Seven days ago, Almond and the others wore status markers that told the system, in every language it recognized, that they belonged to soone else. Then the slave status disappeared the mont they won in the Slave Ga, and what replaced it was cleaner and ca with a very different set of open doors.
One of those doors led directly into the service of royalty. Five kings, specifically, which was a detail that still felt slightly absurd if you thought about it too hard.
Their first Hell Mode Quest was also completed the mont their slave status was removed, which boosted them to Tier-10 instantly, significantly increasing their combat power.
---
The Alliance of Varek was not what most people pictured when they heard the word alliance. It wasn’t five kingdoms spread across a continent, each ruling from its own distant seat of power. It was stranger and more practical than that. The five kings had, through a combination of old treaties and newer necessity, consolidated their courts into a single shared city. Varek’s Crown, they called it. One city running five kingdoms simultaneously, which ant five palaces in comfortable distance of each other, five courts that spent a lot of ti in the sa halls and restaurants and arenas, and five kings who had structured their entire political lives around not actively destroying each other while also not fully trusting anyone in the room, let alone the neighboring kingdoms.
Into this arrangent, nine forr slaves had just been introduced as royal guard.
Almond and others got jobs as Royal Guards directly.
Almond and Lily ended up with King Drevos, the oldest of the five and the one who’d been sitting on the alliance’s unofficial leadership position long enough that he’d stopped calling it unofficial. Natalia and Ainen went to King Orsel, who was younger, sharper, and had specifically requested "the ones who look like they’re thinking about sothing." Saffa alone went to King Bart, which had been Saffa’s own preference on the grounds that she liked the look of his training yards. Kayla and Fraisea were assigned to King Mourne, quiet and thodical, who had reportedly reviewed their assessnt results three tis before confirming. Clovelle and Gopu rounded it out with King Edran, the youngest of the five, who had accepted the assignnt with the particular enthusiasm of soone who had spent years feeling like he was the least powerful person in every room and had just been handed sothing that changed the math.
One city. Five kings. Nine people with their own agenda moving through all of it.
---
The night Almond was thinking about was the seventh night, when King Drevos threw one of his alliance gatherings, which was the polite term for the mandatory social events that all five courts attended and none of them fully enjoyed. The main hall of Drevos’s palace was built for exactly this purpose: high ceilings, expensive lighting, enough space that five separate royal courts could occupy the sa room without technically being in each other’s conversations.
It wasn’t working great tonight.
The tension had been building for a few days, which Almond had noticed and said nothing about because tension was useful when you knew how to direct it.
He stood near the east archway, watching the room, one shoulder against the stone. Lily was sowhere in the hall, which ant she was effectively invisible, which ant she was probably doing sothing useful. King Drevos was across the space in conversation with Mourne and two of their senior advisors, all four of them wearing the particular expression of people discussing sothing they’d rather not discuss in public.
Almond watched them and waited.
---
Across the hall, closer to the center, where the noise was loudest and the drinks were freshest, Natalia was deep in conversation with a minor court official from Edran’s court while keeping most of her actual attention on King Orsel, who was standing twenty feet away talking to one of Drevos’s trade ministers.
"He took the Mireth corridor last season," Natalia was saying, to the official but not really to the official. "Cut Orsel’s northern access by about a fifth."
The official nodded diplomatically. "King Drevos makes decisions for the alliance as a whole."
"Sure," she said easily. "That’s one way to describe it." She glanced across at Orsel, who was nodding along to sothing the trade minister was saying while very visibly not agreeing with any of it. "Orsel doesn’t complain. He’s strategic about these things."
"That’s very wise of him."
"It is," she agreed. "Though I sotis wonder how long wisdom looks like patience before it starts looking like sothing else."
She refilled the official’s glass, smiled at sothing he said, and moved smoothly on.
Ainen was standing near Orsel, technically positioned as a guard and actually functioning as a sounding board, because Orsel had figured out fairly quickly that Ainen gave better counsel than most of his actual advisors and had started directing questions at him in the guise of casual conversation. Right now, Orsel was keeping his voice low, watching Drevos across the hall with an expression he was working to keep neutral.
"He didn’t consult us on the corridor decision," Orsel said.
"No," Ainen agreed.
"He rarely does."
"No."
A pause. "Your assessnt ca back yesterday," Orsel said, shifting slightly. "The Tier-10 numbers."
Ainen said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
"I’ve been in this alliance for eleven years," Orsel said, more quietly now. "I have Tier-13 fighters on my senior staff. Good ones." He didn’t finish the thought.
"The numbers are accurate," Ainen said simply. "If that’s what you’re wondering."
The assessnt was about his combat power. To see how much of the use he could be. Naturally, reaching Tier-10, and after over a week, all of them had beco significantly more powerful, with their third deck completed, though not fully evolved.
