Alyssa couldn’t believe that she had been kicked out of the planning process for Irulon and the solution to the soul problem. Sure, she might have been less helpful than she had thought she would be—which had already been low to start with—but kicked out? It had something to do with Irulon’s latest idea.

The princess was excited. Beyond ecstatic. She had gotten some idea overnight that would apparently solve everything for everyone—referring to herself and the dragon, of course—but needed some time to work out exactly how to go about doing the actual solving. Given that she was working on magic, Alyssa had little that she could directly contribute to the project. All that had been asked of her was to get back into Tenebrael’s ‘good graces’ and then practice her flesh-shaping.

A term that made her shudder. It sounded too… wet and gooey.

But in order to even test at such a thing, Alyssa had to reconnect with Tenebrael. Until she got confirmation that the Astral Authority had been dealt with, she was somewhat loathe to make any attempts. If Irulon needed her right this moment, she would of course take the risk, but Irulon still had her own idea to work out and still had some time beyond that.

So for the moment, Alyssa was taking a casual stroll through the streets of Illuna with Fela at her side. Kasita was taking the time to do a quick check-in with the Yora representatives, checking to see what they thought in the wake of the Astral Authority and infected humans appearing out near the walls. Guard had been doubled on the Owlcroft side of the city. Aside from a few guards still stationed around the monster camp, the eastern wall was practically empty. Apparently. Alyssa hadn’t actually gone out there to see for herself just yet. She just had the report from Brakkt.

Despite the increased presence of the guards on the walls, life inside the city continued more-or-less the same. It was something like what Brakkt had been talking about. There wasn’t an immediate cause for alarm, so most of the general population didn’t worry over anything. They had too much else on their plates to worry over. Food on their literal plates, for instance. Another city might have been concerned over an increased guard presence, but even that wasn’t all that strange to the people of Illuna. They regularly had infected attacking that side of the city. Increased guard was business as usual.

Mostly usual, anyway.

Walking through the market with Fela got her a few looks. Nothing too surprising. Monsters were somewhat commonplace around Illuna. None right now. Martin had asked that all those monsters who were working in the city to remain in the monster camp while the city was on high alert. Just a way to prevent any high tensions from causing incidents. Alyssa was fairly certain that they had passed the word to those monsters who had been sneaking into the city because Alyssa hadn’t spotted any of them.

Not that they were doing that great a job of sneaking anymore.

“The little kid not here today?” a passing customer asked as the pieman handed him a pie.

“Nawp. Daughter’s a bit touchy about it too. Think she’s gotten used to a bit of help around.”

“Thought I saw the little red monster running around earlier, but maybe it was my imagination.”

Not sneaking at all anymore, apparently.

“Good riddance,” another customer said with a hefty grumble. “Pies ain’t supposta have strange hair in ‘em.”

“The kid has blue hair Ed, that strand you pulled out was grey. You’re the only one with grey hair touching your food.”

“The hair was blue, you just couldn’ta told with all the dough baked innit.”

“It was grey,” a seemingly unrelated customer shouted.

“Blue!”

“Grey!”

The entire crowd around the pie stand quickly devolved into bickering and arguing. Seemingly everyone started shouting out colors, including some people shopping at nearby stands. Blue, grey, blue, grey. Even a green thrown in there for good measure. Shame they couldn’t all live in simple peace and harmony, but at least it wasn’t a riot. If anything, the arguing seemed almost in good-nature. Like they were enjoying the little distraction from their morning meal.

Alyssa skirted by, trying to avoid getting herself and Fela involved. The giant flames coming from Fela’s eyes acted like something of a beacon, but she was just unintentionally intimidating enough that most people didn’t like to approach her. At least, she was intimidating toward people that hadn’t seen her chased around the streets by a bunch of children. Luckily for her, that had happened near Martin’s manor, around the wealthier sections of the city. The markets were far from slums, but they weren’t opulent shops either.

And they couldn’t really stop.

Despite their casual stroll, they did have something of a mission. No time to get into an argument about a hair in a pie.

Past the market and through some homely homes, Alyssa and Fela finally reached the wall. The same wall that they had watched the Astral Authority from. Most guards recognized them. One of the guards even tried to escort her up onto the wall itself. But the wall wasn’t their destination for the day.

Brakkt and a trio of draken were already waiting at the nearby gate. He was fully armored, though he had his helmet off. It hung from a hook on the side of Ensou’s saddle.

“Good morning,” he said with a smile and a nod of his head. “Sleep well?”

“I should be asking you that. I had a bed, you’re still out on that makeshift cot in the monster camp. Is that even comfortable?”

“Well enough. I enjoy the rougher nights. Sleeping in the palace always felt too… soft.”

“Fair enough. I guess,” Alyssa said with a half shrug.

