“We need a moment. Could you get her back to her cell?” Miles said to Bren after we had left the interrogation room.

We walked down the hallway for a few meters, until Miles stopped, leaned against a wall, and let himself glide down to the floor. I hadn’t seen him this vexed since Cerus, when he learned that he presumably wouldn’t be able to go back to his home world.

“One thing after the fucking other...” he mumbled.

“Yeah...” I said.

Every single time when we were in high spirits, thinking that things were going our way, something new came up. Learning that there actually was a beast ruling over this region was a shock, and hearing that mother had been... I didn’t even want to think about it.

Initially, I felt rage well up inside me, but Miles had brought me back a little. After hearing the full story, I felt more sad than angry now. Apparently he couldn’t calm himself down though. Sitting there, with a hung head, was unlike him. As was the way he had left the room we had been in almost wordlessly.

“Ugh, leave it, please,” he said, gesturing that he was talking to Lilana. “Because it’s not that simple! We don’t know how strong it is!”

It was curious how you could learn to live with only hearing one side of a conversation and guessing what it was about. Though it was surprisingly simple if you knew the context.

Miles is annoyed, so she said something about the gods... And apparently she’s in favor of fighting this beast.

“You know what my first thought was when Hati told us about this beast?” he asked with a derisive laugh. “Wouldn’t want to meet that one. I jinxed it.”

“Well, I’m at fault as well then, because I thought the same thing.”

There was the possibility that not everything Hayla had told us was true, but I believed her, and based on his expression, Miles did too. This was definitely a setback.

“You hold off wild beasts and they send moderators after you instead. There’s a mining town people rely on? Not anymore. You test a useful script and a god appears to stop you. You try to improve how the world works and... oh, what’s that? One of the strongest beasts known to man has a problem with it? Well, sure. Why not,” Miles ranted.

I could understand his frustration, and he was right that we didn’t know how strong this beast would truly be, but I felt just a little bit more optimistic than him.

“Do you think there’s a chance our attacks won’t work on it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know... Though I’m less worried about the damage we can do, and more about our ability to hit it... So far, everything we managed to hit fell immediately, but the moderators were able to dodge our attacks pretty well, and Hati thinks this beast is much stronger than him... Not to mention the category six, which moved too fast to even see. How fast will a category ten or above be?”

“Hm... Berla and Reurig said category six is an exception though, didn’t they? It’s only a little stronger than a five, even though its speed makes it dangerous. And sevens are supposed to be slower. What if sixes are actually faster than tens?”

“That will be difficult to verify if nobody ever survived a fight with a ten,” Miles said.

“We both agree that we don’t have a choice though, right? We can’t make a deal... That would be the end of our plans.”

If we tried to reach a similar agreement with this beast as the Rulers had, we would essentially no longer be in control. Arax would be calling the shots. We would have to keep supplying it with humans.... and whatever else it wants. If we wanted to actually do that, we would have to find ways to get rid of people. The exact opposite of what we wanted.

“Listen, Tomar. I’m not happy about it, but you have to consider the possibility that we won’t be able to beat it. And if we were to die fighting it... Alarna’s future would be uncertain. With a deal, however, the citizens would at least be able to keep living in relative peace. I’m not saying it’s a great option, but we have to think about it.”

I thought about it for all but two seconds before I gave my response.

“No.”

“Huh?”

“That can’t be an option...” I said. “If nobody stops these beasts, nothing is ever going to change! And there is nobody else who could do it! We need to try!”

Miles looked at me with a conflicted expression. He was trying to find the best and safest solution, as usual. “Min-maxing,” as he called it. Meaning to choose the path with the least resistance and the highest potential gains. I understood perfectly well that he had a point, but I didn’t want to even entertain the idea.

“You need to think beyond the next few weeks,” Miles noted. “Let’s say we fight it and we lose. In the best case, someone else will strike a deal, and life will continue as it has. Nothing will change, and we’ll be dead. That’s far from ideal. And in the worst case, the town might be done for. Thousands of lives lost. If we played along, however, we could still improve people’s lives in other ways, and we would hopefully be able to live on and keep growing stronger, to a point where beating beasts like this isn’t uncertain anymore. Right now, we have no idea if we could even kill a category seven, let alone a ten. But someday we will know.”

“I get that, but... We would be killing people!”

“Ugh... Always feels like I’m being ganged up upon when you two are agreeing on something,” he said, referring to me and Lilana.

“She wants to fight as well?” I asked him, though I had guessed as much already.

“She does... Apparently it’s unacceptable that the temple ever agreed to look the other way, while citizens were fed to a beast. I worry that you two are getting a little cocky... A few days ago you weren’t even sure about fighting the moderators, Lilana. And with that enemy we at least knew what to expect.”

Miles gestured that he was listening to her as she spoke, and I waited until she was done. Granted, even if you could get used to not hearing the full conversation, it was a little unfortunate that we couldn’t hear people on the “backseat.” It would’ve still been simpler.