Orsel looked at him for a mont, doing the math that people always did when they got to this part of the conversation. Eleven years of operating inside a hierarchy he understood completely, and suddenly the hierarchy had a variable in it that didn’t fit anywhere he knew how to put it.
"And your other companions," Orsel said. "The ones assigned to the other courts."
"Sa results," Ainen said. "Roughly."
Orsel turned back to the room, expression unreadable now. He was quiet for long enough that the mont passed naturally into sothing else, the conversation moved on, and nothing had been said directly.
But the math was still running. Ainen could tell.
---
In the eastern wing of the sa palace, Saffa had gotten into what was technically a friendly demonstration with three of King Bart’s senior guard and was currently making it extrely difficult for all three of them to explain to their king why they’d agreed to this. Bart himself was watching from the side of the training space they’d commandeered, arms crossed, with the expression of a man who had expected to see his people make a good showing and was rapidly revising that expectation.
The third guard sat down on the floor, which was the fourth person to do so in the last ten minutes.
Saffa rolled her shoulders and looked at Bart.
He looked back at her.
"Again?" she offered.
"No," he said.
"It’s good for them."
"I’m sure it is." He was quiet for a mont. "Where did you train?"
"Everywhere," she said honestly. "The system mostly."
Bart moved his jaw slightly. He was Tier-14, which had been enough to make him the second most powerful fighter in the alliance for the better part of a decade. He looked at Saffa, who was Tier-10, and did the sa math everyone always did, and arrived at the sa place. "The assessnt results aren’t a calibration error."
"No," she said. "They’re not."
He nodded slowly, looking at his three guards who were in various states of recovering their dignity. "I want a full rundown," he said. "Every capability. Honest numbers."
"Sure," Saffa said. "Want to go again first? Helps illustrate."
"Alright."
---
The demonstration itself, the formal one, had happened three days ago in the open assessnt yard that all five courts shared. All five kings had attended, which was unusual. All five sets of senior advisors had attended, which was more unusual. The word had gotten around quietly, the way things do when enough people are talking about the sa thing.
It started as a standard capability evaluation. Speed, range, control, precision, defense, attack, and specialities. The numbers and evaluations that appeared on the readouts were not standard. Far from standard.
Almond went last.
By then, the yard was completely silent in the specific way of a room where everyone is doing arithtic they didn’t expect to be doing.
King Drevos, who had not gotten to his position by being easily surprised, looked at the readout for a long mont. Then he looked at Almond. Then back at the readout. "You’re Tier-10."
"Yes."
"These numbers are above Tier-15 benchmarks."
Almond just faintly smiled.
Drevos looked at the kings beside him. Orsel’s face was carefully neutral. Edran looked like soone had just opened a door he’d forgotten existed. Mourne was already talking quietly to one of his advisors. Bart was staring at Saffa with an expression that had started as skepticism and was becoming sothing more like reassessnt.
The silence stretched.
Then Drevos looked back at Almond with the particular expression of a man recalculating everything he thought he knew about the last seven days.
"You all tested at this level," he said. It wasn’t quite a question.
"Roughly," Almond said.
Another silence. Longer.
"I see," Drevos said, which ant sothing very different from what those two words usually ant.
---
That was three days ago. The recalculation had been running since.
Wars in the bottom realm were rare. The five kingdoms had arrived at sothing that looked like stability, decades of borders that didn’t move, and agreents that existed on paper and did mostly nothing. The kings understood power through the lens of a hierarchy that had been fixed long enough to feel permanent.
What they were sitting with now was the understanding that the hierarchy had just changed, quietly and without announcent, and the people who changed it were currently wearing their emblems and standing in their halls.
Ambition was not a thing these kings lacked. It had just been filed away in the drawer labeled not worth the cost for a very long ti.
The cost calculation had changed.
That night, in the gathering hall of the alliance’s most important social obligation, five kings moved through the sa room and thought about different versions of the sa idea. None of them said it directly. None of them had to. Almond watched them from the archway, and Lily watched from sowhere she wasn’t visible, and across the room, Natalia t his eyes for exactly a second before returning her attention to soone else entirely.
The bottom realm had been still for a long ti.
The stillness was ending.
None of the five kings had decided anything yet. But deciding was no longer the obstacle it had been a week ago, and that ant the distance between where they were and where this was all going had just gotten a lot shorter.
Almond looked at Drevos across the hall and waited.
He was good at waiting. The whole group was. They’d learned that patience wasn’t the opposite of montum. It was just montum that hadn’t announced itself yet.
It would. Soon. Because the next Hell Mode Quest they had decided to do was to conquer this entire playground of losers under their thumbs and changing it entirely, drastically, and chaotically by abolishing the age of kingdom and creating an age of unified chaos, an idea that the group had discussed and decide to make that vision a truth here.
The reward for this Hell Mode quest?
Reaching Tier-19 instantly, as well as acquiring a territory of their choice in the mid-level realm of the third layer.
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