Gathering their belongings was, predictably, a short affair.

Katherine had all her things in some dingy apartment somewhere, and Emhreeil herself, well…

She only had that Guard’s outfit that she had grown… oddly attached to, and the little goblin she’d apparently, unknowingly, acquired.

The panic about that particular bit could come later, when she would be forced to make a decision of what to do with the little thing.

She felt along the cleaned jacket, made for a man three times her size, and felt a strange sense of importance hidden within a simple weave.

This wasn’t just a jacket to her, not really. This was the blanket she’d been swaddled in after her baptism of acid and blood. The sole comfort she had as she stumbled through empty hallways and felt her body slowly fail. A thick, oversized, padded jacket that was still warm, that made her feel like she was being hugged, back when she thought her friend was dead.

It was also a reminder.

Both of what she’d done, and the version of herself she’d had to leave behind.

She grabbed it by its nape, and lifted it, before shuffling her left arm into the jacket’s, then lifting the arm and sort of… awkwardly shuffling her shoulders into the jacket by shrugging and wriggling around.

She examined herself with a small flare of mana.

One sleeve hung down, empty. The other was oversized, but not too long. The jacket didn’t even need the buttons to close, it was so big compared to her frame that it simply draped over her front like a blanket or a robe.

It was a bit difficult to visualize how she might seem to another, but in her opinion… she looked oddly good in it.

It gave off this sense of… lazy, uncaring authority, almost. An imposing jacket that obviously belonged to a guard, that wasn’t being worn properly nor fit on her.

That thought, of how she looked, brought a bit of insecurity to the surface.

Kat was sitting silently on the couch, lost in thought.

Emhreeil felt a pang of embarrassment in her gut for what she was about to ask, a reminder that maybe she hadn’t left as much of her old self behind as she would have liked.

“You really, really shouldn’t wear that.” Katherine said before she could even open her mouth, and she turned slightly to face her.

“...Why? This is the third floor, right? Guards don’t wander around here… usually...” She trailed off, her brows furrowing as she tilted her head. Why had there been Guards in that waste disposal facility?

Katherine opened her mouth, then closed it. Squinted at empty air, a bit.

“How long did you say you were in the sewers for?” Kat asked, and she felt an odd sense of foreboding.

What had she missed?

“I can’t say with any accuracy, but it felt like months. Realistically, at least one? Maybe a bit less?” She started, turning to face her friend fully, and felt her knees wobble from the motion, one of her knees suddenly just giving out without any warning, nor sign of actual strain.

Katherine was out of her seat before her yelp had even finished, before her outstretched hand could even reach the couch, hands fisted onto the jacket, pulling her up and closer, straight.

Goddamn it. She had to eat again. And not just… these little snacks.

She straightened with a sigh, and could feel the worried twist to Katherine’s features as she used the jacket to hold her up, pull her straight.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure-”

“Kat, you’re not princess carrying me through the streets.”

Katherine’s mouth clicked shut with a nod, and after making sure she was stable, stepped back.

“Anyways. Why did you ask? What did I miss?”

The deep, deep breath that Katherine took before exhaling it all out in an equally massive sigh, was all the warning she got before those three words left her mouth, and she froze in the middle of trying to straighten the jacket one-armed.

“A civil war.”

Her sightless glare crawled to meet Katherine’s as her slack jaw jerkily closed.

“I… explain?”

“It’s… a lot of things. I don’t know the whole of it, but Lady Anna does, and she likes to rant when she’s upset. Long story short, there was an attack on a teleporting station near the Golden Road, by some adventurer’s group based on the third floor. Second strongest, right after The Scions, and as far as the newspapers say, it was a very small gap. I think their team name was Seven-Six-Two. The station… well, it burned down. The highborn didn’t take kindly to all this, flooded the dungeon with the Guard to bring the place to heel, but it’s only escalating. I’d expect a full war to begin soon.”

She remembered that station.

Thus, that statement didn’t make any sense.

“What do you mean the station burned down? There’s nothing flammable there.” She uttered quietly.

The jacket was starting to weigh on her weak frame.

“I mean that it turned into a giant lake of molten metal and glass, Em.” Kat said, with an odd tone of having given up on thinking about how insane that was.

Emhreeil tried to picture it. That building, so impossibly gargantuan, two floors of epic proportions that made any human that walked within them feel like an ant in a human’s palace, enchanted from top to bottom almost, all turned to molten slag.

It was genuinely too hard to even imagine that. The scope was too wide, the feat too ridiculous.

“There’s literally nothing left of it. There were some vivid descriptions in the papers about it. There was this… vortex of almost white fire that could literally be seen from the Royal Palace across half the country in broad daylight and by the time The Crimson Guard managed to smother it, the station was melted and vaporized along with a hundred feet of the surrounding area being torched black. The latest death report was almost two and a half thousand dead, and counting. A lot of tradesmen, some minor nobles, adventurers too. Not just civilians. People call the station’s remains ‘The Brand’ now, because from above, that’s what it looks like.” Katherine finished, her tone with that tiny inflection that suggested she was explaining as much as she was reciting to her what she’d read.

