So, to recap –

Both Sera, a crazy, power-hungry lesser goddess, and Jarva, Kyros’s personal meat puppet, had an eye on Momo’s throne room. Both also had the means to take it.

And where was Momo, you might ask?

Floating on a glorified piece of plywood towards a desert.

Momo gritted her teeth. This was not good.

Still, she had little choice. The ticking time bomb that was the death box in her pocket needed to be dealt with, or it wouldn’t matter whose monarch was sitting pretty on Morganium’s throne.

Staring straight into Gorim’s beady eyes, Momo weighed her options. While she could do very little to ward off Sera’s rebels, the legendary [Great Wall of Nether] perk on Morganium would hopefully be enough to create trouble for Jarva’s troops. The enchantment allegedly rebuffed all Holy attacks, so all of the Holy Knight’s pretty little light beams and solar death rays wouldn’t do much good there.

But if Gorim’s reconnaissance mission was a success, and they found out about the wall ahead of time, they could plan around it. Compel some non-Holy sorcerers to destroy the enchantment and let the Circle of the Sun troops pass freely into Morganium. That’d be a disaster. Momo couldn’t let that happen. Not to her capital, but way more importantly – not to Sumire.

Biting down on her lip, she outstretched her open palm towards Gorim. The knight gave her a quizzical look.

“What in the heavens are you doing?” he said, gripping his halberd.

“Probably something stupid,” Momo said. “[Maladaptive Daydreams II]!”

—

The upgraded edition of [Maladaptive Daydreams] didn’t work in the way Momo expected. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but the reality was a lot more… unpleasant… than her imagination. In order to shape the narrative of the nightmare, Momo was mentally transported inside of the victim’s mind. What he saw, she saw; by simply imagining what she wanted him to visualize next, it would appear inside his dreams as if cast there by magic.

While Kami, Kasula and Ribeye worked to subdue Cyllindrel, which turned out to be a lot like convincing a golden retriever puppy to get into a crate, Momo closed her eyes and focused on the vision. Her plan was to convince him he’d already been to Morganium; by showing him her own version of events, she could send him back on his way home with a completely falsified memory. It was a beautiful plan, in theory.

Not so much in practice.

In practice, Momo kept scaring herself every time she visualized a new thing.

“Agh!” both Momo and Gorim screamed synchronously. Momo had accidentally visualized the giant spider she found crawling around the ship’s shower the previous night. It had been a hairy, red-legged thing called a fire tarantula that Momo had forced Kasula to kill ten times over – not for any sadistic reason, but because the spider quite literally kept getting back up, even after the elf repeatedly stomped it hard with her heel.

“You good?” Kasula yelled from somewhere further down the deck. Her voice was accompanied by the muffled groans and screams of Cyllindrel, who had been blindfolded, gagged, and had his head covered with a wooden bucket. Momo wasn’t sure what the point of the bucket was.

“I’m great!” Momo squeaked, her vision once again returning to the dream – and to the giant beady eyes of the oversized tarantula. “No problems here. Just a big, angry spider that I summoned with my brain. Magic is so fun.”

After taking a few shallow breaths in, Momo cast [Focus]. It allowed her to hone in singularly on the nightmare, pushing away reality and taking the reins on the narrative. She dismissed the spider and sculpted a replica of Morganium, with a few minor changes: she halved the size of the undead army inhabiting it, set fire to a few buildings, gave it zero barricades or fortifications, and made the residents poor, hungry, and restless.

By all accounts, she basically made it look like Viktor Mole City, but with fewer chickens.

“By Kyros,” Gorim mumbled, his pupils completely dilated. “They’re defenseless.”

Momo blew out a breath of relief, taking his reaction as a good sign.

She concluded the nightmare by showing him a preview of the future, a vision of Gorim himself; in the dream, he took the capital all on his own. No other pesky Excaliburs or extraneous lesser troops required. He used his prowess to take down the petty undead, secure the throne, and went back to the kingdom of Jarva a hero, receiving every honor he had ever dreamed of.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Gorim smiled mopily, and Momo left him like that, paralyzed in his ego-fueled dream.

A plan was forming in her mind. A stupid one, half-baked and probably riddled with holes, but a plan nonetheless. Something that could tie all of her loose ends together; a way to make her problems take care of each other, instead of piling up on her doorstep.

At the last minute, she added another element to the vision – a face. Nia’s face. She was the necromancer Gorim was crushing under his foot. It made Momo wince to visualize, her stomach twisting uncomfortably. She didn’t exactly like Nia, but she didn’t want to see the woman’s neck cracking under some guy’s heel, either. But it was necessary evil. It was the first step.

God, necessary evil? Who am I becoming, Valerica? Momo thought miserably as she watched the imaginary scene play out in front of her. It scared her just how enured she’d become to the violence, even if it was all just pretend.

