It was well past everyone’s bedtime, but we were wide awake with a pizza box and cans of cola sitting between us on the bed.

Nom-Nom had been on her third can since roughly the moment she confirmed I hadn’t died in my sleep.

The two previous cans sat crushed in a neat row beside her while she worked through her fourth slice of the pizza with the systematic focus of someone who had spent a significant portion of the night in a state she was now actively eating her way out of.

Peko sat with her back straight in the chair beside her, holding her slice with her fingertips and taking small, precise bites while her violet eyes moved between the pizza and the stumps that had once been my left arm and right leg.

While I had just finished walking them through everything that happened at the Hollow Cinder Mine, from the moment I had stepped my first foot into the basin to the last Outsider disappearing into the treeline, leaving nothing out, and the silence that followed had settled over the room in the easy way that silence settles when everyone present is thinking rather than having nothing to say.

I looked at them both in the dim light, Nom-Nom working through her pizza and Peko taking her delicate little bites, and the knot in my chest that had been pulling tight since the whole thing began loosened.

Sitting beside these two, I couldn’t help but feel strangely invincible. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

"So we now have two international organizations after us," Peko said, in the same tone she would use to note the weather.

"Yup," I said, taking a bite of my slice while Nom-Nom reached into the box and pulled out another slice.

"And the plan is?" Peko asked, setting her slice on the little platter on her knee and tilted her head at me.

"Why do we even need a plan for this?" Nom-Nom jumped in with her expression going from settled to actively pissed in about two seconds flat. "I can just go to that Nexus or whatever first thing in the morning and blow it all up."

"Yeah, no," I chuckled, "... that would do us more harm than good."

Peko tilted her head at me, and I could see that she had, to at least some extent, also not immediately dismissed the idea. Which told me everything I needed to know about where she was sitting after the past twelve hours.

"Look, if we do that," I said, reaching for my can, "... then every single Entropy operative or base in Fugen goes into deep hiding."

"And once that happens," I paused, taking a sip."... we can forget about actually winning."

"Indeed," Peko nodded, picking her slice back up. "We need more intel. We need to know their other bases. If we can own our own network... understand the shape of what we’re actually dealing with before we start kicking at it."

"We need no such thing..." I snorted while Nom-Nom quietly began sliding her hand toward the pizza box. "What we need is a solid plan of self-defense and considerably more power than we currently have. Look, Entropy is not truly our problem. It’s primarily the General’s problem, and I intend to find a way to shove the entirety of it straight into his probably hairy bum."

"Young Master, they are actively after you. I don’t understand..." Peko’s brow furrowed.

"They’re after us out of either revenge for killing Arlath and now the cultist too... or because our existence will mess up whatever they’re cooking up for this year’s Night of the Red Moon... And from here on out, we’re gonna assume both."

"That-jush..." Nom-Nom paused to swallow that enormous mouthful before, "... proved her point, didn’t it?"

"Yeah..." I agreed, " But let’s me add another variable that’d flip the equation."

I leaned forward slightly and began, "We’re legal citizens of Fugen. And not just any citizens, because Shinkotsu’s entire strategy against this year’s Night of the Red Moon hinges on us filling the role Amaterasu’s Crusader left behind."

Peko’s eyes widened, and I watched the implications of what I just said move through her head one by one.

While Nom-Nom tilted her head at me with perfectly innocent, wide violet eyes and said, "Okay, and?"

"The point," I said, letting the grin spread, "... is that it is both the necessity and the active responsibility of the General to make sure nothing happens to any of us. Because if something happens to any one of us, our combined combat effectiveness jumps off a cliff, and the general would need to consolidate the priests around Shinkotsu, leaving the other cities poorly defended..."

"Ohhhhh," Nom-Nom said slowly, nodding with wide eyes while I took a satisfied sip of my cola.

"And what makes the General’s position considerably worse is the fact that you’re my Familiar," Chuckling, I continued, ""If any one of us dies, so dies the other... And Fugen just can’t lose the only Greater Dragon they got."

Peko let out a quiet, genuine chuckle as she picked up her cola and took a sip, before immediately making a face at it, which she quickly covered with great dignity.

