Chapter 17 – The Babysitter’s Gambit

The office door flew open with a bang.

Seraphina didn’t even flinch, her eyes locked on the blank form on her desk. A junior guild scout named Leo stood in the doorway, panting, his face pale as a ghost’s bedsheet. His usual cheerful demeanor was gone, replaced by the wide-eyed terror of someone who had just peeked into the abyss.

“He—the ogre—it—,” Leo stammered, gasping for air. “And the girl with the bucket! She took its eye!”

He pointed a trembling finger in the vague direction of the town gate.

“She called it a relic!”

Seraphina slowly raised one hand, a silent command for him to stop. She’d already heard the first, frantic reports. She knew. Oh, she knew far more than she ever wanted to. Leo finally went quiet, looking like a scared rabbit, and gently closed the door behind him.

The guild was quiet again.

The air smelled like old parchment, spilled ink, and the lingering scent of pure, unadulterated panic. Her desk was a disaster zone of paperwork, but in the center, like a monument to her rapidly approaching career death, was Mission Completion Form 7-B.

She’d been staring at it for an hour.

The quill rested by the inkwell, untouched. Her fingers drummed a frantic, silent rhythm on the worn wood. Each tap was an echo of her sanity fraying at the edges.

The “Target Description” field was filled out. Ogre, one, brutal. Simple.

The “Outcome” field, too. Target neutralized. Also simple.

It was the “Additional Notes” field that held her hostage. It was a void that threatened to swallow her whole. How, in the name of all that was holy and unholy, was she supposed to describe what happened?

Her mind flashed back to the clearing. Alfred Nightshade, the boy she had sent on a “low-risk” mission, standing with his terrifyingly calm expression. The ogre, a mountain of muscle that had been a Class-B threat for months, was kneeling. Kneeling. Like a supplicant before its god. And his new, crazed fangirl, Elizabeth Voss, was cheering him on before carving out the creature’s eye as a souvenir.

A shiver went down her spine.

It wasn’t a shiver of fear. It was worse. It was a thrill of masochistic excitement, an emotion she had learned to associate exclusively with Alfred. It was the feeling of watching a train wreck in slow motion, knowing you were tied to the tracks, and somehow finding the spectacle magnificent.

She picked up the quill.

Additional Notes: Target displayed standard aggression upon initial contact.

That was true. The ogre had tried to paint the landscape with their insides.

Recruit Alfred Nightshade did not employ conventional tactics. He established… dominance.

That was the understatement of the century. Calling what Alfred did “establishing dominance” was like calling a volcanic eruption a “geological hiccup.” He didn’t fight. He didn’t dodge. He just existed, harder than anything else in the vicinity. He gave the monster a look, and some silent, terrifying transaction of power occurred that she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

The tip of the quill trembled, a single drop of black ink falling onto the parchment like a tear.

She could feel the sweat on her brow. She dug her fingernails into the armrests of her chair, the wood groaning in protest. The Guild had rules. Procedures. A comforting, predictable system. Kill monster, get loot, fill form. A system Alfred and his budding cult of one had just thrown into a woodchipper.

She leaned back, the chair screaming under the strain.

Her job was to evaluate new adventurers. Give them missions to test their skills without getting them killed. She was a glorified babysitter for kids with swords and egos. And she was good at it. A perfect record. No recruit of hers had ever died. A few lost limbs, sure, but that was a workplace hazard.

Then Alfred showed up.

Now, her concern wasn’t him dying. It was that he was a walking, talking diplomatic incident. Or a monster-taming prodigy. Or the quiet, unassuming leader of a new death cult, whose first acolyte was currently marching off with an ogre’s eye in her satchel.

“She called it a relic,” Seraphina whispered to the empty room, the words tasting like ash.

She rubbed her temples. The headache behind her eyes wasn’t just knocking anymore; it was taking a battering ram to the door. How could she report this? “Sir, Recruit Nightshade has successfully pacified the ogre. He has also unintentionally acquired a follower who practices amateur ocular surgery. Their combined chaos level is, and I’m estimating here, ‘cataclysmic’.”

She’d be demoted to slime-scraping duty for the rest of her life.

And the sickest part? A tiny, dark piece of her was thrilled. Every mission report involving Alfred was a literary masterpiece of absurdity. The goblin mission turned into a hostage crisis where he was mistaken for a demon lord. The escort mission became a diplomatic standoff. And now, the ogre hunt had become the founding of a new religion.

He wasn’t an adventurer. He was a crisis generator.

She shot up from her chair and began pacing, her boots thudding against the floorboards. The tight space forced her into tight, angry turns. She had to get him out of Silvervale. She needed to put him in a structured environment. A place with high walls, ancient rules, and a staff of people far more powerful and better paid than her to deal with the fallout.

A place designed to handle prodigies, problem children, and ticking time bombs.

A place that would be unable to resist the mystery of a boy named Nightshade.

A slow, slightly crazed smile spread across her face. It was the look of someone shifting a massive burden onto much broader shoulders. It was the look of pure, unadulterated genius born from sheer panic.

She strode back to her desk, a woman on a mission. The half-finished mission report could rot for all she cared. She yanked open the bottom drawer, tossing aside dusty manuals and old scrolls. There, at the very bottom, was a pristine set of application forms, marked with the prestigious seal of a soaring comet over a castle.

The seal of Starfall Academy.

She grabbed the quill, plunged it into the inkwell, and wrote his name on the top line with a sharp, decisive flourish.

It was the only way. She was sending her problem child to the most exclusive, high-security school in the kingdom.

It was, she thought with a grim satisfaction, a truly inspired gambit for a glorified babysitter.