A thought occurs to Haroun before he's had a very long time to think.  He double-checks the thought, making sure it makes sense, but he's pretty sure it does.

"I'll still die to protect you if it comes to that, obviously," Haroun says.  "You can't let somebody get away with being able to drive a wedge between the Summoned Hero and her companions just by saying a bunch of nonsense to her right after she arrives."

"Uh. Thank you. Hopefully this will never come up since I do not want you to be dead but I guess it will simplify hopefully-edge-case tactical planning to have this noted in advance."

He feels oddly touched.  He's not sure why.  It seems very predictable for a Bella-like thing to say, in retrospect, and he's touched anyways.  "Thank you."

Haroun rides on, and thinks.  Bandits town guild inn breakfast guild dungeon.  Trying to recall all the events in order is making him understand the appeal of Bella's notebooks.  Also his mind keeps complaining that it doesn't want to do this and trying to run away and leave everything to somebody much older and more experienced.

Bella lets him think. She has plenty to think about herself - sorting out the dragon's implicit and explicit claims, noting what she saw and didn't take notes on at the time before it fades any farther, processing some feelings about baby pineapples, and practicing currency conversion.

She gets better at currency conversion.

Oh good.

Haroun is mostly silent for the ride to town.  In part that's because he's thinking, and in part that's because he realizes he's slightly tired from all the things and that he might be wiser to rest his mind staring at the grass rolling by, instead of trying to come to any deep decisions.

When he was growing up, life seemed simpler.  Why oh why couldn't it have stayed that way?

Arriving at town gets them a perfunctory look-over by the town guards, who sign off on a chit the dungeon guards provided them, and copy down some codes into a ledger. They're then directed to the Guild, to turn in their harvest and collect their sharecropper's fee on the results.  The Guild's record of the harvest will later be compared with the ledger maintained by the dungeon guards, as somebody takes pains to mention.

After the kingdom's taxes, duchy's taxes, county's taxes, baronetcy's taxes, city taxes, and Guild taxes, Bella and Haroun receive 13 silver and 10 copper for their troubles; almost exactly what the guards estimated.

And Bella now qualifies to get a tin guildplate.

(There was a discussion while she was gone about whether Bella should be forced to take off her belt and scabbard and sword so they could have a better look at her Skill signature.  The Vice-Guildmaster pointed out that the main purpose of Skill fingerprinting is to prevent somebody from repeatedly getting kicked out and reregistering, and that a fingerprint as unique as Bella's serves this purpose just as nicely.)

The design of her tin guildplate, if Bella cares to inspect it, is simple enough that you could imagine the same guildplate being reinvented a hundred thousand years earlier.  The base design is a rectangle in the golden ratio, with clipped corners such that the clipped edges form 45-degree angles with the lines of the main rectangle, and the unclipped part of the short edge is the same length as the edges of the clipped corners.  There's runes on it that spell Bella in the local language, plus some smaller inscrutable runes that are admin codes rather than words.

There's a pamphlet Bella is supposed to read, around the complexity of the rules of the road for drivers in Washington, if the rules of the road put a lot of emphasis on not killing other drivers to steal their cars.  There are repeated injunctions that "But I was stronger than them and successfully beat them up!" is not a defense for refusing to obey the instructions of Guild administration personnel, who actually know all the much more complicated rules pertaining to particular contracts.  Your Guild plate will be revoked as a result, and your parents cannot overrule this revocation no matter who they are.

You need to produce a minimum amount of revenue for the Guild, per three months, to maintain E-rank privileges.  Most ways of doing this involve risking your life and other people collecting a majority of the resulting earnings.  But hey, at least you can now roam around the country without having a new layer of skin ripped off by travel fees every time you cross a local border; and officials will hesitate to do worse than annoy you, if you don't do anything that gives them a good excuse.

And then they're out of the building, and Bella is officially an E-rank Adventurer.

"Subplot complete," she mutters to herself.

Haroun seems content to let Bella decide which subquest to do next.  Either that or he's still mentally tired.

