We left at dawn. The gate guard looked at us the way people look at a cart that's packed too heavy and going downhill. I understood the concern.

  Rena was in front — that was obvious, she'd been doing this for twelve years and moved through the Thornwood entrance like she owned it. Behind her, Torvin, who was humming something and had his shield on his back and his axe on his hip and looked genuinely excited to be here at this hour, which I found alarming. Then Sera, who already had her notebook out and was describing the tree density in writing while walking, which Yua was politely steering her around obstacles for. And me at the back, scroll pouches checked, elixirs checked, dagger at my hip, deeply questioning my recent decisions.

  Look at this, I thought. Look at what I've assembled. A woman who can't deviate from a plan, a man who can't follow one, a mage who was aiming wrong for eight months and is only now calibrating, a healer who'll get us lost on the way home, and me, the F-rank support character who's supposed to be holding all this together.

  We're going to be fine, I told myself.

  I don't believe that, I also told myself.

  The first hour was clean. We found a goblin patrol — three standard, one with a crude spear — and Rena handled them before I'd finished telling Torvin not to move. He hadn't moved. He'd watched with the attentiveness of someone taking notes, which I appreciated.

  The second hour was also clean. A razorwolf, solo, young. Rena read its approach from the underbrush and had positioned before it broke cover. Torvin anchored the line. Sera fired a Wind Cutter — clean, controlled, landed exactly where she'd aimed — and the wolf went down before it reached Torvin's shield.

  Sera stared at the result for a moment. Then she wrote something in her notebook. I was about ninety percent sure she wrote the words "confirmed: staff correction, not user error." I let her have that. She'd been carrying the wrong explanation for eight months.

  The third hour is when things got creative.

  The goblin camp we'd scoped from distance — eight goblins, one hobgoblin, fire pit, rough fortification made of branches and stolen crates — was supposed to be a clean sweep. Rena would go left, Torvin would hold center, Sera would suppress from range, Yua would hold back with me. Simple. I'd called it three times on the walk over.

  What I had not planned for was the second goblin camp fifteen meters behind the first one, which had not been on the guild map, which meant the map was wrong or they'd relocated, and which had a goblin shaman standing at the back wearing something that looked like a bone necklace and looking right at me with small red eyes.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Shaman, I thought. That's a shaman. That's the thing that disrupts scroll enhancement. That's my specific nightmare, the one thing I specifically mentioned to Rena before we left, and here it is.

  "Shaman, second camp, behind and right!" I called.

  Rena heard me — she was mid-swing on a goblin, adjusted her angle, registered the new information. Her two-second freeze hit. Which was fine, I'd accounted for it, but it meant she didn't take the flanking goblin that broke left toward Torvin's exposed side.

  Torvin didn't notice because he was already charging the hobgoblin, which was also not the plan, but I didn't have time to be annoyed about it because the shaman raised its staff and I felt my scroll pouches go cold. Not physically — the enhancement degrading, the efficiency I'd layered in last night starting to blur at the edges like ink in water.

  "Sera!" I snapped. "Shaman, twenty meters, bone necklace, take it now!"

  "I see it," she said, already turning, staff leveled. The enhanced conduit fed her output clean and straight. The Fireball left her staff with none of its usual slight left-drift and the shaman's bone necklace and everything attached to it stopped existing in a radius of about two meters.

  The cold feeling in my pouches lifted immediately.

  Okay, I thought, grabbing a Flash Bomb scroll for the flanking goblin that was now four feet from Torvin's back. Okay, the shaman went down, Sera's working, Torvin is somehow winning against the hobgoblin without tactics, Rena is back online—

  I activated the Flash Bomb in the flanking goblin's face from two feet away. It went down. I tripped over a root on my way back and caught myself on a crate and a passing swear word in Korean that I said at a volume that made Yua look over.

  "Are you hurt?" she called.

  "I'm fine, treat Rena's shoulder when you get a chance!"

  "I'm fine!" Rena said, which meant she wasn't but nothing was broken.

  Torvin finished the hobgoblin with a shield bash that I was not going to analyze because I didn't want to know, and then stood in the middle of two camps of downed goblins and spread his arms wide like he was accepting applause.

  "Yes!" he announced to the forest.

  "You charged without being told," I said.

  "The plan was taking too long."

  "The plan was thirty seconds in."

  "That's a long time when there's a hobgoblin right there."

  It is pointless to argue with Torvin about this, I thought. He did the right thing for the wrong reasons and he knows it and that's the most annoying outcome possible.

  "Next time," I said, "you tell me first. One word. 'Charging.' That's all I need. Can you do that?"

  He thought about it with genuine effort. "Yes. I think so."

  "Good."

  He charged the next three things without saying anything. But he did make a sound that I eventually recognized was him starting the word "charging" before the instinct took over. We negotiated it down to just the "ch" sound. It wasn't perfect. It was functional. That was the level we were operating at.