Rimelion: The Exploiter

Lunaris was facing enemies…

Five more undead. Eight more. The necromancer was pulling them from the ground itself now, and Poundcake was holding with a baking serenity, his hands never stopping, each motion flowing into the next, redirecting, throwing, breaking, the undead piling up around him in a ring of crumpled bodies that kept growing, and his expression hadn’t changed.

Not once.

“Lisa!” Lunaris screamed.

“MOVE!”

Lunaris grabbed Ian and threw them both sideways.

Lisa stepped forward.

It was fury made visible. The heat hit Lunaris from three meters away, like opening an oven door. Uh, no baking, it was like facing a volcano, and her mantle’s enchantment flared, and that was from behind Lisa; she didn’t want to imagine what it felt like from the front.

Lisa planted her staff, opened her mouth, and cast.

The fire came out in a wall.

Rolling, churning, alive with intention, spreading across the valley floor in a crescent that engulfed the undead formation like a wave swallowing sandcastles.

The flames screamed.

The undead evaporated. Rusted armor liquefied, bone became ash, the puppet strings snapped and dissolved into threads of dark smoke. Row after row after row, erased, the fire rolling through them with the indifferent thoroughness of a force of nature that had been asked to do what it did best.

The necromancer raised his hands. Dark energy surged, trying to shield, trying to reform, trying to—

Lisa’s fire hit it.

The contest lasted approximately two seconds. Then there was nothing left but a scorch mark on a mound of earth and the fading smell of something ancient being unmade.

The valley was quiet.

Lisa lowered her staff. Her eyes faded from gold back to green, and her shoulders sagged, and the terrifying mythic-class weapon of mass destruction was replaced by a red-haired woman who looked satisfied and slightly sweaty.

“Done,” she said.

Lunaris stood in the aftermath. Ash drifted around them like gray snow. The ground where the fire had passed was black and smoking, the dead gray soil scorched clean. Nothing remained of the undead army; thirty-some corpses reduced to a thin layer of particulate spread across the valley floor.

Ian was on one knee, breathing hard, one hand on his new daggers, the other pressed against the shoulder wound that Fty’s heal had closed but that still ached. He looked at the scorch mark where the necromancer had stood.

“She’s terrifying,” he said.

“She’s wonderful,” Lunaris said, and the echo of what she’d said about NightSwallow made her smile.

“Both things can be true,” Ian said.

Poundcake stood in the center of his ring of crumpled undead; the ones he’d been fighting when Lisa’s fire rolled through. He’d taken down eleven by hand. “Well baked,” he said and brushed dust from his sleeves with the unhurried care of a man removing flour from his apron.

Fty lowered his staff.

The ward shimmered, holding the green light undimmed despite how long he’d been sustaining it. But Lunaris caught the tremor in his fingers before he hid it.

He still had to focus on the spell; he was spending more than he was showing.

“That was a perimeter warden,” Fty said, and his voice was flat with implication. “A servant. If that’s what guards the edges, we need to talk about what guards the center.”

The ash was still settling when Lisa stretched her arms above her head and yawned.

“So,” she said, with the casual tone of someone discussing lunch plans, “I can still use fire. Normal fire. Fireballs, walls of—well, not walls. The wall thing has a two-hour cooldown.” She wiggled her fingers, and small flames danced across her knuckles. “Everything else is fine though.”

Fty looked at her.

It was a specific look. The Fty look. The one that carried an entire paragraph of professional displeasure compressed into a single, flat expression. “You used your strongest ability,” he said, “on a perimeter warden.”

Lisa’s casual posture wilted. “I wanted to try it,” she said. “I’ve been itching to use it for days, and there were so many of them, and they were right there, and—”

“Two hours,” Fty said.

“Two hours,” Lisa confirmed, and had the grace to look apologetic. The Rebel Fire, mythic-class terror of the battlefield, scuffed her boot against scorched earth like a child caught eating dessert before dinner.

Lunaris let out a sigh. She was going to run out of sighs before they reached the tower at this rate.

“Ian,” she said, because looking at Lisa’s guilty face was making it hard to stay frustrated, “check the remains. See if the warden dropped anything.”

Ian was already picking through the scorch mark where the necromancer had stood, daggers sheathed, hands sifting through ash and blackite residue. His fingers closed around something, and he held it up.

A pouch. Singed at the edges, but intact, filled with a fine dark powder that shifted like sand but caught the light with a faint iridescent shimmer.

“Powder,” he said, turning it over. “It says needs to be identified. Alchemical, maybe?”

“Gather it,” Lunaris said. “Scamantha can identify it later. Or sell it. Or both. Probably both.”

“Okay,” Lunaris said. “We keep moving.”

They pushed deeper.

The terrain got worse in ways that stopped being subtle. The gray wasn’t creeping anymore; it had settled, the default state of a land that had forgotten color existed.

The soil crunched underfoot like old chalk.

What had once been trees stood as silhouettes, bark stripped, branches reaching upward in postures that looked uncomfortably like pleading.

Fty’s ward pulsed. Steadier now, as if he’d found a rhythm, but Lunaris noticed he’d stopped talking. Fty conserving words meant Fty conserving energy, and that meant the pressure on his focus was increasing with every step toward the tower.

Nobody commented on it. They all noticed.

The hills folded into each other, ridgelines blurring, and the valley narrowed around them as the mountain’s foothills began to assert themselves. Rock outcroppings jutted from the dead earth like broken teeth, dark stone streaked with something that might have been mineral deposits and might have been something else entirely.

Lunaris saw the cave before she heard it.