“That’s easy for you to say, you aren’t doing the fighting...” he said eventually and turned towards me again. “Tomar. Try to be as emotionless as possible for a moment. Which option gives everyone the best chances for survival in the long term, assuming that we will kill it eventually?”

I looked around a little helplessly. If you thought about it purely rationally, of course this would be a viable option. Until we know how strong it is, and whether we can beat it, we could try to appease it. Whether it would even be ready to make a deal with us was a different question, but if not, the alternative would be fighting it anyway. However, if we went this route, we would potentially have to do terrible things.

“I don’t know if I could do it...” I said. “Could you send people to their deaths? Just like that?”

He was quiet for a moment, thinking over either my question or his response. In truth, I suspected I already knew the answer.

“I could. If necessary,” he said.

“I see...”

That’s what I figured...

“Trolley problem...” he mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said with a sigh. “Here’s what I would propose. First, we meet with this beast and see what we’re up against. If, by some stroke of luck, it seems like we would be able to beat it, we will fight. But if not, we’ll try to make a deal instead, and prepare until we’re ready to kill it.”

It was a reasonable suggestion, and if we determined that fighting it would be feasible, we could end it right then and there. It felt wrong to me to ever consider the alternative, but at least I had something to cling to. Reluctantly, I came to agree that this would be the best path forward for the moment.

“Okay... Let’s go with that for now,” I said.

“Good. Lilana?”

...

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said after a moment. “Three for three. We’ll go with that plan then.”

With a deep sigh, he got back up and brushed the dust off his robe.

“I guess we’ll need more information now...” I said.

“Yea... Let’s finally introduce ourselves.”

***

Hertar Alarna had been in isolation for the past couple of days, and by this point, he assumed he probably wouldn’t get out of his cell for many more days to come. The bells had told him that there was a beast attack the day before, but apparently it had been dealt with quickly. Assuming that this had been a talking beast, it would make Lilly even more of a hero in the people’s eyes. He could hardly blame them though.

Out of the thousands of people in town, only seven knew the truth about Alarna. They were the only ones who could know. He, of course, knew that the changes Lilly was bringing were highly desirable, but the people would presumably soon learn that there had been a good reason why generations of Rulers upheld these laws, even though the town had been more than prosperous enough to not need them for resource management.

Initially, he considered telling Lilly why the Rulers needed to stay in control, in an attempt to correct course, and if they had played their cards right, maybe nothing would’ve happened. However, he had concluded that they would’ve certainly assumed that to be a lie, and not believe him anyway.

He had also hoped that Lilly might be the solution to this entire problem before she entered the town, and he had tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t meet with him. And when her “blessings” hadn’t stopped Arax from coming here earlier in the month, he knew that this was a dead end.

He thought about telling the guards at the prison too, in hopes that they would trust his words and help him and his family. But not only did this seem unlikely, he couldn’t hope to predict what would happen in that case. The guards might tell others, word would spread, and soon every single citizen would know, breaking another rule, which would spell doom for Alarna.

In the face of all this, he decided that silence would be the best course of action. Arax would inevitably come here, and that would open up possibilities. His family and the beast had had a good business relationship for centuries, and even if they had been dethroned, maybe it would decide to kill Lilly and reinstate the Rulers. It was also possible that it would attack the town, and that he and his family might be able to flee in the chaos. Or maybe Alarna would be reformed, acting solely as a food source for the beast, like many other towns and villages. But even in that case many citizens would be able to survive.

Deliberately breaking the rules was not something he was comfortable with, however, because the promise from the beast to his ancestors had been that that would be the end. There were potential chances to get out of this without the town getting raised to the ground and every single citizen getting killed. Including him and his loved ones. This was what the former king was hoping to come to pass, as improbable as it was.

“I wonder how long it will take...” Hertar wondered aloud, when he heard noises in the hallway outside his cell.

Usually it was pretty quiet out there in this part of the prison building, so it was curious to hear people at all. He was even more surprised when the door was unlocked and creaked open, but he was floored when the person standing in the open door was the High Priest.

“Orthur...?” Hertar said.

“Go on,” came a male voice from behind the priest, and Orthur slowly walked into the cell, hindered by the shackles around his ankles. Hertar caught a glimpse of a young guard, but the door was closed again right away, without him entering the cell.

The king assumed that he had been separated from his family and put into a cell alone so he couldn’t act as a leader to them, and he suspected that it had been the same for the High Priest. Putting the two leaders into the same cell now seemed weird, so there had to be a reason for it.

“What’s going on?” Hertar asked.

“I don’t know,” Orthur said, but there wasn’t nearly as much displeasure in his voice as usual when the two met.

“Were you in isolation as well?”

“I was,” Orthur said. “I have to admit, seeing a familiar face is a pleasant change of pace. Even if it’s yours, King Hertar.”

“Likewise, High Priest Orthur. Though I am concerned about why you were brought here. They surely didn’t just want to give us an opportunity to socialize.”

“No... probably not.”

The two made some brief smalltalk, until there were noises at the door again, and when it opened, they could see Lilly and Tomar entering the cell.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Lilly said. “We need to talk.”