“Are you sure you want to leave?” Laima asked.

“No,” Apexus responded sincerely. “I am only certain that stagnancy is worse than a half-shaped decision.”

“We say half-baked,” Reysha chimed in.

“We could ship you to the Dreadnoughts,” the pirate captain suggested. Her motives were obvious, even to Apexus. The four of them were more powerful protection than anything money could buy on this Leaf. It would take the deliberate effort of an army exhausting them to be defeated by the locals.

“That’s not our current prey,” Apexus stated. “We will go through that hunt another day.”

Although the increased difficulty of the Dreadnoughts was a reason to avoid that Dungeon for the time being, the truth was that Apexus still hadn’t found a satisfying answer to his conundrum. Did he want to intervene or not?

The question remained unanswered.

With nothing left to say, Apexus simply turned around and began walking away. The pirate captain was left standing there, confused. Aclysia bowed, Korith jumped off the crate she had been sitting on, and Reysha just waved, before following after the party leader. They vanished into the setting day as quickly as they had arrived.

“They seem like the most decent people so far,” Korith said, once they were out of earshot.

 “Affirmative, they seem to be,” Aclysia responded, stressing the verb. “It cannot be said whether we met the best of the current leadership and we certainly have not met the worst of the pirates, by their own admission.”

“Bla bla, caution, bla bla,” Reysha mocked. “I get it, you don’t have to introduce a moral gradient into every situation.”

“She does,” Apexus disagreed, as they marched over the grassy green of the island. “Because I urge her to be involved and I require the best counselling.”

“Just do it.”

“Reysha!” Aclysia chided, annoyance bound into that single word. Before she could ramp it up into a lecture of some kind, the redhead pushed back.

“What? Ya gonna keep going on about this detail or that detail? Oh, we don’t know literally everything, so we can’t do anything! That’s just bullshit and it never, ever works out. There’s a point where you either have to surrender to the current state of affairs or say ‘fuck it, I’m going in’ and do whatever the Hellroots you wanted to do.” The intense stare of the tiger girl’s narrowed pupils kept Aclysia quiet even in the long pause. “There’s literally no fucking way we can ever know what happens once we stir the pot. The only question you have to ask yourself is if you’re fine with the current state of things.”

A complicated question and Apexus didn’t agree that was the only thing that mattered. The better question would be if he was fine with taking the risk that things could get worse. He wasn’t sure of that yet.

Reysha putting her foot down had a chilling effect on the conversation. They were all lost in their individual thoughts, wrestling either with the question of what they were justified in doing or how to convince the rest of the party to go along with their particular view on things. Knowing that was going on, Apexus asked the question, “Would you change things here?”

“I’d start yesterday,” Reysha spoke.

“We were in the middle of nowhere yesterday?”

“It’s a metaphor, big guy.” Cackling, she poked him in the ribs. “Or a figure of speech or whatever the fuck.”

“I think… I am leaning more towards intervening… at least when it comes to the city… cities?” Korith threw her lot in. “I don’t know.”

“I understand that waiting until we have analysed everything is unfeasible, but I retain that our current state of intel is insufficient.” Aclysia looked to Apexus. “Darling?”

“I don’t know,” Apexus stated. He had nothing more to say, for he truly did not know.

The topic surfaced repeatedly over the next eight days of travel. Sometimes the differences of opinion, particularly between the usual two suspects, led to heated exchanges, but nothing worrisome. At the end of the day, whatever differences they had in their views regarding the local or even general politics, they were friends, a party, and lovers.

The four of them sat, once again, in the comfortable seats atop the head of one of the serpent constructs. They were gliding through the waves, across the largest divide yet. They had an entire night’s rest and still the only colour surrounding them was blue, the occasional cloud notwithstanding.

“Wherever we go after this, I want it to be just one landmass,” Reysha stated.

Aclysia tilted her head in confusion. “Why? This mode of travel is quicker and more comfortable.”

“I’m fucking sick of water, I like using my legs, and unlike you, if this thing sinks, I am fucked. Not as fucked as the dense girl over there, but still.”

“H-hey!” Korith protested. “I’m not stupi- Oh, you mean that my bones are dense…”

Reysha giggled, “Little bit of both, maybe?”

Red rose to the tips of the kobold’s ears. “S-screw you, I can swim!”

“I mean… kinda,” Reysha thought back to the attempt the kobold had made at swimming. The combination of her metal-reinforced bones/scales and her rather immense assets had her buoyant enough to stay afloat. Between most of her updraft coming from her chest and her short limbs having to compete with her comparatively large surface area, she was neither a graceful, nor fast swimmer. “More like paddling though.”

“Wawawa…” Korith let out a scandalized series of sounds. “Why am I always getting bullied?”

Apexus suddenly put his large, heavy hand on top of her blonde head. The kobold turned his way, hope in her golden eyes. Gently, she swayed with motions of his palm, his fingers scratching behind the base of her horns. “You’re small and cute,” he provided an answer, “Soft.”

Blushing, Korith let go of this for now and just enjoyed the sensation of the large paw combing through her mane. Before long, Apexus had her settled in his lap instead. The ways he touched her became indecent as the travel continued.

Before he could work up the appetite to pull her clothes off, Reysha whistled. It made both of them look up and spot the towers that peeked up over the horizon. “Guess we’re there!”

The city of Inero, eastern of the three Walled Ports, differentiated itself from Pernero in practically every way. It was located on a peninsula connected only via a tiny land bridge to the larger island that housed the second dungeon. Neither was there a mountain on the island that the port could have been carved out of nor was there a surrounding reef system that had been deliberately shaped into channels and deadly traps.

