Rimelion: The Exploiter

The meeting room in Rimebreak Tower had the specific energy of a room where important things happened and nobody had slept through them.

Totally nobody.

Got it?

Lisa was sprawled in her chair, one leg tucked beneath her, chin propped on her fist, red hair spilling over the shoulder of a fitted black top that cost more than some of the furniture.

Fty sat across from her, upright, hands flat on the table.

Poundcake occupied the chair beside him with the stillness of a mountain that had been asked to attend a briefing; hands folded, expression serene, as if the meeting were a loaf that would rise in its own time.

Or something similarly nonsensical.

Yuki was vibrating, tapping a rhythm against her knee that had no discernible pattern. Her pink hair was pulled back in a hasty ponytail that was already losing structural integrity, and she kept glancing at the door, then at me, then at the door again.

Lucy sat at the far end of the table, leaning back, arms crossed over a navy peacoat that she wore regardless of weather because it looked vaguely nautical and she was still cosplaying a pirate.

And beside me, Lola.

Lola, whose hair was pulled back with professional severity. Lola, whose clipboard was positioned at a precise angle on the table. Lola, whose posture was so composed that it circled back around to being suspicious.

She had not looked at me once since sitting down.

Her ears were pink.

I was enjoying this enormously.

The door opened.

Lunaris came through first, Ian half a step behind her. She moved with the mechanical fluidity of the exoskeleton, each step carrying the faint hum of the framework doing its work.

I didn’t comment on it.

“Sorry we’re late,” Lunaris said, slightly breathless, already scanning the room for open seats. “The bus ride was—”

“Thank you for coming,” I said and smiled. “Both of you. I know the retreat was supposed to be longer.” Lunaris blinked. Something softened in her expression. She dropped into a chair, Ian settling beside her.

I looked around the table. My people.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve gathered everyone, I’d like to thank you all for coming. As you know, we have some delays—” I gritted my teeth, because the word delays tasted like chewing sand, “—so our departure to our core territory has been pushed back.” I pointed at Lucy. “Lucy will take her ship and explore the route to our future capital.”

Lucy sat forward. “Aye, me Queen!” she boomed, at a volume that made Fty’s left eye twitch. “The Glorious Rimebreak be ready to sail at yer command! We’ll chart them waters, map the coastline, an’ bring back word of what awaits; or me name ain’t Captain Lucy of the Rimebreak Navy!”

I cringed visibly and didn’t hide it, because hiding it only encouraged her, and I could already see the delighted grin spreading across her face at my reaction. She lived for the groans. She fed on them.

“Right,” I said, pushing past it. “So because of the food delay, I’ll be sending teams out to gather supplies and level, so we’re ready to face the empire once we’ve founded the city.” I met everyone’s eyes around the table, one by one.

Then I turned to Yuki.

“Yuki found something,” I said, and she sat up so fast that her chair creaked. “Would you like to tell us about it?”

“Okay,” she said, pulling out papers, a notebook, and what appeared to be a hand-drawn timeline that unfolded across two sections of the table. “So I was cross-referencing the Altandai Academy employment records—the ones I found in the auxiliary archive, not the main one, because the main one was reorganized during Grandmaster Thevian’s tenure and half the pre-reform files got mislabeled—and Grandmaster Thevian, by the way, was actually a fascinating administrator, very meticulous, he kept personal notes on all senior staff including dietary preferences, and he apparently ate hard-baked bread every single morning for forty years—”

“Yuki,” I said.

“—which is actually relevant because—”

“It’s not.”

Poundcake stirred. “Hard-baked bread,” he said, with the quiet approval of a man who had just heard something profound. “A man who begins his morning with a crust that resists the teeth has already practiced patience before the day begins.”

Everyone looked at him.

He said nothing further. The silence settled around his words like…uh… flour over a counter.

“...anyway,” Yuki continued, slightly derailed but recovering, “the employment records led me to a Senior Enchanter named Veranthos. He was at the Academy about eighty years ago, a brilliant theorist specializing in unstructured magical amplification. Free-form casting theory—the idea that magic should respond to will and intent rather than rigid spell frameworks.”

Lisa’s posture shifted, straightening her spine, the leg untucking from beneath her, her chin lifting off her fist.

