Bath's eyes flashed, a sly smile hinting at painful training to come. "Want to try the dolls?"

Lisa's face grew ashen. "Wait," she took a step back. "No no no no..." She glanced left and right as the disturbing dolls from the tournament just an hour or so earlier reappeared. "Bath, damn it," she gritted. The dolls just stared, unmoving, except for one little girl doll who was sharpening a butcher's knife.

"You need to use everything I've given you so far together," Bath instructed. "Including magnetic sense."

Lisa grunted exasperatedly as she fended off five dolls now diving in her direction. "How?"

"Combine magnetic sense with the administrator boons," Bath suggested.

Lisa turned toward him, narrowly dodging an oversized syringe needle. "What administrator boons?"

Bath rose an eyebrow. "Oh." The dolls stopped moving, like puppets on severed strings. "Sorry. I got ahead of myself."

Lisa let out a sigh of relief. "I swear," she menaced, "if these things, like, dismember me, or pull out my teeth--"

"Shh," Bath said, smiling bashfully.

Lisa walked over and slapped his arm, face turning serious. "Let's just get it over with. The administrator boons."

A few minutes and several muted screams later, Lisa stomped back over to the middle of the training room's slightly lowered fighting pit. Bath crossed his arms, then asked, "Ready?"

"No teeth!" she emphasized.

Bath looked skyward. "Oh, I suppose..."

...And then the dolls rushed into action once more, clambering over one another to reach Lisa's crouching form. 'Magnetic sense and the administrator boons...' she thought to herself. She hadn't allotted any time to practice the administrator boons, figuring that combat with the dolls, even if more difficult than basic training, would more than suffice. Since Bath hadn't protested, Lisa figured she was right.

She could sense them, the administrator boons, as she lashed out with her hands to attack and defend. 'What is that?' she wondered to herself. It felt like a variant of her magnetic sense, only more concentrated. She almost wished she had some kind of object through which to channel...whatever the feeling was. 'Administrators usually use dragonleaf weapons as focuses, right?'

Unfortunately, she didn't have any dragonleaf sprouts at her disposal. She did have her own hands, but had a strong premonition that using them would lead to injury. The administrator power was expansive in nature, as though releasing it through her palms would distend them and cause them to crack from the inside out.

'Bath has to know all this,' she reasoned, 'so what does he think I can do with the administrator boons and magnetic sense?' Lisa still didn't have a good sense what the administrator boons even were. Bath had, rather unhelpfully, given her the apprentice through expert boons in one complete package.

Lisa began to dart back and forth faster and faster, her hands moving in a whirlwind as she fended off the encroaching dolls. Their sinister guises were starting to grate on her nerves, while several close calls with various sharp instruments were putting her on edge. The intensity of the attacks continued to increase, and Lisa was beginning to feel like she was falling behind, unable to keep pace with the dolls' strikes.

Bath looked on carefully, eyes alert, eyebrows drawn in, face cocked ever so slightly to the left. In the few moments Lisa could spare a moment to look in his direction, she felt as though he were watching her in anticipation...like he was waiting for something.

"Don't lose the momentum," Bath called out, sensing Lisa's deteriorating will to struggle. "Have faith in your instincts. Trust them just as you would trust me. Think of them as a stand-in for me when I'm not beside you."

Lisa's expression momentarily grew soft, her eyes sparkling in the light of the training room. She looked over: not a glance, but a full-on stare. Bath met her eyes, his gaze's intensity matching her own.

The dolls took advantage of her lowered guard and collectively advanced forward, their knives, teeth, and syringes all aimed towards either her chest or throat. However, Lisa's body remained sculpture-still. The weapons were only an inch away, a centimeter...

As though oblivious to everything besides Bath's gaze, Lisa inhaled deeply. Then, she closed her eyes.

---

"What was that?" Kessalo wondered, a faintly audible 'pfft' reaching his swiveling ears. "You three," he barked, looking at the three closest jerboa quasi-sapients. "You heard that, right?"

The three jerboas' heads bobbed up and down like the spindle of a sewing machine. "Yep!"

"Good, good. Let's investigate to make sure nothing dangerous is threatening Basalith's underground." Aside from assassinations and interrogations, Bath also charged the jerboa quasi-sapients with watching out for subterranean threats. The training rooms were all sound-proofed and distant, ensuring that any noise the jerboas detected from their living quarters was abnormal in origin.

The three burrowed through the ground, wary of the now continuously sounding 'pfft' noises. They were growing louder, louder...

The jerboas looked up at the ceiling of the tunnel. Kessalo's nose twitched, his ears folded back against his head. "Isn't a training room directly above us?"

The other jerboas' whiskers twitched gently, feeling for the shockwaves above. "It sounds like a loud clap," one of them whispered, then looked over expectantly at Kessalo. "Can we take a look? Can we?"

Kessalo's eyes remained transfixed on the ceiling, as though he could actually see in the absolute darkness of the newly-burrowed tunnel. "We can't just leave a suspicious noise unchecked," he said after a moment of silence. "Even if it's from a training room. Up!"

