. . .
"So, about your mission to find a solution against the kingdom-wide problem that has been plaguing us?" I questioned Lance, taking a seat at a corner of the humid canal. We had walked a bit away from the refugees so our conversation wouldn't be overheard. The last thing we needed was to either plunge them into despair or, worse, give them false hope.
"Unsuccessful," he sighed, settling down. "The only cannon we could find was destroyed during our battle with the Slime Queen and King outside the kingdom, in the forest."
My white, bushy eyebrows shot up. Slime Queen and King? Those sounded massive.
"This little group was able to defeat slime variants that big?" Lessa asked, looking at Fee and the others with newfound respect.
"Yeah, I was kinda the key piece in spreading the fire to destroy the slime," Fee bragged smugly, though there was still a smidge of something in her voice I couldn't quite place.
"You know you people don't have to be here?" I said, turning toward Lancelot's group.
"Well, we are," Fee and Leil said in unison, sticking out their tongues before flopping onto the floor.
"They're always like this, aren't they?" Lancelot muttered, setting his helmet down and running a hand through his disheveled hair, his tone caught between embarrassment and mild frustration.
"Unfortunately, yes." Apparently, we both had teammates who don't respect private conversations.
Kevin, the shorter knight, and Mage rested against the slick walls, listening with weary eyes, while the wolf and little girl lay curled up on the damp floor, already asleep.
Calm moments like these weren't all that bad—
"You were saying something about fighting a bunch of slime outside the kingdom?" Mage prompted, snapping my mind back to the conversation at hand.
"That's true," I continued. "You said you used a single cannon to destroy entire colonies of slime? Paint me skeptical, but that sounds hard to believe."
"It wasn't just a single cannon," Lancelot corrected. "There was a liquid we used to ignite it and spread the fire. That was how we won."
An explosive liquid… could it be—? No, there was no hope for that.
"So where's the liquid now?" I asked.
Lancelot's head drooped in shame. "It was exhausted in the battle."
I sighed. I knew I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. We may have gained a few extra fighters, but we were still no match for the mounds of slime consuming the city. And those damned rogue knights only made everything harder.
"Actually, it's not."
A small voice piped up.
Everyone in the corridor turned to look at the speaker. The little girl with purple eyes—Meili—was still curled against the wolf, its chest rising and falling in sleep.
"What do you mean it's not exhausted, Meili?" Kevin asked her.
She sat up and reached for her knapsack, pulling out a small round vial no larger than her little palm.
Inside, plugged shut with a dirty rag, was a single drop of an orange liquid I recognized all too well.
Mage's eyes widened in recognition as I snatched the vial from Meili's hands.
Lancelot hesitated, his hand instinctively reaching for his hilt. Everyone else tensed, though they didn't know why.
"What's the problem?" Kevin asked.
"First question. Let's start with how the hell you got this," I said, my voice harsher than usual. Mage leaned slightly toward me, while Lessa and Leil stood uncertain, waiting for direction.
"It was—how do we—can we trust you?" Lance finally settled on asking.
"We fought against the rogue knights and gathered as many refugees here as possible. We've done more for PrideFall than any of you have," Mage told Lancelot bluntly.
"Harsh, but true. That's not to say we've been playing out there for the past week," Kevin spoke up while Lance clenched his teeth, his frustration evident. "We've gathered valuable information and this explosive liquid vial thing that seems really important to you. So can we just have a civil discussion without attacking each other?"
Lance sighed for what felt like the hundredth time. "My knight is right."
Kevin beamed at that sentence as Lancelot continued.
"We found this at a cottage belonging to an ammunition expert who participated in the war of Orion. It was the only significant thing we recovered from our expedition. What's its significance to you?"
"Trying to say I'm not significant?" Fee teased.
I ignored her and considered Lancelot's words. If an ammunition expert really possessed my vials of Phlogiston, even if it was twenty years ago, that was incredibly bad news.
Truth be told, when all five vials went missing from my laboratory, I thought I was done for—that I'd be executed for treason if the explosives were ever used in another war. But that never happened. I had always wondered why… what became of the Phlogiston in the meantime.
All the while, the lumberjack sat unusually quiet.
That didn't matter.
"What was its significance?" Lancelot had asked.
"These were explosives meant to be used during the wars of conquest, particularly in Orion," I explained. "As you probably figured out, just a single drop could blow a crater through a house."
Everyone stiffened. This wasn't something meant to be said out loud.
