The ruins job came from a veteran adventurer named Osric who was too old for mid-ring work and too proud to say so. He'd been hired to clear a collapsed watchtower site of stone golems — three confirmed, possibly four — and had decided, with the logic of a man who wasn't going in himself, that subcontracting to a newer party was an efficient use of resources.

  He phrased this as an opportunity. I recognized it as a situation where someone didn't want to go in and had found someone willing to. I took the contract anyway because stone golems were C-rank and we were F-to-D and that gap was where all the interesting experience lived, and also because the pay was good and Rena confirmed she'd cleared golems twice before and survived both times.

  "Define survived," I said.

  "I'm here talking to you," she said.

  "That's not a definition, that's evidence."

  "It's sufficient evidence."

  Stone golems were immune to physical damage below B-rank force output, which meant Torvin's axe bounced off the first one and he stared at his axe with an expression of personal betrayal.

  I told him this would happen, I thought, from behind a broken wall twenty feet back where I was already running enhancement passes on the three Fireball scrolls I'd allocated for this fight. I explained golem resistances on the walk over. He nodded. He understood. And then he swung the axe anyway because the golem was right there and it was an instinct.

  "Torvin! Shield stance, hold it in place!" I called. "Sera, fireball on my mark — aim for the mana core, center chest, you'll see it glow when it moves!"

  Torvin activated Fortress Stance and became immovable approximately one second before the golem swung a fist the size of a barrel at him. The shield held. The impact was loud enough that birds left the surrounding trees. Torvin didn't move an inch.

  The golem's mana core pulsed orange at the center of its chest as it wound up for another strike.

  "Mark," I said.

  Sera's enhanced Fireball hit the core dead center. The golem didn't explode — it cracked, the stone fracturing outward from the core in lines, and then sat down heavily and stopped moving.

  Silence.

  "Hm," said Torvin, looking at his dented shield. "The axe should have worked."

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  "The axe can't work," I said. "Physical resistance. I said this."

  "I thought maybe it would be different in practice."

  It is never different in practice, I thought. Theory is the same as practice. That is why we have theory.

  "Next two," I said. "Same formation. Torvin holds, Sera targets the core. Rena, watch for the second one flanking — golems coordinate if there are multiples, they'll try to split our attention."

  Rena nodded. She'd already been watching the rubble to the left where I suspected the second one was waiting.

  The second golem broke cover exactly when I expected it to. Rena was already there — not to fight it, just to redirect, to make it chase her in a circle and buy Sera the targeting window she needed. Two Fireballs, one Fireball-Wind Fusion for the third golem that was larger than the others and shrugged off the first hit.

  The Flame-Wind Fusion was the first time I'd seen it work properly. It wasn't just a bigger explosion — the wind element spiraled the fire into something rotating and dense and when it hit the golem's core the heat got into the cracks first and then the force followed. The third golem came apart at the seams.

  Sera stared at the result. Her notebook was already out.

  "That," she said carefully, "was a forty-three percent force increase over standard Fireball at equivalent mana cost."

  "It looked like more," Torvin said.

  "Forty-three is more. That's considerably more." She was writing rapidly. "The spiral pattern is doing work I didn't model. The surface area of the fire contact is geometrically larger by—"

  "Sera," I said.

  "Yes?"

  "After. Can the math wait until after?"

  She looked up from the notebook. Around us, three destroyed golems. Dust settling. Nobody hurt.

  "There's a fourth one," she said.

  "What?"

  "The contract said possibly four. I've been tracking mana signatures and there's a fourth, smaller one, under the collapsed eastern wall. It hasn't moved. I think it's dormant."

  Everyone looked at the eastern wall.

  "You've been tracking mana signatures this whole fight?" Rena said.

  "I was also fighting. I can do multiple things."

  She was fighting, providing tactical information, and doing academic research simultaneously, I thought. This woman is going to be incredibly useful and also at some point she's going to get herself killed because she was writing notes during a B-rank encounter and I'm going to have to figure out a rule about that.

  "Good work," I said. "How dormant is dormant?"

  "Its core output is about eight percent of active. Unless something disturbs it significantly, it'll stay down."

  "We leave it," I said. "We report it to Osric and let the guild log it as a known dormant. Not our problem."

  Nobody argued. We collected the contract proof — a fragment of each golem's cracked mana core — and walked out. Yua treated a bruise on Torvin's shield arm that he hadn't mentioned. He thanked her with the genuine warmth he gave everything, which Yua accepted with the calm she gave everything, and I thought not for the first time that whatever else this group was, the way they treated each other was actually fine.

  Don't get sentimental, I told myself.

  I'm not getting sentimental, I told myself back.

  You're getting sentimental, said the part of me that had stayed up past midnight enhancing scroll stock for five people who didn't ask me to.

  I didn't answer that one.