"Up!" the rest squeaked. Burrowing into the training room took a few seconds, the four delayed by a layer of rock under the floor--a remnant of Ritus' original foundation.

---

Bath had sensed the jerboas' approach a few minutes previous. His lips quirked upward as the little contingent stuck their noses up out of their entrance hole, whispering to one another about how best to be covert. Bath let them be.

He understood why they'd come.

Bath's hair whipped around his face and his cape fluttered out behind him with each one of Lisa's strikes. When her hands lashed out, incorporeal whips struck up to seven feet further away, exploding out with such force that the reinforced floor was cracking. The dolls, while constantly being reformed by Bath, were shattering with every few received blows. Considering the speed with which Lisa was jabbing her arms, the dolls would be dust in a minute without his interference.

'As expected,' Bath thought to himself, eyes alight with satisfaction. When the administrator boons met with the resistance of her magnetic sense, the result was...explosive.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Lisa barely felt conscious of her body's movements. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't really using them to see. She--and the dolls--were moving too fast. No, she relied on reflex and sense of touch. She felt hypersensitive to the positions of everything around her, as though her magnetic sense had expanded out beyond herself into a reaching net. As she moved, she could release some of the administrator boons' power into a strand of the net, like plucking an arrow. In her case, instead of plucking, she simply jabbed her hands into the strands of incorporeal netting.

As she knew where everything was within her web of magnetic sense strands, she could also strike anything within that net. Whenever she jabbed, anything on the path of the strand was fair game. She could control when the whip-like explosion of power would occur along the strand's length, enabling her to hit targets shielded by weapons or other dolls. As she struck, she waited for the resistance of her magnetic sense to trap the flow of the administrator boons. The resulting vibrations felt like mini motors churning up water in her wrists.

As she fought, she knew intuitively that the power wasn't completely safe. Let the power build up too long, and her wrists might explode. Moreover, she couldn't dispose of the power safely: once her wrists began to vibrate, she needed to send the energy somewhere. Of course, she could always send the energy into thin air, but even that would create substantial shockwaves and a loud, whip-like crack.

Suddenly, the dolls were gone, and Lisa's final strike did just that: explode into empty air. She heaved, her eyes red, knuckles white. Her hands pressed onto her knees and she collapsed on the ground. She looked downward, though her eyes were unfocused.

"Lisa."

Lisa's eyes snapped up. Her face softened, and her breathing subsided into light pants. "Haha," she rasped, throat dry from lack of water. "Wow."

Bath smiled back. "Wow."

Something white out of the corner of Lisa's eye caught her attention. Turning, she saw four jerboa quasi-sapients, each aligned behind the other, pinning down their ears with diminutive paws. She glanced back curiously at Bath, who just gave her a light-hearted shrug.

He then turned towards the four jerboas. "What do you think?" he asked. "Think anybody could stand up to that in a fight?"

Kessalo, only now realizing that the other figure in the room with this random girl was the Dragon, quickly shook his head, extremely wary of his own lack of decorum. "Nope! I'd be pulp in a second, Creator."

"Right, Creator!" came three cries from behind.

Kessalo trained his round, shiny eyes on Lisa's sweat-sleeked form, then looked back at Bath. "Apologies for the interruption, Creator."

"No matter," Bath said back.

Kessalo shifted in place, like a squirming child. Bath raised an eyebrow, causing Kessalo to gulp before asking, "Who is that?"

Bath held out a hand in Lisa's direction. Before the jerboas' eyes, the sweats-and-t-shirt-toting, simply pretty girl transformed into the perfection that was the Church. No blemishes remained; even her sweaty sheen disappeared.

Kessalo's ears twitched madly along with his swishing tail. The jerboas behind him lowered their heads. Kessalo's voice sounded out meekly: "As expected from our Lady."

---

Dean couldn't believe how competent Amalo actually was. As soon as the city's name, Jerboaland, became official, Amalo immediately instructed his underlings to create a network of caverns stretching from Jerboaland--a few miles out from Somalia's capital, Mogadishu--throughout the entire country.

Dean had been skeptical at first. How could an army of jerboa quasi-sapients, no matter their numbers, burrow across the whole damned country? However, within two days, people were coming in from literally every region and town in Somalia. Even some people from Ethiopia and Kenya had managed to make their way into the jerboas' expansive network. In the caverns themselves, people made their way to Basalith by snake.

Dean hadn't even known they had snake quasi-sapients before his twenty subordinates gave him reports of people commending the snakes for "polite and efficient" service.

Dean waited at his desk now for Amalo to arrive. Today was their first meeting since he last spoke to the jerboa two days hence. For some reason, Dean found he wasn't surprised at all that the jerboa was a little late.

Dean looked up from his laptop as Amalo entered the threshold of the room. "Hello, Knight."

"Amalo. The jerboas have been busy, to say the least," Dean said, his face betraying no emotion.

