Spite is a terrible force.

For Cless, spite manifested in the way she built the wall. Her Earth magic could not create matter in bulk, only the small projectiles her offensive spells used. She didn't want to do her best so she cut corners. To raise the walls, she took the matter from both the inside and the outside, lowering the latter considerably more. The hundred-and-fifty meters of the wall was done in a single night but the residential district intended to be sheltered by this new wall would have severe flooding problems if nothing was done.

"That's scary," Jason quipped as he inspected Cless' spellwork. "But the machicolations are well-done."

The girl outdid herself and burned more magic than anyone but the Great Sage could hope to. She lost her footing from exhaustion and had to be supported by Jason to avoid inelegantly crumbling into a heap on the wall.

"If I hadn't invested so much in this town already, I'd just pack up and leave. Bunch of assholes," The queen-in-exile vented.

Cless combined her divine and arcane magic to enact a ritual to raise the walls faster. She used Sacred Dance to mass-cast Construct on the sections of the wall. She burned her eight hundred plus Magic Points at once. That was one of the reasons she pulled matter from the vicinity of the wall site. Multi-casting sacrificed finesse. Still, the rumble from the mass of dirt and rock shifting so fast caused alarms to ring in the nearby inhabited sections of the town.

The expansion was right next to the noble ward of the town, after all.

"I'd like to point out that assholes are everywhere. As much literally as figuratively," Vic mused. "Every person brings at least one with themselves, after all."

"Are these guards going to be trouble?" Silverfang broke his silence, pointing at the regiments of guards both annoyed and concerned at distance.

"Nah," Cless waved a hand. "Venaris and Kurt can deal with them. The leader of the guard detachment is a woman and I lent him the proper Skills. I don't think there's a female with enough willpower to resist him now."

She bore a proud grin.

"Not even you?" Jason asked, unaware of the faux pas he was committing. He was still helping Cless stand and felt her tense under his hand.

Silverfang growled. The lycan was never at ease with the gloomy vampire boy near Cless and he understood better than anyone what was Jason's mistake. Cless' smile faded.

"Given enough time, not even me. Skills are a scary thing, Jason. I was once on the receiving end of one of them..."

She felt a pang of pain as she remembered the night she spent trapped in the tent of the High Inquisitor. On how Marion almost seduced her. She felt an urge to put even more Stats in Wisdom but her already high score granted her the clarity to know that would be foolish.

Stat allocation cannot become a coping mechanism, her boosted intuition told her.

"It seems the female commander wants to have a talk, guild master," Vic pointed at the approaching guardswoman.

Cless turned around, steadied herself and gently brushed Jason's helping hand from her waist. Sensing the mood, she took Silverfang's hand and squeezed it. The lycan's scowl softened.

"Guard captain. Welcome. To what do we owe the visit?" Cless shouted at the approaching town officer.

"Guild master Cless, I presume. You did a ruckus here, didn't you? We have several complaints about the noise you made. Why did you have to do it at night?"

"It was only for a minute! Look, I was asked by the Lord to do this wall as fast as possible. So I did it right after receiving the commission. I know there are laws against making noise inside town at night, but that's not here."

They were technically outside the town as the expansion area would only become part of the town proper when it was entirely surrounded and connected to the wall.

"Quite the hole you dug here too."

Cless mimicked Jason's trademark 'don't care' shrug. "Yeah. Maybe they will cart some dirt to cover it. The wall is done and it is stronger than any other. We are on our way."

Venaris and Kurt returned and the mawarpy cooed at the captain. Cless could see the lawwoman's cheeks blush as Kurt's Skills melted her brain and other body parts.

"Are we done?" The gnome girl asked. Cless nodded.

"Blind Eye, time to go home. Captain, see you around."

The female guard tried to stop them but Kurt fanned his tail feathers and mesmerized her. Cless decided that was too much power to be held by a single entity and withdrew the Skill she loaned him.

Kurt, Vic, and Venaris went straight to bed. Tomorrow would be a holiday for the Blind Eye. Jason drank a goblet of blood Cless offered him and withdrew to his coffin. Silverfang was about to go to his quarters when Cless held his wrist.

"Don't go. Stay and sleep with me. Like old times."

"Yes," The wolf-boy answered without a hint of emotion.

Cless would take what she could. She led Silverfang to her room and the lycan changed into a silver wolf. His clothes fell off except for his enchanted gloves that shifted to fit his paws. Some dust fell from him as his fur rejected the contaminants and he jumped onto the bed. The queen changed into her pajamas and joined him on the mattress. Once they were under the duvet, she dismissed the Light spell keeping the room lit.

"You are angry, aren't you, Silferfang?" She asked.

Even though he was in wolf form, she could understand him due to the Skill she took. The wolf language was dry of vocabulary but it would be enough. She thought Silverfang was jealous of the attention she gave Jason. That he was being spiteful. She ahd to address that.

"Jason," Cless muttered with a sigh. She felt her heart clench. "You think it was a mistake to let him live. To recruit him. To feed him out of my own blood."

Silverfang growled. He wasn't giving Cless much to work with.

"I think there's good in him, Silverfang. He is not a monster. Just like us."

He didn't answer.

Cless extended her arm and looked at the deformed skin covering the limb. Her mark of a survivor. The burns that would never let her forget how spite and hatred took her mother away from her. The marks that set her apart from society for her whole life until she was strong enough to carve her own place. Literally.

She remembered her encounter with the massive silver wolf. Starving, leading his pack away from the orc horde and desperate to survive. A pariah without a place. She remembered Vic and Kurt, trapped in the Orc King's pantry, sacrifices for his Skill to take on the skin of those whose hearts he ate. Pariahs without a place. Venaris, pregnant with sixteen orc fetuses, parasites that would kill her. The last of her gnome tribe, stewards of the mountain dungeon. A pariah who had lost her place.

