Rimelion: The Exploiter

The next day, Lunaris was nervous…

The corridor to the Grand Hall was longer than she remembered.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was exactly the same length it had always been, and Lunaris was just walking slower, which was a thing she did now, walk slowly, consider things, measure distances instead of sprinting through them.

Ian’s hand was in hers, his thumb doing the small circular thing on the back of her knuckles that he probably didn’t know he did.

She knew. She always knew.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she squeezed his hand. “Nervous. But the good kind. I think.”

“There’s a good kind?”

“The kind where you’re nervous because something matters. Not because you’re scared.”

He was quiet for a second. “Whatever happens in there, I’m with you.”

It came out smooth. Smoother than he’d intended, clearly, because his ears went red and he looked straight ahead with the rigid focus of a man who had just said something accidentally romantic and was hoping the floor would open and swallow him.

She almost laughed. Almost. But the laugh caught on something in her chest and stayed there, and instead she just held his hand tighter.

They reached the doors, which two guards flanked, and after they confirmed it was Lunaris walking, they opened them.

Lunaris stopped breathing.

The Grand Hall stretched before her like a cathedral. The five tables with their assistants, quills moving, stamps thudding, the organized machine of a kingdom that worked. The Custodian near the front, hands clasped, posture perfect, radiating satisfaction.

Banners with the Rimebreak crest hanging from columns that had been scrubbed until they shone. And at the end of it all, on the dais, on the throne of frozen water that caught the light like a wave made of glass —

Charlie.

Lunaris’s feet stopped.

She’d seen Charlie in combat. She’d seen Charlie laugh, crack jokes, call Poundcake “Pancake” and get gently corrected, threaten to duel an entire tax office, eat street food while wearing a crown. She’d seen Charlie be silly and warm and human in ways that made you forget, sometimes, what she actually was.

She wasn’t forgetting now.

Charlie sat on the ice throne with her hands resting on the armrests, chin slightly lifted, frost clinging to the edges of her clothes as if it were part of her rather than something she wore.

Her eyes were steady. Not cold, never cold, not really, but certain. The kind of certainty that came from someone who had fought for every stone of this city and knew, in her bones, that it was hers.

She looked like a queen.

Not the queen from old Earth stories; the distant, untouchable, and draped in gold. The queen who had dirt under her nails last week and blood on her sword last month and was sitting on a throne that was so cold she felt it here.

She looked like someone you’d follow into something stupid and survive because she’d freeze the world down before she let you not.

Brian’s voice flickered, unbidden: Your Queen will get you bullied.

Lunaris looked at the grand hall. At the assistants. At the guards. At the kingdom that hadn’t existed a few months ago and now functioned as if it had been here for centuries.

No, she thought. My queen built thisand I nearly threw away what she gave me because I thought being fast was the same as being ready.

Ian’s hand squeezed hers. She realized she’d stopped walking.

“Luna?”

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be. She straightened her back and walked.

The hall felt enormous around her. Her footsteps echoed. She was aware of the assistants glancing up, of the custodian’s measured gaze, of the distance between the door and the dais shrinking with every step.

Charlie watched her approach.

With those steady eyes, and behind them, something that Lunaris recognized because she’d been on the receiving end of it before; a faith in her.

Charlie had believed in her when she was nothing. A low-level nobody with two swords and a dream and too much energy, bouncing into a room to shout an oath she’d rehearsed in a mirror. Charlie had handed her a million-credit class like it was pocket change and a cloak that had —

The cloak.

The thought hit like a fist under her ribs.

The Oathsworn Mantle. Silver-lined, legendary, inscribed with Charlie’s snowflake crest. The fabric that had flowed behind her like liquid moonlight, that had guided her twin blades, that had shielded her from strikes she couldn’t see. Charlie had given it to her as a marvel-tier item, and the system itself had upgraded it because Lunaris’s oath had been sincere.

Gone.

Lost with the class, with the fight, with everything. Shattered when Brian’s sword came down, and the world went black, and she woke up in her capsule staring at a death screen.

She’d lost the cloak that the system said she’d earned through sincerity.

Her eyes burned. She blinked it away with a furious breath through her nose. Not here. Not now. You don’t get to cry about a cloak in front of the woman who gave it to you.

