Five minutes later, Alejandra and the girls were all hunkered down in a copse of orange-leafed trees as Alejandra described the situation to Matty and Toraline back at the home clearing.

"I do not think it noticed us," she finished relating the encounter. "Or if it did, it made no move to pursue. Olivia was unable to identify it, because of its camouflage properties. Apparently we need to have either the name of the creature, or be able to see or otherwise detect it for her Consul ability to work."

"Total ripoff," Olivia grumbled.

"What you describe," Toraline's voice sounded tinny and strange over the little Motorola radio Alejandra held, "sounds similar to a Zone Keeper. In function, anyways, if not specificity. Which is curious, because I had assumed that Mighty Caesar had destroyed the last of them during his reign."

"Zone Keeper?" Olivia somehow both heard and managed to pronounce the capital letters. "Oh now that's something I can check. Hooli–Ah, thanks." She accepted the scroll from the owl, who had produced it almost before she had asked for it. She unrolled it and scanned it as the radio kept talking.

"They are extremely dangerous, Consul," Toraline said. "They are not a single class of creature, but rather a role into which multiple creatures may be slotted. But each one will present a significant challenge. It may be best to avoid them for now–"

"Oh crap, they're boss monsters," Olivia said.

"Hold for a moment please," Alejandra said into the radio, then turned to Olivia. "You have something?"

"Yeah, I've got a whole list of critters that fall under the Zone Keeper flag." Olivia turned the scroll around to show her, and Alejandra's eyes nearly crossed. The scroll was not only completely incomprehensible, it was aggressively so, and made Alejandra's eyes hurt to look at it. She let out a noise and jerked her eyes away.

"Uh, Mom? You okay?" Olivia blinked and glanced at the scroll, seeming completely unaffected by the gibberish Alejandra saw.

Alejandra took in a breath and shook her head to clear it of the buzzing. "Si, mija, I am fine. I just… I do not think I see the same thing as you do when you look at one of your special scrolls."

"Really?" Olivia looked at the scroll again, then turned it to face Dinah. "Can you read this?"

Dinah took one look, then squawked and fell over backwards, clapping her hands over her eyes.

"Holy crap, that hurts! Put it away! Agh, it's like ants are crawlin' on my eyeballs!"

Liv blinked, looked at the scroll again, then showed it to Hoolio. The little owl blinked twice, then looked up at Olivia with what Alejandra would swear in court was a raised eyebrow.

"Hoo?" he asked.

"Huh." Liv shrugged. "Okay, I guess that's a Consul ability then. Some scrolls have information on them that you guys just don't get. Cool, aren't I special. Okay, so, like I was saying. Zone Keepers are a bunch of different creatures, it looks like. I'm not sure which one this is, I'd have to go through their names one by one it looks like. But the big thing is that they're boss monsters, and you can't claim a territory they're in until you've defeated them. And from what I'm seeing here, the hexes they're in almost always have something good in them. Huh." Liv looked up and blinked. "Hey, I bet that big thing Mom killed was a Zone Keeper. And we got Billy out of it, plus all the resources in the rubble and stuff."

Alejandra let out a low whistle. It had been a terrible fight, one she nearly had not survived, but it had resulted in what was probably the most important discovery in this new world. Billy was what was keeping them safe and secure as they slept, what protected them from whatever other horrors this island might throw at them.

And if this creature were protecting something equally as valuable…

"We totally need to kill it, don't we." Isabel's words were not a question. Alejandra looked up to see her eldest daughter meeting her gaze, a grim smile on her face that would not have looked out of place in her squad back in the Desert.

"We don't know what it's guarding though," Dinah pointed out. She was standing guard, her eyes always roving around the jungle around them, her rifle held low but ready to come up at a moment's notice. "I ain't sayin' I wouldn't relish killin' it, but it might not be worth the effort right now."

"Toraline," Alejandra asked over the radio. "What do these Zone Keepers usually protect? Is it resources? Items? Something else?"

"It can be anything of important, from rare natural resources to a cache of gold and gems to magical weapons to… Well, to powerful allies." Alejandra could almost hear the sword's smirk. Yeah, she was thinking about Billy as well. "The stronger the Keeper, the greater usually is the reward."

