For perhaps the first time in her life, Pheyvev frowned.

There were just too many. At first they had been easy to defeat. But they just kept coming, in endless waves of blue and green. She didn’t really even know what they were, those odorless, featureless... stick men. They were just colored a flat and boring color, reds, blues, greens, yellows, oranges, violets, with a perfectly spherical head and cylindrical body parts. Faceless and fearless. It would all be quite interesting if they weren’t trying to kill her.

In fact, it had all been interesting until they started actually having a chance at killing her.

Another one of the stick men went down with a Mittens strike that sliced him in half, but she was taking much too long. Their swords may have looked cartoonish, but they were real enough – Doom was already in statis and reviving, and Pheyvev herself had a wound in her shoulder – to be fair, it was barely a paper cut, but it meant that their swords could cut flesh well enough to kill her. Eventually, if she wasn’t fast enough, they would encircle her, and then advance upon her and she could do nothing about it.

Something slammed into her from behind.

Mittens flew out of her hand and somersaulted through the air until it landed into a pillar, embedding itself into it. Pheyvev, meanwhile, landed hard on the ground, dropping into a roll to mitigate any injury. It didn’t feel like she had hurt herself. Then she looked up and found a stick man’s sword staring back at her.

She gulped.

Is this the end?

…no, probably not. The Author wouldn’t let that happen. If I die, I’ll go out in a blaze of glory, not against a bunch of faceless mooks. He’ll do a stupid and wildly out-of-place Deus ex Machina or something so that I can get out of this.

Then again, considering that he’s going to save my life, I don’t think I have grounds to criticize his terrible writing.

The stick man holding the sword over her fell backwards as a giant beast slammed into him.

With its fearsome claws, massive teeth and maw, and body structure that made it look like a giant pink sock with four stubby legs, the beast easily dispatched the remained hundred or so soldiers in a matter of seconds. It was actually sort of beautiful despite the beast’s ugliness, watching him bound around and eat the colored spheres that passed for heads. To conclude the slaughter, he puked a rainbow on the last soldier and the rainbow swallowed him up and disintegrated him.

Seriously? Okay, I get that you needed a Deus ex Machina, but a yabur? Really?

The beast clomped over to Pheyvev, who at this point had stood up.

Wait, I think I recognize him…

“Mr. Waki!” she shouted excitedly in recognition.

“At your service, Miss Hart,” the beast growled, in that low, scratchy voice characteristic of all yaburs. He bowed his head as he spoke; Mr. Waki was one of the only yaburs left that properly showed respect to royalty.

“Wait, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be fighting in the war?”

The old yabur sighed, the girl’s words reminding him of olden times – the times when war was honorable and not a bloody slaughter of the numerically superior besting the tactically superior, the times before the Desni Alliance and the War against the Union.

“The war… is going badly. The Queen sent me here to help you.”

“But I don’t need help as much as her,” replied Pheyvev. “You should go back, help our glorious Queen retain her rightful status as sole ruler of our lands.”

“But she told me…”

“I insist.”

“She insisted too.”

“Well, I double insist. So there.”

They both chuckled a bit at that. It truly felt good; the yabur realized that Pheyvev was perhaps the only human that could make him laugh at this point.

“I’m not entirely sure that’s sound reasoning…”

She darkened. “Our Queen needs your help. You’re worth ten thousand soldiers and without you the army will suffer. You know this.”

The yabur considered this, and unfortunately, he did know it was true. He disliked the idea of disobeying the Queen, but he disliked the idea of losing the war much, much more.

“Alright, then. But first, I must request your payment.”

Yaburs fed off tears of humans. Each day, they needed one tear to survive, and thus they did one good deed each day for it. (Of course, besides the tear, they still need to eat, which is why most good deeds consist of eating enemies’ heads. It’s simply an extra basic need. But that’s beside the point.) Pheyvev had never personally paid before, but she had watched her mother do it. She had asked her how she was able to cry at will, and she said to think of something very sad, then after that think of something very happy and you would stop crying.

So she thought of home. Her mother. Beautiful, rolling hills. Armies marching across those hills to combat the Desni Alliance.

And, she realized, they were losing the war. At first it had been easy, against just the Reds. Then the Desni allied with the Red Empire, eager for the profit they would make if they won. And the Whites, sworn enemies of the Reds, just watched as the Desni Alliance won battle after battle. Their army was just too large – they could just keep throwing hundreds of thousands of soldiers at the Hart Empire and they would practically never run out. It was just unfair. Only the brilliant tactical genius of the Hart commanders, led by the Queen and formerly by Pheyvev, had kept them alive for this long.

And when the Harts did finally fall, the Desni would take over, betray the Reds, and make both of them into a Desni province. They would merge the Red Empire and the Hart Empire into one province, and then they would be paid a massive amount of gold from the nation of Vuer, who had no army but were amazing diplomats and lived in near-unbreakable fortresses – such that it would not ever be worth it to attack them. And of course they would have their own motives, but who knows what those were.

And at that moment she realized why her mother had sent her away. She thought that the war was close to over, and she wanted her to be safe and alive when they did lose. The witch was just an excuse.

A single tear rolled down her face.

The yabur sucked the tear away, which was actually quite a strange experience – light distorted around the tear and the tear elongated towards the yabur’s open mouth. The tear clung desperately to Pheyvev’s face, causing it to stretch a short distance and causing her to feel a decidedly unique leechy sensation where the tear clung to her face. The tear then lost the battle against the yabur’s mouth’s suction, and plopped into its mouth, bouncing back to its original shape. It was quite interesting, as liquids don’t usually stretch well, but Pheyvev was still devastated by the revelation and so noticed none of it.

The yabur spoke.

“I will be going on my way now. Would you like me to send a message home?”

Think of something happy.

She thought of the daily beheadings the Queen held. Every morning, she chose a random person that had annoyed her the previous day and allowed them to make a plea. She would hear the plea and approximately twenty-three percent of the time she would pardon them, according to recent data collected by the National Queen’s Habits Foundation. If the plea did not please her, she would summarily execute the person. (Interestingly enough, there were a few brave political activists that deliberately offended the Queen in hopes of being able to talk directly with the Queen and tell her what she should do better. Amazingly enough, this strategy has actually worked, with only one death to date.)

That cheered her up, but did not allow her to forget home.

“Tell my mother that I will return, and that we will win this war and prevent the Union.”