Rimelion: The Exploiter

“Then you’ll have a decision to make on the ground,” Charlie said. “And I trust you to make the right one. Lunaris.”

The words landed. Heavy and warm and terrifying, the kind of trust that felt less like a gift and more like a sword pressed into your hands with the blade already swinging.

Lunaris opened her mouth to respond.

The system got there first.

A notification bloomed in her vision, gold-bordered, shimmering with the particular insistence of something that wanted to be read right now and would absolutely not be minimized, dismissed, or politely ignored.

[Epic Quest: The Oathsworn’s Redemption]

A blade that has shattered must be reforged in fire greater than the one that broke it.

You, Lunaris, Chronosblade of Rimebreak, stand diminished. Your oath was spoken twice—once in bright arrogance, once in bruised truth—and the kingdom watches to see which voice endures. The crown has returned your class, but trust is not a gift that can be given twice without proof.

Deep in the southern reaches, beyond rivers choked with death, the Twir outpost of Ashenvault stands corrupted. Within its walls, the mage Veranthos—once brilliant, now possessed, forever fallen—commands forces of undeath that spread like rot across the land. His power grows. The miasma expands. And at the heart of his domain lies an artifact of terrible potential: a staff of unstructured amplification, a relic of the Twir civilization that predates even the Grandmasters themselves.

This is your trial, Oathsworn.

Venture into Ashenvault. Face the corruption that festers in Veranthos’s keep. Retrieve the Twir staff. And return to your kingdom not as the girl who lost her class on a battlefield of pride, but as the blade who earned her place in the frost.

The Oathsworn Mantle remembers. Will you give it something worth remembering?

Objective: Enter the Twir outpost. Confront the source of corruption. Retrieve the Twir Channeling Staff.

Secondary Objective: The outpost harbors a guild operating within unclaimed Rimebreak territory. Negotiate their integration into the kingdom’s authority, or neutralize them as a strategic threat. The crown’s sovereignty over this corridor must be established before departure. Failure to resolve the territorial dispute will result in partial quest completion.

Reward: Contribution points based on performance. Kingdom reputation restoration. Experience scaled to encounter difficulty.

Note to Lunaris/Charlie:This quest was generated based on current kingdom status, bearer history, and strategic conditions. It reflects the system’s assessment of the optimal growth trajectory for the recipient. Counter-quests may be issued to the other party.

Do well.

Lunaris stared at it.

Her vision blurred, and she blinked, and read it again, and the words didn’t change. They sat there, gold and certain, and the last two words hit her somewhere behind her sternum with a force that had no business coming from a system notification.

Do well.

The same words Charlie had said. In the Grand Hall. When she’d handed back the shard. “Um,” Lunaris said.

Everyone looked at her.

“I just got a quest.” She looked up from the notification, eyes wide. “From—from the system. Not from you,” she added, looking at Charlie. “It’s called The Oathsworn’s Redemption, and it’s...” She trailed off, scrolled back through it, and her voice went small. “It knows about Brian. It knows I lost the class. It says—it says the kingdom is watching.”

Charlie blinked.

It was a very specific blink. The blink of someone who had been standing in full queen mode, frost on her clothes, certainty in her jaw, strategic authority radiating from every pore, and had just been informed that the system had done something she hadn’t authorized.

“I didn’t create that quest,” Charlie said.

Lola looked at her clipboard. Then at Charlie. Then at the clipboard again.

Then she giggled.

It was quiet. The kind of giggle that Lola would later deny had happened, delivered behind the clipboard at an angle that made plausible deniability theoretically possible. But her shoulders shook, once, and the sound escaped like a bird from a cage, and Charlie’s head swiveled toward her with the wounded precision of a woman who had just been betrayed by her most trusted ally.

“Cloudy,” Charlie said, and her voice had the specific tone of someone addressing a misbehaving pet. “Cloudy gave you a quest.”

“A really dramatic one,” Lunaris said.

“How dramatic.”

Lunaris shared the notification.

Charlie read it. Her expression cycled through several stages: surprise, reluctant acknowledgment, a wince at bright arrogance, another wince at bruised truth, and then, when she reached Do well, something that flickered too fast to catch before it was replaced by a very deliberate frown.

“‘A blade that has shattered must be reforged in fire greater than the one that broke it,’” Charlie read aloud, flatly. “It’s being dramatic.”

“It’s being you,“ Lola said, and the giggle was gone, but the warmth wasn’t.

Charlie’s pointy ears swiveled.

