Vex had been a little concerned that his words wouldn't be enough — but it turned out that he needn't have worried. The 'rebels', such as they were, were strangely willing to trust him on his word, though they insisted on sending someone in with them to the dungeon. The new person wouldn't have to accompany them — he'd stay at the edges of the bonus room, hopefully away from the danger, and focus on studying the glyphs that Vex gave him. In the meantime, Vex could go out to identify new glyphs and expand his knowledge of this True Magic.

First, though, they had to finish with the food distribution. They left a cartload with Ingress and the librarian, each of them promising they'd find the right people to help distribute the food to those that needed it; between them, they could cover about a third of the city, which means they still needed to find trustworthy distributors for the other two-thirds.

Vex still had the merchants he wanted to find, the ones that had helped him out to begin with — but the rebels had also helped by providing a number of names they deemed trustworthy. They weren't necessarily members of the rebellion, but they were people that were noted as being kind; the kind of people that would help as honestly and fairly as they could.

So that was who they went looking for. It wasn't a process that was anywhere near as quick as they wanted — but Ingress told them they needed time to set up a way to sneak them into the dungeon, too, so that gave them a few days to secure distribution of the food and to figure out what was happening to growth spells.

It was time that they spent... as well as they could.

"Hey, hey, hey, it's alright," MIsa whispered. Vex was standing beside her, his dagger brandished and his eyes narrowed; he kept his back straight and his tail still, every muscle poised to strike. He was the very picture of danger, even as his larger companion comforted the small child that was crying on the ground. "Shhh. We've got you."

"Get out of the way," one of the teenagers Vex was poised against said. He was a scruffy-looking human, his hair and clothes both a mess; there were holes in his shirt, and streaks of dirt along his arms, along with hints of blood, like he'd fallen and scraped his arms. He was holding a dagger, but the dagger was trembling; Vex didn't need Physical Empathy to see how much the kid didn't want to do this.

The child was holding a piece of bread, clutching on to it for dear life; even that piece of bread was stained with tears and blood and dirt. Julia enforcers were nowhere to be seen, because of course they weren't; they didn't really come to this part of town. Vex was starting to understand how the rebels were able to operate under Wisfield's noses. A lot of the nobles just didn't care enough to bother with what they considered the slums of the city, the slightly poorer outer circle that lived along the kingdom's walls.

"No," Vex said, his voice steady. Derivan and Sev were off splitting up another conflict; they'd seen three separate fights as soon as they'd entered the district, and immediately split up to break up those fights. "Put your dagger down."

"Get the fuck out of the way," the teenager said again, gaining confidence. The two humans behind him, both smaller and younger — his brothers, maybe? — stared up at him with his eyes wide, but they did nothing to stop him; they stood poised to fight instead.

"You don't want to do this," Vex said again, adding a note of warning to his voice.

"Why? What level are you?" the boy demanded. "You're just another one of Mydsa's thugs, aren't you?"

"What are you— you're the ones trying to steal bread from a child!" Vex couldn't keep the exasperation from bleeding into his voice. "You think I'm the thug in this situation?"

"You didn't answer my question," the boy said.

"You didn't answer mine!"

"It doesn't matter," he said, and he charged forward. It was a reckless charge, too; the boy didn't know anything about his level or his stats. This was pure desperation at work, and...

There were three of them charging at him, actually; the boy's two brothers, if that was who they were, were charging with him. And even with that, Vex didn't feel like he or Misa or the small child she was helping were in danger.

They were just too... slow.

It was hard to get away from the absolute stat disparity between them; the difference had been clear with the bandits, and they were even more clear now. Vex had plenty of time to step out of the way and push the offending daggers to the side, his tail sweeping down to knock the boy off his feet, and even arrange the subsequent fall so the kid didn't stab himself on the way down. Likewise, his brothers posed almost no threat...

They tried an [Adjust Position] on their daggers, to force them to strike him, but even that Vex could respond to; the recent flood of levels he'd gotten allowed him to step away from the mana-focused build, giving him more of the agility he needed in close combat confrontations. When the dagger appeared in front of him, he sidestepped, letting it bounce off his leathers harmlessly.

Normally, at this point, he would've cast [Sleep]. But this...

"Look, you just want some food, right?" he said to them — to their backs, really, as they lay groaning on the floor. He didn't comment on it. "We'll give you some bread. We're not looking for you, anyway."

"You're not one of Mydsa's men," the first teenager said, staring at him, eyes wide.

"No," Vex sighed. "Like I said, I don't even know who that is."

"She's the one that handles food distribution here." The words were filled with spite. "One of Julia's lackeys. She just gives out the food to the families she likes." He glared at the child, who still lay trembling in Misa's arms.

"...That doesn't fucking give you leave to hurt a child." Misa's tone was flat.

"Well what the fuck do you want us to do?!" the kid suddenly exploded, rounding on Misa with a hostility that surprised even himself. His eyes were wet, but he spoke with defiance. "My mom hasn't — she hasn't eaten in two weeks! The system's gonna take her—"

"We'll get you some food," Vex interrupted, trying to calm the boy down. "For your mom. Whatever she needs to break the status effect. Just... stop. We'll figure things out."

The boy glared. But he didn't pick up the dagger again; it lay on the ground where Vex had knocked it, sparking strangely with a hint of his magic.

"Fine," he said. Not because he was really giving up, or even because he trusted Vex to give them the food he said he was going to. He just saw that he didn't have a choice. He'd tried, and the stat disparity was simply too large; Vex saw the defeat in his eyes.

