"I'm not sure if I like being feared like this." Penelope hadn't realized how much it would affect her. They were halfway across the no-mans-land, and she could already see the eyes of the Western soldiers locked on her.

"Stop, then. I'll walk." Despite his command, and expectation that Penelope would follow it, she didn't halt.

"No. I might not like it, but it will not stop me helping you. You need to have an aura of power. Showing off the kingdom's magic and riding a dragon loses its impact if you don't ride the dragon. I'll do my best to not spook anyone, but if something happens—hold on tight."

Stewart braced, thinking she meant to take off right then, but then he put together her train of thought. "Got it. And, thank you again." He sighed. "I'm having to say that a lot."

"You don't have to, but it's appreciated." As they reached the first of the lines, Penelope recognized a lot of hand gestures—holy in nature. She kept her teeth as hidden as she could when she said, "May the gods guide us all." The words drew surprised looks.

"Smooth," Stewart said. "Can you take us to the command area over there?"

Twisting her neck a little, Penelope caught Stewart's pointing and nodded. The whispering among the soldiers was perfectly audible to Penelope. She listened to their wondering about what would happen next. One seemed to be priming a rumor that Stewart would feed them all to her. The big news, though, was what she'd said. She caught the eye of one woman telling her comrades about Penelope's words and nodded to her. "Rumors about me are spreading faster than I could fly," she said to no one in particular.

When they arrived at the command area of the Western army, obvious because of all the standards that were now lowered, Penelope went through the motion of raising her leg and lowering her neck.

Elanor, having assisted the other priests present, stood up from where she crouched over one officer, having used her own spells to clean the wounds prior to the more experienced priestess of Balance doing a resurrection. "Your Majesty," she said, dipping her head to Stewart. "I hope you aren't too upset with my actions, I—"

Cutting her off by dint of striding forward and pulling her into a hug, Stewart whispered, "Thank you," to her.

A little lost at first, mostly due to the fact that with them both wearing armor, she couldn't actually feel him hugging her. "Are you thanking me or Sandwalker?"

"One at a time. I'll pray to your god with my thanks later, but I wager they already are well aware of how I feel about them. Thank you for saving so many lives." Almost on the tip of his tongue was begging her not to risk herself again like that. It was stupid, selfish, and he only barely stopped himself saying it because his heart demanded it so loudly.

Walking around the pair, Penelope watched as the knight—a large hole where her chest had formerly been—was being seen-to by a priestess. The cleaning process was first, then as much of the woman's armor as could be was removed, and finally the priestess poured magic into the knight until the huge wound healed and she took her first breath among the living again. "Welcome back."

Looking up, Charlie wasn't surprised she was alive again. What surprised her was the face staring down at her. Blotting out the sun was the visage of a dragon. "Give me some space?" When the dragon didn't move, Charlie turned to look at the priestess who was beside her. "You didn't resurrect me to be used as dragon food, I trust, so why is it here?"

"You could ask me instead. The reason I'm here is to make sure you're okay. The King seems to respect you." Giving the woman room to get up, Penelope lowered one wing to Charlie's side to give her something to lean on.

Standing on her own, Charlie grumbled at the state of her armor. She pressed her fist against her healed flesh, finding plenty of room around it before her arming doublet's ruined fabric. "What hit me, a cannon?"

"Explosive rifle round. I'd explain how they're made, but I have no clue. Put the cased round into the rifle, fire it, it makes a hole the size of a cannonball. Sometimes bigger." Penelope drew her wing up and folded it at her side. "You couldn't have picked a worse time to stand against the kingdom."

"Fighting against the lad—" Charlie had to school herself; not wanting to use the excuse of the resurrection to explain bad manners. "They don't know the King can still use his shield like that. If I were you, I'd make sure no one gets away from here to tell that upstart about it."

"Too late for that. Several of your officers had their talismans intact," the priestess said. "Unlike you, they did not wear theirs on a necklace above their chest, or they had a second."

Penelope uttered a few curses under her breath, which didn't do much to hide them from anyone's ears. When She saw Stewart approaching, she cut her tirade short and gave him the same bad news.

"That ruins our chances of this ploy being a surprise next time. Or our presence here being a surprise." Stewart reached up to Penelope's shoulder and gave her a few good thumps as thanks. "I hear you've tipped our hand to your fellow knight. I guess I will do the proper introduction. Lady Knight Penelope Bogblood, this is Lady Knight Charlie Downs. Sir Charlie, this is Sir Penelope."

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Charlie's eyebrows had risen about as high as they would go. "You made a dragon a knight of the kingdom?"

"She's shown more chivalry and honor than most knights I've met—present company excepted, of course." Waiting for Charlie's eye-roll, Stewart shrugged. "And you have to admit, she makes a better entrance than most knights. It's a formality at this point, but do you offer your surrender here today?"

