“HELLO!”

Felicia woke from her stupor. “Hello?” Her voice sounded like cracking bones.

“Great! I’m feeling great. Ooh, so much food!”

And she was alone again.

Something inside her broke then.

She was still lying on top of the small hut, staring out into the sun. Had you asked her two weeks ago if a human being could do nothing for three days, she would have told you to fuck off and stop wasting her time. Had you offered her enough money for her to find an answer to this question, she then would have ordered some egg-head employed by her company to compile the scientifically supported list of reasons why a human being couldn't ever do nothing for three entire days. It would be pretty, include links to all kinds of vetted research documents, and be rather clinical overall.

But still, despite knowing it to be impossible, Felicia woke from a three-day stupor feeling only slightly sore. The voice inside her head had woken her frozen thought process. Her subconscious thoughts had continued through the past few days. The chain of conscious thought inside her mind had just stopped moving. The worsening smells had not woken her from mental stasis. Nor had the slowly changing chorus of sounds playing out around her made any form of impact to her vegetative state of mind. She had just given up on a deep and fundamental level, and her mana-infused psyche had run with it.

“Right.” She paused before continuing thinking for a moment. “Right, Felicia.” This one was aimed at herself.

She then sat up and looked around. The bare ground beneath her was covered in a slowly moving sea of beasts. A relative sparse sea of beasts, she saw. Then a smooth branch materialised in front of her and Agren spoke again. “Get to it then.”

“Get to what?”

“Killing those mice.”

“Why?”

The silence that followed was filled with the same condescending patience she had been sending at the stone only days before. “Because they ate all the other mice. So they took all of their mana. This means that they are now stronger. One mice containing the power of a hundred mice means that it’s a lot stronger. The amount of mana I’d need to spent to kill them would cancel out the mana I’d get. You forced me to learn these number things, you told me what a null-sum game is. Me killing them is a negative sum game. You killing them and me absorbing them is a very positive sum game.”

“Right. I’ll get to it then.” She grabbed the club with wooden fingers and let herself fall to the ground below.

Hours later, she was tired. She hadn’t slept at all over the last few days. Her mental state was drenched with exhaustion. The fact that she just spent hours smashing overgrown mice with a wooden stick meant that she was also drenched in physical exhaustion. She dragged the thick wooden club behind her as she stalked the last critter.

Agren had asked if she could please put him back inside the choker. She wasn’t sure if it was something like Stockholm syndrome, but the core seemed most at ease nestled into the crook of her neck. She hadn’t complained and sullenly held the stone against the shattered bits of necklace still clinging to her skin as it reformed its own prison.

Then she had become death itself delivering crushing blows to all mice around. It had taken her a relatively short amount of time to crush the small animals. Her conscious mind had woken again but wasn't much more than a single thread of purpose at this point. She just smacked the small grey things until the went red and then they disappeared. Then she looked around for another small grey thing.

So she ended up a physical and mentally exhausted wreck. She barely managed to get to her bed before the blissful nothingness of sleep took her.

She woke an instant later, suddenly horrified at everything. Like waking from a nightmare, she wondered what the hell she had been thinking over the past few days. Looking down, she saw that she was still covered in the same ripped business suit. “What did those other people wear?” She winced the moment she said it. Callously talking about a group of sapient individuals that could have still been alive if not for her negligence was harder than it had seemed at first.

“Rags. Nothing good.”

“Make me new clothes, please. Or at least fix my old ones.”

“I thought you liked the combination between business and survival.”

Felicia halted ascending the stairs. “What?”

“One of the latest food items had a lot of fashion experience.”

Keeping herself from vomiting again, she continued walking upwards. “No. I should have realised that your skills at modifying items as you materialise them should have grown. I should have noticed a lot more things, come to think of it. Fix my clothes, please. And remove the labels, while you are at it. Those things itch.” Felicia smiled as she felt her clothes shift around. The rank odour wafting from her pits vanished, along with all the tears and rips in her skirt and blouse. Her underwear stopped being sticky and the itching at the nape of her neck disappeared. She managed to forget about the growing streak of needless murders happening around her entirely as she saw the newly grown forest.

Before she went to sleep, the hexagonal prison surrounding the hut had been a wasteland. Mice had scurried through felled trees, gnawing at the last bits of greenery as they reduced all colour to grey and brown. Now she was surrounded by a luscious forest again, small critter scurrying here and there. Felicia smiled.

“I think we should do bunnies next.”

“No,” was her immediate reply.

“Mice just feel so small to me now. The amount of mana I can store has increased by a lot. I think at least twenty times, and mice are too small.”

“Mice eat each other. Bunnies do not. I am not killing bunnies.”

“That’s not efficient.”

Felicia scoffed. “I don’t care. I'm not killing hoards of bunnies just so you can eat. Why is it so quiet?”