She reached the base of the dais.

Charlie looked down at her.

“Lunaris,” she said.

“Your Majesty.”

The words came out steadily. That was something.

Charlie produced the shard—the Chronosblade shard, the same weight, the same impossible density of meaning compressed into a small stone—and held it out.

“Do well,” Charlie said.

Two words. That was all. No speech, no lecture, no enumeration of failures and conditions. Just do well, delivered with the same certainty that sat in her eyes, the certainty that said I know what you did, and I know what it cost you, and I’m giving this back because I believe the person standing here is not the same person who lost it.

Lunaris took the shard.

It was heavier than before.

The first time, it had burned with expense, with debt, with the giddy terror of receiving something she hadn’t earned. What has she done to be worth a million credits?

Nothing.

This time it burned with something else.

I have to earn this twice.

She closed her fingers around it.

And then, without planning it, without rehearsing it, without the bouncing energy or the wide-eyed excitement or the blur of white and silver shooting forward —

She dropped to one knee.

The hall went quiet.

Her head bowed. Her hand pressed over her heart. The stone floor was cold through her clothes, and she felt the absence of the mantle like a missing limb, the way it would have settled around her shoulders, the way the fabric would have pooled on the stone, the silver snowflake catching the light, the sock.

Gone. Because she’d been reckless. Because she’d been fast instead of ready.

“I solemnly swear that I’m a good person,” she said. Her voice didn’t shake. She was distantly proud of that. “I swear I’ll fight in the name of Rimebreak, with honor and for glory.”

The same words. Exactly the same. She’d said them weeks ago, vibrating with excitement, barely understanding what they meant. She’d rehearsed them in front of a mirror and delivered them with the dramatic flourish of someone who thought oaths were performances.

They weren’t performances.

She understood that now. “I pledge my blades, my strength, and my spirit to the cause.” Her throat tightened. She pushed through it. “May my victories bring honor, and my fall be met with pride.”

The last word hung in the air.

She stayed on her knee. The shard pulsed in her closed fist. She could feel it waiting; the same way it had waited the first time. The system didn’t care about worthiness. It cared about acceptance.

Lunaris accepted.

[Congratulations! You are now Chronosblade.]

I’ll be the fastest. But I’ll be ready this time.

She stood.

Charlie was looking at her with an expression Lunaris couldn’t fully read, something between warmth and steadiness, something that didn’t need to say I’m proud of you because it was simply there, in the set of her mouth and the frost on her throne and the kingdom she’d built around them both.

Ian was standing at the edge of the hall, and he was crying. Quietly, messily, making absolutely no effort to hide it, his face blotchy and wet and proud, and Lunaris loved him so much it hurt.

She turned back to Charlie.

“I won’t waste it,” she said.

Soon, the Grand Hall was behind her, and the shard was settled, and her class was back. She flexed her fingers. The Chronosblade was there.

I won’t waste it.

Ian was walking beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. He hadn’t said anything since they’d left the hall. He didn’t need to. His face was doing all the talking.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Me? I’m great. I’m fine. You’re the one who just—” He gestured vaguely at everything. “—did the whole thing.”

“The whole thing,” she repeated, grinning.

“The oath. The kneeling. The—” He cleared his throat. “It was really cool, Luna.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He looked at her, and the blotchiness softened into something warm and earnest and so purely Ian that her chest ached. “I’m really proud of you.”

She almost stopped walking. Instead, she bumped her shoulder against his, hard enough that he stumbled half a step and caught himself with a startled laugh.

“Come on, Daggerbear,” she said. “We need to get you armed before we ship out.”

His face did the thing. The thing where he tried to look casual about being called Daggerbear and failed so completely that his ears turned the color of Lisa’s hair. “You don’t have to keep—”

“Daggerbear. We’re going to the blacksmith. Keep up.”

He kept up.

The shop was the same squat, blocky cube with a chimney trailing lazy smoke and a sign that read BLACKSMITH with the subtlety of a war horn. The floor inside gleamed like a temple. Every rack stood in obsessive formation, blades angled identically, shields sorted by size, hammers arranged with a precision that suggested the person responsible would declare war on a crooked nail.

Veer was behind the counter.