Vex sighed again.

Some victories really didn't feel like one.

"You don't fucking get it," the orc told Derivan, his voice rough. "There isn't enough for us to share. We share and we both die before the next shipment arrives. This is all we fuckin' got. Don't come down here and judge us if you aren't going to fucking help."

They'd set up a pseudo-tournament in this part of town, one orcish fighter against a human girl. She was smaller and faster than the orc, and the orc was clearly losing; there were bruises developing in his skin where the system failed to heal him properly, a side effect of the [Hunger] effect that lessened the protection of health.

The girl didn't seem like she wanted to fight, though. There were tears in her eyes when she did. But her eyes were determined, and her fists were clenched; she would not lose.

Derivan couldn't explain they were here to help; not here, where they were surrounded with an audience. He'd already tried that once before, in a different encounter, and the result had been the four of them getting swarmed by people desperate for food.

"I didn't know it was this bad," Sev said, his voice quiet. "People didn't look like they were starving. Are people dying already...?"

"Of course you wouldn't see it," the orc scoffed.

"You'd only see this around the city edges," the girl told them quietly; she'd straightened, apparently deciding that the fight was over for now, and spoke with a sort of quiet confidence. "Places the nobles don't really touch, because they don't really consider it a part of their city."

"Sometimes adventurers come on by and help us out," the orc said. "But they've been doing that less lately."

"Turns out there's a reason for that," Sev muttered, glancing at Derivan; the armor just bowed his head slightly. He'd seen the glimmer of [Reinforcement] on more than one person while they were moving through the city, and he'd broken it where he could; the soul-cracks that resulted would still take some time to heal. He'd even broken it on some of the nobles they'd come across.

"Look," Sev said, glancing around. Derivan heard the pain in his voice when he spoke, though he tried his best to hide it. "Fight's over. Stop... watching this. It's not — don't make a game out of this. You're going through a lot and I get it, but..."

"Judge us when you're the ones starving," someone in the crowd jeered, and Sev winced slightly — but he didn't say anything. He watched as the crowd slowly began to disperse; only the orc and the girl stayed, both staring at him.

"If you're breaking up the fight, I assume you have a solution," the girl said.

"Or food," the orc rumbled.

"It is both, we hope," Derivan said quietly. "But it did not seem wise to say so in front of a large crowd."

"No," the orc agreed; he squinted his eyes at Derivan in a leer. "They would've torn you apart."

Derivan disagreed. They wouldn't have been able to do anything to him. But he didn't respond, instead staring until the orc shifted uncomfortably.

"...What now?" he finally asked, the word emerging almost reluctantly.

"Now we get you some food," Sev said. "And you bring us to someone that can help give it out."

Some places were better than others. That one district in the southwest section of Elyra was probably among the worst, whether it was because it was located farthest from House Julia or for some other nebulous reason; other districts had smaller evils or smaller needs, but it was largely the same thing between districts — there were always people who were desperate.

For Vex, it was a bit of a shock; he'd always seen Elyra as a prosperous kingdom, for all that he knew it had its faults. Yet it was clear now that it hadn't taken much for Elyra to start to fall at all — a single type of spell had stopped working properly, and already the kingdom had started to fall apart. Only at the outer edges, sure, but given enough time...

It was sobering. And maybe what was worse was the fact that most of the nobles likely weren't aware of it, even ones that specialized in knowing; if most of them didn't bother to spend their time in the outer edges, they would likely just assume that everything was fine. People closer to the center of the kingdom weren't exactly hale and hearty, but they weren't starving or desperate, either.

That was only happening where it could be hidden.

They'd given out a good two-thirds of the food by now, not distributing it by hand, but giving it to individuals they felt could be trusted to give out food in turn; the orc that had been losing in the southwest district turned out to be fighting to win food for a smaller community of impoverished people in the area, and not just his own family, and so he'd gotten a large chunk of bread and another chunk of preserved foodstuffs that would last. They'd watched as they left, and saw him give a loaf of bread almost immediately to the girl he'd been fighting; she'd clutched it tightly to herself —

"A lot of this is so much worse than I thought," Vex said, hugging his tail to himself. "I need to figure out what's happening with growth spells. And why it's growth-specific spells that are affected. The food we're giving out isn't going to last forever."

Derivan nodded. "Perhaps what we have learned from Teque will help?" he offered. "Or perhaps we could study this phenomenon from within the bonus room."

"I think that's gonna be our best bet," Vex said. He leaned into Derivan, feeling a wave of exhaustion overcome him, and saw the armor look down at him in concern; Vex managed a small smile.

"Any news from Ingress, yet?" Misa asked.

"Nothing," Sev said, shaking his head. He glanced at Vex and Derivan and gave them a small smile, then turned to Misa. "We still need to get another third of this distributed before we can do that anyway, so..."

"About four more stops," Misa said. "You guys see the people following us too, right?"

"Yeah." Sev glanced back through the windows, towards the rooftops. "Not sure if they're Julia enforcers or people in the city, but an ambush didn't work too well the last time someone tried."

"I had some kids try to attack me, too." Vex said, tapping his fingers listlessly on his seat. "Not a surprise that some people noticed what we were doing. The caravan's pretty noticeable."

"If they are enforcers, we must be prepared," Derivan said. "We cannot assume it will be an easy fight."

"No," Vex agreed. "They'll have magic items and raw stats. So we'll have to be careful."

And they were.

Which was probably why it was two more stops before they got attacked, instead of one.