“Another busy day gone by,” Kris said lightly, dipping a six-inch prawn into the bright red sauce and biting down with relish.

  Shrimp were a deeper water meal, and so largely a delicacy to fishermen who couldn’t get past the Shoreward.

  Cue up a certain Imperial Princess having the great idea of having me Locate Animal, running out there with a net, and then having me telekinetically scoop up a boat full of the things before running back to throw a spontaneous welcome back party for the former Mayor of Ayan Baquar.

  He was back to his former height, too, courtesy of a Polymorph Other at VII+1 as a favor, and a wild party had erupted when he made it back to Freehold and met up with his famous cousins Aliester and Ardry, as well as his niece Britana, who had been one of the NPC’s bound up in Varicci’s torture chambers for a generation. The spell was basically fixing some deficiency of his Clone and should have no trouble persisting as he eased into his original body.

  There were a couple casks of QL 36 vintages up there, although Briggs preferred a good brandy with cigars and Kris preferred smokey scotch whiskey. A couple shots of the latter had even the red-faced and very experienced Ulgrim wheezing and dribbling snot down his nose.

  “You’ve been planning this for a while,” I judged. The big Force Boat I’d dumped all the shrimp into was packed with ice, surrounded with big bowls of six different varieties of shrimp sauce, and we had a platter stacked up with the things in between us.

  There was also a veritable cauldron of seafood and shrimp spiced and boiled to perfection, which people had devoured with almost unseemly speed, unable to keep their mouths away from it. Probably a good ton of spiced prawns, clams, and oysters had vanished in less than fifteen minutes as I allocated scoops of the mix to everyone, and they all begged for more after it vanished so quickly.

  Alas, they had only the cold prawn the size of their hands with the incredible sauces to fall back on.

  “I can’t do much in the way of genealogy studies here, so I’m left with cooking good food. Yeah, had all the stuff rounded up for a while, but Fuzzy did most of the hard work while we were on Ulgrim’s Island.” She grabbed up another prawn, peeled it smoothly with one nail, dipped the whole thing, and devoured the whole thing slowly and thoroughly.

  I wasn’t going to compete with her bottomless gullet and ability to digest food, even if she barely needed to eat, so I got to be a little bit more proper in how I ate mine.

  Damn, that was a fine sauce. Just the right amount of bite, heat, tart, sour, and sweet.

  “Which island do you think Harlune took cover on?” she asked me.

  “There’s really only two possible ones, right? Qin Xikit’s island over north of Ayan, or the two Spur islands off of the Tou-Tou Peninsula,” I said around the sweet flesh of the shrimp. It was hard to open my eyes, I was enjoying the melange of sensations from the sauce too much.

  There was a big barrel of some really, really good rum and fruit juice mixes being seen to by Briggs over at a very impromptu bar. The big man was having a good time passing out drinks, while the gentle wind of a southern winter came off the sea and was keeping everyone cool. There were musicians playing some energetic songs, and Ulgrim was happily leading dance after dance, seemingly full of inexhaustible energy after his long disappearance.

  “I rather doubt he’s going to use an island that holds a temple to the deities of the Falatacot. That leaves Tou-Tou,” she nodded. “I’d like to say that’s our next move, but we’ve got another not-small problem to deal with first.”

  “Oh?” I had to ask, wondering what had come up.

  “Scouts reported the wandering Tremendous Monuga is back around Yaraq. It must have gone into the Dires and come back along the shoreline. The scouts on duty there didn’t engage with it, preferring to keep as far away as possible. There’s indications that it has a regular route it takes up through Tufa, then Samsur, then east into the rolling hills beyond the desert. It stays out of most of the canyons, and out of the north, and steers wide of Cragstone now, too.”

  “How has it reacted to us closing down the Summons?” I asked, dipping another prawn for myself. Nibble, nibble, nibble…

  “We basically cleaned up the board for it. It knows anything it sees is food now, instead of being distracted by Summons. We don’t want to have to deal with it on its terms.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “So, you want to set up a trap for it, lure it in, lock it down, and kill it.”

  “There are multiple records of it eating Isparians, lugians, and tumeroks. Nobody around wants it alive,” she confirmed. And we couldn’t have a forty-foot three-eyed Jotun rumbling around eating everything on the landscape, which it certainly would do, and it was alive and cunning, perfectly happy to run away if wounded and not fight to the death like a Summons.

  “Fine, fine. Then I need five days off to finish off the work on Primus Atamarr’s Heart. We should have the Gearknight Lord up and running by then.”

  Kris just nodded. “I need to get a lot of smithwork done, as does Briggs. Activity now is mostly recon and surveillance work, and coordinating the grinding and conditioning of the troops. It’s really not too much different from Ispar in one respect: the cap for normal folks is about 100. They just start tapering off really quickly there, satisfied with how tough and badass they are at that point. Sort of like hitting Six in the Matrix System.”