“Why are you talking to yourself? What language is that?” Felicia froze. She had been strolling through the forest, dragging a hand through the sprouting underbrush here and there as she made her way to the hut. Then a feminine voice had spoken from above. She looked up and stared directly into a pink cloud that surrounded a black pair of panties. “Don’t look up my skirt. Who are you talking to?”

“What?” Felicia felt like that word had been used way too much over the past week. Agren had been saying it repeatedly, and now she had been infected.

“What? I’m not landing, by the way. Here, we can chat on top of the chamber.”

Felicia stared with open mouth at the regally clothed girl floating above her head. She gaped even harder as she felt herself being lifted off the ground. Something in the floating girl’s face kept Felicia’s attention riveted to this new person. Something about the way her hard eyebrows and even darker lashes contrasted with the blue shine of her meticulous blonde curls kept her on edge. This odd wariness and business-like fascination kept her from freaking about the fact the girl waved her hand around as they both floated towards the hut. There, the girl sank down, her frilly dress deflating around her as she sat cross-legged on the smooth cabin roof.

“Better, no? My name is Campresse Inguss. I just arrived in Wegland’s tower and saw something odd when checking the farm’s status. Now, you absolutely must tell me how someone like you ended up in a dump like this.” Campresse then smiled brilliantly at Felicia. The perfect rows of white teeth put the businesswoman even further on edge. The girl couldn't have been more than sixteen, eighteen at most, but something in her innocent and charming smile set off all kinds of alarm bells.

“Hi. Nice to meet you. Call me Fel.”

The cute girl’s green speckled eyes shone with blue lustre as she blinked at Felicia. “One moment, please.” Campresse waved her fingers around while pouting and frowning cutely. Any male would have been grinning like an idiot at the adorable spectacle, no doubt, Felicia forcefully suppressed the shivers running down her spine. Every single social and business instinct she had developed during the career-oriented phase of her life is shouting at her that this girl was trouble. She had trouble adjusting her mindset before, she briefly reflects. She also suspects that she would have wallowed in the moral morass that consists of the question of whether or not those deaths three days ago had been preventable. The introduction of this sudden new factor had drastically shifted her priorities.

While Felicia was re-evaluating events that were immensely shocking on a personal level, Camprisse cast a rather complicated spell.

She had grown up around magic. She had never seen the extra layer of reality overlapping daily life in the Empire as anything but a tool. So she used this tool to do what tools are used for; reducing high-effort tasks to something trivial. Where previously, many weeks and even months would have been needed to bridge the gap between her linguistic understanding and Felicia’s, the heiress to a sizable portion of the Empire’s nobility employed an incredibly complex piece of equipment with a convoluted series of hand-waving and finger-wagglings. This relatively simple piece of arcane ritual called upon hundreds of thousands of hours of magical experimentation and effort as it translated between Felicia and Campresse.

Felicia did not notice any of this. She just stared at the pretty girl waving her fingers about until the businesswoman understood the words flowing from her mouth.

“Here is the deal. I will keep your existence a secret. You will owe me a favour. How does that sound?”

Once again, every single alarm bell Felicia had access to went off. “What would this favour entail?”

Felicia registered the sudden change in expression. Deciding to nip a certain conversational dis-advantage in the bud as soon as possible, she started her first attack. “Do you mind if I call you Ingy? Campresse is such a mouth-full to pronounce.” The seasoned businesswoman actually saw the shift in conversational tone that occurred between the two females. She observed the very moment the cute girl realised the oddly dressed woman in front of her was more than she seemed. Felicia noticed the moment Ingy realised this fact. Then she realised that Ingy had realised that Felicia had realised this fact.

“No, please call me Campbell, if you please.” Camprisse’s perfect smile told her she was on to something.

“I think I will call you Cammy, if it’s all the same to you.” The fact that the women sitting opposite her flinched was proof for Felicia that she had struck a decisive victory.

“You… can call me Cammy.” The genuine pout that followed was even more proof.

“So Cam, what are you doing here?”

Felicia’s guard went up some more at the fact that this new girl accepted her defeat so quickly. “I want to make a deal. My superiors assigned me to this post, expecting me to fail hard. I want to slap their faces. I want to show them that we women are even more capable than those two men they are putting up for promotion.” Here Cammy stared into Felicia’s eyes. At this point, Fel realised that even though this Camprisse girl might be a product of some backstabbing form of high-society, she still had a core of truth inside of herself. “I want to crush those pricks and rise above even the senile old fart that owns this county.”

The steel and determination in Camprisse’s eyes nearly bewitched Felicia. She then thought about it for a few seconds before allowing herself to be entranced. “Okay. I will help you. What do you need?”

The secret smile the two women shared would have scared any male watching on a deep and instinctual level.