“I also got one!” Lisa’s hand shot up, waving, as if anyone could possibly miss her. She pulled up her own notification and read the title with the delight of someone unwrapping a present. “Mine’s called—wait— ‘Aid the Oathsworn: The Rebel Fire’s Vigil.’ Objective: Assist Lunaris in completing her quest and ensure the retrieval of the Twir staff.” She beamed. “It says I’m supposed to protect the party’s magical integrity. And it called me ‘the flame that shields.’ Cloudy likes me.”

“Same here,” Fty said, and his voice carried a resignation. “Mine is... ‘Aid the Oathsworn: The Anchor Holds.’ I’m instructed to—” He paused. Read it again. His ears reddened faintly. “‘Keep the blade from breaking before it learns to bend.’” He looked up. “I don’t need a system notification to tell me about my job.”

“‘Aid the Oathsworn: The Daggerbear’s Stand,’” Ian read, and his voice cracked on Daggerbear in a way that suggested the system had accessed information he had not consented to share. His ears were on fire. “It—it knows my—”

“Of course, Cloudy knows everything,” Lola said, and the clipboard had become a shield again, but the wrong kind; the kind that hid a smile. “Nicknames are included.”

Poundcake looked at his notification. Then at the group. Then back at his notification. “The system,” he said, “has called me ‘The Baker Who Holds the Flame.’ It says my role is to—” He paused. “‘Ensure no dough is left unbaked in the shadow of death.’”

Complete silence.

“Cloudy went there,” Charlie said.

“The system understands,” Poundcake said, and he sounded genuinely moved.

Charlie looked at Lunaris. Her expression had settled now, and the fumble, the brief flash of a woman who had been beaten to her own emotional moment, was gone, overwritten by something steadier.

“Well,” Charlie said, and her voice was warm and dry and just a little rough at the edges. “If Cloudy thinks you’re ready, I suppose I should agree. Make me proud, Lunaris.”

Lunaris gripped the mantle at her shoulder. The fabric was warm. The snowflake crest caught the light.

“I will,” she said.

The journey south took four hours.

Four hours of Lucy’s ship cutting through water that shifted from clear blue to muddied green to something that didn’t have a color so much as an absence of one, as if the river itself was forgetting what it was supposed to look like. Four hours of rigging and wind and the crew moving with the ease of people who had stopped questioning why their captain spoke like a 17th-century corsair and had simply gotten on with it.

Charlie and Lola had left the dock. Charlie had raised a hand and Lola had inclined her head with a clipboard, and then they had gotten smaller, and then the harbor had gotten smaller, and then Altandai had become a smudge of towers on the northern horizon, and then it was gone.

Lunaris hadn’t watched it disappear. She’d turned forward before that happened, because looking back felt like the wrong habit to rebuild.

Now it was noon. The river had narrowed, threading between hills that rose on either side like hunched shoulders, and the air had a quality that Lunaris couldn’t name but could feel, a thinness, as if the atmosphere itself was pulling away from something it didn’t want to touch.

Lucy stood at the bow.

She had the spyglass extended; a brass-and-crystal instrument that hummed faintly with enhancement magic, the artifact that let you count the teeth on a wolf at three hundred meters and was probably worth more than everything Lunaris owned combined.

Lucy’s peacoat flapped in the river wind, one boot braced against the bowsprit, and she held the glass to her eye with the steady hand.

She lowered it.

“Blimey,” she said. Then something else, in a register of a pirate so dense it had its own postal code. Words that sounded like they might have been English once, before being dragged through a century of salt water and tavern brawls and reassembled by someone who thought grammar was a suggestion. Something about dead water and a foul berth and what Lunaris was fairly sure was a nautical term for we should not be here, expressed through a metaphor involving a mermaid’s funeral.

Lunaris blinked. “What?”

Lucy looked at her. The theatrical gleam was there; it was always there, but underneath it, something sharper. The actual soldier, the actual paladin, the woman who cosplayed a pirate because it was fun but had the levels and the instincts of someone who’d survived things that weren’t.

“Bad water ahead,” Lucy translated. “Dead shore. The land’s gone off, if ye take me meaning.” She held out the spyglass. “Wanna look?”

Lunaris took it. The brass was warm from Lucy’s grip, and the crystal lens caught the light with a faint prismatic shimmer.

“Me too!” Lisa appeared at her shoulder, bouncing on her toes. “Let me see after, I want to—”

“The baker does not need to see the shape of the oven before the bread goes in,” Poundcake said. He was standing near the mast, arms folded, expression serene. “He trusts the one who reads the heat. Her.” He inclined his head toward Lunaris.