“Die, necromancer scum,” Gorim said, grinning madly as he absorbed Momo’s vision. His eyes had gone hazy red with gluttony. “Oh, I can’t wait to see their miserable faces when I crush that sniveling twerp like a worm. They’ll all be sorry when he finally chooses me. Not Kristof, not Farrah, not that idiot Cylindrel. Me. Only me.”

Momo shook her head. People and their egos.

She walked over to him, shut his eyelids, and punched him straight in the throat.

—

“Owww.”

“Serves you right for punching an Excalibur knight,” Ribeye scolded as he rolled the bandage another time over Momo’s knuckles. “What were you even thinking? What’s your Strength score exactly? A two? Trying to knuckle one of those brutes at your size is like punching a slab of stone. Just plain stupid.”

“I was just trying to knock him unconscious,” Momo mumbled. “Like they do in the movies.”

“The what?”

“Nevermind.”

While she hadn’t been able to knock Gorim unconscious, the spell had naturally left him in a daze. Kami took care of the rest. The lemur gave him a sedative, Ribeye drew some crude drawings on his face with a quill, and then the group of them joined together to push the hulking heap of metal back onto his boat. After that, Momo performed the same spell on Cyllindrel, and they unfurled the grappling hooks connecting the two ships.

“Push!” Ribeye bellowed, directing the children to shove against the knights’ vessel. With their combined but determined power, the yellow and purple ship set afloat once again, its sails whipping wildly in the wind. The six unconscious bodies strewn amongst its wet wood made it look a lot like a Viking Funeral.

“What sad sacks,” Kasula laughed. “Jarva’s best men. Right.”

“Putting a bucket over that cylindrical fellow did feel a bit like bullying an infant,” Kami said, taking a puff of his pipe. “But on all accounts we got lucky. We caught them in the right circumstance. The Knights of the Sun aren’t nearly as powerful on an overcast day like today.”

“Wait, huh?” Momo piped up, watching as the ship disappeared into the mist. She could see the faint silhouette of the civilian deckhands clambering over the knights’ unconscious bodies. “Are they solar-powered or something?”

She meant it as a joke, but Kami looked at her gravely, as if to say, obviously.

“Not or something, that’s exactly what they are,” Kami said with a nod. “The brighter the sunlight, the higher their Strength stat. These guys clearly didn’t expect a formidable enemy, so they didn’t use any of their weather clearing skills. If they had known who we actually were, this could have gone very differently.”

“Oh…” Momo said, looking down at her bruised knuckles. The pain of punching him – well, attempting to punch him – was still radiating up her arm and into her shoulder. If that was how the knights were at their weakest, she did not want to see them on a sunny day.

Oh well. There were always ways to block out the sun. Umbrellas, clouds. She’d just have to tell Sumire to hire a bunch of water mages. They were going to have to turn the capital into Seattle, Washington if they wanted to keep their advantage. Luckily, the undead didn’t mind working through a few rainy days. Actually, going broader, they didn’t mind anything. They were literally mindless skeletons.

Although it might be a good idea to buy them rain jackets, Momo thought. What if their bones start rotting and the capital starts smelling like a muddy graveyard?

Ew.

—

“[Summon Familiar - Vicar]”

As she sat atop the ship’s crow’s nest, the undead raven materialized on Momo’s outstretched forearm. The Scepter of Ruin was propped up next to her, dusty and covered in cobwebs. She luckily had the foresight to stuff it in her backpack before she left Morganium, but it hadn’t seen much use on the campaign trail. With so many undead at her disposal these days, she had forgotten about the talking raven entirely.

Not that I’d ever tell him that, she thought, swallowing. I’m sure he didn’t notice.

Now fully formed on her wrist, the raven squawked, coughed, and spit out a hairball.

“By Morgana, that backpack is filthy,” Vicar said in lieu of a greeting. After straightening himself, he turned to Momo and lowered his voice. “Your Majesty. It’s been awhile.”

Momo winced. He totally noticed.

“Vicar,” Momo said, laughing nervously. “Nice to see you too. Sorry about the backpack.”

He huffed, looking towards the sea. The wind buffeted the two or three feathers still sticking to his bones. Momo had the urge to pet him, but she didn’t want to infringe on his personal space.

“It’s no issue. I’m quite durable. Now, how may I serve you?” he said, his tone still a bit bristly. He was clearly peeved, but his loyalty overshadowed whatever irritation he was feeling. If Momo recalled correctly, the bird had been at the disposal of necromantic rulers for over a thousand years. Being stuffed in a backpack for a few months was probably not the worst thing he’d endured.

“I need you to make a delivery. The carrier pigeons are out of service, and I don’t know if I can trust the system these days. You never know who’s watching, you know?”

Vicar eyed her oddly, but made no comment. Momo slipped a piece of paper out of her satchel. It was a handwritten letter. The writing was awfully sloppy – it was hard to dot your i’s when you’re sitting on a moving sea vessel – but it still made her heart flutter to read it back. She tucked it in an envelope, and filled out the to and from sections.

For my favorite pirate, she wrote, smiling stupidly. From your favorite sea captain.

She handed the letter to the raven, and he took off into the rain.