Fela, after letting out a truly massive yawn that had a few of the nearby guards taking a step back from her sharp teeth, shrugged. “I slept great, but someone woke me up too early.”

“If you’re left alone, you’ll sleep as long as Irulon.” Though at least it wasn’t as difficult to wake Fela up. A bit of light shaking of her shoulders would do the trick.

“Shall we head out?”

Alyssa’s smile faded somewhat as she looked out through the open gate toward the swampier side of Illuna. There were a lot of corpses out there. Bodies of the infected slain by the Astral Authority. Alyssa had checked the corpses of a few on her way back, using the scythe to try to pull out a soul. None of them had possessed souls, but there were a lot of corpses out there.

Illuna already had a few teams of guardsmen scouring the land for any sign of pentagrams, with Trik overseeing or maybe just observing them. Trik was the leader of the plague containment teams back in Lyria, so he knew a thing or two about infected and clearing them out, but Illuna had a decent amount of experience in dealing with such things as well. The symbols had to be destroyed or simply disturbed lest Illuna become the new Owlcroft. However, they essentially had to comb the swamp. With Fela, their team could go directly from corpse to corpse, following the scent throughout the area. With every body they found and every pentagram they destroyed, the dire situation grew less perilous.

Apparently. Alyssa wasn’t sure how they knew the exact mechanics behind the formation of the pit. Perhaps arcanists back when it had first formed used Retrograde Cognition or other spells to diagnose the problem. Regardless, the belief was that demoniacally formed pentagrams contributed to the pit’s existence. Alyssa had no reason to doubt them.

So she hopped up into Izsha’s saddle. Brakkt slid into Ensou’s saddle while Fela more literally hopped onto Dasca.

And they were off.

Illuna’s teams already scoured the area nearest to Illuna. Luckily. They didn’t have to trudge through the actual swamp much at all, sticking to the path as they headed further into the drier sections of the forest. Alyssa felt bad for the poor guys who were going around with a meat wagon, hauling up all the corpses left behind by the teams. They had to go wading through the murky water to find bodies. At least they didn’t have to search much. Small magical flares burned bright over checked bodies, both alerting Alyssa as to where they could ignore as well as drawing the body collectors to the corpses.

Fela did spot a handful of infected bodies that the initial teams had missed in the swamp. Most of the missed ones were fully submerged with the water too murky to spot the faint glow from the pentagrams. How Fela managed to smell them from beneath the water was anyone’s guess. Perhaps some small gas bubbles escaped or maybe they just left a lingering scent from before they died. Regardless, Brakkt and Ensou went around trampling the pentagrams while Alyssa, using spell cards provided by the city, cast the flare spell to mark the bodies as found.

They continued like that for a good few hours, following Fela, trampling, and marking. It was surprisingly relaxing, considering they were dealing with dead bodies. There was just no sense of danger out in the forest. The Astral Authority had been thorough and effective. Randomly, Alyssa would pull out a scythe just to make sure that there were no bodies slipping by with souls still intact, but so far, every body had the pentagrams next to them and lacked souls.

Something Alyssa had been mildly worried about was the Astral Authority. They seemed to be gone, but were they really? So far, she hadn’t spotted one. All the ones around Illuna were gone, but she thought there was a possibility of finding an injured one out in the forest, left behind. But as long as their portals were working, they probably wouldn’t leave any behind unless they had completely died. At which point, given that it had been several hours since the action the night before, the bodies probably would have disintegrated.

There was too much ground to cover for one day, unfortunately. Owlcroft was several days off. Assuming that infected fled roughly evenly in every direction, there would be miles upon miles of ground to go over. Fela was just one person and Alyssa was not equipped for a full expedition at the moment. Neither was Brakkt. Even Illuna’s guardsmen were mostly sticking within a day’s walking distance. There were preparations to perform a more extensive operation, but nothing that would happen by the end of the night. It would probably be a few days. At the moment, they were just trying to mitigate any potential threats near Illuna.

The full expedition would probably be quite the ordeal. Even if they weren’t going that far from Illuna relative to somewhere like Lyria or even the distance between Teneville and Lyria, it was going to be a long and hard march. Without someone like Fela with them, they were going to have to comb the forests and swamps by hand.

Perhaps another of the monsters inside the camp had the ability to sniff out demons. There were a number of gremlins in the camp. If they could somehow detect demons, having a few of them in the expedition would surely speed up how soon those guards got to return home.

Something to check out once she returned to the city this evening.

Roughly four hours later and Alyssa found herself out of the flare cards. She had even been rationing them. If two bodies were close enough, she would place the flare between them with arrows drawn into the ground or a nearby tree. Doing that, she had been able to mark a good forty bodies with only thirty cards.