Alejandra frowned. "Usually?"

"The system upon which it was built is dying and being reborn, Consul. The rules as I remember them may not be in effect anymore."

"Right." Alejandra grunted. Perfect. A strong enemy and a possible reward. And close to their camp, too. Right in the next hex, even. She was going to have to get an accurate read on just how big the hexes were before the maps became useful as more than just approximations.

"Uh-oh," Liv said, and Alejandra closed her eyes for just a moment before asking "What now?"

"Okay, so, Zone Keepers, right? Strong, tough, guard stuff," Liv took a deep breath. "They also attract other tough monsters."

"What?" Bel leaned in to look at Olivia's scroll. "What are you talking about?"

Everyone blinked as Bel's eyes scanned over the scroll Olivia was reading. Without her even blinking.

"Uh, Bel? You can read this?" Olivia stared at her sister.

"Yeah, I ca—Oh." Bel blinked. "Woah. I can. Why can I but you guys can't?"

Alejandra relayed the situation through the radio to her husband and his sword, and they both responded with confusion as well.

"Historically, only a Quaestor and Mighty Caesar himself were able to read scrolls directly from the system vaults. I do not know why Isabel would be able to do so as well, unless it has something to do with the fact that she is not connected to the empire system in the same manner as you all."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Oh-kay? That's kinda weird," Bel said, frowning now at the radio. "I can read the system stuff because I'm not part of the system stuff? That doesn't sound kinda off to you?"

"Do you enjoy making me repeat myself?" the sword asked, and Alejandra had to laugh at the huff in her voice.

"Sorry Toraline," she said before Bel could react. "We are just trying to wrap out heads around the evolving situation."

"The point," Liv said, taking the reigns of the conversation again, "is taht Zone Keepers attract strong monsters around them. Like whatever the heck that thing was that it ate back there. And if we leave it alone, then it'll just keep bringing stronger and stronger stuff to it, and it might spill out into other hexes."

"So why hasn't it happened yet?" Dinah asked. "I mean, we just got here, but it's been here for ages, right? So why ain't this whole thing overrun in super-strong skunk-octupus things? Or whatever?"

Olivia blinked. Opened her mouth. Closed her mouth.

"Huh." she said, cocking her head to the side. "I have no idea."

Alejandra repeated the question over the radio, and got much the same reaction from Toraline.

"Y'know what it's like?" Bel said after a second. "It's like this island didn't start up stuff until we got here."

"Come again?" Alejandra said.

"Like, okay, we're assuming that this whole place has been operating on a constant level, right?" Bel tapped her swords together, eyes unfocused, as she thought through it. "Like, it's been the same way and functioning the same way for who knows how long. But what if it hasn't? What if it's been doing just some stuff, but then our arriving here woke something else up? Like how Toraline didn't start talking to us until Dad picked her up. Or how Billy 'woke up', somehow, when we claimed the territory. What if the whole place has been, like, asleep or something until more Sojourners showed up?"

"And now the systems are trying to kick on again." Liv nodded slowly. "Because now there's Sojourners again, so everything that was set up to help them or fight against them or give them challenges is starting to wake up again too. Yeah, yeah that might make sense. That'd at least explain why we're just now starting to see these Zone Keeper things and why we didn't get our spines pulled out of our butts the second we stepped onto the beach."

"Charming visual." Alejandra snorted before relaying everything back to Matt and Toraline.

"Are you thinking about taking it on?" This time it was Matty on the line, and she took a second to think about it before answering.

She looked at the kids around her. "We might have enough firepower to deal with the creature, but I would prefer to know more about it before we engage with it. The last time I tangled with something in this category, I was saved only by dumb chance…"

Alejandra trailed off and blinked. No, not dumb chance, she had been saved by an Art. An Art she had tried to activate again in the fight with the bugs, but that had failed her utterly.

"Toraline," she said after a second, "Tell me about Desperation Arts."

There was very specific kind of silence for a long moment over the radio. Then:

"What are Desperation Arts, Consul?"

Alejandra blinked at the radio. "What do you mean 'what are they'? Don't you know?"