"The wars would have been… much more brutal if that had happened," Lancelot finally concluded. He had likely fought in them himself. PrideFall had won, of course, but if these explosives had been used, it wouldn't have been a battle—it would have been a massacre.
A heavy silence settled over us until Lancelot, ever the knight, pressed forward.
"So, can you make more of this… Phlogiston?"
I considered it. I couldn't create a new batch from scratch, but I could synthesize it. "I can duplicate this drop, but as you'd expect, it won't be as potent as the original. It would be diluted—we don't have access to the raw materials, not with the kingdom in crisis."
"So, step one… make more boom boom juice," Fee said quietly.
For once, Lance chuckled, then turned back to the conversation.
Several hours passed in discussion. The only ones who stayed awake and contributed, apart from Lancelot and me, were Mage and Fee.
"So, parts of the city are infected with slime?" Lancelot asked. "I didn't see any on the streets earlier."
"That's because of the rogue knights and the trolls controlling them," I explained. "They've taken over the waterways and flooded entire streets. Since slime can't grow on anything that isn't organic, the water has kept it contained."
"That's… actually effective," Lancelot admitted.
"Yes, but they've also drowned civilians who refused to obey their orders."
Lancelot scratched his beard, his frustration visible. "So not only do we have the slime to deal with, but also rogue knights, trolls, and whatever other creatures are roaming around? Are there any real knights left?"
"Not as far as I can tell," I answered honestly. "Most of the knights were wiped out in the first wave when the slime attacked. The rest turned rogue and sided with the trolls. There might be others guarding refugees in different sectors, but I can't confirm that."
The odds were stacked against us. That was something I had come to terms with a long time ago. But maybe—just maybe—this knight in front of us could change that.
"How about the position of the slime colonies?" Lancelot continued. "Since the rogues have temporarily contained them, we need to pinpoint their locations before we plan to wipe them out completely."
"I have a map with details from our patrols. We can strategize based on that."
"Good," Lancelot said. "Any other threats I need to know about? Besides the slime, rogue knights, trolls, hogs, and giant spiders?"
"You forgot the crows," Mage added. "Not exactly deadly, but a complete nuisance. They scavenge everything."
"Also…" she hesitated.
I groaned immediately. "Noooo, please don't say what I think you're about to say. Those lunatics don't count as an actual threat."
"What is it?" Lancelot asked warily. "I need every ounce of information I can get."
Mage sighed. "The Alterra Axis."
I let my forehead hit the wooden table with a thud.
"What's the problem with them?" Lancelot asked.
"They're a religious group—a subset of the Cyra and Elara Advent, in fact," Mage explained. "They popped up a few days after the slime invasion, and one of their core tenets is that the slime is a divine punishment from the Goddesses and shouldn't be fought."
"Yes," I muttered, rubbing my temples. "They surrender themselves to the slime mounds… sometimes even force other civilians to be dissolved along with them."
Lancelot's jaw tightened. "Zero sense of self-preservation."
He glanced toward Meili, sleeping soundly on Silver's belly, her fingers loosely curled around her necklace.
"True," I said, sitting up. "But we haven't spotted them in about four days. So either they all walked into the slime willingly, or they got wiped out some other way. Either way, they're not our problem anymore."
"That's morbid," Fee muttered. Then, with a stretch and a yawn, she added, "Anyway, what's the time? And more importantly, is there anything to eat? I'm starving."
Several hours had passed. It had to be the seventh sun arc by now. I was starving too. I hadn't eaten since meeting Lancelot and his group at the Twin Bridges.
The sewer hideout had settled into an uneasy quiet. The initial excitement of our arrival had faded, replaced by the low murmurs of survivors tending to their own. Some prepared what little food they had left, others curled in their corners, conserving what little energy they had.
The air was thick—stale, damp, tinged with rot. It clung to everything, seeping into our clothes, our skin, our bones. The old stone tunnels stretched into the dark, a forgotten maze of flood canals that now served as a last refuge.
These weren't soldiers. They were shopkeepers, craftsmen, nobles turned beggars. People who had never wielded a weapon in their lives. And yet, they had survived. Not because they fought. Because they hid. Because they got lucky.
This wasn't a rebellion. It wasn't even a resistance. It was a huddled mass of people clinging to what little they had left, too afraid to make noise, lest the wrong ears found them.
And now, sitting among them, was a knight of PrideFall.