  “Hmmm.” She kept better track of that stuff than I did. “So, ten percent are pushing to become more?”

  “That seems to be the right number. The cap on those seems to be about 200, give or take. The ones who push past to 275 are going to be one in a hundred. They just seem more common because we inherited so many paramounts from before the Fall, and they had a better overall survival rate than those of lower Levels.”

  Who would end up becoming the new champions and officers of the new generation. That effect was particularly pronounced around Briggs, and rubbed off on Kris and I as a result. Those who associated with us were generally those aiming for the heights of power their forebears had gained from before the Fall. It just wasn’t as easy now as it was back then.

  “Well enough, then. A pit to hold a forty-foot Jotun… the damn thing’s going to need to be over a hundred feet deep!” It wasn’t a small amount of stone to move, although nothing like a larger Pyramid. “I can probably dig one out of the needed size in about half an hour.”

  “Good. Ideally, we’d like to put it down someplace it just passed so it won’t suspect a thing when we lure it back that way. You should be able to track it with Divs, right?”

  “It’s powerful enough it might notice the magic, but yes.”

  There was a rustle of motion, and Ulgrim, tottering a bit, red of face and bright of eye, was tottering behind our plate of prawns, having somehow snuck away from his legion of well-wishers. “Highness, Magos!” he breathed out, opportunistically taking a prawn, cracking the shell, and dunking it without shame.

  His face lit up. “Oh, this is the best sauce yet!” he proclaimed happily.

  “Is that a surprise?” I had to ask him as he chewed, the jaw motion making him sway from side to side.

  “No, no, can’t say that it is, Lady Magos!” he exclaimed brightly around his new favorite. “But I have a special request of you, if I may?”

  “Sobriety spell already?” I asked, raising my fingers.

  He jerked away from me as if I’d stung him. “The first good buzz I’ve had in almost twenty years, and you’re going to take it away from me?!” he cried out in horror.

  “Apologies. I thought you’d enjoy getting it back again.”

  He blinked a bit owlishly at that. “Hold that thought, Lady Magos. This was brought up to me by my niece Britana, who you rescued from that bastard Varicci’s grip. She was wondering if you might not be able to locate and rescue her brother Ketnan.”

  I let that name bounce around a bit, and couldn’t remember anyone mentioning him. “That is not familiar to me, Master Ulgrim?” Kris asked him archly.

  “He’s a bit of a wheeler-dealer, set up shop in an extinct volcano north of the main city on the Tusker Island there, where he catered to Isparian tourists getting about the place.”

  “A merchant?” I asked him carefully, glancing at Kris, who blinked to hide the sudden interest in her eyes.

  “Yes, selling some, eh, odd wares. If you could get him back from the tuskers, that would be wonderful!”

  “We are planning to go to Aphus Lassel soon, Master Ulgrim. We will certainly attempt to repatriate any humans who seek to return here.”

  “Thank you!” he beamed, almost falling down before catching himself. “Er, this sobriety spell, it won’t KEEP me sober, will it, Lady Magos?”

  “No, Master Ulgrim. It simply gets rid of alcohol in the system and the symptoms of drunkenness. It does not, however, repair the damage to your liver.”

  “Well, I’ve got a new liver that’s been waiting almost two decades to be properly tested. I’ll take a shot of that spell, then.” He smiled expectantly.

  “It’s called Seagram’s Chaser, Master Ulgrim. And you are only allowed to receive it if you promptly go over to Commander Briggs over there at the bar and order a Purple Jungle Doom.”

  Kris proudly held up a drink with a slice of lemon and orange floating in it, sparkling yellow lights swirling inside a cloudy purple drink.

  He blinked at me and at Kris. “A Purple Jungle Doom,” he repeated carefully. “That sounds wonderfully ominous. I shall most certainly endeavor not to disappoint you, Lady Magos!” he promised quickly.

  A minute later he was much more stable on his feet and fairly sprinting over to Briggs’s bar, where the big fellow was already mixing his drink.

  “Well, that’s a fast way to get him drunk again,” Kris told me out of the side of her mouth.

  “The chill when it comes out the other end is going to be particularly memorable, as I recall?”

  “It really is a fast way to cool down your arse,” she agreed sagely. “I’ll go on ahead to track the TM and be ready to lure it. Bring the Mick and the Roaches along to make things quick and clean.”

  “Going to be a heck of a Baneskull for you…” and she grinned fiercely at the idea.

  “Yeah, not many options for good ones here, as the Monugas are the only ones we’ve seen. But, you make do with what you have.”

  I could only agree to that. I tunked my glass of Brigg’s cherry cordial to her Purple Jungle Doom, and we stayed to watch the last of the sunlight vanish in the west, and eat more prawns.

  ============================

  For those who would like to support me and my daily updates, my Patreon Link is at:

   Ebook Series: The original Power of Ten: The First Day, The First Week, and finally The First Month, Vol Five and Six!