The door closed behind Liam, and the guildhall immediately became a different kind of room the air in the meeting room shifted from "tense military briefing" to "high school locker room." The "Vanguard Chef Fan Club" was officially in session.

Berry dropped into her chair and let out a breath she had been holding for approximately twenty minutes, and her tail, which had been performing a controlled professional movement the entire meeting, immediately abandoned all pretence and started going at full speed. She pulled a hand mirror from her inventory, checked her reflection, pushed her guild robes slightly off one shoulder, reconsidered, pushed them back, and then pushed them off again.

"Did you see that?" she said to the room, to nobody, to everyone. "One hand... He picked him up with one hand, and the pillar just cracked. My heart rate is actually concerning me right now."

She adjusted her guild robes, pulling the fabric tight to emphasise her curves. "I’m a G-cup," she muttered, puffing her chest out until the buttons on her top were about to pop out. "Surely he’s going to notice that sooner or later. I don’t care how many cat kin he has hanging off his arm; stats don’t lie."

Noir was already changing armor sets at the back of the room, her cheetah-kin speed making the process take approximately four seconds. The set she had switched into had, by any objective measurement, twenty per cent less coverage than the one she had been wearing, the high-agility build that showed the sharp line of her waist and the full length of her legs, with a defense penalty she had decided was a tactical sacrifice.

"The cat is built like a house cat," Noir said, with the clinical tone of someone making a military assessment. "Liam is a grown man. He is going to want someone who actually fits in his arms without needing to be carried." She pulled her hair over one shoulder and checked the result. "I’m not competing. I’m just being strategic."

"I switched to the silk healer set," one of the healers at the far end of the table announced, holding up a piece of armour that was doing its absolute best with very little material. "It has a Divine Grace enchantment and a defence penalty I have decided to ignore. If he looks at me while serving soup, I consider that an acceptable trade."

"I don’t even like other girls," another healer added, with the resigned honesty of someone updating their personal policy in real time, "but for Liam, I would be open to scheduling arrangements. We just need to figure out how to get the pink cat to let go of his arm for five consecutive minutes."

Across the table, a group of high-level healers were whispering and giggling, checking their reflections in their polished shields. "I’m switching to the mini-skirt set," one whispered. "The one with ’Divine Grace.’ It’s basically silk and a prayer. If he looks my way while serving soup, it’s worth the DP penalty."

Berry drummed her fingers on the table. "We don’t need to be friends," she said, with the focused pragmatism of a woman who had managed hundred-person operations and understood logistics. "We have a common objective. He’s going to need someone to manage his supply chain in Areos. Someone with administrative experience. Someone who fills out a guild coat in a way that communicates competence and authority." She paused. "I am that person."

Noir’s tail whipped. "That is not how supply chain management works."

"I know what I said," Berry said "we don’t have to be friends, but we have a common goal: Project Feed the Chef. We will need to take turns Monday through Wednesday."

On the other side of the room, the temperature was different.

Barbosa’s hand was white-knuckling the armrest hard enough that the wood was splintering audibly.

River Soul was back on his feet, leaning against the pillar that Liam had introduced him to, wearing the expression of a man who had decided that crying was not an option and had settled for viciously homicidal instead.

"Every single one of them," River Soul said, his eyes moving around the room at Berry, adjusting her robes, Noir in her tactical sacrifice armour, the healers comparing silk enchantments, all of them still oriented toward the door Liam had walked out of like plants toward a window. "Not one of them looked at me like that not even once."

"It’s the appearance sync," a Ruby Eye captain muttered, his jaw tight with resentment. "Before the other day, he was a toddler. Now he’s six-foot-six, silver-haired, and smells like a Level 30 Rare Spawn. It has to be an exploit."

Barbosa slammed his fist onto the table.

BOOM.

"I don’t care what it is," Barbosa said, and his voice had gone somewhere quiet and cold that was worse than shouting. "Half my scouts joined this guild to impress Berry. If they see her looking at a cook like he hung the sky, the guild structure collapses." He looked at River Soul. "We don’t fight him here. Small room, wrong conditions. We already know how that ends." His eyes moved to the door. "But the Catacombs are different. The Catacombs are chaos."

River Soul wiped his mouth, and the grin that formed had nothing pleasant in it. "An accident."

"Better," Barbosa said. "We let him take his separate unit into the Lich’s chamber. We wait until he’s chest deep in the undead, and then we fail to hold the perimeter. We let the skeletons swarm him. When his HP bar is in the red, and he’s calling for a healer on his own stream, we ride in and save the girls, and everyone watching sees exactly who belongs at the front." He looked at the door. "And when he goes down, I want that legendary basil found and burned in front of him. Just to finish the message."

"Forty-eight hours," River Soul said, still smiling.

"Get the men ready," Barbosa said.

In the hallway outside the meeting room, Liam sneezed.

"Someone talking about you?" Elizabeth said, her tail giving a slow, curious flick.

"Probably Barbosa," Liam said, rubbing his nose. "Man looks like he has chronically high blood pressure. He should eat more fibre."

"Forget him," Elizabeth said, her grip on his arm settling into the comfortable territory it had been occupying since the fox-kin girls at the gate, somewhere between bodyguard and something she had not found a name for yet. "Let’s go get the butter. I want to watch you cook something that makes the fox-kin girls faint. It’ll be extremely funny."

"I need forty-eight hours of prep before the raid," Liam said, already calculating. "Garnish sourced, broth base started, equipment checked. It’s tight."

"Liam," Elizabeth said.

"Yeah."

"You just slammed a man into a stone pillar with one hand, and his entire guild is definitely planning to kill you in a dungeon in two days, and your response is garnish."

Liam looked at her. "The garnish matters."

Elizabeth looked at his face, at the complete sincerity in it, at the red eyes already running ingredient calculations somewhere she couldn’t follow, and made the sound of someone who had found peace in a particular kind of surrender.

"Okay," she said. "Let’s go get the butter."

[Tool Tip]:

[Guild/Social Status: The Vanguard Chef Fan Club (Unofficial)]

Type: Passive Global Debuff (Social) / Party-Wide Morale Buff

Membership Criteria: Must possess a high "Thirst" stat and a preference for silver-haired "overachievers."

Current President: Saffron (Self-Appointed).

Current Sergeant-at-Arms: Ellie (By sheer proximity).

[Passive Effects]:

The "Main Character" Gravity: When the Vanguard Chef (Liam) enters a room, all female NPCs and Players within a 30-meter radius suffer a -20% Intelligence penalty. Logic is replaced by a temporary [Dazed] status.

The "Sharing is Caring" Protocol: Membership grants a unique mental resilience to the "Harem Trap." Members are 100% more likely to agree to "rotational scheduling" if it means the Chef stays in the party.

Tactical Fashion Shift: Members automatically ignore armor defense stats in favor of [Visual Impact].