Korgan Charter-Bead

Korgan Charter-Bead is the most pleasant man who will ever ruin your life, and he'll do it with the paperwork countersigned and a genuinely warm handshake.

He's dwarf — five-foot-three, two hundred and change, the usual dense Hardfell frame — but where a pit boss goes rough, Korgan went smooth. His beard is short, oiled, and threaded with charter-beads in Guild silver and assay-house green, each one a filing he's won, and he keeps them clicking gently through his fingers while he talks like other men worry a coin. He runs an assay-factor desk out of the Hardfell shell on Khesret, matching resupply hulls to League claims, and he is very, very good at it. Books balanced. Convoys on time. A smile that has never once been caught lying, because Korgan doesn't lie. He just knows exactly which true things to say.

When he hands you the Deep Rise run — frame spares, smelter feed, oathplate, fuel, out to a wildcat claim two hops past Hardfell Core — it's clean, fair-priced, and routine, and every word of that is accurate. What he won't volunteer is the timing: that a System King's assay office is closing on that same claim the same week, that Korgan's manifest is one of the tidy true facts that'll help paint a debt-clan wildcat's strike as League property, and that he sleeps fine because none of it is technically theft. Push him and he'll agree with everything you say and change nothing. He isn't a monster. He's worse — he's a professional, and the System King pays professionals to make a taking look like a filing.