Why wouldn't it be different with Jason? Why couldn't Silverfang see that?

The same hand went and stroke the wolf's fur. Soft. Felt like touching clouds. Her hand would glide on that fur. Warm. Safe.

Cless sighed and the sigh became a sob. She noticed she had tears in her eyes. Pooling at the corners of her eyes, seeping into her nasal cavity without her knowledge. She turned around and the tears ran over her nose and down the side of her face. She pressed her lips together and tried to keep her throat still but it was too hard. There was no way it would be held in.

She cried.

Right there she wasn't a queen-in-exile. Nor a guild master. All the titles, Devil's daughter, priestess, holy maiden, adventurer disappeared at that moment. She was just Cless, a teenager girl that couldn't untangle the mess of feelings in her.

She met those canine eyes and as much as she tried, her emotions couldn't be reined in. She was afraid of losing what she had. Which included Jason but she was also afraid of losing Silverfang. Cless held the wolf's head and pressed her face against the side. She was actually slightly choking him, but the stoic lycan decided to endure. Once she calmed down a bit, she spoke.

"Did I do wrong?"

Silverfang had to shift back to wolf-kin form to speak as what he wanted to say couldn't be expressed with wolf growls, howls, and barks.

"You are a queen, Cless. There is no right or wrong in what you do. Your word is law. Your actions are the will of your nation. You do what you want, you are not beholden to anyone."

"So can I keep Jason?"

Silverfang shook his head. Cless' arms were still around his neck and their faces were almost touching. There was also the issue of a very naked lycan in the queen's bed but he wasn't going to point that out.

"I won't validate your choices though."

Her eyes were glistening, the faint light in the room reflecting on these two watery beads.

"Meanie," Cless pouted.

"Recruiting Jason might be a mistake as he is undead. He can't control his impulses forever. Sooner or later he will slip and cause a disaster."

Cless relaxed her hold on the boy's neck. "I can amend our agreement and keep him from hurting anyone with my Skill."

Silverfang sighed. "And there's another proof that he can't be trusted. Would you offer to release him from his binding agreement like you did to us? Do you trust that leech enough to let him loose? Set the vampire free? What would he do now that he is no longer a thrall? Make his own undead coven?"

She pushed him away and hit his chest. "Why must you always be right?"

Silverfang shrugged. "I just don't voice my opinions unless I am certain of them."

She thought about what to say when she noticed what was going on under the sheets. "This conversation is over. Shift back to wolf form."

Silverfang grinned. "As you wish, your Majesty."

The next day was a free day for the guild members. But for Cless, it was time to expand the tunnel network to go underneath their driveway leading out to the lot next to the church, under the street and then fork into the Steelhammer guildhall and the new building she got as part of the wall deal. She spent a good deal thickening, reinforcing and compacting the stone walls of these tunnels until they were almost as strong as a Dungeon's walls.

She spent the rest of the day drafting the terms and conditions for her next project. Or a couple of projects. The Steelhammer guildhall would be renovated to work as their guildhall but the new building had a purpose.

Cless was going to make a Quest Hall.

A building where people could obtain missions that would give them when fulfilled, both a monetary and an Experience awards. The rewards would be supplied by the quest creator and she was going to take a small cut of the Experience to herself.

The wording and fine print of the contracts were giving her trouble. She needed to ensure secrecy but not in an ominous way. She also had to ensure honesty on both sides of the quest and to act as a middle man so nobody would have to know who asked for the mission and who completed it. She also had to curate what kinds of missions could be offered. The first thing on her big NO list was an assassination. Next was sentient trafficking.

She thought about giving an incentive to new questors and also a way to track them. She decided to take one out of every thousand Experience from questors for each active quest they had. This would let her know they were alive and active and forbid them from hoarding quests.

The matter of secrecy was an issue because someone could just browse the contract and decline, taking the knowledge of the contract's existence with them. To counter that, she would split the contract into two parts, the first one being a binding agreement of secrecy. She would set the punishment to just muting or loss of coordination as long as they tried to leak information, or forgetfulness if they were exposed to mental probes.

And why not make it in more than two parts? She could get them to agree to secrecy with the first contract, then to non-aggression with the second, and finally hook them on the third, binding all three contracts together in one. After that, they would be allowed inside the quest hall and would decide what quests to undertake.

She would make boilerplate quest contracts that would just have the blanks filled in with the specifics of each quest. And since not even her Skill could make the ink disappear, she would charge for the parchment and ink of the quest contract.

She would have to think of ways to attract quest givers and questors. But for the former, since Experience was going to be part of the reward they could save on the coin. Or even use a proxy, like sending an employee to make the quests. No, she would be giving reason to exploit the less fortunate. The quest could be made by a subordinate if the boss was also helping foot the Experience bill. There would still be grounds for using people as a front but that was beyond her ability to control.

Cless also decided she would post the first few quests. Gathering missions for alchemical ingredients.

Yes. That was a good idea.

Sell supplies and consumables for questors and taking Experience and less money than their market value. That way she could earn back the Experience she would have to hand out for the raw materials quests. And why stop at supplies and consumables? She could sell weapons and armor.

Short on money? Get your gear with pure Experience. Or better, an Experience payment plan.

She pushed her greed away and decided to not touch Stat Points or Skills. That was a recipe for disaster.

She only had the issue of finding people to staff the Quest Hall. She wanted it to remain independent of the Blind Eye guild.

And she knew just the kind of people she wanted to hire.

She would need Jason's help.