Chapter 207 — Back to Basics

Chapter 207: Chapter 207 — Back to Basics

The quest board looked different this time. Not because it had changed — same worn wood, same overlapping notices, same crowd of adventurers picking through it — but because Arlen was looking at a different section of it.

He skipped past the exploration postings entirely. Past the survey work, the "confirmed Awakened preferred" tags, everything that would’ve pulled him deeper than Floor Nine.

Subjugation. Escort. Gathering. That’s it. That’s the whole list today.

A handful of notices caught his eye as he worked down the board.

Rockslide clearance, Floor Two eastern checkpoint. Check rubble for nesting pests. Reward: 30 silver.

Guard escort, merchant supply run, Floor One to Floor Two outpost. Half-day. Reward: 20 silver.

Pest subjugation, Hollow Ant nest reported near Floor Three mining crew. Reward: 40 silver.

Cartography escort, Floor Four map update. Two days. Reward: 60 silver.

He glanced sideways at a different board entirely, the one nearer the tavern counter, where a surface-side merchant had posted a request for warehouse guards in the city proper — same rough shape of work, considerably lower pay attached.

Makes sense, I suppose. Nobody’s getting eaten guarding a warehouse.

"You’re standing in the wrong spot," Mina said, coming up beside him with a stack of paperwork under one arm. She wasn’t Greyhaven’s Mina — this Mina ran the outpost desk near the training wing — but she had the same brisk energy, and Arlen had started thinking of her the same way out of habit.

"Wrong how?"

"Confirmed Awakened, Novice realm, clearance mark on your badge — you’re standing at the beginner board like you lost a bet."

"I didn’t lose a bet."

"Then what."

He considered how much to actually say. "I went a little too far, a little too fast. Figured I’d come back and do this properly instead."

Mina studied him a second, then shrugged, unbothered. "Guild doesn’t care why. Pay’s the same either way." She tapped the rockslide notice. "This one’s decent. Rubble’s blocked a supply route, and something’s clearly moved into the gap since it came down."

"Thirty silver for that?"

"That’s Floor Two. Anything down here pays better than the same job would on the surface. Risk’s risk, wherever it’s rated." She said it like it was obvious, because to her it was. "You want easier work, you go work a warehouse up top for half that."

"I’ll take this one."

She pulled the notice, logged his name against it, and handed him the details without much ceremony.

He set out that same afternoon, and found the job exactly as unremarkable as advertised — a stretch of collapsed tunnel, a handful of loose Stone Beetles that had moved in once the rubble opened up a new pocket of shelter, nothing that asked more of him than a clean strike and a little patience clearing debris by hand.

It felt strange, honestly. Good strange. He’d forgotten what it was like to finish something without his hands shaking afterward.

He turned the job in the next morning, and took the escort contract the same day — walking a merchant’s cart between Floor One’s market stalls and Floor Two’s outpost, nothing more demanding than presence.

The merchant, a stout human woman named Corel, eyed him with open curiosity halfway through the walk.

"You don’t talk much for someone who signed up for company work," she said.

"Didn’t realize talking was part of the job."

"It’s not. Just unusual. Most guards either won’t stop talking or won’t start." She adjusted the strap on her cart. "You’re the quiet kind that’s actually listening, though. I can tell."

"Is that bad?"

"No. Just noticed it." She grinned. "You’ll do fine down here, if you keep noticing things instead of just swinging a sword at them."

He delivered her safely, and found himself smiling the rest of the way back — small thing, but it stuck with him.

He took the Hollow Ant job next, which turned out to be nothing more than someone overestimating a nest that had barely grown past a nuisance, and then the cartography escort, two quiet days trailing a mapmaker who updated an old Floor Four chart while Arlen mostly just watched the tunnel mouths for anything that wandered too close.

Sixty silver for that one. He was starting to understand the shape of it now — nothing here paid like exploration work, but nothing here asked what exploration work had asked of him either, and the two facts sat together easier than he expected.

He found Kellan at the shop one evening, dropping off a dented buckle for repair, and the dwarf glanced up from his work with a raised eyebrow.

"You’re keeping busy," Kellan said. "Different busy than before. Gear’s coming in clean, not chewed up."

"Different work. Slower stuff."

"Good. I like slower stuff. Means I’m not stitching your armor back together every two weeks." He set the buckle aside for later, studying Arlen a moment longer. "You look steadier than you did last time you were in here."

"I feel steadier."

"That’s worth something." Kellan went back to his forge without further comment, the conversation apparently finished on his end.

Arlen spent that evening at the Foxglove’s kitchen, working through a modest stew, and found Rilla watching him from across the counter with her usual quiet attention.

"You’re around more," she said.

"Sticking closer to home for a while."

"Good." She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask her to. It was the kind of good that didn’t need explaining.

Pella wasn’t quite so restrained. She dropped into the seat across from him uninvited, the way she always did, and studied him with open, unabashed curiosity.

"So you’re just doing normal jobs now? Like everyone else?"

"For a while, yeah."

"That’s boring."

"It’s supposed to be boring. That’s kind of the point."

"Still boring." She stole a piece of bread off his plate anyway, unbothered by her own complaint. "You’ll get restless. People like you always do."

"Maybe. Not yet, though."

He meant it. There was something settling about the rhythm — wake up, take a job, finish it properly, come home. No fissures. No creatures three times his own length deciding, unhurried, whether he was worth the trouble of chasing.

He wrote a short entry in his journal that night, the first in a while that didn’t carry the weight of a discovery or a near-death account.

One hundred fifteen silver this week, give or take, spread across four small jobs. Nothing that tested me past what I could actually handle. I think that’s exactly what I need right now — not less danger forever, just less danger than I’ve been choosing lately.

Floors One through Nine. Properly, this time. I’ll know when I’m ready to go further, because it won’t feel like guessing.

He closed the journal, and found himself, for once, entirely content with an evening that had nothing remarkable in it at all.