Rimelion: The Exploiter

The cave smelled like chalk and something sweeter underneath, something that reminded Lunaris of the Scamantha lab in Altandai if Scamantha had stopped cleaning and started losing arguments with their ingredients.

Oh, silly me. She probably did.

Lunaris went first.

Rapier drawn, longsword loose in the off-hand, the mantle tucked close so it wouldn’t catch on the narrowing walls.

Behind her, Ian moved with his hands on his daggers, and behind him Lisa, the faint warmth of her passive fire aura pressing against Lunaris’s back like a hand on her shoulder. Poundcake walked in the center with the unhurried gait of a man browsing market stalls. Fty brought up the rear, his ward contracting around them.

The tunnel curved. Twice, then a third time, each bend revealing more of the same; rough-hewn walls, dead air, the faint sound of voices growing clearer with every step.

Then the tunnel opened.

The cave widened into a chamber maybe thirty meters across, the ceiling high enough that the darkness swallowed it. Stalactites hung like teeth from an invisible jaw. The floor had been cleared—swept, Lunaris realized, actually swept—and in the center of the space, lit by pale blue flames that burned in iron brackets bolted to the stone, was a fortification.

A palisade.

Wooden stakes driven into the cave floor in a semicircle, sharpened at the tips, lashed together with rope and reinforced with what looked like bone. Femurs and ribs and things Lunaris didn’t want to identify, woven into the structure like rebar, and whether it was decorative or structural she couldn’t tell and didn’t want to ask.

Behind the palisade, eight skeletons stood in a line.

They were different from the shamblers outside. These were armored, mismatched pieces of plate and chain, rusted but functional, and they held weapons with the locked-elbow rigidity of things that didn’t need muscles to grip.

Their eye sockets glowed with a faint violet light, dim but steady, and they didn’t move. Or breathe, obviously, but also didn’t do the swaying thing that the wild undead did. They stood like soldiers at attention, and the difference was worse than any amount of shambling.

And behind them, in the deeper shadow near the cave’s far wall, something bigger moved.

It stepped forward into the blue light, and Lunaris’s stomach dropped.

[Death Knight Lv.42]

Type: 3-rare HP: 2,200/2,200

It was tall. Taller than Katherine, which Lunaris hadn’t thought possible in anything that wasn’t technically a building. Black plate armor, scarred and pitted but intact, covering a frame that had been large in life and had lost none of its mass in death. A greatsword hung at its side.

Its skull was visible beneath a half-helm, jaw intact, eye sockets burning with the same violet light as the skeletons, like coals that had been burning for years and had forgotten how to go out.

It looked at Lunaris.

She looked back, and the mantle on her shoulders felt very thin.

“Yo.”

The voice came from behind the palisade. Human. Casual, the vocal equivalent of leaning against a wall with your arms crossed.

Two figures stepped out from behind the Death Knight.

Players.

The first was a man, mid-twenties maybe, lean, wearing dark robes with bone accents that matched the palisade’s aesthetic. He had the look of someone who had committed to a theme and was enjoying it enormously. A staff topped with a skull, an actual skull, humanoid, jaw wired shut, rested against his shoulder.

[Gravesworth — Lv. 34]

Guild: The Necromancers

Class: Bonecaller

The second was a woman, shorter, stockier, with close-cropped hair and a leather chest piece studded with what Lunaris was fairly certain were finger bones. She held no weapon, but her hands were wreathed in faint dark energy that clung to her fingers like smoke.

[Toxica — Lv. 29]

Guild: The Necromancers

Class: Plagueshaper

Gravesworth grinned. It was not a friendly grin. “Well, well,” he said, tilting his skull-staff toward them. “Visitors.”

“We’re from Rimebreak,” Lunaris said. She kept her voice steady, kept her rapier low, non-threatening. “I’m Lunaris. We’re—”

“Oh, we know who you are,” Toxica said. She leaned against the palisade, arms crossed, dark energy still curling around her knuckles. “Rimebreak. The Ice Queen’s little kingdom.” She said kingdom the way someone might say hobby project. “We’ve seen the holo-net. Very cute.”

Lunaris felt her jaw tighten. She forced herself to loosen it. “Our kingdom’s borders include this territory. We’re not here to fight—we want to talk.”