"There is an idiom I read the other day," she said, setting the can back down and away from herself. "Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all."

"Now, now..." I said, while Nom-Nom on my left very sneakily began moving her hand toward the last slice of pizza, "... That doesn’t mean we can laze around, pretend it’s all dandy... We need to get stronger, all three of us, all the while playing the political equivalent of floor is lava."

Both of them tilted their heads at me in unison, while I chuckled and continued.

" Look, the General is going to do everything in his power to drag us into his little war against Entropy... Since our deal with him only covers the Nights of the Red Moon and nothing else, he can’t exactly order us, so he’s gonna get creative.... And Entropy itself will almost certainly send people after us, so we need to be ready for that without giving the General ammunition that he can use to make us fight his little war."

And just as I finished, I reached out and snatched the last slice before Nom-Nom’s hand got close, and immediately took a large, deliberate bite while looking at her straight in the eye.

Nom-Nom stared at me with enormous eyes that communicated, in sequence, disbelief, personal injury, and then settled into a tongue stuck out in my direction.

I stuck mine right back while Peko, with complete composure, looked at the wall.

"So what are our immediate next steps?" Peko asked.

While I cackled at Nom-Nom for one more second before turning back to Peko, and grinned, "Here’s what we’re gonna do... First, I use Trace, my new magic... I’ll explain it to you later. I wanna use that on the sword. I want to understand everything there is to understand about the sword..."

And before I could even explain my reasoning, System’s little ding resounded inside our collective heads.

-Ding!

{Ill-advised. The curse on that sword is just a Tier below Divine. It may directly connect your consciousness to the Eldritch god that has placed the curse.

Consequences of that will be unpredictable at best.}

"Damn, I was really hoping to be able to replicate it," I couldn’t help but sigh, "Even without that curse, that’s a top-of-the-line sword..."

"But it’s not worth the risk, I agree with the System," Peko said

"Yeah... Okay, scratch that, I’ll leverage it some other way," I said, turning to Peko, "I need you to extract memories from the cultist’s body... You’ve probably seen it in the inventory. Take your time, do it slow, I need everything. He should know a lot about Entropy’s operations in Fugen... their contacts, their timeline, their objectives for this year’s Red Moon... Once we have the knowledge, depending upon what pans out, we’ll decide our next move."

"Understood," Peko gave a single sharp nod, "My mastery over the spell is still incomplete... But I have discovered a ritual in my Inheritance that will circumvent it. Though I will need a few days to prepare for it."

"Got it... just don’t take too long," I said, before tuning to Nom-Nom. "... Back to the grind... we’re still a long way from the Heart of the False Martyr, and Peko needs to be free of the Blood Pact asap, and you need to be strong and skilled enough to take on anything... I have something going on that’d allow you access to higher-tier dungeons if it works."

Nom-Nom nodded with complete seriousness, putting the slice that was stolen from her fully behind her.

"One more thing...." I said, putting the slice down. "We need to start thinking towards the Destined Journey... Not today, not even next week, but we gotta stop treating it as something we can defer forever. Our little cover won’t last forever. And with the waves we’re making, Pantheon probably already knows we’re here. And once the Red Moon is dealt with, they’ll be after us... Besides, I would rather reach Cardella on our own terms than get forced into it at the worst possible moment."

Peko was quiet for a beat before she said, "And the Tier 9 curse?"

I glanced at my arm stump, and then at the space where my leg had been.

"Working on it," I couldn’t help but sigh, " The Grade 1 Cleansing Potion is... well, it’s not happening. So, I’m betting on Crusaders, best-case scenario, Amaterasu picks one out tomorrow. Worst case, she doesn’t at all, but then again, the path to Cardella runs past a lot of places. We’ll find another Crusader."

Nom-Nom looked at the stump for a moment, and then looked at me, and her expression held something she had not yet found words for, so as a compromise, she reached over and just held my hand in hers in a firm grip that said all she wanted to without uttering a single word.

"You need to rest," Nom-Nom said softly. "So rest... we will handle it one step at a time."

"I know. " I sighed, "But in any case... this place has become too volatile to be our permanent home. Though I will try damn hardest to make sure it remains the home we want it to be."