Wordlessly, she walked up to the couch Kat was leaning against, and did the same, arms limp by her side on its leathery back.

The Crimson Guard. She remembered reading about them as a teenager, not by her own choice, but intently all the same.

They were essentially demigods, by most people’s standards. The best of the best that Carmera’s Royal Family could afford, the ones who delved two, three levels down into the Factory just to keep leveling. The ones who would get sent overseas in place of an actual army, to deal with whatever uppity kingdom decided to send ships over the Black Ocean to reach Carmera.

They were never enough to hold the territory, but that wasn’t their role. They were a walking team of weapons. Declare war on Carmera, the country with the most profitable, largest, and most brutal Dungeon in the entire world, and you could expect these six to drop out of the sky, raze a couple of your port cities to the ground, annihilate your navy then disappear again.

Carmera hadn’t been at war in over ninety years, and part of it was attributable to the Crimson Guard. Of course, the giant, dark ocean covered in unspeakable horrors and Leviathans also contributed heavily to making Carmera unable to expand or be invaded by sea. The lightning cannons covering the mountains and walls made aerial assault impossible as well, at least by any large force.

But the Crimson Guard were a big part of this... untouchable nature of Carmera. At least from the outside.

All of a sudden, she was rather glad she’d read up on the basics of military history. The added context was immensely helpful to help her frame these events in her head.

To hear that even with the Crimson Guard at the scene, two thousand people ended up dead, was difficult to even comprehend. They were a team built for war, but still, they had to have barriers, some kind of damage control capabilities, right?

And what Kat had mentioned about a full-blown civil war erupting…

Carmera had a standing army, yes.

But it was tiny in comparison to the actual population. How would this even work? Would they just conscript literal tides of mercenaries from overseas with the next metal shipment?

Or would they just conscript from the various factions that inevitably would form from the Kingdom trying to expand into the Dungeon properly? Then, it might not be “the kingdom versus the uppity undersiders”, it would just be common man versus common man, fighting for who would hold their leash.

Like slaves.

Like dogs.

The whole situation was only just unraveling itself to her and she already hated everything about it. She wanted nothing to do with this.

So with a heavy heart, she sighed, and shrugged off the red jacket, which Katherine quickly noticed her struggling with and helped by tugging the sleeve off her hand.

“Thanks.” She muttered, and flexed her shoulder blades a little, leaning back. Katherine nodded, gathering the jacket and folding it on her lap, likely out of habit.

A minute passed in silence, both of them lost in their thoughts. She was just trying not to think too much about the civil war.

Eventually, Katherine tapped her forearm, and she focused back on the present.

“Did you run into a golem, by any chance?” Katherine asked, and nodded her head towards the goblin girl, who was sitting cross legged, holding the bundle made of her own shirt shut against her stomach.

Emhreeil startled as she realized how Katherine knew that.

“I- Yeah. Wait, is that what she’s been holding onto this entire time?” She asked, voice rising in hope.

Katherine nodded.

She groaned in pure, unadulterated relief, slumping slightly.

Feeling oddly reinvigorated, she pushed off the couch and quickly walked to the goblin, who watched her like a wary owl chick, eyes wide and body curling down like a wary animal trying to mold its body to the wall.

She tried to crouch down, but with how weak her legs felt, she only just managed not to fall on her ass, fumbling down to sit cross-legged next to the goblin with jerky, clumsy movements.

For a moment, they just “stared” at each other.

Emhreeil found that the goblin was…

It was adorable. And something about that was so… disconcerting on an emotional level.

Her entire life, she’d been told goblins were these… horrid, malformed creatures with gigantic triangles for noses, beady red eyes, mismatched teeth and a permanent sneer of hatred. Subhuman wretches that were too lowly to ever enter their walls, neither as servants nor slaves nor pets.

In the Dungeon, she’d seen a decent amount of them, which clued her in to the descriptions being rather exaggerated.

But seeing something in crappy lighting through a crowd, usually from a fair distance away, was not nearly enough to realize how exaggerated.

Her eyes were huge. Her hair was short and scruffy, not reaching past her shoulders, and her nose was like a little button. She almost wanted to press it.

She couldn’t see her eyes beyond feeling the surrounding eyelids and tension in her features, but she assumed they were not beady red holes of hatred.

And her ears were not these… leathery, scrunched flaps of skin she’d been expecting. They felt more like Emhreeil’s ears before she lost most of them, just upsized by twenty times, being longer than the goblin’s head from chin to hair, and subtly moving with muscles hidden behind the ear’s base. It was cute.

She wanted to touch them.

The goblin uncurled the shirt-dress, hesitantly, and fished out the objects Emhreeil had been inwardly stressing about, and suppressing. A compass and a golem core. She sort of held them in her open palms together, making an odd, questioning croak.

Emhreeil couldn’t help but feel her lips twitch into a small smile. She sounded like a squeaky little frog.

For a thoughtless moment, she moved her arms to take them, before remembering her right arm was no longer there and awkwardly abandoning the motion. She licked her lips.