“Veranthos was a prodigy,” Yuki said, flipping through her notebook. “He joined the Academy young, published three papers before he was twenty-five, and early in his career he was part of an expedition south—a survey team exploring old ruins along the river valley. They found an old Twir outpost.”

“Twir?” Fty said. “Like Gatei?”

“Twir,” Yuki confirmed, eyes brightening. “Small fortification, edge of a mountain, visible from the river flowing through the valley below. Veranthos documented it extensively—he was the junior researcher on the expedition, but his notes were the most detailed. The outpost was intact, defensible, remote.” She turned a page. “He also found something there. A staff.”

She said it the way she’d said hard-baked bread. As if a legendary magical artifact and a Grandmaster’s breakfast preference occupied the same tier of historical significance.

Nobody reacted.

“The staff was apparently a Twir-era relic—a channeling instrument designed for unstructured magical output. It amplified the wielder’s intent directly, no spell frameworks required. Veranthos brought it back to the Academy, and his research accelerated dramatically after that. His publications shifted from theoretical to applied. He was producing results that nobody else could replicate, and the staff was the reason—it was doing exactly what he’d theorized, letting raw magical will shape the output.”

She paused for breath. Her hands were moving now, arranging papers on the table in a pattern that made sense only to her.

“Then his mother got sick. Degenerative condition. The Academy healers couldn’t treat it. Veranthos started researching preservation magic—life extension, soul anchoring. The line between experimental healing and necromancy is...” She wobbled her hand. “Academically blurry. He crossed it. Not out of malice—he was trying to save her.”

“And someone reported him,” Fty said.

Yuki’s expression soured. “Councillor Drethain. His academic rival. They’d been feuding for years over free-form theory—Drethain was a traditionalist, thought unstructured casting was dangerous. They published competing papers, gave competing lectures, once submitted rival proposals for the same research grant, and the review committee had to be replaced twice.”

She held up a finger.

“But here’s the part that matters. Drethain didn’t report Veranthos promptly. He knew for six months. He waited until the week before the Academy’s annual review, when Veranthos was being considered for promotion to the advisory council. A position Drethain also wanted.”

Lucy let out a low whistle.

“The Grandmaster sided with Drethain,” Yuki continued, “because Veranthos’s free-form theories were politically inconvenient. Easier to banish a heretic than admit the Academy’s foundational doctrine might be wrong. Veranthos was stripped of rank and expelled. The official record was sanitized—‘practicing proscribed arts of death manipulation.’”

She pulled another page.

“He went south. Back to the Twir outpost he’d found as a young researcher. He had the staff, he had his research; and he had years of isolation and bitterness. And then—” She set the page down on the table. “He tried to make himself immortal.”

The room was quiet.

“He failed,” Yuki said. “His last correspondence with the Academy was a letter.” She read from her notes. “‘If you don’t hear from me again, never go near, for I have been possessed. Deploy an army and turn this to ashes.’”

She set the notebook down.

“The Academy filed the letter. There’s a note in the margin. Estimated cost of military deployment, troop logistics, supply lines.” She paused. “And a single word: Denied.“

Fty’s jaw tightened.

“That was about fifty years ago,” Yuki said. “Whatever possessed him is still there. And it’s been growing.” She pulled out the last set of papers. “These are merchant reports Charlie smugg—, uh, brought here. River traders passing through the valley over the last three years. The first one mentions discolored water near the mountain and a bad smell. The second one, a year later, describes dead vegetation along the western bank. The third one—” she laid them side by side. “—maps the dead zone. It’s expanding. The miasma is spreading outward from the keep.”

She tapped the most recent report.

“At the current rate of growth, it reaches the river in twenty-five years. That’s the same river Lucy’s route passes through.”

“So there’s a possessed keep,” I said slowly, “radiating death magic, full of undead, sitting on Lucy’s route south, with a Twir-era staff inside that amplifies free-form casting.”

“That’s a good summary,” Yuki said, looking pleased. “Although I left out the part about the Twir outpost’s architectural—”

“Yuki.”

“—yes. That’s the summary.”

“Thank you,” I said as I turned to face the table. “So, this is the background. Now we have a potential expedition.”