She could hardly believe just how many there were. Granted, there had been tons of them when she had been at Owlcroft. But even with her using Annihilator to decimate armies plus whatever forces they lost to the Astral Authority before they started fleeing, there were so many. Had they just been building up for one massive attack on the entire world? It wasn’t impossible. Taking that into consideration, despite the trouble they had caused, the Astral Authority might have been something of a blessing for this world.

It would take Illuna weeks if not months to scour the entirety of the land where the infected could have fled to. Alyssa did not envy them.

With no more spells, their little group started heading back to the city. On the way, she did drag a few bodies to already marked corpses using Spectral Chains. In retrospect, she should probably have been doing that in the first place to group up five or so bodies at once. It would have let her flare spells last a little longer.

“Shame,” Brakkt said as they neared Illuna. “They’ll have people working constantly to create more spell cards. Any supply of ink and paper is likely to run down because of this.”

“It isn’t all bad,” Alyssa said, looking around the swamp. Most of the flares that were dancing around the surface of the water when they had left were gone now, cleaned up by the body collectors. “There aren’t likely to be any demons attacking the city in the near future because of this. I doubt the Astral Authority missed any. They might have even been able to close the pit. Illuna will have to send out some surveyors to see. Or I could ask an angel if I see one anytime soon.”

“True. So long as they don’t come under attack from any other forces in the time being, they will likely have time to restock before any major calamities strike. Hopefully they will have cards reserved to continuously propagate their farms. A famine would be disastrous at the moment with the monsters still at their doorstep.”

“The camp does have a lot of people in it, but relative to the rest of the city? They can’t be taking up that much food.”

Brakkt glanced over. His helmet was still off, giving a clear view of his face. He hadn’t worn it at all since they set out on their errand. There just was no need to do so. Although dreary, the swamp and forest weren’t dangerous at the moment.

Unfortunately, that lack of a helmet gave Alyssa a clear view of his knowing look.

“You think that will matter when the townsfolk are starving and looking for anything to blame? At best, the monsters will be run off. At worst?” He shook his head.

“Perhaps a suggestion to Martin about moving the monsters off to somewhere else. Give them a plot of land near enough to still be under Illuna’s protection, but far enough away that the general population doesn’t worry too much about them all.” As long as the monsters remained allies with Illuna, a dedicated community could even serve as a beachhead into becoming more recognized and accepted as a clique of human society.

Of course, Alyssa wasn’t sure at all how well the camp could grow into a proper community. There were less than a dozen of any given species of monsters. Barring strange reproduction methods, growing a community would require an influx of monsters from elsewhere. For that, Volta could probably step in. Alyssa had no doubt that, as both the leader of a monster community at the oasis and as the court arcanist for Illuna, Volta could get some word out. Whether or not anyone came was another matter entirely.

Still, that was a long-term problem that, while Alyssa would try helping with it, would probably not actually involve her that much. They had spent a lot longer in Illuna than expected. While Alyssa didn’t particularly mind the vacation—she had grown rather fond of Illuna in general, it being a smaller city without wars or attacks helped her fondness—Oz and the other guild members were still trying to get a job for the return trip and Trik was supposed to have returned a long time ago. Brakkt didn’t seem like he was in much of a hurry, but the royal siblings probably shouldn’t stay away forever.

The real question at the moment was about Irulon. If moving back to Lyria interrupted her research and spell crafting, they would be sticking around for the foreseeable future. If she thought she could make better progress back in the palace, they might just be leaving as soon as tomorrow.

Near the gates to the city, Alyssa spotted a familiar face. Kasita stood by, chatting with one of the guards like she knew him her whole life. The moment Alyssa got close enough, she broke off the conversation with a terse smile and practically ran up to Alyssa.

“Mild problem,” Kasita said with no hint of amusement in her tone. “Apparently last night has spooked the Yora goons. They want to leave as soon as possible and were sending off Messages all day about getting away from monsters, demons, and Illuna.”

“That sounds like a good thing. Where’s the problem?”

“From what I gathered from my spying, Yora wants a ‘sampling’ of the monsters. If they can’t get them all, they’re going to try to take a few. And they’re planning on taking them in chains.”

“The camp is still under the protection of Illuna. They aren’t planning on kidnapping some monsters, are they?” Alyssa asked, glancing from Kasita to Brakkt.

The prince put a hand to his chin, considering for a moment before answering. “Martin may choose to go with what ends up easing possible tensions between Illuna and Yora.”

Alyssa pressed her lips together in a tight frown. “Perhaps we should go see Martin? See if we can’t sway him toward keeping the monsters all together. And perhaps make sure that Yora doesn’t kidnap any. There is still that group out in the wilderness that Rokien and Fezzik thought were watching them.”

Even in the wake of a crazy night, something just had to crop up.