Rimelion: The Exploiter

The sunlight hit us like a wall.

After hours in the dark, breathing metal dust and stale air, the afternoon light was so bright it felt like an attack. I threw my arm over my eyes and heard Katherine hiss beside me, Lucy swear, and Lucas make a sound like a cat that had been dropped in water.

Frozna walked out unbothered.

We stood outside the mine entrance, blinking and squinting and adjusting to a world that had colors other than amber and grey, and for a long moment nobody said anything. Just breathed.

Clean air, pine and grass and the distant smell of river water, and it tasted so good after the copper-iron tang of the mine that I wanted to bottle it.

Wolfie was the first to recover.

He bounded out of the tunnel, shook himself violently, and rolled in the grass with the abandoned joy of a creature who had been underground for far too long. Lizzie launched from Frozna’s shoulder and spiraled upward into the sky, chittering with delight.

“Freedom!” Lucy declared, spreading her arms wide and tilting her face toward the sun. The pirate accent was back at full force, thick enough to spread on bread. “The earth has released us from her clutches! The sky welcomes her wayward children home!”

“We were underground for like six hours,” Lucas said.

“Six hours in the belly of the beast! Practically swallowed whole and spat back out!”

Lucas was still transformed. Windprincess ribbons caught the breeze, and his small frame looked even more delicate in the daylight than it had in the mine’s dim glow. He’d been in the form for... I counted... well past the three-hour minimum, so he could get out anytime he wanted. He didn’t.

He caught me looking and scowled. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking you look very pretty in sunlight.”

“I will electrocute you.”

Katherine dropped onto a flat rock and stretched, arms overhead, joints popping like fireworks. “Ahhhh. Good fight. Best fight!”

“Best fight,” Lucy agreed, dropping beside her. “And I won the bowling.”

“You did NOT.”

“Did so! Seven with one swing, I counted!”

“Was five!” Katherine held up five fingers for emphasis. “Charlie was counting! Charlie, tell her!”

“I was not counting,” I said.

“Ya was! I saw ya looking!”

“I was looking because you were launching miners into the ceiling, Katherine. That’s hard to ignore. I was not keeping score.”

“Then who was counting?”

“Nobody was counting!”

Lucy grinned triumphantly. “If nobody was counting, then my seven stands unchallenged. Maritime bowling rules: uncontested scores are final.”

“Tat’ not a real rule!”

“All rules are real if ye declare ‘em with authority!”

Katherine turned to Frozna for support. Frozna considered the question with her usual gravity, then said: “I was shooting. I did not count.”

“See? No witnesses!” Lucy pumped her fist.

Katherine sputtered.

I sat on a rock and let the argument wash over me, warmth on my face, clean air in my lungs, and temporal shards plus command crystal safely in my inventory.

We’d done it.

We’d actually done it.

“Can we talk about how Charlie defeated the final boss by filing paperwork at it?” Lucas said from his perch on a boulder, legs dangling, ribbons drifting.

Lucy cackled. “Aye! ‘Foreman Unit, I require a status report!’ And the big lug just... froze up! Every time!”

“Was good trick,” Katherine admitted. “But boring. Need more hitting.”

“You hit plenty.”

“Could hit more.”

“And Charlie talked it to death,” Lucas continued, something between admiration and disbelief in his voice. “That’s going to be the story people tell. The Queen of Frost defeated the ancient mining golem through the power of bureaucracy.”

“Administrative exploitation,” I corrected primly. “It’s different.”

“It’s paperwork combat.”

“It’s—” I gave up. “Fine. I defeated a boss with paperwork. Add it to the legend.”

“The Goddess of Paperwork!” Lucy declared.

“I will push you off this mountain.”

“Oh!” Katherine sat up straight, eyes bright. “And Frozna broke the shard!”

Frozna went still.

“Careful one!” Katherine was grinning from ear to ear, relishing this. “Perfect aim! Right through shiny!”