It was set into the base of a ridge, partially hidden by a collapse of loose stone, the entrance a dark mouth maybe three meters wide, but the edges were too clean for it to be natural.

She raised a fist. The party stopped.

Then she heard voices.

Faint, echoing, coming from inside the cave, distorted by stone and distance into something she couldn’t parse; words without meaning, tone without content.

Lisa’s head tilted, her ears catching it a half-second after Lunaris. Her eyes narrowed. Ian’s hand went to his daggers. Poundcake’s expression didn’t change, which at this point Lunaris had accepted was his version of high alert.

Fty looked at her.

Right. Because she was the leader. Because she had to decide.

Lunaris jerked her head, and the party withdrew, moving back behind the ridgeline until the cave entrance was out of sight. They crouched in a shallow depression between two rock outcroppings, close enough to speak quietly, far enough that whatever was in the cave wouldn’t hear them.

“Voices,” Lunaris said. “Could be the guild. Could be NPCs. Could be something pretending to be either.”

“Could be an ambush,” Ian said. “But if it’s the guild—the Necromancers—this might be our best chance to make contact before we hit the tower. Out here, away from their defenses, away from Veranthos.” He touched his daggers’ hilts. “If we wait until we’re at their front door, any conversation starts with them behind walls and us in the open. I’d rather meet them in a cave.”

Lunaris blinked. That was... tactically sound. From Ian. He caught her expression and his ears went red. “What? I listen when Dmitry talks. Sometimes.”

“He’s right,” Fty said, and Ian looked so startled by Fty agreeing with him that he nearly dropped into a sitting position. “The tower is fortified. The cave is neutral ground, or close to it. If there’s a chance to talk before we fight, this is where it happens.”

Lunaris turned to Poundcake.

Poundcake was gazing at the ridgeline with the serenity of… Lunaris struggled to think of a baking metaphor. Of… a man watching bread cool on a rack?

He nodded. “The baker does not choose whether the customer enters the shop,” he said. “He ensures the bread is ready, regardless of who walks through the door.” He inclined his head toward Lunaris. “You are the baker. I will tend the oven.”

Lunaris parsed this. “That means you’ll go with whatever I decide.”

“The bread is ready,” Poundcake confirmed.

She looked at Lisa.

Lisa shrugged, one shoulder, casual, the gesture of someone who had already made her decision and was waiting for the formality to catch up. “You’re the leader, Luna. You call it.”

“I’m not—”

“You are,” Fty said.

“Charlie said—”

“Charlie said you’d make the right decision on the ground,” Lisa said. “This is the ground. That—” she pointed toward the cave, “—is a decision.”

Lunaris narrowed her eyes and let out a sigh of resignation. “Fine,” she said. “But if this goes sideways, I want it on record that I protested being in charge at least three times, and if Charlie asks—”

She stopped.

Because Lisa’s expression had done something. A flicker. Tiny. The specific kind of flicker that happened when someone remembered something they should have mentioned earlier and was now calculating whether the moment had passed for mentioning it gracefully.

“Lisa,” Lunaris said.

“Mhmm?”

“What.”

“Nothing! It’s just—” Lisa raised her hand above her head, fingers spread, and made a small gesture. A translucent icon materialized above her palm for exactly one second, the symbol for a live broadcast, before she dismissed it with a flick of her wrist.

The icon vanished.

Lunaris stared at the empty air where it had been. “Are you,” Lunaris said, very slowly, “streaming this.”

“Charlie asked me to!” Lisa said with a defensive speed. “She wanted to watch the expedition remotely. Pearl set up the private channel. I was supposed to explain before we shipped out, but then there was the whole leadership vote and Ian’s daggers and the boat and then the undead, and I just—” Her cheeks flushed, pink spreading across freckles. “I forgot I was streaming? It’s been running since we left the ship?”

“Since the ship?!” Ian’s voice cracked. “She saw—the boat? The shore? The—” His hand flew to his shoulder where the wound had been. “She saw me get hit?”

“She saw everything,” Lisa said, with the blunt honesty.

Lunaris’s brain was doing math. Streaming since the ship, which meant Charlie had watched the undead fight.

Which meant Charlie had watched Lunaris scream Lisa’s name with increasing desperation.

Which meant Charlie had watched Lunaris grab Ian and throw them sideways.

Which meant Charlie had watched Lunaris count Poundcake’s eleven kills.

Which meant Charlie had watched every single moment of Lunaris being a leader while insisting she wasn’t one.

Which meant Charlie had heard her say I hope Charlie doesn’t know.

Lunaris pressed both hands over her face.

“Luna—” Lisa started.

“She heard me say I hoped she wouldn’t know.”

“...yes.”

“While she was watching.”

“Probably.”

Lunaris made a sound into her palms that was not a word in any language.

Lisa crossed the distance between them, wrapped her arms around Lunaris from behind, and squeezed. The hug was warm and carried an apology delivered through compression. “I’m sorry,” she said, chin on Lunaris’s shoulder. “I really forgot. You know me, I’m—”

“An airhead,” Lunaris muttered into her hands.

“I was going to say eager, but sure.” Lisa squeezed tighter. “Forgive me?”

Lunaris dropped her hands.

She stared at the sky, the gray-hazed, miasma-tinged sky of a dead zone spreading outward from a possessed necromancer’s tower, and she thought about Charlie sitting somewhere in Rimebreak Tower, probably with Lola beside her, probably watching this exact moment, probably smiling.

She let out another sigh. This one was longer than the first.

“Let’s explore the cave,” she said.