Leopold hears the thud of an object falling on the ground before he could realize the object hit the back of his legs at all. He turns to see six scoundrels giggling not far from the well he is pulling water from.

“Oh, conkers! The monster! It saw us.” They giggled, throwing another slipper on his leg.

He raises an eyebrow, noting most of them with only one slipper on. Feravis, the little twerp, with his long silky hair covering most of his face had actually thrown the first slipper.

“I’m busy,” Leo says.

“You always say that Leo.” Andeera whines, gesturing to throw the slipper on her hand.

She has sun tanned skin, freckles on her tiny face and a chipped tooth from one of her many shenanigans. At least today she decided to tie her unruly brown hair rather than let it get stuck to her face with sweat.

With a groan, Leo lifts the bucket full of water over the well. “You best go bother Jaira instead.”

“Jaira sucks! If she catches us, whoever’s the slowest becomes her ‘slave’.” Little Timothy replies. His plump figure and chubby cheeks makes it evident who Jaira catches the most.

“She wouldn’t be callin’ any of you slaves if you just helped her out in the kitchen.”

The kids shuffle at their feet, grumbling to themselves about how, despite the adults all going to work, the oldest kids in charge of them are just as or even worse than their parents.

“Ain’t that so, Little Tim?” Jaira, the only teenager in the group, creeps behind them, with her brunette hair tied in a crown braid, a dirty apron and the smell of smoke fluttering around her.

She picks up the youngest kid with ease. “Leo, I was wonderin’ where the water’s at.”

“This ain’t for cookin’. The children needs a bath, and they’ve been skirtin’ it for 2 days now.”

“Well, I need a bucket for the stew. Little Tim’s gonna have to skirt the bath for a third day ‘cause I need help in the kitchen s’well.”

Suddenly helping out with the chores was no longer a dread after being presented with an even worse option.

“Monsters!” Andeera falls to her knees, refusing to choose a lesser devil.

Krowm, a lanky girl with short boyish dark hair, raised her dirty little hands offering to take her to the kitchen instead. Her snot covered face begging Jaira to save her from the bath.

With a chuckle, Leo carries the water down the hill. “Well, y’all better start hidin’. After I bring this water to the kitchen and get a new bucket, the first one I catch takes a bath first.”

They all shriek, running into the woods. However, Little Tim and Krowm continued to negotiate with Jaira to take each other’s place.

Finally, quiet in Rapsa. The sun is nearing its peak just as lunch is about to be finished cooking. Leopold took three trips from the well back to a community bathing area that he has to keep clean, filling a huge wooden tub with water, enough to bathe all of them.

He’s confident that he could grab two of those pesky children and he’d be finished before the sun sets when the adults arrived back from mining.

As he opens the door, Feravis bumps into him. Trembling, his hair matted with something viscous. Something’s wrong.

“Whoa!” Leopold catches the younger kid.

Feravis heaving, pointing towards the woods, “a tree… the tree. It caught her. It caught Andeera!”

He didn’t even notice his body moving, the wind was weaving through his braided hair. He had grabbed a rusted gardening hoe by the entrance of the village. The heat of the sun no longer prickling his skin at how fast he is moving, leaping bounds over the rolling hills of Rapsa, into the woods.

There is no greater danger in the world for a province that survived this long than nature reclaiming its territory.

Adults are gone but the older children are tasked to protect the youngers ones for a reason.

The continent of Hilagro spares no mercy towards Wydellians and the creatures that lives within its dense woods are vengeful barbarians.

With the sun at its peak, one would think that its rays would penetrate through the crownings of the trees, but at its edge, Leo feels a shudder at how dark the woods is.

He tightens his grip of the hoe, swaying around his immediate surrounding to clear the way.

A shrill scream further in takes his attention, his head whipping to its direction before he bursts into a sprint one more.

“Don’t leave me!” Andeera cries out.

 One of the kids that ran off to the woods to hide, Kire bumps into Leopold. His small frame shivering, blood gushing from his head. The impact makes the kid fear for his life, thinking he’s been caught.

He screams, “no! Please!”

“Hey, hey.” Leopold drops his weapon, grabbing Kire by their small shoulder. “It’s Leo. Where’s Andeera?”

Weeping, Kire points further into the woods. Towards Jardin, the city isn’t near at all, give or take 5 days of travel by foot, it’s more of a general direction, but it is towards there.

“Stay close,” Leo says.

He ushered Kire behind him, with the hoe in hand, careful not to alert the Treants that capture Andeera. The screaming only got louder.

Crickly crack, branches pop. Before Leopold is a massive Treant, bony branches hitting Andeera’s small back over and over as the child howls for them to stop.

If there is a stone that would make world stop, Leopold would have found it already. He’d have it just so he wouldn’t feel this wretched guilt for pausing to figure out how to help Andeera out.

As a twelve-year-old, he isn’t short at all but compared to the monster in the woods, he is still a child.

And this child, with his hands gripping the gardening tool like a weapon, screams as hard as he could to catch the Treants attention.

It creaks its head unnaturally. Tilted to the side as if broken to see where the sound came from. Leopold leaps over a rock, garden hoe raised above his head, slamming against the branch that held Andeera upside down, breaking it.

He drops his weapon, catching the little girl, hugging her tight. “I got you. I got you.”

