Zelphy

Zelphy is a seasoned adventurer of the frontier town of Darion, hired through the Guild by Hawkins to serve as the instructor for Lyle and Novem when they first take up the adventuring life. Introduced as a woman with twelve years of experience and a spotless reputation, she bristles at being called a "veteran" and insists she is still only in her twenties. She is famous for her rough, unrefined manner of speech, but beneath the coarse exterior she is a diligent, dependable teacher who drills newcomers in the fundamentals: reading contracts carefully, gathering information from travelers, judging danger, and surviving grunt work like ditch-cleaning before ever risking real combat.

In the field Zelphy fights as a versatile warrior-mage, wielding a shield and sword while weaving her own original spells into combat — striking with the shield, thrusting with the blade, and knocking enemies off their feet with magic, a style Lyle had never seen before. She holds back her own strength when teaching, forcing her students to do the fighting so they learn, and her method is to rein them in when they overexert themselves rather than push them past their limits.

Her past is that of a fallen knight: she once served House Lockwarde, whose family was exiled from their domain, and she turned to adventuring to support her relatives — her body is covered in scars that testify to how hard those years were. Quietly loyal, she is secretly an adventurer connected to Bentler (Ventler), the lord of Darion, and it was through her influence that the Lockwardes were allowed to settle in the town. When Aria Lockwarde comes begging for help recovering the stolen family jewel, Zelphy's ties to her old masters draw her into Lyle's schemes.

During an urgent Guild request into the forest and its Dungeon, Zelphy leads the party and shows both her lethal skill and her hard-edged pragmatism: after a veteran colleague is killed, she coldly strips his corpse of its valuables, appalling Aria — only for it to later emerge that she intends to return everything to the dead man's family, revealing her deep, unshowy sense of duty. Her contract ends after this arc; she retires from adventuring to marry an ordinary man, sharing a tearful farewell with Aria. Even long afterward Lyle remembers Zelphy fondly as the mentor who first taught him and his companions what it means to be an adventurer.