"I have never heard of something called a Desperation Art before. May I infer from your question that you have encountered or utilized such a thing since arriving here?"

"Yes." Briefly, she outlined her encounter with the gator-cat alpha and the ability she had triggered that had almost done as much damage to her as it had to her enemies, and then the subsequent inability to use it in the fight with the bugs.

There was another long silence after Alejandra finished, and not just from the radio. It was the first time the kids had heard about what exactly had happened, too, and she looked up to see grim faces and grimmer realizations stirring in their eyes.

"I didn't realize it'd been that close," Isabel said quietly.

"We were that close to losing you…" Liv had a faraway look in her eyes.

"Yeah, but we didn't," it was Dinah's voice that snapped them out of it. "An' now we're stronger 'cause of it. C'mon," the girl gave the others a fierce grin. "Life sucks and then you die, and whatever don't kill you just makes you stronger. So snap out of it an' let's figure out if we're gonna go kill us a thing or not."

"I still do not know what Desperation Arts are specifically, Consul," the radio finally crackled back to life. "But from what you describe, it sounds as if it is a… sort of 'hidden' Art. Something that kicks in only a specific set of circumstances, in this case perhaps coming close to death while also triggering something through the emotions of the time. As to why you were unable to access it later… Perhaps a cooldown timer? Like in the System under Mighty Caesar. Perhaps it can only be triggered again after a certain amount of time has passed, or perhaps there are other conditions that were not met."

"Huh. This is weird." Olivia was reading through one of her scrolls. "I'm not seeing anything about Desperation Arts here, either." The teen's eyes came up and Alejandra almost laughed at the predatory glint she saw there. "That means that there's powers not codified by the system!"

"It is possible it is the new System coming into being, shaping the existing powers in response to your instinctive need," the radio said. "There may be other Arts that have not yet come to light that you might find yourself able to access in the right conditions.

"Oh heck yeah," Olivia grinned. "We've got Plot Armour, baby!"

"No," Bel said, poking Dinah in the side with a finger. "We've got weird unknown skills that we don't know how to activate and don't know if they'll work when we need them."

"They saved Mom, didn't they? With the croco-kitties?" Olivia shot back.

"Yeah, and then didn't work with the Bugs, and we all nearly died," Bel retorted calmly. "That's not Plot Armour, that's just another kind of trap. It gets you to rely on it, and then yanks it away when you really need it."

"Bel is right," Alejandra decided. "We may find more of these hidden Arts as we go, and the Desperation Arts may be of use, but we cannot count on them if we cannot activate them reliably. Any plan of action we make must be based on the abilities we possess and can utilize on command. Clear?"

"Got it!" Bel said, and Dinah and Liv nodded along. "So what's the plan from here? Are we goin' after the Keeper?"

Alejandra pursed her lips in consideration.

"Olivia? It will continue to attract strong monsters if we do not deal with it?"

"Yup. As long as it's there, monsters spawn or are attracted or whatever to it."

"And will eventually spill into other hexes. Like our home clearing hex?"

"Yeah, pretty sure. Billy probably could handle them though."

"But perhaps not forever. And anyways, we do not want to just treat him as a bulwark. We must consider his welfare in all this as well." Another silence, shorter this time, as Alejandra weighed her options. Then she raised the radio.

"Matty, we are going to prepare to engage the Keeper. We are going to scout the area, then move in for the assault. We will call just before we go in.

"Gotcha, Allie. And… Be careful. All of you."

"We will," Alejandra said quietly. "We love you."

"Right back at you. All of you. Listen to your mother, girls, and call me if you need me."

"We will Dad," Olivia said for all of them.

Alejandra clipped the radio back to her belt, then stood from where she'd been crouched on her haunches and stretched before unlimbering her rifle and checking the bolt to make sure it was loaded and primed.

"Alright, mijas," she said, and this time her smile showed teeth. "As my old sergeant used to say, let's go get a piece."

"Oh heck yes," Bel said, grinning. Olivia nodded and hefted her staff, and Dinah just clicked the safety off of her rifle.

They turned and started back into the jungle.

Alejandra had promised to be careful. The best way she knew to do that, was to be dangerous.

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