When the captainless crew of the Shaltenforb was asked who ran their ship, Felicity was the first to wave her arms and shout, “ME! ME!”

She wasn’t the last, though, and there came a storm of competing cries for dominance and attention—as well as fists and the like.

Barely audible above the fighting, the message from Nightfall Cruiser continued, “Uh, okay then...send up your leader (that’s lead-er singular) sometime this eternity, before our lord gets bored and has their way with you.” The transmission ended.

What followed was the battle royale to end all battle royales. Those demons who weren’t immediately offed organized themselves seamlessly, as if by instinct, into tournament brackets. Then they went at it, chokeholding and drop-kicking in the corridors. No breaks.

It continued for about five human months, and ended when Felicity, wasting away and charred to the edge of her life, was pushed out of a hatch in the flea-ship’s back, into the eternal night, to meet with Lord Nyx by proxy.

Felicity had won, but the victory would feel hollow for quite some time—she’d bribed a few opponents, conned others, and as for the final match, she had agreed to carry out the final wish of an eternal glymph. All the honor of Glymph House rested on her shoulders and it was hard to celebrate anything when you felt that.

But hey, she was here, like she told herself she’d wanted. And in front of her was familiar Dodd, who’d transformed into her still-pretty-familiar tall, threatening form. After the blitz of faces hungry for blood that Felicity had just battled through, though, she found that Dodd’s face looked like a mask, a jack-o-lantern.

“Hey,” said Felicity, her voice haggard.

“Hello,” said Dodd, not lowering herself to Felicity’s level.

“What’s that thing around your neck?” asked the wood imp.

It was a noose, that deadly and incredibly un-fancy necktie. Its purpose was to magically yank Dodd out of the scene and back into the castle when necessary, but Dodd was under no obligation to say all that.

“It’s a necktie, as far as you know,” she said, and she winked unconvincingly.

“Oh... Well. What is your lord calling for? Did they know I was here or something?”

“No,” said Dodd.

“Oh... Well again. Doesn’t my existence change anything?”

“You said you were the captain of this flea,” said Dodd with a point straight down into the fingernail-textured back, “so wouldn’t claiming a connection with my lord, and your mere former lord, defeat the purpose?”

“Oh... Right.” Felicity straightened herself up and dusted her body off, flinging several scraps of dead bark away. It surprised herself a little that she didn’t end up falling to her knees, hands clasped in mock prayer, begging for a job that was simpler than the life she’d now chosen.

Then she squinted with suspicion.

“What is going on all around us?”

The eternal night of Positron Space had been flaring into supernovas since their talk began. Between the iridescent sparks and strobe auroras, armies of cruisers, battlecraws and enwidened microbes dismantled each other with weapons, personnel, psychic blasts and ED-Fields. The whole thing should’ve made Felicity’s head pound (shortly before blowing it up), but instead she and Dodd were as calm as could be.

“ED-Field,” said Dodd, since this answer was succinct enough. She traced the shape of a dome in the air.

“Ah.”

“W-well, Captain Felicity of the Shaltenforb, Lord Nyx sends the following message: if you don’t want a fight, you must surrender all you’ve got. All your goods, properties, and live peons...if any remain alive—”

“Some do!” Felicity yelped. That was another surprising change: suddenly her crew was her dignity.

“What’s your decision?”

She worked it over in her mind. “Both,” she said. “I’ll give up my things and I’ll fight.”

“...That doesn’t really make sense?”

“It does! It does. I give up everything on my ship and every title owned by my ship, but the demons you’ll have to kill to capture.”

Dodd couldn’t help but smile. “You must be crazy, acting like an archlord.”

Felicity rolled her eyes and said in sarcastic monotone, “You must be crazy serving a human.”

An insanity that Agi would call unbecoming but Nyx would be proud of.

Soon the battle for Shaltenforb’s crew erupted, literally, with such fury that it burst the flea’s flesh to pus and splinters beneath war rubble and ash. Though Nightfall Cruiser hovered nearby (connected to the flea via a long and flimsy but dramatic rope-bridge), Shaltenforb’s demons couldn’t make their way aboard. Nyx’s crew fought off the wave. The horde of imps and commoners was not only capable, but hundreds strong—a humble lot compared to archlord armies, maybe, but getting better all the time.

In the middle of the fray, protected by the bubble of an ED-Field, Lord Nyx satisfied their curiosity as well as Captain Felicity’s desires by meeting her for a one-on-one battle, and not to the death.

Felicity had recovered physically thanks to fifteen layers of pixie balm, though there was still a lost and woozy look in her eyes that wouldn’t leave until she felt she was someone’s queen. That wish didn’t fall upon every imp, but when it did, it dug its claws in with all its might.

Lord Nyx stood before her in dark armor, all dragon scales and points. The shoulders, elbows, and sides of the wrists pointed skyward. Combined with the pizza-slice triangle in their hair, the spikes evoked a castle in fog. Their gauntlets cradled a new blade, one that was thin and serrated and unfamiliar to Felicity.

A single light-charged swipe knocked Felicity into the rubble. Both knew this fight wouldn’t end any other way. But to have received so much respect from her old master—to almost have been through a passing of the torch—profoundly touched the wood imp. As she lay face-down in the broken skin, she wanted to tear up, not with regret or sorrow but with pride.

Felicity knew how much her skills had grown in the past several years—years too numerous and hazy to count. She knew she could never be the greatest, but recent actions proved that she could still be pretty darn great.

And Nyx...