Elara's words still hung in the air of the room.
"From now on," she had said, looking straight into Lys's eyes, "Lys won't be an adventurer. And that is final."
The room went completely silent.
Lys sat in the chair, staring at his mother. His mouth was slightly open, but nothing came out. The idea of not being an adventurer anymore, of giving up the system advantage of the sword, the growth that might come with it, hit him hard in the chest. He wanted to argue, but the look on Elara's face stopped the words before they could form.
Mira was the first to break the silence in the room.
"That is completely unfair," she said. Her voice was steady, even though her eyes were still red from crying earlier. She wasn't sobbing anymore. She was angry because something she cared about was being threatened. "You can't just take adventuring away from him like that. I'm sure Lys loves doing it, and I get why. Taking it away isn't protecting him. It's just taking something important from him and calling it protection."
Elara looked at her daughter evenly. "I'm not taking it away to hurt him, honey. I'm taking it away because I almost lost him twice in the past month, and I am not willing to watch a third time."
Mira shook her head. "Then the problem isn't adventuring. The problem is him going into dangerous situations without backup. That's a completely different thing. You're mixing the two together and calling it a solution. Think about it."
Elara watched Mira for a long moment. "I have seen what adventuring looks like for him so far, honey. He almost died once because of his hunter job before. And a near-death fight with a hobgoblin this time. How many more of these do I have to sit through before the pattern becomes clearer than this?"
Mira leaned forward, her voice rising just a little. "Yes, the pattern is clear. He certainly needs something. And I think what he needs is someone with him. Someone who cares enough about him to actually stop him when he's doing something reckless. That's the pattern. And the solution isn't to ban adventuring. The solution is to fix the conditions under which he adventures."
Elara asked her daughter quietly, "Why are you so hell-bent on not banning adventuring? Isn't it you who was crying just now because it was almost killing him?"
Lys tried to say something, but Mira held up a hand without looking at him. She wasn't done.
"I know you're scared, Mom. I'm scared too. I was terrified when I found out he was missing last night, and I barely slept while he was recovering at Vessa's house. But fear is not a plan. You can't run a household on fear alone. If we ban adventuring today because of fear, what do we ban next time something frightening happens? We can't let this family get smaller every time the world gets harder, can we?"
A heavy silence fell.
Elara watched Mira with a look she rarely showed, not agreement, but real attention like her daughter had just said something she hadn't expected.
Sara spoke from her chair, quietly, not taking sides yet. "So, the real question everyone must be thinking but not saying is: what would make adventuring safe enough? Not perfectly safe. I know, there is no safe in a real sense in this job. But just safe enough for him to continue doing it. Because the answer to that question is probably more useful than arguing about whether to ban it entirely. Right? "
Elara looked at Sara, as if she had said the most important thing they needed to hear right now. "And what would 'safe enough' actually look like, in your opinion?" She said it as not ridiculing Sara, but genuinely asking her the question.
Sara thought for a moment. "Someone must be with him when he does any mission. Always. Someone capable. Not a stranger from the guild. Someone from this house."
Elara shook her head slowly. "What are you talking about? No one in this house is an adventurer."
But Sara didn't suggested this house specifically without any solution. She knew something, or at least had a feeling about something that Elara didn't have the tiniest idea of.
"Not yet."
Selene, who had been sitting very still at the end of the table through all of this, finally spoke. Her voice was quiet but clear enough to be heard by everyone around the room.
Everyone turned to look at her.
The room went silent once again, the weight of her two simple words shifting the conversation in the room like a turning point no one had seen coming.