Kyra got home late that night to Fenne scampering out of the bedroom to greet her.

  She reached down and stroked his head, which he responded to with a happy squint. "Look at you, boy. You're acting like we haven't seen each other since morning."

  In the months that she'd had him, the fox had grown entirely too many tails, and he blocked the entire hallway with soft fur whenever he got excited and fanned them out.

  She brushed past him into the kitchen and checked on the automatic feeder. It was a handy device because she kept forgetting to feed and water him. She felt bad for relying on it because it only dispensed dry kibble, and Fenne liked his food fresh.

  "I'm a really bad master, aren't I?" she said as the fox followed in after her.

  The truth was that her lifestyle simply wasn't compatible with looking after a pet. The needs of her mission frequently took her away from home, and Fenne's nature made it hard to find an alternative arrangement for him. She couldn't ask a neighbor to petsit when she was away—not that she was the sort of person who would do this even for a dog. And there was no way she could give him up to a normal family, animal shelter, or wildlife preserve. This was the problem with keeping a B-rank monster for a pet.

  Sometimes she wondered how she even got herself into this situation.

  After confirming that Fenne had been eating from the feeder and that there was still plenty of kibble left in the tank, she heated some leftovers on the stove for herself and then brought it to the living room and plopped herself down on the couch.

  Fenne came over and nuzzled against her hand. She sighed and pulled a mystic orb from her dimensional storage.

  "This is what you're after, isn't it, boy?" she said, holding the orb in front of his drooling maw.

  To his credit, Fenne maintained his discipline and waited instead of trying to snatch it from her hand. It wasn't until she held it to his lips that he opened his mouth and munched down.

  "I could be selling these, you know," she said as the fox happily chewed into the magical item.

  Not that she would. As lucrative as it was to sell dungeon loot in the many marketplaces that had sprung up, she couldn't afford to draw too much attention to herself.

  She checked the time. Tristis was probably in bed by now. She sent him a message, expecting not to get a call back until morning.

  To her surprise a call immediately came through on the secure channel.

  "Why are you still at the office?" she asked.

  "This isn't the sort of job you can switch off from," he replied.

  Though he didn't mean it as a jab, it made her feel a little guilty. It was meant to be her at the helm, working the long hours for the sake of securing her timeline—her life. She was sure that was how the other Kyra must have done it. But this time it was Tristis slaving his youth away in an office while she was home feeding her exotic pet.

  "You still need to eat and sleep," she said. "And make time for your family."

  "I'm doing this for my family," he replied.

  "What about your staff? Are they staying late too?"

  "No, I sent them all home. It's one thing for the boss to work late, but it doesn't feel right to expect the same of the workers."

  "How are you getting any work done alone?" she asked.

  "It's work I've been putting off all day. Besides, I'm not completely alone. We do have our liaisons overseas where it's the middle of the day. And I'll be meeting up with Lori later."

  "Lori's working late too?"

  "Yeah. I'm going to pick her up from the lab and take her to see her mom at the hospital."

  Lori was the head of research at the Usha. She was in charge of her very own facility located just outside Lacris-Cheree. A good chunk of the association's budget went to that lab, and it was worth every cord.

  "You mentioned yesterday about the breakthrough on mass-producing appraisal sheets," she said. "What's she working on now?"

  "Our current research priority is a study of where and when dungeons have popped up. We hope to find some sort of pattern that will allow us to predict where future dungeons will appear. Lori also believes that the data will be useful in formulating some sort of fundamental laws of magic."

  "This will make more dungeons available for allocation?" Kyra asked, recalling one of the major problems she'd uncovered in her time among the guilds.

  "Only marginally," Tristis replied. "It can only give us the dungeons that we're missing, and at the moment we're pretty good about finding the ones that have popped up, with all the eyes of the public and everyone eager to do their part in preventing a repeat of Teelameer. But it only takes one dungeon to escape our notice, and that's the main goal of this project—to make sure that doesn't happen."

  "So it won't do anything to solve the dungeon shortage?" she asked.

