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Stray Cat Strut (A cyberpunk system apocalypse!) - Ongoing

Fluff (A superheroic LitRPG about cute girls doing cute things!) - Ongoing

Love Crafted (Interactive story about an eldritch abomination tentacle-ing things!) - Completed!

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café (An insane Crossover about cute people and tentacles) - Hiatus

Cinnamon Bun (A wholesome LitRPG!) - Ongoing

The Agartha Loop (A Magical-Girl drama!) - Volume Two Complete!

Lever Action (A fantasy western with mecha!) - Volume One Complete!

Heart of Dorkness (A wholesome progression fantasy) - Completed!

Dead Tired (A comedy about a Lich in a Wuxia world doing Science!) - Ongoing

Sporemageddon (A fantasy story about a mushroom lover exploding the industrial revolution!) - Ongoing

Past the Redline (A girl goes too fast, then she does it again) - Completed!

Magical Girl Crystal Genocide (Magical Girls accidentally the planet, and then try to fix it) - Completed!

Magical Girl Rending Nightmare (A sequel to Crystal Genocide! Cute girls in a soviet dystopia having a picnic on the roadside) - Volume Two Completed!

Noblebright (A shipcore AI works to avenge humanity) - Completed!

The Complicated Love Life of Ivil Antagonist (The Empress of Mars finds love) - Completed!

Pokebun (Broccoli Bunch in the world of Pokemon) - Hiatus

Queen Violence (An Assassin Reborn as a Kitten) - Completed!

No Strings Attached (An Elden Ring/Bloodborne inspired progression fantasy) - Ongoing

Save Scumming (A time-looping system apocalypse) - Ongoing

Chapter Five Hundred and Eighty-Six - Secret Society

I cleared my throat, glanced at my friends to see if there were any reservations, then took a long step forward.

I wasn't sure at first if the man's armour was really all-black. Perhaps it was dull grey, darkened by the dim lighting of the shadowy halls, but... no, it really was black.

More importantly than that, the man was powerful.

It wasn't something super obvious, but I could still feel it. The same way that the air felt tense when Bastion became very serious, or how a few other people I'd met seemed to have their own sort of gravitational pull around them.

This man had something similar. Just looking at him made the air feel sharper, it made me want to step back and maybe boilt, only I was pretty sure that wasn't a skill. It was just the result of someone with a lot of levels standing in one place, ready to do violence.

It wasn't the strongest violent pressure I had ever felt. That went to Rhawrexdee's mom, but she was a dragon and a mom, so maybe I had expected a sense of danger from her.

That wouldn't stop me from being polite. "Hello, sir," I said. I tried to pay attention to the way I said it, tasting the words as they came out. It was definitely not the same language that people spoke around Port Royal or Mattergrove, but it wasn't too far off from it. "My name is Captain Broccoli Bunch! I hope we're not bothering you?"

The man shifted, the grip on his sword changing subtly, but I had the impression that it had gone from ready to strike to something a little more casual.

I saw his eyes shift behind his visor, locking onto me. "Riftwalker," he said.

I felt a jolt run down my spine. "Um, yup!" I replied. "That's me! Hi!"

The man spun his sword around, then slowly slid it back into its scabbard with a rasp of metal on wood. "Interesting. How did you find this place?"

"Oh, uh, mostly following a whole heap of clues? But this helped," I said as I pulled the necklace I had around my neck out. The little knife on the end of it dangled there, the full focus of the probably-a-Black-Avatar.

"Huh, well, that's something," he said, and suddenly the pressure I'd been feeling lessened. "Brave of you to fly through our storm like that. But you made it, I suppose. Give me a moment."

"Sure?" I said, then jolted as a wave of magic washed past me and my friends.

"So, not a threat, then?" Someone asked from behind us.

I spun just as the shadows on the ceiling shifted and a person dropped out of them, landing with a faint thump on the carpeted floor. A woman? She stood up and grinned at us, ears flicking slightly. She was an elf! I hadn't seen any elves since the Snowlands. She was a bit on the shorter side for an elf, which still meant that she was a bit taller than I was (minus the ears) with the usual pointy ears and a fairly lithe build.

She was, unsurprisingly, wearing all-black armour, though it looked lighter and more flexible than what her friend had on. Blackened metal splits sewn into darker leather and a tight gambeson that was dyed black.

