The moon was well up by the time they made it back to the Drunken Fox. Nicole peeled off toward her aunt's tavern with a wave, and Gareth and Luna climbed the stairs together, splitting off at their separate doors without much ceremony.
Alone in his room, Gareth showered, dropped onto the bed, and pulled up his status without really meaning to.
[Name: Gareth Draventhal]
[Aura: Tier-3 Grand Knight, 1-Star]
[Mana: Tier-3 Archmage, 1st Circle]
[Talent Grade: F]
[Passive: Unbound Path]
Nothing new. He hadn't expected anything new, not this fast, but he found himself checking anyway.
Holding hands today. Maybe more, given time.
With a system like this backing him, patience felt less like a virtue and more like a strategy. He closed his eyes, still half-smiling, and let sleep take him.
Next door, Luna sat by the window drying her hair, her gaze drifting to the leather jacket draped over her chair, the one Gareth had given her in the mine when the cold got to her shoulder wound. She'd forgotten to give it back.
Or maybe she hadn't forgotten at all.
She folded it and set it in the drawer instead of handing it back the next morning, telling herself it wasn't worth the walk down the hall this late.
She didn't examine that thought any further before sleep found her too.
The month that followed blurred together into a rhythm of quests, more E-rank jobs than either of them could count by the end of it, subjugations, escorts, the occasional job that turned out to be more complicated than the posting suggested. Some days they ran three quests before sundown. Other days, one job ate the whole day and left them dragging by evening.
They took on D-rank work too, when it paid enough to be worth the risk. Gareth led those, Luna backing him with spellwork, Nicole watching their flanks and calling out anything that moved wrong. None of it came easy. The easy contracts belonged to crews who'd been working Northwind for years and had first pick of the board.
The worst of it came at a set of ruins southeast of the city, a job that should have been a straightforward D-rank clearing and turned into something closer to a real fight. A Tier-3 lizard, thick-hided, with a stare that didn't quite turn flesh to stone but slowed it down enough to matter. Gareth took a tail strike across the ribs before Luna blinded one of its eyes with an ice spell and gave him the opening to finish it.
He spent the next full day recovering in bed.
"If a mid Tier-3 does that much damage," he said, staring at the ceiling, "anything stronger and we're not walking away clean."
Luna didn't look up from the spellbook she was reading by the window. "Which is why I kept telling you to stop chasing every D-rank posting on the board. The odds of running into something like that are low. Not zero."
He couldn't argue with that. A Tier-3 beast wasn't just stronger than a Tier-3 human, its whole body worked like armor a blade barely wanted to bite into, and its raw physical output sat somewhere closer to what a Tier-4 human could put out. If they hit something even tougher without room to retreat, that gap might be the difference between walking away and not walking away at all.
After that, they eased back toward E-rank work. Lower pay, but steady, and nobody came home bleeding.
By the end of the month, Gareth had climbed from Black Iron to Bronze. Nicole made the same jump alongside him. Luna had already been sitting at Bronze before any of this started, and the climb to Silver needed a stack of D-rank kills that, realistically, none of them were ready to chase yet.
One evening, the three of them crowded into Gareth's room around a table stacked with coin.
Gold, silver, copper, sorted into neat piles that caught the lamplight in a warm yellow glow. Accounting night, as Nicole had taken to calling it, half joke and half genuine excitement every time it rolled around.
Gareth finished tallying his own stack and looked up. "What have you two got saved?"
Luna produced a small leather pouch from inside her coat and emptied it onto the table without ceremony. All gold and silver, no copper at all.
He counted it twice to be sure. "That's, what, a hundred and seventy gold?"
"Two years of saving. Not much." She said it plainly, like it wasn't worth remarking on.
He gave her a look. For an 8th Circle mage, that was a genuinely impressive number, mages usually burned through half their earnings just keeping themselves stocked on spellbooks and mana draughts. Saving that much meant either relentless work ethic, real discipline about spending, or both.
"My turn!" Nicole dropped her own pouch onto the table with enough force to send coins rolling. Mostly silver, a handful of gold, a scattering of copper mixed in.
"About twenty-five gold," Gareth said after counting.
"Three years of pocket money," Nicole said, chest puffed out with pride. "Don't laugh, that's not nothing."
He didn't laugh. For someone who'd only recently broken into Tier-2, that was its own kind of remarkable, even accounting for the fact that some of it had probably come from the aunt who ran her tavern rather than quest work alone.
Last, he tipped out his own pouch. Ninety-three gold, most of it earned this month, the rest whatever was left from the system's starter funds after a month of living expenses.
He wrote the total on the paper in front of him. "Two hundred eighty-eight gold, combined."
He looked at Nicole. "You said you'd ask around about land. What'd you find?"