"Of course. You did agree to name the city after our kind...this is the least we can do."

"Tell me, in your own words, how things have been going." Dean felt he delivered the whole "serious" routine expertly. He'd said the exact same dialogue to every one of his subordinates. He figured that this way, he wouldn't stumble over his words or forget what to say.

Amalo cleared his little throat. "The humans were, in the beginning, very alarmed when we popped out of the ground. A few locations even had machine-gun toting hooligans who tried to kill us." Amalo blinked. "Long story short, we managed to convince people to enter the tunnels."

"And the gun-toting hooligans?" Dean asked.

Amalo gave a toothy smile. "Don't worry about them."

'Dear lord,' Dean sighed internally. "How did you convince people to enter the tunnels?"

"Well," Amalo began, ears flopping to the left side of his head. "Humans find us...adorable, I suppose you'd say."

Dean nodded. "And?"

"We told them we had food and shelter. Many of them didn't even know about COTD, especially in remote areas. I think that our cheerful personalities convinced these ignorant individuals that we were angels in white."

Dean's eye twitched. He pictured Virigard, the little reaper, drawing lines of sanguine red across soldiers' throats.

"Many of our tunnels are long," Amalo continued, face downcast, as though long tunnels were a tragic existence. "Making travel difficult for so many of the less fortunate humans we rescued."

"So you brought in the, um, snakes. The snake quasi-sapients."

Amalo gave Dean a sly grin. "You know? Wonderful. Yes, that's when we used the snake quasi-sapients."

Dean narrowed his eyes and thrummed his fingers on the table. "Where on Earth did they come from? I've never seen any snake quasi-sapients."

Amalo's tail swished. "They've always been in Basalith," he said slowly. "Most of them have just been sleeping. You see, snakes are very lazy creatures. Not at all like jerboas, always awake and moving. In any case, we jerboas woke them up from their slumber and asked them to transport the humans."

Dean hid an incredulous snort by coughing. This sounded like the kind of word-play he expected from a middle-school bully. 'Asked them.'

"How exactly did you convince the previously unmotivated snake quasi-sapients to help out?" Dean suspected that snakes wouldn't take kindly to being human mounts, and yet he'd received reports that they'd been absolutely stellar steeds.

"We gave them positve motivation!" Amalo chirped. "We told them that they could be our trash disposal. I know, the job sounds undesirable, but to low-bred snakes, such employment is the cream of the crop. They fight each other for the opportunity!"

'Trash disposal? Do I look stupid, or does Amalo just enjoy toying with me?' Dean decided that it was the latter, if only because the alternative was too self-esteem-crushing.

"Can you send the leader of the snakes to meet with me?" Dean asked, immediately regretting his words. 'Leaders don't ask, they tell.' He cringed slightly at his own submissiveness. 'This is why you need to memorize everything, until this becomes second nature.'

"Consider it done," Amalo said graciously.

"For a final question, how many people have we been able to welcome into Jerboaland so far?"

"Considering how many people we send into the tunnels, the number can't be more than two million...but we're working as fast as we can." Amalo nodded his head once.

Dean's pupils contracted, his fists tightening under his desk. 'And that's just based on the people Amalo's jerboas are sending by tunnel, not those arriving on their own from Mogadishu and nearby areas.

"That's all, you're dismissed," Dean said. Amalo bowed his head, then dashed out the door. Alone once more, Dean let out an enormous exhale.

"I thought Basalith didn't have more than one hundred thousand people," he murmured. "Over two million?" He walked out of his office toward the Spire's outer pavilion. He reached the balcony and watched as the glow of the setting sun illuminated the city below. Dean looked out, hands choking the balcony's railing.

"This is so fucking crazy," he whispered, speaking to the wind. He raised a hand to his face, as though trying to ensure that he was still there. That he was still awake, that this wasn't all just some neverending dream. "Who would ever put me in charge of a massive city-state?" he chuckled out loud, his voice absolutely devoid of humor.

The city had already expanded out far into the horizon, far wider than the more heavily-fortified Basalith. "The land-shapers should get a raise," Dean mumbled, smirking at his own joke. Not that there was any money or reward to give them. No, the real reward was the practice, the chance to utilize their land-shaping skills...the opportunity to continue along the path of self-determination.

"The hell am I doing?" Dean said softly. He looked down at his hands, then looked back out. "I haven't even left the Spire since I got here." He had food brought to him, and used the private chambers above the office room to sleep and bathe.

As he looked out at the setting sun, he thought of Basalith, of the Way of the Dragon's sunset-colored path, one ribbon amongst many, back when the Dragon first appeared in Tokyo. Then he remembered Bath's words: "think higher."

Dean looked up, as though searching for some abstract truth in the clouds. He relaxed his grip on the balcony and fingered his necklace. After a moment of contemplation, his eyes narrowed. Then, as though driven by a sudden impulse, Dean vaulted over the balcony and fell to the ground below.