Kazue’s worried gaze followed Mordecai and then switched to Moriko. “Love, could you go be with him? He’s doing well enough to not be dispersing his avatar at least, but I think I need to wrap things up here.”
Moriko nodded with a slight smile. “I can take care of him.” They kissed briefly, and then the monk turned to follow their husband.
With a soft sigh, Kazue turned back to look over the prisoners while her mother began tending to the ones in need. This situation made her feel depressed in so many ways she didn’t even know how to untangle it. “I, I don’t know your stories. And I think I agree with my husband that I don’t really want to right now. But while I can understand why the version of events you know has led you here today, you are making the same mistake that he made before he got sealed away so long ago. My name is Kazue, I was born a kitsune in the Azeria clan before my untimely death got me reincarnated as a living dungeon. Moriko is our wife, she was born nearby. This is my mother and my father, and my clansmen, and my friends.” She gestured to include Brongrim, Nainvil, and all of the bunkin and rabkin.
“We are the people you were willing to murder for your concept of justice. But it’s not even a personal grudge for you. You do not know a single person who Mordecai harmed, not even indirectly. But you were willing to be sent off to assassinate us all for whatever your cause is.” She couldn’t stop her eyes from watering. “You made me hurt some of you to defend the people I love. I am just glad I didn’t have to kill anyone. But you are all assassins and would-be murderers. I can not understand how you could be driven to kill for such an ancient grudge.” There was no disguising the disgust in her voice and she just couldn’t take these people anymore.
She turned her back to them and spoke to her father and friends. “Dad, I want to talk with you and Mom as soon as she is free. Everyone else, feel free to join the other delvers in the feast hall.”
Kazue let the others leave first, then followed after, leaving Ricardo to keep Akahana company for the moment. She forced a brief smile as she passed through the feast hall and waved at the quiet gathering, then made her way to the war room to wait. She wanted to let herself cry too, but she’d already let herself have a bit of that and needed to hold it together long enough to explain the rest of the plan to her parents.
It would be ideal for Mordecai to handle this, it was mostly his idea, but she could feel him struggling with his emotions and Moriko comforting him. He was normally very in control of his emotions, and even without this particular issue Kazue suspected he preferred being this way, so she could imagine how hard it was for him to have his feelings rampaging like this.
Oh. Oh my. Kazue blushed at a sudden shift in emotions, and realized that Moriko had decided to use a different method of comforting him. Well, distracting him that way should certainly work, but Kazue decided to wall off her awareness of them for now, until after she’d talked with her mom and dad. But she did feel a little better knowing Mordecai was being taken care of.
Her rabbit friends were taking care of things for her in both the feast hall and the war room, which made Kazue feel a little guilty, but she had to remind herself that while she and Mordecai were in charge this was, in the end, a partnership. And the laganthro clans were generally as social as she was, so it wasn’t a real burden for them.
By the time her parents had arrived, Kazue had entirely regained her composure, though she didn’t try to hide her emotional exhaustion. For a long while the three of them just hugged and held each other, feeling the warm security of knowing that all of them were safe.
Eventually, they separated and took seats around a small table while some of the bunkin served drinks. For a rarity, Kazue took some wine instead of tea. “Well, Mordecai didn’t have a chance to cover all of our plans with you, partly because we decided to layer who knows what. Mother, remember how we were talking previously about environmental dungeons? Well, we’ve decided to do that and grow out and up at least once, and possibly again in the future. Setting up the trading post through working with Dad creates the narrative we want, because we do not intend to tell anyone else that we’ve grown out that way. By appearance, we’ll look to be one floor smaller than we actually are, which might help throw people off who mean us ill.” Her lips quirked. “Okay, mostly they mean Mordecai ill. But the three of us are a package deal. And it also means we’ll be able to watch people when they think they are not in our territory yet.”
Her parents considered the thought for a moment, and Ricardo spoke first. “Part of me says that sounds a little paranoid, but given what happened earlier today, I’m good with that. I don’t understand the whole situation, but from what your mother has said, it sounds like what I thought were just random idiots with strange ideas are actually a fellowship of some sort.”
Akahana sighed. “This is one of the few things you never listened to me about before. They’ve always been there, and the clan keeps track of rumors involving their activities in the kingdom. It’s not a lot of activity, but there are always a few people trying to recruit. Even a couple of the noble houses harbor sympathizers, though I don’t know of anywhere that it’s a popular opinion. They aren’t just harmless kooks though, and they quietly support the activities of the bigger groups in the empire.”
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Kazue frowned. “Does that mean they have imperial backing?”