“It was behind the armor plate,” Frozna said, her voice carefully neutral. “I could not see it.”

“Ya shot heart!”

“I was aiming for the structural flaw. The Angel’s Vision showed—”

“Perfect shot!” Katherine clapped her hands together. “Too perfect! So good it was bad!”

Frozna looked at me. I held up my hands. “Don’t look at me. She’s been waiting to do this since the first overseer.”

“Been very patient,” Katherine confirmed.

“Next time,” Frozna said, with the quiet dignity of someone accepting an embarrassment they could not escape, “I will aim worse.”

“Don’t aim worse,” I said. “Just... maybe check what’s behind the wall before you shoot through it.”

“The Angel’s Vision does not work that way.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.”

Lucy leaned back, arms behind her head. “And let’s not forget the Kia bit! Charlie walks up to the biggest golem, puts on a voice, and says ‘this is Senior Artificer Kia,’ and the thing just... believed her!”

“It didn’t believe me,” I said. “It recognized the authority pattern. The governance protocols—”

“She talked to the big metal man, and he went to sleep,” Lucy translated for an imaginary audience. “Like a bedtime story. The Queen tucked him in.”

Katherine howled.

“That’s not—it was a legitimate exploitation of—you know what, never mind.”

The laughter settled into the comfortable silence of a team that had survived something together and come out the other side with stories to tell. The breeze carried pine scent and birdsong, and for a moment everything felt simple and right.

Lucas smiled. Not his usual sardonic half-smile or the reluctant upturn he allowed when something was genuinely funny despite his best efforts.

“My ultimate worked,” he whispered.

The silence lasted exactly one second.

“Oh, did it?” Lucy turned to him with exaggerated interest. “I must’ve missed it, what with all the warriors still standing afterward.”

“It cleared the path. That was the objective.”

“Cleared a path! He says, ‘Corvael—descend!’” Lucy threw her arms wide in imitation. “Divine wind, ten seconds of absolute destruction, and when the dust settles... half of them are still there.”

“They’re metal constructs! Wind against metal—”

“Big fancy wind princess couldn’t blow tin men!” Katherine cackled, miming Lucas’s pose. “Very dramatic! Very pretty! Not very effective!”

“It killed dozens of warriors—”

“Dozens out of hundreds! Truly, the scourge of gentle sea breezes!” Lucy joined.

Lucas groaned and buried his face in his hands, ribbons drooping around him like wilted petals. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Aye, but ye did.” Lucy patted his shoulder with exaggerated sympathy. “And we love ye for it, Luka.”

“Don’t call me—”

“Luka the Windprincess, whose ultimate almost worked!”

“It DID work—”

“Almost!” Katherine agreed cheerfully. “Very close to working!”

Lucas’s groan could have been heard from the bottom of the mine.

I laughed. “Sorry,” I managed, wiping my eyes. “Sorry. It did work. It was incredible.”

“But?” he said flatly.

“But nothing. You were great.”

He studied me suspiciously. “You’re going to add something.”

“No.”

“You’re going to say ‘for a gentle breeze’ or something.”

“I would never.” I paused. “Windprincess.”

He threw a pebble at me. I caught it in a shell of ice and flicked it back.

The walk back to Thalvirea was downhill, and the late afternoon light painted the hillside in gold and amber that I tried very hard not to compare to golem eyes.

The old mining settlement’s ruins passed by on our left, those dozens of collapsed shelters where workers had lived before the golems took their jobs.

I thought about Kia. About a spoon. About a sister named Tira who had lived in the Altandai Eastern Quarter a hundred and sixty years ago.

I’d look into it. Probably nothing left to find, but I’d look.

We reached the town as the sun was touching the hills, long shadows stretching across the cobblestones. Smoke rose from chimneys, and the smell of cooking drifted through the streets.

