Chapter 307

The summons were raucous in my mind, their warring voices muting my trudging footsteps along with the ambient noise of the floor beyond.

“We’re in trouuuuuble,” Audrey groaned. She’d been off happily hunting for most of the exchange, and seemed overwhelmed and stressed out by the other two.

“It makes no sense. It makes less than no sense. Miles made it clear that he is the enemy of our pack. That he intends to stand in our way and create obstacles. He already knows our den, where we hunt, where we take shelter. What idiocy prompted him to reveal even more?” Talia lamented, speaking at an accelerated clip that was difficult to parse, let alone offer a reply.

“Where we hunt?! HOW DOES HE KNOW?”

“Not really the point, Dree,” Azure said, his tone soothing and calm. “I agree that it’s bad. But give Matt a little credit. He’s spent a lot more time than any of us socializing with humans.”

“A practice, by his own admission, he is terrible at!” Talia snapped, her voice growing increasingly shrill.

“Not when it’s important,” Azure turned harsh, losing his cool. “Navigating casual social settings and acting decisively in a crisis are different skill sets. He’s gotten us out of tighter spots before.”

“Tighter than handing a highly capable enemy a neatly organized list of his strengths and weaknesses?”

“Stop.” I halted mid-stride and closed my eyes, trying to filter out the chatter. Surprisingly, it had the opposite effect. Within the darkness behind my eyelids, I found my three summons represented as blue ghostly apparitions arranged in a half circle, paused mid-conversation. “What. Have I just, never noticed? Are you guys always here?”

“Uh.” Azure quickly stood to his feet, his boyish features twisting in a half-smile. “Yeah. This is the void. It takes more effort to access when I’m in item form, but this is where we spend our time unmanifested. How are you here?”

“Dunno.” I glanced over to Talia, who was at least three to four times larger than her manifested form. “Can you choose your own appearances within the void? Or are you just astralogically huge?”

“Huge? Huge?!” Talia raged. “This is the size I was before you plucked me out of the adaptive dungeon! It is a perfectly acceptable—”

I opened my eyes, pastel colors of the tower floor flooding in.

“—Do not disappear when I am speaking to you!”

“He can still hear you, idiot,” Azure said, his voice long-suffering.

“I could hear you the whole time,” I added, continuing to trudge up the hill. They fell silent as I pulled up my DMs and sent Nick a blank message, testing the permeability of the floor, hoping for a spot with service. It didn’t go through.

“These two, faithless traitors. I never doubted you,” Audrey suddenly proclaimed.

“Whatever you say, Dree.”

“Stupid plant,” Talia snarled.

“Look. There’s nothing wrong with having doubts, or questioning my actions. It’s better for everyone in the long run if there’s not a chorus of voices in my head, rubber stamping everything I do. Just don’t talk about me like I’m not present,” I said, scanning the approach to the elevator. There were enough people around that doing what I needed to do was likely possible, but Miles having me under a microscope made it difficult.

“To be fair, we didn’t know you were present,” Azure pointed out.

“Noted,” I grunted. “Now, obviously, from what I heard, you all have questions. We have a brief window I can answer them, but after that I need Azure.”

“Ooh. What are we doing?” Azure asked. “I could take Miles’ form and start calling guild-masters and associates. Make him out to be a raving lunatic and start eroding his credibility with conspiracy theories.”

“Absolutely not,” I shook my head. “You have enough juice regenerated for a couple transformations, though?”

“In the tower. Outside… it’ll be hard to manage one.”

“But you can maintain it outside the tower?”

“Yessir.”

“Perfect.” I waved to Tyler, the Guild Master of the Adventurer’s Guild, not expecting to find him still here. He seemed to be negotiating with a small group of merchants, all of whom wore the Merchant’s Guild sigil around their necks, a golden coin—Greek, if I remembered correctly—that depicted a ship traveling diagonal, an olive branch crossing it in the opposite diagonal.

Tyler seemed attentive to my arrival, and almost looked ready to break from the group and speak to me before I broke eye-contact and smoothly changed directions, routing around the public towards the door. On an ordinary day I’d have no issue taking a few minutes chatting with Tyler, but from the moment I sent Miles my character sheet, the clock was ticking and every second mattered.

Thankfully, he didn’t follow.

“Two minutes. Questions, go.”

There was a dull growl from Talia, typically a sure sign she was amping up to something. But Audrey’s warbling voice spoke before she could. “Miles has a summon.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“A bird.”

“That’s accurate.”

“Birds taste good.”

There was a collective groan from Talia and Azure, so I attempted to spur the plant along. “Audrey, do you have questions or just observations?”

“Yes question. Because Miles’ summon is bird and bird taste good. If someone were to eat bird, couldn’t he just re-summon it?”

Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen the hawk since I left. I’d been looking for it, half-expecting to find it flying overhead. “Audrey. Did you eat Miles’ bird?”

“…no,” Audrey answered, after a long hesitation. “Just… thought about it.”

“Okay.” Given the gravity of what was happening around us, and the intensity Talia was giving off, it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to spend a lot of time addressing. But what I’d learned from the nursery was that I couldn’t just shrug off simple queries from people that relied on me and treated my word as gospel. There could be serious repercussions otherwise. “You’re a summon. I can bring you back if you die. Why shouldn’t I just serve you up to Talia whenever she eats, vary her diet with a side of greens?”

“Because it would hurt!” Audrey exclaimed.

“It hurts other things when you hunt them.”

“But once they die, they’re dead,” My plant summon argued. “Can’t feel pain anymore. If you let the wolf eat me—”

“—Not that the wolf would,” Talia groused.

“—I’d feel that pain every time.”

“And it would be worse, because you’re more intelligent than you were as a basic flower fang.” I internally apologized to Socrates and hastened the conclusion. “As far as I can tell, most summons are like that. Gain a degree of amplified intelligence that varies based on the summoner’s stats. So not only would you feel the pain, you’d remember it and grow to dread it. How would that affect you?”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Bad,” Audrey’s voice held a shudder. “She’s a messy eater.”

“—Excuse me?!”

“Then, taking everything we just talked about and applying it to Miles’ summon, knowing it likely feels similarly on the matter, should you eat the bird?”

“No,” Audrey pouted.

“Great. Next?”

“I’m not even sure that I have a question,” Talia spoke quickly this time, reserving her place before anyone else could. “It’d be more accurate to say that I’m resentful. For the fact that we are now placed in this position.”

Azure scoffed.

“No, let her speak. Talia, what you really mean is that you’re resentful that I placed us in this position, correct?”

I ignored the part of me that whispered arguing with a summon was pointless. Talia operated best with a considerable helping of autonomy. She’d saved my life before, acting of her own volition. If we were going to survive the next few weeks, I needed to get my house in order. Which made this as critical, if not more, than everything else I needed to accomplish before the morning.

“Yes. I suppose that’s true,” Talia relented, breaking the silence.