Behind him the chanting had come apart into something looser and considerably worse, and somewhere inside it Scarlet was signing a recruit's gauntlet and telling him it was worth more scratched.
The veterans had all run the same calculation, and their math had been sound. Wait a year or two.
Eclipse would be a corpse or a stable guild by then, and there was no version of the second one where a guild that young turned away an A-tier with a hundred and twenty levels behind him.
So Voss could sit at home with the wife, the kids, and the mortgage, and lose nothing at all by it. The door would still be open whenever he got around to knocking, and the people opening it would be grateful he had finally come.
That was the assumption sitting underneath every polite non-answer he had read that morning. Eclipse would still be the one asking.
Doug's voice came from the folding table, explaining tax residency to a woman who was very obviously not listening to a word of it.