  "Dungeon shortage? Are you talking about the shortfall between the numbers requested and allocated?"

  "So you're aware of the problem."

  There was a brief pause on the other side of the line before Tristis replied, "We've received complaints about it, but I wouldn't consider it a problem. It just means that we have more hunters than we need. Isn't that a good thing? Better this than to have dungeons going uncleared."

  "You have good judgement," she said, "but something about this feels off. Are the major guilds receiving preferential treatment in the allocations?"

  "To be honest, I don't handle that side of things. Matters of logistics and resources are overseen by Lorelei."

  Lorelei Maxwell. For some reason the heir apparent of the Maxwell family had seen fit to insert herself into the association and currently held a position representing the Litten Dominion on the board of directors. It had come as a surprise to Kyra that Lorelei would take on this role, given how busy she should have been with all the responsibilities of managing an extensive business empire.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Victor had assured her that his sister was earnest and only wanted to make sure that the job was done right. But Kyra wasn't so trusting. It wasn't too unusual a move for a business leader, as they tended to hoard seats on prestigious boards like notches on their belts. But running an organization in the public interest required a very different mindset from running a business, and not everyone who made the transition was honest with themselves about their own motives.

  It also represented a loss for Kyra, who'd been hoping to make use of Lorelei in another capacity. The reason she'd allowed Victor to reveal his magic to his sister was in the hope of getting Lorelei to put all her weight behind his guild. It appeared that she'd miscalculated, as the woman's interest in the hunter community had gone in a different direction than what she'd expected.

  It would have been nice, had everything gone as planned. With both the association and the largest guild on the continent as her puppets, her control over entire Concordian hunter community would have been absolute.

  Instead Victor's guild only qualified as midsized and his sister was potentially causing problems within her association.

  "It looks like I've got a trip to Fueslin coming up," she said.

  "You're really planning on speaking with Lorelei directly?" Tristis sounded worried.

  "Do you think she suspects?" she asked.

  "Surely she must."

  "Have you noticed anything in your interactions with her?"

  "Well, no, but she isn't going to show her hand like that," he said.

  "Whatever the case, I have to meet with her anyway," she said. "Not just about the problem of dungeon allocations, but to decide for myself whether I want her to remain in the association."

  "Do you want me to prepare to push her out?" he asked.

  "Don't make any moves until I decide. She's potentially a valuable asset, and I don't want to risk alienating her."

  "As you wish."

  "There's one other matter we have to sort out," Kyra said. "Did you look into the problem of the healers?"

  "I have. It seems that a lot of them are leaving for the civilian sector. Personally I don't blame them. Why deal with horrifying monsters and dungeons when you can drive an ambulance?"

  "How bad is the shortage?"

  "Well, that's the thing. You know how we were talking about there being far more hunters than we need to clear the dungeons we have? It's the same deal here. There aren't enough healers to fill all the teams, but once we take into account nondedicated healers—hunters in other roles who possess the gift of healing and can perform the magic in some capacity—then we have about enough to clear every dungeon."

  "When you say we have about enough, that means we're still short?" Kyra asked.

  "It's a matter of assumptions," Tristis replied. "One healer can assist multiple teams in a day. It's a matter of how far they can be stretched."

  "I don't want you making those sorts of assumptions," she said firmly. "You can't assume that other hunters have your level of talent. I bet most healers wouldn't have the mana pool to safely raid a second dungeon in a day. What does the data say?"

  "I'm afraid we don't have that sort of data yet. Lori is working on it."

  She realized that she was being too hard on her disciples. They were juggling a million different problems that came naturally with their jobs, and she was piling extra priorities on top of that workload. It was her fault that Tristis and Lori were working into the night.

  "This isn't the sort of thing that should require Lori's attention," she said. "She should have staff that she can delegate this sort of research to. Is it a problem of budget? I can look into getting you more funding."

  "Sorry, I meant to say that there's a team under her that's working on it," Tristis said. "We aren't short on money at this stage, but these sorts of studies take time. And from what I hear, not many hunters are willing to consent to having their stats measured. I suppose the thought of having their skills exposed to anyone in the world with a high-enough appraisal skill makes them feel more protective of what little privacy they have left."