“Talk,” Gravesworth repeated. He looked at Toxica. Toxica looked at him. They both looked at Lunaris with the shared amusement of people watching a door-to-door salesman who hadn’t noticed the “no soliciting” sign.

“Sure,” Gravesworth said. “Talk. Go ahead. We’re listening.”

He sat down on a rock behind the palisade, crossed his legs, and rested his chin on his fist with theatrical attentiveness.

Toxica snorted.

Lunaris took a breath. “Rimebreak is offering integration,” she said. “Full guild rights within the kingdom’s structure. Land allocation, compensation, access to Altandai’s markets and resources. You’d keep your leveling grounds, we’d just formalize the arrangement. Make it official.”

She paused. Waited.

Gravesworth’s grin hadn’t moved. “Uh-huh,” he said. “And if we say no?”

“Then we discuss alternatives.”

“Alternatives.” He looked at Toxica again. “She said alternatives.”

Toxica laughed. “Sweetie,” she said, and the word dripped with condescension so thick it was practically visible, “do you know where you are right now?”

“I’m in a cave,” Lunaris said, “talking to two players who are squatting in sovereign territory and calling themselves the Necromancers while living in a necromancer’s tower, which is—and I mean this with respect—not the most creative branding I’ve encountered.”

Behind her, Ian made a sound that might have been a laugh suppressed into a cough.

Toxica’s smile vanished. “You think this is funny?”

“I think it’s a conversation,” Lunaris said. “One I’m trying to have in good faith.”

“Good faith.” Gravesworth stood up. The theatrical amusement was still there, but it had cooled. “Let me explain something to you, Rimebreak girl. We’ve been here for weeks. Weeks. We found this tower when nobody else wanted it. We mapped the dead zone, we learned the spawn patterns, we built—” he gestured at the palisade, the skeletons, the cave, “—all of this. From nothing.”

“The wild undead out there?” Toxica added. “We hunt them. Every day. That’s our grind. That’s our leveling. We’ve built classes around it, specced into death magic, made deals with Veranthos for command access to his organized forces.” She tapped the palisade. “This patrol route? These skeletons? They’re ours. He gave us authority.”

The Death Knight shifted. Not much, a slight rotation of its skull, the violet glow tracking from Lunaris to Gravesworth and back.

Waiting.

“So when you walk in here,” Gravesworth continued, “with your little queen’s little offer of integration and land rights—land rights to land we already have—you’re not making us an offer. You’re making a threat. And we don’t respond well to threats.”

Lunaris held his gaze. “It’s not a threat. It’s—”

“You know what’s a threat?” He pointed his skull-staff at the Death Knight. “That’s a threat. Over level forty. Rare-tier. And it listens to us.” He smiled. “If I tell it you’re enemies, it attacks. If Toxica tells it you’re enemies, it attacks. One word, Rimebreak girl. One word and your little expedition gets real complicated.”

The Death Knight’s hand moved to its greatsword. Just touching the hilt. The gesture of something confirming that it remembered what it was for.

Lunaris felt Ian tense behind her. Felt Lisa’s warmth spike, a fraction of a degree, the instinctive response of a fire mage preparing to burn.

Felt Fty’s ward pulse.

She kept her voice level. “Nobody needs to fight.”

“Nobody needs to,” Toxica agreed. “But some people deserve to.” She uncrossed her arms. The dark energy around her hands intensified, curling up her wrists. “You want to know what Veranthos promised us?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” she murmured.

“Expansion.” Toxica’s eyes were bright, eager, the gleam of someone who had been handed a plan they loved and couldn’t wait to execute. “The miasma doesn’t stop here, Rimebreak. It grows. Veranthos is pushing it north. Past the river. Past the valley. All the way to Altandai.” She grinned. “He wants the magic academy.”

“The academy,” Lisa said from behind Lunaris, and her voice was flat in a way that made Lunaris’s skin prickle.

“The whole thing,” Gravesworth confirmed. “The miasma reaches the academy, and everything in its path becomes undead territory. Leveling grounds for miles. Spawn rates through the roof. And us?” He spread his arms. “We’re his vanguard. His officers. Every meter the miasma expands, we get stronger. New skills, new commands, new undead to control.”

He leaned forward.