Lunaris lowered the spyglass without looking through it. “I’m not—”

“You are,” Fty said.

He was leaning against the rail, arms crossed, and the smile on his face was so unexpected that Lunaris almost dropped the spyglass. An actual smile was unprecedented, and it changed his face in a way that made Lunaris realize he was younger than she’d always assumed.

“I told Charlie I’d lead the expedition,” he said. “And I will. I’ll keep everyone alive.” He paused. “But I won’t be the one making the calls where to go. About the players. About the tower. About what we do when we get there. That’s not my role.”

“That’s not mine either!” Lunaris said, and the protest came out at a pitch that made the nearest sailor glance over. “I’m—I’m the one on probation! I literally just got my class back! You can’t—”

“Charlie said you’d make the right decision on the ground,” Fty said. “She was talking to you. Not to me or Lisa.” He uncrossed his arms. “She just forgot to say the word leader because she thought it was obvious.”

“It wasn’t obvious! Nothing about this is obvious!”

Lisa, who had abandoned the spyglass queue, threw her arm around Lunaris’s shoulder. “I vote Luna.”

“This isn’t a—”

“Aye!” Lucy boomed from the bow. “The lass has me vote an’ me hammer!”

“You’re not even coming with us!” Lunaris said.

“Still votin’!”

Poundcake nodded. “The loaf does not choose to rise,” he said. “But it rises.”

Lunaris looked at Fty. Fty looked back with the calm of a man who had already decided this and was simply waiting for reality to catch up.

She looked at Ian.

Ian was standing slightly behind her, hands on his dagger hilts, and his expression was the one she loved most. The one that wasn’t trying to be anything. The one that was just him, earnest and warm and slightly red around the ears, looking at her like she was the answer to a question he hadn’t figured out how to ask.

He stepped forward, took her face in both hands, and kissed her.

It was brief. It was firm. It tasted like river air and the terrible dried fruit Lucy’s crew served for brunch. When he pulled back, his thumbs traced her cheekbones once, and he said, “You can do this, Luna.”

Her chest hurt. The good kind. “Fine,” she said, and her voice was rough, bright, and not entirely steady. “Fine. But if I mess it up, I’m blaming all of you.”

“Noted,” Fty said. “Now look through the spyglass.”

She raised it.

The world lurched into focus.

The river valley spread below in a sweep of terrain that should have been green, the rolling country that belonged on a painting, gentle hills folding into each other, wildflowers and long grass bending in the river wind.

She could see where it had been that, once. The edges were still alive, still holding color, stubbornly green in the way of things that hadn’t yet received the memo.

But the center was dead.

It started gradually, a yellowing, a thinning, grass that looked tired instead of sick, and then it wasn’t gradual at all. The hills closest to the mountain had gone gray. The soil was exposed in patches, pale and powdery, and nothing grew on it. Nothing moved across it.

Except for the things that did.

She saw them at the edges of the dead zone where gray met green. Figures. Slow-moving, scattered, walking patterns that had no destination, the aimless patrol of things that had forgotten why they were walking but hadn’t figured out how to stop. She couldn’t make out details at this distance, even with the spyglass. Just shapes.

And at the center, the mountain.

It was squat and broad, a clenched fist of dark stone rising from the dead hills, and halfway up its face, the tower.

Tall. Taller than it had any right to be for something this old, a needle of dark stone that caught no light, no reflection, nothing. A wall circled its base, following the contour of the mountain, and even through the spyglass Lunaris could see it was intact. Someone was keeping it standing.

Or something.

The miasma hung over all of it like a bruise on the sky. A discoloration that wasn’t quite fog and wasn’t quite smoke, something between the two that pooled in the low places and drifted outward in slow, patient tendrils.

Toward the valley.

Toward the river.

She could see where it was reaching.

The western bank of the river, where Lucy’s route would pass, where trade ships would carry supplies between Altandai and the future capital, the miasma was maybe a kilometer from the water. Close enough that the vegetation along the bank was already starting to thin.

Twenty-five years, Yuki had said. Looking at it now, Lunaris thought Yuki was being optimistic.

She lowered the spyglass.

Lisa was watching her. Fty was watching her. Poundcake was watching her, Ian was watching her, and Lucy was watching her with the spyglass-less eye of someone who had already seen what was there and wanted to know how the new leader would handle it.

“It’s bad,” Lunaris said.