kael still had his own surplus to move. He pulled up his contacts and fired off a message to Marcus Webb.

Kael: Got another batch ready. Interested?

Marcus Webb: Absolutely. We’ll take every piece, whatever the volume.

The reply landed inside a single second fast enough, and earnest enough, to say plenty on its own. Official channels didn’t move that quickly, or commit that completely, without real confidence behind the decision.

It also said something about exactly how deep that official backing actually ran.

Between the Ring of Infinite Fortune’s warped odds and Kael’s own drop rate, every run out of the city came back with a haul that bordered on absurd value high enough that even Alexis’s conglomerate-backed studio couldn’t absorb it all in one sitting.

Only an entity with government-level resources behind it could credibly promise to take everything, no cap, no hesitation.

Kael East Gate Square. Same as before.

He cracked a return scroll and made his way back to Frostwatch.

Three figures were waiting when he arrived Marcus Webb and Casey Doyle, both familiar faces by now, and a third he hadn’t met before.

A level 28 mage going by Chosen Mage, trailing close beside Doyle with the kind of persistent, ingratiating chatter that clearly wasn’t landing the way he hoped.

Doyle’s expression sat somewhere between irritated and resigned, the look of someone who’d given up trying to shake an unwanted tagalong somewhere around the third unsolicited compliment.

With the groundwork from their last deal already in place, and whatever professional embarrassment Doyle was currently nursing kept carefully out of the negotiation, this transaction moved fast.

Kael shared his full sell list, official evaluators ran the numbers, and a price came back that he accepted without argument.

The guild token stayed off that list entirely. An item carrying this much weight deserved its own negotiation, separate from a bulk equipment sale.

Before he could raise it himself, Marcus Webb beat him to the point.

"One more thing, boss separate from the gear." His tone shifted, just slightly, into something more deliberate. "There’s another matter the official team wanted to put in front of you directly."

Kael’s eyes narrowed a fraction. Whatever this was, it hadn’t been part of the plan either of them had walked in with tonight, and in his experience, anything the official team felt the need to raise separately from a routine transaction usually carried more weight than it first let on, whatever friendly packaging it happened to arrive in.

"I’m listening," he said, and waited, running through every possible shape that request could take before Webb even opened his mouth to explain what it actually was.