“So when you ask us to integrate into your cute little kingdom? When you offer us land rights to dirt we’re going to own anyway in six months?” He laughed. “Why would we bow to your queen when we’re going to be standing on her academy’s roof?”

The cave was quiet.

Lunaris could hear her own heartbeat. Could hear the faint crackle of Lisa’s aura, the slow pulse of Fty’s ward, the creak of Ian’s leather gloves tightening on his dagger hilts.

She looked at Gravesworth. At Toxica. At the Death Knight behind them, hand on its greatsword, violet eyes burning steady.

She thought about Charlie. About the stream. About Charlie watching this, right now, from Rimebreak Tower, seeing Lunaris stand in a cave and get laughed at by two players who wanted to drown her kingdom in dead things.

She thought about what Charlie would do.

Charlie would fight.

Charlie would freeze this cave solid, shatter the palisade, and deal with the consequences later, because Charlie was a queen who had built a kingdom by being willing to do what needed doing, and what needed doing here was obvious.

But Charlie had said: I trust you to make the right decision on the ground.

“We’re leaving,” Lunaris said. Every head turned to her. Including her own party’s. “Luna—” Lisa started.

“We’re not fighting here,” Lunaris said. Her voice was steady. Her hands weren’t. She sheathed the rapier, then the longsword, and the sound of steel sliding into leather was very loud in the quiet cave. “Not today. Not like this.”

Gravesworth’s grin widened. “Smart girl.”

“Don’t,” Ian said quietly, and there was something in his voice that Lunaris hadn’t heard before, something hard and cold that didn’t match his face. Gravesworth glanced at him and the grin dimmed, just slightly.

Lunaris turned. “Fty, take the rear. Lisa, stay close. Ian—”

“I know,” he said. He was already moving, positioning himself between Lunaris and the palisade, daggers still sheathed but hands ready.

Poundcake hadn’t moved. He stood where he’d been standing the entire conversation, arms folded, expression unchanged, and he was watching Gravesworth with… uh… the serene focus of a man measuring an oven’s temperature by the sound of the fire, or something.

“Come on,” Lunaris said.

They turned toward the tunnel.

Lunaris took three steps.

Then she felt a shudder in the ground.

Subtle, like a heartbeat transmitted through stone, and Fty’s ward flickered, from around, from the walls, from the floor, from the dead earth itself—

“Contact behind!” Fty barked, and his staff slammed down, the ward flaring to full intensity.

The cave floor cracked.

Hands pushed through.

Gray, skeletal, clawing at the stone, pulling bodies upward from soil that shouldn’t have had bodies in it, except it did, because the entire dead zone was saturated with death magic and every meter of ground was a potential enemy.

Five. Eight. Twelve. Rising from the cave floor between the party and the tunnel exit, blocking the way out, armed with the same mismatched armor and violet-burning eyes as the palisade sentries.

Lunaris spun.

Gravesworth had his staff raised, skull glowing with dark energy, and Toxica’s hands were spread wide, the smoke around her fingers now thick and purposeful, feeding into the ground.

“Did you think,” Toxica said, “that leaving was up to you?”

The Death Knight drew its greatsword.

The sound filled the cave, steel on steel, long, the unsheathing of something that wanted you to hear it coming.

It stepped forward.

The ground trembled under its weight. “One word,” Gravesworth said. “I told you. One word.”

The skeletons behind the palisade activated, climbing over the bone-laced stakes, weapons raised, joining the summoned undead in a closing ring around the party.

Twenty. Twenty-five. More still rising.

And the Death Knight, level forty, advanced.

Lunaris drew her blades.

The mantle flared silver behind her, catching the blue firelight, and the Chronosblade hummed in her hands, and she was afraid, genuinely afraid, but underneath the fear was something brighter, something that burned the way Ian’s eyes burned when he looked at her, the way Lisa’s fire burned when it screamed.

Fine, she thought. You wanted this.

“Positions!” she shouted, and her voice rang off the cave walls, and it didn’t shake. “Fty—ward tight, conserve everything! Lisa—controlled fire only, no mess, keep it surgical! Ian—stay on my hip, watch my left! Poundcake —”

Poundcake was already moving, feet set, the warmth of the Proving beginning to radiate outward.

“— do what you do.”

“The bread,” Poundcake said, settling into his stance, “is ready.”

The Death Knight charged.