Lisa nodded, the sprawl gone from her posture. “Similar to the quest for the legendary sword,” she said.

The room shifted, and at the center of it, Lunaris.

She didn’t flinch. She did something worse. She shrank. Her shoulders drew inward, her chin dropped, and she seemed to physically diminish in her chair, as if she could fold herself small enough that the memory wouldn’t find her. Her hands disappeared under the table.

The exoskeleton hummed faintly in the silence.

I focused on her.

“So, Lunaris.”

“...yes.” Her voice was small. A voice I’d never heard from her, not the bright exclamatory Lunaris, not the reckless grinning Lunaris, but a quiet one. The one who had watched her own reflection in a sword and lost.

Ian’s hand found hers under the table. I saw his fingers close around hers, and she let him.

“Lunaris, this is mandatory for you,” I said. “You will go there and retrieve the staff, which is for Lisa.” I pointed at Lisa, who was watching Lunaris with a fierce big-sis energy dialed up to something sharper than usual. “I don’t know if it’s legendary, but according to Yuki’s research, it should be. But...”

Lunaris nodded before I finished. She knew what was coming. “But I don’t have a class,” she whispered.

“I’ve decided to provisionally grant you the class back,” I said. “You need to get the staff. If you don’t, we’re taking it back.”

She nodded. A small, accepting nod. No argument, no bright defiance, no grin to hide behind. Just acknowledgment from someone who understood the terms and knew she’d earned them.

“You are demoted until you prove you can be trusted to lead again.”

Her head dropped. She stared at the table, hair falling forward, and nodded once more.

Ian’s hand tightened on hers. He looked at me, and the puppy-dog earnestness in his expression had hardened. “Charlie, she fought a Chronosblade with better stats and twelve elites,” he said. “She didn’t yield. She didn’t join him. She—”

Lunaris’s free hand came up and pressed gently against his arm. He stopped.

She didn’t look at him. She didn’t look at me. She just held his arm and shook her head, and Ian swallowed whatever else he’d been building toward and went quiet, his thumb tracing a circle on the back of her hand.

I let the silence hold for a moment. Then I looked around the room.

“You weren’t chosen at random to be here,” I said. “We think this is the best configuration for leveling, and the Twir outpost should function as a dungeon. Clear it and you’ll level for certain.”

Lisa was already moving. She unfolded from her chair, crossed the distance to Lunaris in three strides, and wrapped her arms around her from behind in a hug so aggressive it made the exoskeleton hum in protest.

“I’m obviously in,” she said, chin hooked over Lunaris’s shoulder, grinning. “How could big sis let Luny go alone?”

Lunaris made a sound; half laugh, half a startled yelp, and one of her hands came up to grip Lisa’s arm. She didn’t push her away.

Poundcake inclined his head. “A dough that has collapsed must be kneaded again,” he said as if delivering scripture. “But the second rise is always stronger than the first. I will tend the oven.”

Lisa looked at him over Lunaris’s shoulder. “That means he’s in,” she translated.

“I understood it,” Fty said flatly.

Lucy slammed both palms on the table. “An’ ye have me hammer, me Queen! No foul beast of death an’ darkness shall stand while Captain Lucy draws breath an’—”

I looked at her. “Lucy, you are mapping the route. No going into the dungeon.”

Her face fell with theatrical devastation. “But—”

“No.”

“Aye aye, blasted Queen!” She slumped back in her chair, arms crossed.

I rolled my eyes and turned to Fty. “Fty, I’d love you to lead this expedition.”

His expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes was already calculating. “Will I have to deal with Scamantha?” he asked.

I glanced at Lola. She consulted her holo, an actual consultation this time, not the emotional shield variant, and nodded. “She’ll be providing potions for the expedition.”

Fty let out a sigh. “As long as someone else brings the potions,” he said, “you can count on me.”

Ian leaned over and kissed the side of Lunaris’s face; quick, unself-consciou and grinned at her. “I’ll also help! You’re not doing this without your Daggerbear.”

Lunaris’s eyes were red-rimmed, but something flickered in them. She squeezed his hand and didn’t let go.

“Okay,” I said, and smiled. “That settles it. I wish you all good luck.”