The spindly tree chatters, sounding like million tiny barks clapping in unison, looking at the broken branch of its body. With its only attached limb, it slams towards Leo, but he manages to roll out of the way.

“We have to go! Run! Run!”

>><<>><< 

With all the screaming that Monica was doing, it cannot be that no one heard her. Sunniva’s lungs and vocals can take over an entire room with one single command, the sound of her voice enough to demand attention. Despite the fact that it is not her in that body, that body is still Sunniva’s and her scream reaches somebody’s ear.

The watery entrance of the cave began to bubble.

Truscott and Leopold are engaged in a rather polarizing conversation of which neither are wrong but ultimately, neither one of them is listening to each other.

“Mages don’t exist, Truscott.” Leopold says.

Truscott inhales, raising her hands and clenching them tight in the air. “They are! I’ve seen it! Sunniva is a mage!”

Gray delights himself upon the contraption that is Monica’s phone, snobbishly laughing as he swipes at the images of him that had been captured.

“Oh ho ho, this one with the stalactites. It made my horns look bigger. Marvelous!”

Only Feravis and Monica notices the bubbles in the water.

Knowing nothing of this world, Monica sees the bubbling water and posits curiosity from her. The dream has entered a lull where she had spent a good ten minutes draining her social battery with Gray that a new stimulation drew her in.

Feravis walks along the edge of the water, waving to Leopold on the other side of the cave. He stalks towards the side of the cave where the ocean is, and he hears this faint chatter.

Eyes widened, he whistled. “Soldiers! They’d found us!”

Leo wasted no time, unsheathes his greatsword in polished movements. Marching towards the water’s edge but not entirely to still be out of sight.

“We can’t possibly fight ten knights and then escape a mile run with nowhere to hide.” Gray says upon hearing this. “I’m squishy and easy to kill.”

“We ain’t got no choice.” Leo explains.

“This is my last unruined clothes!”

Truscott runs towards Monica. “You led us to a dead end!”

She brandishes her dagger and for the first time Monica stares at the weapon, not with nonchalance but fear.

“I didn’t…” She fails to finish her sentence.

“Leo is right! You are a monster.”

Leo tosses a rope to Truscott. “Tie her hands and hide with her. Be our last line of defense.”

“I don’t know how to.” She grips on the rope, remembering her earlier performance.

Leo calmly instructed her on how to do it with Monica cooperating. It’s unsettling but he pushes aside his doubts. This mission requires faith.

Not that his team has any of it.

“Gag her too.”

Really, Monica? She thought to herself upon hearing Leo’s command.

Gray paces around one side of the cave, “you can’t be serious. Look at me, Leo! You’ve run out of healing. I’m too pretty to aim. Feravis has 10 arrows left. You’re asking Truscott to hide. And there are Glasse soldiers about to swim up here!”

“We don’t have any other options.”

Gray stumbles on an answer, “hide! Look around you! There’s a lot of rocks and a lot of places to hide in.”

Leopold turns his whole body towards Gray’s direction, gaze bearing straight through his soul. He can see, despite no confirmation from the man himself, that the wound he got at the balcony weighs heavy on his shoulder.

A soldier knows that great offense is a better defense, but Leopold understands that if they aren’t in it together, then there was never a defense in the first place.

“Fer, plan b is killin’ them.” He concedes, picking up their belongings.

Gray smiles, quickly hiding their tracks with his tail sweeping the dirt.

Truscott shoves Monica in the furthest left side of the cave, behind two stalagmites. Leo hides the bags on the stack of rocks nearest to the waters while he hides behind a boulder near the water as well, further up where the bags were hidden. Gray rushes to the other side, opposite Leo.

Feravis flexes his fingers around his crossbow, “I’m still aiming!”

“For the empire’s sake, stop solving problems with blood!” Gray shrieks.

“Her head is literally sticking out, man.” Feravis points out Monica’s barely concealed head. “We’re doomed!”

To Feravis’ credit, he did hide behind a rock and considered Leo’s command. For a moment, he lowered his weapon, before aiming it again towards the water.

As such, he was the first to notice the first soldier emerging, his arrows still trained at him.

Clawing their way out, three soldiers immediately turned their heads to the direction of Sunniva, tied up on one corner of the cave, barely hidden by the stalagmites.

When the soldier in front of Feravis turns and notices his figure in between the rocks, he releases his arrows. Flying straight at the soldier only for it to be deflected by their sword.

“An attack!” The soldier bellows.

He shoots again, springing into the dirt wall as the soldier tilts their head away. Leo, following Feravis’ lead, much to Gray's discouragement, swings his greatsword from below.

It tore the leather armor of the soldier Feravis tried to attack, carving from their clavicle to the tip of their ear in one swipe.

Feeling the pressure, Gray dances about on their hiding spot, shaking the nerves.

“This is a bad idea.” He chants, trying to fight the urge to join.

He could. He thought of it. But with the way he looks, if Leopold and Feravis, who are Wydellians, falls then his fate, as a Hilagran, would be far worse. With that resolve, he unsheathes his long sword.

From behind the soldier that Leo and Feravis attacked, Gray leaps into the air, ganging up on the poor man. He lands his first hit in the battlefield. Adrenaline rushing through his body, it's quite exhilarating to actually hit your opponent.