Due to this lack of opportunities, Inero was a comparatively simple gathering of buildings. Bricks brought from a quarry in the mainland had been bought across over the generations, gradually stacking up into tall, grey walls of rock and mortar. Several rings of fortifications surrounded uneven ring after uneven ring towards the tall palace at the centre of it all. Decade after decade, the city had expanded. Nowadays, it nearly met the shore and the first settlers were putting their houses on the other side of the land bridge.

Towers were a large part of the cityscape, a display of wealth by the merchant class and a precautionary measure by the guards, to have an easy time overseeing the streets below and the salt fields beyond the walls. The architects of Inero had the same expertise as their counterparts across the ocean when it came to moving water through channels. Sea water flooded the fields, was evaporated by the sun, and the resulting salt was then scraped together by slaves.

Because even an ocean’s divide did not change the customs of these people.

The serpent mechanism slowly sunk under the waves, leaving the party to make landfall by the typical, tall shrine. Expectedly, they were met by a small assembly of guards. The encounter went as predicted, with the soldiers leaving intimidated and the party making their way into the city under watchful eyes.

“Imma wait until nightfall to see if I can find the local scum,” the tiger girl whispered.

“We are not staying,” Apexus decided. The cobblestone streets were steadily being swept by slaves. Their clothes were of good quality, albeit bland in colouration compared to the lords and ladies wandering the streets. Inero had fused the oligarchic nature of a Walled City with the caste system to create a sort of merchant nobility that reigned above the citizenry and the slaves. Those fortunate enough to serve those that could afford to live by the main street that stretched from palace to port were well clothed and fed. Slaves beyond that had the typical sorry lot of their kind: kept in bondage in conditions reigning from unhygienic to acceptable. All of them were marked by a metal ring tightly fit to their neck, impossible to remove without the proper cutting equipment.

Although this port was different, it was also the same in all the things that Apexus had loathed about the last. Since Elaya had been reported to be the same as Mayana, that only left Hebero as a potential bastion of what he thought to be proper behaviour.

Chances were slim, he already knew that city, too, practiced slavery.

“Not going to lie… I’d rather get out of here too,” Korith stated from her perch atop Apexus’s shoulders. As with all environments with dense crowds, letting the shortstack walk was just asking for her getting separated. “Let’s take that side street!”

Apexus followed the pointing finger of the kobold and they made it off the busy main road. It only took them two crossings for the steady, sweaty smell of large humanoid gatherings to be replaced with the stench of urine. The entire area they were in now was squalid. Not a single tower rose from the buildings. It was a prison without walls.

Slaves without owners sat under shoddily constructed sunscreens, playing cards, drinking and consuming whatever numbing substances they could get their hands on. One bug-eyed man with patchy, greying hair was drunk enough to draw a knife and sway in the party’s way.

Apexus opened his mouth for a moment, to deliver a warning, but there was no sense of sapience behind those green eyes. Their colour was as muted as the mind behind them, both damaged by years upon years of alcohol, malnourishment, and other ailments.

“G… gimmeeeee…” the drunk slurred, incapable of even holding a knife up to them. Under other circumstances, onlookers would have joined the mugging. Considering the man that was leading the formation and the fact that the redhead behind him was wielding a Dalara sword, they did no such unwise thing. It was that sole old man who was too out of it to recognize how far he had to tilt back his head to look into Apexus’ eyes.

The humanoid chimera slowly extended his hand. The gesture failed to register in the mind of the man. Everything in his field of view was already swirling. A stumble nearly let him dodge. Nearly was not enough to escape Apexus. Pinching a couple blood vessels, he had the man passed out within a few moments. There wasn’t even a real struggle.

“He is not dead,” Apexus said to a pair of young men who sat near the crate he placed the old man on. They nodded, too deep in poverty to even care about the unusual sight the adventuring group posed. The nice clothes the party wore already put them in a different world. That they came from another Leaf was practically secondary.

Once the old man was situated against the wall, Apexus resumed moving. Korith slipped off his shoulders, not wanting to be stuck up there in case there was a larger altercation down the street. She was justified in the fear, as Apexus stopped ten metres down the grimy road. His fox ear turned first, responding to the sound of sleeping groans and clothes being removed.

Turning his head, the humanoid chimera saw the two youths pull anything they could off the unconscious man. “He – is not – dead!” Apexus repeated, louder than he had meant to. The young men turned their eyes his way and just blinked slowly. No understanding about what caused the interruption existed.

Apexus stomped back the way he came. Survival sense made the duo scatter, running into a nearby alleyway with what they had already robbed in hand. Left behind was one passed out old man, still unconscious due to the alcohol more so than the meridians, with barely even the muddy brown clothes on his back to call his own.

Even those would be taken from him if Apexus just left him there.

Not thinking further about it, the humanoid chimera picked the man up and threw him over his shoulder. He reeked, of booze and worse, felt icky to even touch, but Apexus still did it. “What’s the plan with him?” Reysha asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything,” Apexus responded, harsh and bitter, two intense emotions that had the trio around him exchange concerned glances. They had to walk with large strides, jump even, in Korith’s case, to keep up with the humanoid chimera’s aggressive steps. “This entire Leaf is a lecture,” he spat out.

“Darling, you’re…”

“Off centre,” he agreed and took a deep breath. With the air, he forced as much of his aggravation out of him as he could. “I still cannot fathom when it is justified to kill a person, how could I know when it is justified to kill a nation?” he looked around him. They hit the invisible barrier of districting and, across a single, partially fortified street, stepped into a nice area. With a single glare, he made the guard about to stop them decide to keep standing by the corner instead. “You are both right. We should act when we want to and we should know more. I will start here.”

With the unconscious man draped over his shoulder, the party left the city.