She wants a late lunch / early dinner, and then to go back to their inn, and then she says, "Can I see the exercises the slimes taught you or do you need to crash for the day?"

Haroun has recovered faster physically than mentally.  Their room at the inn is a little crowded for this, but he can do at least some of the exercises.  He takes off his shirt, which the slimes forcibly did to him and which could be important for all he knows.  And he goes through some of the exercises he was taught.

To Bella, the result looks vaguely like Tai Chi or Hollywood Kung Fu.

She takes little notes, though she has to improvise how exactly to write down hollywood tai-fu or whatever this is. "Thanks." She tries them. She does not take off her shirt first.

"My Skill is not nearly leveled enough to tell whether you're doing those right," says Haroun.  "If you were somebody else, I'd say for you to wait until I had enough levels myself to try teaching somebody else.  But I don't know, maybe you have special privileges."

Bella doesn't seem to be getting any better at whatever it is she's doing.

"You need levels in something to teach it? I'm not even soliciting instruction per se, I'm just imitating -"

"I mean - I think it's mostly a matter of knowing what you're doing, not of, I don't know, some direct interaction between numerical levels?  I imagine that you could teach me skills where you didn't get them by leveling at all, because you'd know enough to teach me.  And that I could teach things to somebody from your world, even if they were learning without Skillups.  But I'd have to know the thing.  And I don't know this thing.  I've just been led through some exercises enough to get Lv. 1 of a Skill, which means I have the Skill to keep doing those exercises.  It doesn't mean I've done them often enough and know how they work instead of, of just being able to, do them - so I can't tell by looking at you if you're doing them right.  You usually want at least a two-level difference before you try to teach somebody at all and a four-level difference is much better.  I'm sorry if I said that at too much length, I'm still feeling a bit beaten(*) when it comes to saying things better and shorter."

(*) Lit. kneaded-like-dough.

"Bleh. Okay. You didn't seem super into it so I figured I could just copy off you and you could forget about it if you wanted."

"Oh.  Um.  I'm guessing that martial arts in your world don't do - things-that-your-world-doesn't-have - and that means you can learn a martial art just by imitating what you see martial artists do?"  Honestly that still sounds a little implausible to him, but whatever.  "The slimes made me do things exactly right until I got Lv. 1 of the Skill and I can definitely feel that there's, uh, something going on, though it's very faint."

"Uh, I think if you're doing it seriously you have a teacher correct your form, not that I've ever tried a martial art because of the balance disorder, but I'd expect you to be able to get anywhere just watching a - just watching."

"No, this is definitely one of the weird mystic ones.  Sorry.  And if it actually is a lost art that comes from a dragon at the core of the world, I'd expect it to be, uh, super extra bonus weird and mystic."  Tired as Haroun's brain may be, there's some kinds of reasoning it can do on full automatic.  "Assuming the whole thing was true, did you get the impression this is one of those, uh, legendary story-style destiny-related situations where I've got to practice this art because I'll suddenly turn out to need it five chapters later?"

"Uh. I did not get the impression of that off anything that happened in the dungeon but I have in the background been assuming that I should default to keeping you around because I was placed near you and any unusual abilities you acquire don't make me think that less."

"It honestly didn't occur to me until now that I might be your destined Companion, but now that you point it out, I can see how I'm a pretty atypical guy to run into right as his carriage is being attacked by bandits.  But I am going to deal with this revelation later, you know?"

"Can you without overloading yourself at least tell me if 'destined Companions' are in fact a thing and what that thing is, I was operating very much on guesses."

"I don't know off the top of my head, sorry.  I mean I don't know from history or anything like that.  But it seemed obvious in retrospect as soon as you pointed it out, and I applied the Inverse Probability Theorem to the prior odds of something like that being true and the likelihood ratio for you crossing the path of my carriage at the exact time of a bandit attack.  Massed bandit attacks on carriages with two visible C-ranked guards are just not that common."

"Oh.

Uh, sorry."