"Hi!" I said as my friends shuffled around. Amaryllis seemed ready to cast, and both Bastion and Caprica had hands on sword-hilts.

"Hey there, little bun," the elf woman said. She glanced over to her friend. "So? Did we all forget how to treat guests after all this time?"

"It's not something that happens very often," the man in the black plate said. "Three second tiers. The sylph male is third tier."

"Got it," the elf said before returning her attention onto us. "So, what's a little riftwalker and her friends doing at Castle White?"

"Castle White?" I asked. "But it's... black?"

The elf's grin only grew. "I know!"

"That isn't the castle's name," the other said with barely repressed exasperation. He shifted, letting go of the hilt of his sword entirely. "But the question is valid. What are you doing here?"

"Uh," I said. I glanced at my friends, particularly Amaryllis. "Honestly, I kinda forgot at this point."

The elf seemed to think that this was very funny, because she broke out into cackles of laughter. "That's great! But come on, this isn't a place you stumble into by accident and without cause."

I cleared my throat. The elf was being very friendly, which I genuinely appreciated, but there was an undertone to this entire conversation that was worrying. Then again, putting myself in their shoes, or their sabatons as the case may be, I could see why they were a little worried. We had just barged into their home. And it wasn't like their home was just off the street in an easily accessible place. Actually, it was very much the opposite. Other than like, in the centre of an active volcano, or deep underground, I couldn't think of a place that signaled a need for privacy more than the middle of a cyclone.

"Ah, well, we were set on this path a while ago. A... guy we know gave us a hint that we should talk to the Black Avatars. I have a Quest from the World, and I thought that this might have something to do with it. Then we started to hunt down clues, and after a while we made it to here."

The elf looked to her friend across from us. "Tristain and Guinevere are going to want to chat with them," she said.

"They will," the man said. "Should we escort them over?"

"I don't see why not? Captain, can you promise that you're not here to harm anyone?"

"Su--" I started to say, then paused. "No?"

"No?"

I shook my head. "I didn't come here intending to do that, but we discovered a dungeon not too far from here that had a weird device wrapped around its core. It was hurting the dungeon. That's not okay."

"You would care so much about a thing like a dungeon?" the man ahead of us asked.

"You wouldn't?" I replied.

The elf laughed. "Oh, she got you there, Percy. Captain, I think that you don't need to worry so much. Come, we'll be hospitable. It's the least we can do for our first guests in so long." She took a step forward and--

I spin around, trying to keep track of her, but the elf moved so fast she was literally a blur. One moment she was a dozen steps behind us, the next she was ahead of my friends and I, walking at a slow, almost lazy pace. Fast! That was the kind of speed that I'd only ever seen Bastion put on, and only when he was in the middle of a fight.

I had the impression that we weren't dealing with weaker people here. These two had at least three classes, which put them on the upper tiers of strength.

Was that a requirement to be a Black Avatar?

"Guys?" I asked as my friends and I started to walk. "What do we think?"

"That they can hear us," Amaryllis muttered.

"That's okay. If I had anything bad to say to someone, then I think I'd want them to know that I'm saying it where they can hear me," I said.

Amaryllis huffed. "Foolish. But fine then. I think that these two are third tier, at least. Bastion?"

"Agreed," he said. "They're at a level of strength comparable to a Paladin."

That was pretty high up there, then. "Good thing we're not here to fight them, then," I said. "We're here to... I guess make friends, and find out if they're doing anything the dungeons."

"If we're lucky, it's all related to your quest," Caprica said. "Perhaps the World has acknowledged these Black Avatars as helpful, powerful individuals? That would be ideal, I think. But I don't know if I can so easily assume that ideal scenarios are what we're facing."

"You hear that, Percy, we're ideal," the elf woman ahead said.

"There's nothing about you that's ideal," Percy replied.

I giggled. "You two seem like you're good friends!"

"We're not," Percy replied.

"Sure are," the elf said at the same time. "This place is nice enough, but the view gets stale and after a few years stuck on this flying rock, you either get to love each other or start thinking of taking a plunge."

"You never leave?" I asked.

"Only sometimes," she said.

"Huh. If you never leave, or rarely leave, then I wonder how Rainnewt learned anything about you," I said.

The elf stopped in her tracks and turned to face us. "Did you say Rainnewt?" she asked.

***