I Stopped Simping and the Heroines Lost Their Minds

The heavy, iron-banded doors of Warehouse 9 were closed tightly against the damp afternoon air of the industrial sector.

Inside the raised wooden office, the atmosphere was thick with absolute, sterile bureaucracy.

Sylvia sat behind her desk. The towering stacks of red-inked debt notices had been pushed to the side. In their place sat three pristine, heavy sheets of official City Council parchment. They bore the crisp, golden seal of the Guild Association.

She had rushed straight to the administrative district the moment they returned from the woods, navigating the complex web of guild laws to file the discovery deed.

Arthur sat across from her. He reached into his spatial inventory and placed the two heavy leather pouches onto the wood. Seventy thousand credits. Liquid, untraceable, and ready to be handed to the noble creditors by sunrise.

"The claim is officially registered," Sylvia said, her voice entirely devoid of emotion as she slid the first parchment across the desk. "The coordinates are locked to our registry. The City Council has formally recognized the F-Rank cavern as a private, farmable asset under the Obsidian Hand."

Arthur picked up the quill. He didn’t skim the document. He read every single line of the fine print, his eyes scanning the dense legal jargon with calculating precision.

"Fifty percent equity," Arthur murmured, confirming the clauses. "Ultimate veto power over all roster changes, recruitment, and terminations. Equal split of all net profits generated from the dungeon."

"And Clause Four," Sylvia pointed out, tapping the parchment. "I retain the title of Guild Master. I maintain complete control over day-to-day operations, logistics, and shift rotations. You bring the strategy and the assets. I run the warehouse. We don’t step on each other’s toes."

Arthur nodded. It was a perfect, pragmatic arrangement. He had zero interest in managing mining shifts or balancing daily ledgers.

He pressed the nib of the quill to the paper and signed his name in smooth, dark ink.

Sylvia let out a quiet breath. She pulled the contract back, signing her own name next to his. She looked past Arthur, peering out the glass window of her office down to the warehouse floor. Her three starving rookies were sitting around the cold forge, anxiously waiting for the verdict.

"The guild survives," Sylvia said quietly, a profound sense of relief finally washing over her face. "My hunters can actually eat tonight. I’ll draft the rotation schedules for the crawler cavern immediately. We start farming tomorrow."

"There is one more condition," Arthur said, his voice cutting through her relief.

Sylvia’s head snapped back to him. She immediately raised an eyebrow, her posture tensing up. She knew there was always a catch.

"Don’t get worked up," Arthur stated calmly, raising a hand. "It’s nothing that affects your bottom line or your daily operations."

Arthur turned slightly in his chair and looked down at the warehouse floor.

"Emily, Felix, Chloe. Come up here," Arthur called out.

The three academy students climbed the wooden stairs, filing into the cramped office. They were still coated in a thin layer of cavern dust and crawler fluids from the expedition.

"My team and I are first-year academy students," Arthur explained, looking back at Sylvia. "We need field experience, fast leveling, and combat training. But the academy heavily restricts our access to high-tier or unsealed dungeons. I want the Obsidian Hand to act as our official sponsor."

Sylvia frowned slightly, processing the request.

"We will go on occasional dungeon raids under the guild’s banner to bypass the academy’s restrictions," Arthur continued. "But whatever monsters we kill, and whatever cores or materials we harvest during our specific training runs, belongs entirely to us. It doesn’t go into the guild’s ledger."

Sylvia stared at him for a second before letting out a short, incredulous laugh.

"That’s it?" Sylvia asked, shaking her head. "That’s a trivial matter. Consider it done."

"Good," Arthur said. He reached into his coat and pulled out three standard guild affiliate waivers. "But since we are operating under your flag, and protecting the secrecy of the crawler cavern we just discovered, I need my team to sign these. Non-disclosure and official affiliation."

He placed the waivers on the desk.

Emily didn’t hesitate for a second. The prospect of bypassing the academy’s boring rules to fight real monsters was exactly what she wanted. She snatched the quill, signed her name with a feral grin, and stepped back.

Felix was far more pragmatic. He picked up his waiver, his eyes scanning the text to ensure the loot clause was exactly as Arthur described. Satisfied that they got to keep their own spoils, the massive shielder signed cleanly.

That left Chloe.

The blonde healer stood near the back of the office. She stared at the final piece of parchment resting on the desk.

Her heart was hammering a frantic, terrifying rhythm against her ribs. She wasn’t afraid of dungeon diving or keeping secrets. She was terrified of the paper itself.

Signing that waiver meant officially binding herself to Arthur Vance’s private squad. It meant stepping out of the safety of the academy’s random party assignments and willingly placing herself under his direct, uncontested command every time they left the walls.

She remembered the feeling of his hands gripping her hips in the medical bay. She remembered the dark, suffocating whisper in the crawler cavern just an hour ago.

Her hand trembled as she reached out and picked up the quill.

The ink threatened to drip onto the parchment. She couldn’t bring herself to sign it. The psychological pressure was crushing her. If she signed this, she was accepting her role in his shadow. She was accepting the degradation.

Arthur didn’t rush her.

He calmly pushed off the edge of the desk. He walked around Sylvia’s chair and stepped slowly behind Chloe.

The moment his large frame loomed behind her, Chloe stopped breathing. She could feel the ambient heat radiating off his dark armor.

Arthur leaned down, his face stopping inches from the back of her neck. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t need to. The sheer, overwhelming proximity was enough to make her knees weak.

"You can walk away, Chloe," Arthur whispered, his voice a smooth, dark velvet that sent a violent shiver straight down her spine. "You can drop the pen and go back to the dorms."

Chloe swallowed hard, her blue eyes wide and entirely panicked.

"But if you walk away," Arthur murmured, his breath ghosting over her skin. "You’ll have to stop watching."

The implication hit her like a physical blow.

Her mind flashed to the dark tavern hallway. To the wet, filthy sounds of Arthur dominating the rabbit-kin. He was telling her the absolute truth. If she didn’t sign, she would be cut off. She would never get to stand in the shadows and watch him completely ruin someone ever again.

The deep, humiliating heat pooled intensely in her core. Her voyeuristic addiction violently overrode her fear.

Chloe let out a shaky, defeated breath. She pressed the nib to the parchment.

With a trembling hand, she signed her name.

The moment the ink dried, a translucent blue screen materialized in Arthur’s vision.

[System Notification]

[Faction Seed Advanced]

Obsidian Hand: Provisional Control Acquired

Arthur Vance: Majority Investor / Strategic Director

Sylvia: Operations Manager

Affiliate Strike Team Registered: Emily / Felix / Chloe

[Target Route Updated: Chloe]

Trait Awakened: Voyeuristic Devotion;Bond Stage: Complicit Healer

Arthur dismissed the screen with a mental command, a dark, victorious smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. He stepped away from Chloe, letting the trembling girl finally gasp for air.

Sylvia picked up the signed equity contracts and the affiliate waivers.

She pulled a heavy, iron stamp from her desk drawer. She pressed it into a pad of dark black ink, aligned it over the bottom of the main parchments, and brought it down with a heavy, echoing thud.

She looked up at Arthur, her gray eyes burning with a renewed, fierce light.

"The paperwork is finalized," Sylvia stated, stacking the contracts together.

The Obsidian Hand was officially back from the dead.

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