He looked up as they entered, pipe clenched between his teeth, soot already dusting his boots in a way that suggested he had been explicitly told not to walk on the clean floor and had done it anyway. His eyes moved from Lunaris to Ian, then back to Lunaris, and a grin cracked through the gravel of his face.

“The swordbear returns,” he said, smoke curling around the words. “Heard you had a rough go.”

Lunaris’s stomach tightened. “I’m back,” she said, and kept her voice bright. “Class restored. Ready for the next stupid thing.”

Veer grunted approvingly, the way a mountain might approve of a goat that kept climbing. His gaze shifted to Ian. “And this is?”

“Ian,” Ian said, straightening. “I’m her—”

“Boyfriend,” Lunaris finished, because watching him try to navigate that sentence was a form of cruelty she wasn’t in the mood for. “He needs the daggers.”

“She told me you were good. Are you?” Veer asked.

“He’s improving,” Lunaris said.

“She means I’m terrible but stubborn,” Ian said.

Veer laughed. “Good. Stubborn I can work with.” He reached under the counter, and the motion had none of the hesitation of a salesman fishing for stock. He knew exactly where they were. He set a case on the counter and flipped it open.

Two daggers sat on dark cloth.

They were beautiful. The blades were slightly curved, single-edged, with a weight distribution that Lunaris could read even from across the counter: fast draw, quick recovery, built for someone who needed to commit and get out before the commitment killed him. The handles were wrapped in dark leather, and the guards were minimal.

They looked like they’d been made for exactly one person, by someone who’d been paying attention to what that person needed.

Ian stared at them.

Then he reached for the system interface, and his eyes went wide. “Epic?!” The word came out at a pitch that made Veer’s pipe wobble. “How—”

[Veer’s Ironbite]

Quality: 5-epic

ATK: 58-66

Durability: 120/120

Restriction: Level 25

Effects: +5% DEX, +4% AGI, Quick-Draw (reduced draw time by 30%)

Veer shrugged, pipe smoke drifting. “The materials your Queen sent were good. And I was focused.”

Ian’s mouth was still open. “I—thank you. These are incredible. I don’t even—”

“Don’t thank me,” Veer said. “Thank the steel. I just convinced it to cooperate.”

Ian lifted one of the daggers and turned it in his hand, testing the balance with a grip that was, Lunaris noticed with a small, private flutter of pride, actually improving. Still not elegant, but not the desperate flailing it had been. His wrist found the weight point, and something settled in his face.

“They’re perfect,” he breathed.

Veer nodded, satisfied. He pulled the pipe from his mouth to tap the ash into a tray. A clump of it missed the tray and landed on the counter. Another clump drifted to the floor.

A silence fell.

Veer’s eyes moved slowly from the ash on the counter to the ash on the floor to the trail of soot his boots had tracked across the pristine tiles. His pipe hung in his hand. His expression was the expression of a soldier calculating retreat angles.

From the back room, a sound.

Footsteps, approaching with the inevitability of weather.

Veer grabbed both dagger sheaths from under the counter, thrust them at Ian, and jerked his head toward the door. “Out,” he said.

“But I haven’t paid—”

“Settled with your Queen. Out. Now. Go.”

The back door swung open.

“VEER!”

The voice hit the shop like a siege weapon. Lunaris saw a flash of spotless apron, pinned hair, and a cleaning rag gripped like a mace. Behind the counter, Veer was already moving, his stocky frame somehow achieving a speed that defied his build, circling wide around the far rack toward the front door.

“WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT THE BOOTS! WHAT DID I—”

Lunaris grabbed Ian’s arm and ran. They burst through the front door together, Ian clutching his new daggers to his chest like a man rescuing children from a fire, and Veer barreled out behind them, pipe miraculously still in his mouth, soot trailing from his boots in a damning evidence trail.

He stopped on the street, straightened his apron, and reinserted the pipe. “She’ll settle down,” he said.

From inside the shop, a crash. Then a word in Dwarvish that Lunaris was fairly certain translated to something anatomically creative.

“Eventually,” Veer amended.

He looked at them. “Take care of each other out there,” he said. Then he turned and walked back into the shop.

The door closed behind him and the shouting resumed.