“No no,” Akahana said with a shake of her head. “At least, not official backing. But they are more vocal and have entire houses backing them in one way or another, even if the imperial family isn’t involved.” Now it was her turn to frown. “Mordecai is right about one thing for sure. The group they sent wasn’t fodder. The strongest of them sat between me and Takehiko, and all of them were individually stronger than Shizoku, Brongrim, or Nainvil. None of them would have survived for a long while partially drawn into Zushi’s void. It’s probably part of why there weren’t more of them, though maybe there was a second wave preparing if I hadn’t dispelled the scrying sensor. It’s a lot harder to teleport without accurate coordinates, and a dungeon’s internal area is sort of fuzzy in relation to the rest of the world.”
She grinned. “I have to admit, I started to practice to see how close I could get here in a hurry if I needed to. If the space between the outside and the inside was normal, I should be able to step into a tree out there and step out from a tree of my choice in here, but I can’t even sense them. At least, not individually. I can kind of tell there are some trees in the right direction, but I can’t pick them out and I can’t tell how far they actually are. Trying to tree stride into your dungeon felt like a good way to stride out of a dozen trees at once. And I’d rather not scatter my body into a smear across one of your floors. But I can see how having a direct scry on a particular tree might help me focus, so I assume it works similarly for teleportation.”
Kazue had called up a notebook to write in when her mom started talking about her experiments. The strongest dimension-related spells she’d practice with Mordecai would let her open a door-like shortcut for a limited distance, or make her body flicker between transitive planes and the physical world without actually moving her. Not that she actually needed to take physical notes, but it felt better this way. “I never really thought about druid spells. Mordecai said that my talents would make learning more esoteric spells easier, but make learning some of the more traditional arcane spells harder. I don’t know how much that overlaps with nature magic.”
“Esoteric…” Akahana wrinkled her nose. “Wait, you mean the same sort of spells bards are skilled with?”
“Er, sort of? I mean, not the music and singing stuff obviously, but Mordecai talked about how imagination and creativity play a part in the way my magic manifests. Like the way I can sort of create weapons when I need to, but they aren’t really there. But they still hit things. Or let my daydreams start to spill out into illusions nearby.” Kazue giggled. “That one is kind of weird and fun, and it's super easy now that I know how.” Reality started to fuzz around her, blurring with dream-like qualities as random flits of fancy manifested into short-lived figments that shimmered on the edge of becoming real before vanishing and letting the edges of reality become sharp and clear once more. “It’s not super useful, but it’s enough to confuse someone’s senses briefly if I need it.”
Akahana’s eyes shone with curiosity, but Ricardo cut in before she could ask a question. “I’m sure the two most wonderful women in my life can share notes about magic tricks later, but maybe we can get back to the plans for the dungeon?”
“Oh, right! Sorry Dad. Um, so, the idea is you teach the bunkin how to set up shop outside, then the caravan moves on to Riverbridge so that no one is around when we claim the territory. Um, we were planning on waiting anyway. You see, we aren’t certain what would happen if we claimed an area with people in it, and that wasn’t an experiment we wanted to try. Anyway, that gives a cover story for how they are constructing buildings outside of the dungeon since dungeon magic wouldn’t be able to help them. We’re going to have to make some adjustments to everything before we make another floor, but we’ll start growing the ‘normal’ way again. For a little while at least. One floor outside doesn’t look like it will mess with anything, but we aren’t certain how trying to grow up from there will look if we want to still keep that as our starting area. So we’re going to hold off until we have a better idea of what will happen.”
Kazue grinned. “Oh, and best of all! I’ll be able to fully incarnate my avatar. So I’ll be able to walk around outside our territory as well! We’ve been working on some travel plans for Moriko and me.” And that brought a sigh from her. “Unfortunately, Mordecai won’t be able to incarnate his avatar yet. I wanted to wait until he could be with us, but then we had a talk about personal growth and experience and stuff instead of relying on him, but I’m still gonna miss him and being here and stuff.”
Akahana tilted her head. “Won’t you still be able to talk to him with your mental link?”
The younger woman couldn’t keep herself from pouting. “No, and it kind of sucks. The link isn’t tied to our minds, it ties to our souls. And my soul will be remaining right here with my core. So Moriko gets to talk with Mordecai, and gets to talk to my core-self, but from what Mordecai said, when my avatar isn’t in the dungeon the connection with my core will be too thin to have that sort of communication with myself. I’ll kind of have two selves. I mean, it feels a little like that sometimes already, but my thoughts flow freely between my core and brain. So it’s just that I have two brains that are better at different things. And my core-mind can do dungeon magic, and my avatar-mind can do spell magic.”
And that started off a whole conversation about how exactly the avatars worked. Neither of her parents was entirely comfortable with the thought that their ‘real’ daughter was actually in a crystal nearby, or at least her soul was. It sounded a lot like a lich’s soul cage when described that way.