"Yes, Your Majesty, when you kill every commander from the other army in the opening seconds of a battle, that is what defeat means. I surrender and ask that you spare the soldiers of my command." She doubted Stewart would take the hands of the soldiers. The amount of effort he'd put into harming as few as he could was obvious to her, but just as obvious was that he'd been prepared to use all those cannons if it hadn't worked. "Wait, you never even contemplated sending the—sending Lady Penelope to attack!"

"If you'd attacked him at the railway line, I would have," Penelope said.

"Bah. Where would be the honor in that? I would have deserved to be sent to meet the gods if I'd been so unsporting." Spitting on the ground, Charlie tested her range of movement. "Your priests do good work." She paused a moment and then sighed. "Very well. I surrender. I will not inform you of the disposition or position of any other forces behind me, nor will I say what that whelp in the West has planned. I will say he wasn't expecting you for months, nor did they think you'd have any of the royal magics."

"I could take a guess and say they expected the kingdom to be lacking in food and for a significant travel time to shift all these troops from the Eastern cities to the capital?" Watching the calculation in Charlie's eyes, Stewart caught her nod. "You won't believe how we're doing it, but it relates to Lady Penelope."

Curiosity burned in Charlie. She looked at Penelope, then back to Stewart. "And you won't tell me because you're shipping me back to the capital for public beheading?"

"The first thing, but not the second. You're out of this war, Charlie, but there's still a place for you in the kingdom, and it starts with escorting your people to the capital and waiting for my return. Once I'm done with David, I'll be back to figure out what to do with you—but it won't involve the headsman's axe." Taking a moment to look around the army Charlie had been in command of, Stewart was relieved the trains would be returning with more troops.

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> Quest Complete: Destroy another dungeon.

> New Quest: Breach the walls of an enemy city!

"This can't all be from the dungeon, surely? Wait, 'enemy city'?" Travis looked over the XP he had gotten. "Hang on, I got two more levels there! How does that work? Pe—" He froze. It had become so natural to ask Penelope for her thoughts that, without her anywhere near any of the cities he now existed as part of, he felt a bit dejected. "Uh, Felna?"

Yawning and stretching, Felna lifted her head from the boss room of Penelope's "dragon fight" mini dungeon. The lava in the room, or at least the heat from it, made it one of her favorite new haunts. "Mmmm, yes?"

There was something unique, for Travis, about not being able to look at someone now. The only pair of eyes in the whole room Felna occupied were her own. "I'm not sure what just happened, but I got… uh… about ten million XP."

Pulling on her clothes, Felna glanced around for any lizards looking her way and pouted. "That's a lot, I think? I am not sure of numbers at that scale."

"Oh! Uh, so take a thousand gold, then put that in a chest—"

"It'd need to be a pretty big chest," Felna said, and glanced down at her clothed self.

Travis only barely caught himself from laughing at her joke. "Right. Big chest. Now get a thousand of those chests all filled with a thousand gold."

Walking toward the lava moat that bisected the room, Felna whistled. "That's a lot of gold. You have more than that, right?"

"We have a lot more than that. Just the— Hold up. I was trying to make a point there. So I got ten million XP from something. I got a quest completion for destroying a dungeon, so Fife and co took care of that, but I shouldn't have gotten that much for it."

"Are you forgetting that Pen is out doing her own thing, too?" The silence that met Felna's words made her groan. "Sorry. I—"

"You're right, though, even if I didn't want to think about her being so far away. I guess the other reason I don't want to think about it is that it would mean she killed a lot of people."

Walking across what should have been dangerously hot lava, Felna felt the silence crowd in around her. Penelope, she knew, was a fighter. But there was a difference between a fighter and a force of nature on a battlefield. "I don't think she'd do that. Maybe there are other things that count as killing an army?"

"I—" Travis narrowed his focus a little, letting some other conversations slip from him with a hurried apology. "You're right. I've done nothing but dodge around my dungeon system's rules and expectations. For all I know, she gets XP from being part of Stewart's party, and what I got was her share for making the entire West surrender."

Leaving a trail of silence in her wake, Felna left the small dungeon behind and finally asked, as she reached her temple, "Would you only get two levels for defeating a whole half of the kingdom?"

It broke the tension in Travis. He laughed at the notion. "Probably not. I got what, ten, for Stewart's troops marching through. I got a million XP just for having Stewart walk in every day."

"Your ability to juggle all these absurd numbers is curious. Are such calculations often needed in your world?" Felna, in her god's temple, felt a reassuring warmth pour over her like a hot day in a desert. "I think things are going well in the west."

Travis felt the warmth too. It didn't wrap around him, but it poured out from the temple to Sandwalker and made, for a while, the depths of his dungeon a warm and inviting place.

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