  There was something else bothering her about the healer problem.

  "The major guilds have been poaching healers from the other guilds," she said. "They have investors with deep pockets that the smaller guilds can't match. Do we know how many of the healers have they collected?"

  "We don't have any way to tell," he replied.

  "You don't have data on guild membership?"

  "We do. But we don't know who has the gift of healing."

  It took her a moment to digest his words. "How is that possible? You were telling me about the number of healers in the hunter community a moment ago."

  "That's data extrapolated from our surveys," he explained. "We don't actually store any information about an individual hunter's abilities in our database. In fact our appraisers don't even collect it. It's considered personal health information, and it's protected by strict privacy laws in most of Concordia. We simply don't have any legitimate reason to collect it."

  "You're the association responsible for the administration of the hunter community, and it's information related to hunter abilities. How is that not a legitimate reason?"

  "Personal health information can only be used for the benefit of the person it's collected from. It must also be disclosed voluntarily by the individual and can't just be collected by appraisal. And it may only be used for the specific purpose that the individual has consented to. We can't just collect this information because we'd like to have it. What we can do however is conduct anonymous surveys. But that data isn't of any help in answering your question about how many healers the major guilds have collected."

  As frustrating as it was to have Concordia's privacy laws get in her way, it was also reassuring to see that even a powerful organization like the Usha didn't have an easy way around them. As a private citizen, she very much appreciated the continent's dedication to individual freedoms. It was what had allowed her to lead an unbothered life out of the spotlight all these years.

  "So when you were telling me about the healer numbers earlier," she said, "you were estimating based on anonymous surveys?"

  "I'm sorry. It completely slipped my mind."

  "It's a sign you're working too hard," Kyra said. "You and Lori should both pace yourselves and tell me if I'm putting too much on your plates. What we're doing is a marathon, not a sprint."

  "I'll pass that message on to Lori."

  "Then tell her this too. The new research priority is to find a way to mass-produce healing sheets like she did with appraisal. The mapping project can wait."

  "This means we'll continue to risk a breakout from a dungeon we missed," Tristis pointed out.

  "I expect that the other associations are just as concerned about that problem as we are," she said. "We'll have to rely on their research until we can get around to it ourselves. In the meantime a healer shortage could end up breaking the guild system just as well as a misallocation of dungeons would."

  "It sounds like you believe that the major guilds are up to something."

  It would be a surprise if they weren't. There was a lot of money to be made if the major guilds could run their competitors out of business and consolidate all the working hunters under a small number of large guilds. If she allowed this to happen, they could end up with more influence on the hunter community than the association.

  "You've already got enough to worry about," she said. "I'll investigate and let you know if further action needs to be taken."

  "I'll pass your instructions on to Lori," Tristis said ever dutifully. "Is there anything else you want me to do?"

  "Nothing that can't wait. Go home and get some sleep."

  Kyra immediately began making preparations for her trip to Fueslin to see Lorelei.

  She would have liked to stop by Spaercka to see Victor, but he'd been incredibly busy since Teelameer, globetrotting with his guild and clearing out high-level dungeons all around the world. Until the rest of the hunter community caught up, there were some dungeons that couldn't be handled by anyone else—at least officially.

  What this meant though was that his guild hadn't grown at all. Every member was a soldier buddy of his.

  This was the problem that she'd hoped to solve by bringing Lorelei into his guild.

  It's also why Victor hadn't been the one to tell her about the problems with dungeon allocations and healers. His guild didn't rely on allocations, and his healers were absolutely loyal. They wouldn't leave for all the money in the world.

  Kyra looked down at Fenne curled up by her feet. He'd fallen asleep waiting for her attention, and soon she was going to have to leave him again, this time for longer than a day. She hoped he wasn't too disappointed with the master he'd ended up with.

  She made sure to top up his feeders with food and water and gave him an extra mystic orb as a treat before she left.