Three weeks later. Skill level five. The plan written out, tested in theory, explained to the party four times with diagrams that Sera improved and Torvin folded into a pocket and definitely didn't read again.

  The plan was simple. Simple plans were the only kind that survived contact with this group.

  Torvin draws the troll's attention and anchors it with Fortress Stance at the base of a natural choke point — a gap between two large rock formations that the troll would have to face forward through, which limited its swing arcs. Rena flanks to harass and keep it from thinking. Sera fires enhanced Fireball in three-second intervals targeting the regenerative tissue on its back and shoulders. I maintain scroll supply, call Sera's targets, and keep the fire arrows coming from behind cover. Yua holds the rear with healing priority on Torvin, who was going to take hits.

  "The troll regenerates," I said, going through it the fourth time. "We can't out-damage the healing with physical strikes. We win by volume of fire damage over time — disrupt the tissue faster than it can cycle. If we sustain the rate, the regeneration starts failing around the twelve-to-fifteen minute mark."

  "And if we don't sustain the rate?" Rena asked.

  "Then we retreat and try again with more scrolls."

  "You have a retreat point planned?"

  "Yes. The split in the rock formation forty meters back. The troll is too wide to follow through at speed, it'll have to go around and we gain eighty seconds minimum."

  She nodded. She liked plans that had exits. I'd learned that about her.

  Torvin raised his hand. "Can I charge it at the start or do I walk?"

  He's asking, I thought. He's actually asking first. That's growth.

  "Walk," I said. "We need its attention on you from the beginning, not you arriving so fast it pivots to someone else. Walk in, get its eyes, get to the choke point. Then you can be immovable."

  "Walk," he confirmed, with the air of someone making a genuine commitment. "I can do that."

  The walk to the mid-ring was quieter than usual. Everyone thinking. I'd enhanced the full scroll stock twice over — the most I'd ever pushed the preparation. My MP pool was nearly full and I had four mana tonics for the fight. Torvin's shield was at the highest I'd ever pushed a piece of equipment, the iron feeling almost different under my hands — denser, more resolved, like it had decided what it was.

  The troll was where the recon said it would be. It found us first, actually — caught Torvin's scent and turned toward us with a sound that was less a roar and more a statement of intent.

  Torvin walked toward it. This required visible effort. He walked, at a pace that was technically walking, across forty meters of open ground while an eight-foot regenerating monster oriented on him, and he got to the choke point, and he raised his shield, and he activated Fortress Stance.

  "Now," I said.

  The troll hit the shield like a door hitting a wall. Torvin did not move.

  Rena went left, drawing one of its arms. I was already counting — first Fire Arrow scroll activated, feeding enhanced charges in three-second intervals the way I'd practiced, the arrows hitting the troll's shoulder and back and the flesh there going dark and not healing back the way it should have.

  "Sera, upper back, center mass," I called.

  Fireball. Clean. Hit.

  The troll's regeneration was losing ground in a visible band across its upper body — the tissue cycling but not recovering, the heat damage accumulating. It was working. It's working, I thought, cycling to the second scroll. The timing is right, the volume is right—

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  The troll, which had been treating Torvin as the primary threat, looked past him and directly at me.

  Oh, I thought. Oh, it figured out where the fire is coming from. It's smarter than B-rank usually — it tracked the arrow source. That's not in the bestiary. That's—

  It shoved Torvin aside with one arm. Not a strike — a dismissal, a clearing motion. Torvin was in Fortress Stance but Fortress Stance was stance, not force resistance in all directions, and the shove caught him on the edge of the shield and spun him sideways and suddenly there was nothing between me and a B-rank dungeon troll moving with purpose.

  "Rena!" I was already moving backward, second Flash Bomb scroll out, but the troll was fast, faster than something that size should have been, and the distance was closing and—

  Torvin hit it from behind with his axe.

  The axe did nothing to the regenerative tissue, obviously, but the mass of a half-orc and the force of his charge knocked the troll one step sideways, and one step was enough for Rena to arrive from the left and get her enhanced blades into the troll's knee joint — not the tissue, the joint, the one spot on a troll where the regeneration was slowest because the mana density was lower — and the troll went down on one knee with a sound like a building settling.

  "SERA!" I yelled.

  She'd been waiting. She'd stayed calm while I'd been almost eaten and Torvin had done something the plan definitely did not include and Rena had improvised a target I hadn't called, and she had been watching and waiting for the clean shot at the back of the troll's exposed neck, where the regenerative tissue density was lowest, where the heat would get deepest.

  Flame-Wind Fusion. Direct hit. The spiral motion drove the fire into the cervical tissue and the mana cycle there broke completely and didn't restart.

  The Dungeon Troll of the Thornwood mid-ring, six years undefeated, sat down fully and did not get up.

  Silence. Actual silence — even the forest went quiet for a second, the way places sometimes do when something large and permanent stops.

  Then Torvin made a sound that I can only describe as a war cry of celebration and Rena exhaled once, sharply, and Yua said "everyone hold position, I need to check Torvin's shoulder," and Sera immediately opened her notebook.

  I stood behind my cover for a moment longer. My hands were shaking slightly — the specific tremor of adrenaline leaving a system that had too much of it. I looked at my scroll pouches. I'd burned through eleven of the twelve Fire Arrow stacks. I had six charges left on the last scroll and three elixirs I hadn't needed.

  I opened my status screen without thinking about it.

  [ STATUS — PARK JUNHO ]

  Level:7 ▲ LEVEL UP

  HP:240 / 240

  MP:185 / 185

  INT:21 (E)

  SKILL:Minor Enhancement Lv.5

  RANK:F

  LUK:3 (F)

  Level seven. Skill level five.

  Still F-rank, I thought, with something that was not entirely bitterness — more like reading a running joke that was starting to have a punchline I could almost see. Still F-rank. We just cleared a six-year unclearable B-rank monster and I am still, officially, F-rank.

  I closed the screen.

  Torvin was letting Yua examine his shoulder while simultaneously trying to describe the fight to anyone who would listen, which in practice was himself because everyone else had been there. Rena was cleaning her blades. Sera was still writing.

  "Good plan," Rena said, without looking up from the blade.

  "The troll improvised," I said.

  "Plans survive partial contact. That's what makes them plans and not hopes."

  I thought about that. That's actually a useful distinction, I thought.

  "The deviation at the end," I said. "The improvised knee joint target."

  "I saw the opening."

  "It wasn't in the plan."

  She looked up. "Do you want to debrief or do you want to say thank you?"

  I paused. Both, I thought. I want both but the order matters.

  "Thank you," I said. "Debrief later."

  She went back to cleaning her blade. The faint gold shimmer of the enhancement caught the dim light of the mid-ring and I noticed, not for the first time, that the edge showed no wear at all despite the fight.

  We walked out. The guild record would log the Thornwood Troll as cleared by Pale Coin party, F-rank registered, seven members — wait, five members, I needed to recount — and in the notes it would say the clear was achieved through sustained fire-element suppression over approximately fourteen minutes, which was accurate and told the reader almost nothing about what it had actually been.

  Which was fine.

  The people who needed to know were walking out of the mid-ring with me, arguing about whether Torvin's axe bounce at the end counted as a contributing hit. He was voting yes. The evidence was voting no. The vote was ongoing.

  I walked behind them in the narrowing light and thought: fifty gold coins.

  That's what they thought this was worth.

  Okay.