Lucy peeled off immediately, heading for the docks with purpose. “Got to round up me crew! Those layabouts’ll be three sheets to the wind by now, mark me words! If Bosun Hicks has been at the rum again, I’ll have him swabbing decks from here to Rimebreak!”

She vanished around a corner, her voice still audible as she descended toward the river, shouting threats and endearments at sailors who probably couldn’t hear her yet.

I found the town official near the main square, the same man who’d given us the quest. He was talking to a merchant, but when he saw our group approaching, dusty, and trailing a wolf, a falcon-cat, and a Windprincess, he excused himself and hurried over.

“You’re back!” His eyes scanned us, counting limbs, assessing damage. “Did you find the source of the attacks?”

“It’s dealt with.” I kept it simple. “The mine complex in the hills, Thalvirea Mining Complex. Old grandmaster installation. The golems inside reactivated recently due to a magical disturbance and were coming to the surface to check on agricultural emitters buried in the farmland.”

He blinked. “Golems?”

“Mining golems. Automated workers. They’ve been shut down. All of them. Permanently.” I met his eyes. “You won’t have any more attacks.”

His relief was instant, a full-body exhale that took years off his face. “Thank the—thank you. Truly. We’ve been losing sleep, losing livestock, losing people to those things for weeks.”

“There’s more.” I straightened, shifting from adventurer to sovereign. “The emitters buried in your farmland are part of an ancient magical agriculture system. They’re still functional. I’m working on reactivating the full network from Altandai, and when I do, your crop yields could increase significantly.”

His eyes widened. “How significantly?”

“I’ll send a minister of agriculture to assess and implement. My people will contact you directly.”

“A minister?” He looked as if I’d told him it was going to rain gold. “Here? To Thalvirea?”

“To Thalvirea.” I smiled. “You’ve held this town together through a lot. It deserves proper support.”

He straightened, and that quiet pride I’d seen when he’d first introduced the town resurfaced. “We’ve managed for over a hundred years. A little help wouldn’t go amiss.”

“You’ll have it.”

I shook his hand; his grip was firm, calloused, the hand of a man who maintained a dying town through sheer stubbornness, and turned to rejoin my team.

Katherine was already walking toward the docks. “Boat time! Good boat!”

“Ship,” Lucas corrected automatically.

“Big boat!”

“It’s a—never mind.”

Lucy had, against all reasonable expectations, located her entire crew in under twenty minutes. Most of them looked slightly worse for wear, a few were definitely still drunk, and one sailor appeared to have acquired a goat that he was trying to smuggle aboard, but they were present and mostly vertical.

Why is it always goats…

“All hands on deck!” Lucy used the ring to amplify her voice, which rattled the dock’s already precarious structure. “Anchors aweigh, ye barnacle-bottomed bilge rats! We sail with the evening tide, and if any man among ye isn’t at his post in two minutes, I’ll use him as an anchor meself!”

The crew scrambled. Ropes were untied, sails were unfurled, and the ship began to ease away from the dock with a creak that suggested the dock was as relieved to see us go as we were to leave.

I stood at the rail, watching Thalvirea shrink behind us. The town’s few lights glowed in the gathering dusk, and somewhere among those patched roofs and stubborn walls, a man was probably telling his neighbors that the attacks were over, and a minister was coming, and maybe things would get better.

Maybe they would.

The river caught the last light of the sun, and the ship turned toward Altandai.

Lucas leaned against the rail near me, his Windprincess transformation finally fading as we sailed. The ribbons dissolved first, then the light, then the delicate frame filled back out into his normal proportions, grey robes replacing flowing skirts. He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and let out a long breath.

“Better?” I asked.

“You have no idea.”

“I kind of do.”

He flicked his stare to me and winced. “…sorry.”

“It’s okay, I love who I am now,” I nodded at him.

Lucy’s voice drifted down from somewhere above, singing a shanty about a queen who defeated a giant with nothing but words and winter, and I was fairly certain she was making it up as she went.

I closed my eyes and let the river carry us.