“Kat? Could you grab and hold onto these?” She asked, and gestured to her stump as if to answer a question not yet spoken.

Katherine simply nodded, and marched over like a soldier, making the goblin tense a little bit, before extending her hands to Katherine.

Her friend shoved the things into her coat pockets with genuine care, as deep as they could go, and the goblin shifted, pulling up the stretched shirt until it was on her knees.

Which had the very unfortunate side effect of making Emhreeil momentarily feel her… private bits with mana, and she froze, immediately halting the small pulses she’d been sending in her direction.

God damn it, it was already awkward enough trying to regulate the mana pulses enough to not go through Katherine’s clothes and accidentally “feel her up”, now she felt like some disgusting creep.

She dropped her face into her open palm, and groaned.

“Why is she not wearing any clothes besides the shirt?” She miserably whined, and after a moment of silence, Katherine inhaled sharply, before clearing her throat awkwardly.

“Oh. Oh, u-uhm, we didn’t… I mean, she didn’t really grab enough attention for someone to notice. I- I didn’t think about your… Skill. I’ll go ask Lady Anna for some garments her size. The things I requested from her should be ready as well. I- sorry? I’ll be back.” Katherine fumbled before fleeing, and Emhreeil couldn’t help but snicker a little at how easily flustered her friend got by the insinuation.

Then she remembered her previous request she hadn’t gotten to ask, and jerked her head up.

“Wait! Could you grab some bandages or a veil too? It’s just…” She waited until Katherine turned around, and vaguely gestured at the disfigured mess that was her head.

Katherine nodded, expression not shifting in the slightest from the mildly embarrassed purse of her lips, then turned away again and fled.

With nothing else to do, she sent another pulse of mana, a small one, roughly where the goblin’s head was, taking great care to direct and weaken it.

It was staring at her, its head tilted, blinking lazily.

She wanted to pet it.

Wait, no.

Her.

The girl wasn’t an animal. She was told they were like one, and it certainly didn’t seem much more intelligent than a human child, but it felt wrong to call her an ‘it’.

Thoughts freshly organized, she doubled back on the initial impulse.

She wanted to pet her.

She shuffled forward, a little bit, before slowly extending her hand towards her.

The goblin sort of… scrunched her shoulders up, eyes widening as she tried to curl her neck down to hide her head between her tiny shoulders, likely staring at Emhreeil’s hand, judging by the angle of her head.

The same hand that had turned a man’s head into charred paste a mere foot or two away from her, back in the factory.

With that thought in mind, Emhreeil was fully expecting the goblin to flee or just lean away in fear at least, but proving her previous bravery in both helping her initially and not fleeing when Emhreeil walked away, she just progressively tensed, but stayed put.

Her fingers brushed against scruffy hair, and it was exactly what she was expecting.

Greasy, dirty, and likely stiff with errant chemicals that had glued onto the strands and made them feel more like coarse hay. It oddly reminded her of the wolf's fur.

She didn’t feel much revulsion, truth be told. She’d licked blood and spider slime off her buddy. She was beyond such things by now. She didn’t feel much beyond an odd sense of gratitude.

Had this little thing not given her that health potion, “wasted it” according to the guard, could she have even been coherent enough to realize what she had to do? Would she have been able to even coordinate her body and mind enough to kill the guards?

Was this yet another person or something close to one, that she owed her life to?

She didn’t know how she could fit the goblin into her makeshift little team, nor what she would do when she’d find her friend again. Hell, she didn’t even know how she would go with him, if she could even keep up with him and help him or just be a burden. She wasn’t even sure if he’d want her to come with him.

And if she did go, what about Katherine? What about this nameless goblin that she was now apparently in charge of?

Part of her, a guilty, whispering, feral part of her, wished to leave all this behind, completely and utterly, and stalk back into the bowels of this hell pit, as long as her friend was by her side. To leave civilization and connections behind, to kill her old self completely and utterly, disconnect.

But she couldn’t do that to Katherine. She couldn’t do that to herself after all that struggle to find her again.

When the time came, maybe she could work on some sort of compromise. A half-way, some way she could keep her pie and eat it too.

Her fingers inched forward into the strands, an inch, two, and tension melted off the goblin’s shoulders, lowering.

Her palm came to cover her head, and she awkwardly brushed her fingers through the dirty locks, back, in a way she was unfamiliar with, a way she barely remembered Katherine doing to her, ages ago when she’d be at her lowest and needed someone to care.

A sniffle made her pause, her brows rising in surprise, and she drew her hand back as she felt with phantom fingers, the shy crawl of tears moving down the goblin’s cheeks.

Before her fingertips could extract themselves fully, an odd garbled whimper left the goblin’s lips, and small fingers clasped around her wrist for the second time since they first met, tugging her hand back.

Confused, she just let the goblin drag her hand back onto its- her head, and then let it sit there for a moment, as she wondered what she was doing. The goblin poked her fingers, nuzzled her head into her hand, pushed against it, and Emhreeil experimentally moved her fingers, brushing through her hair.

The goblin’s hands retreated to sit on her lap, and she leaned her head up into Emhreeil’s touch like some kind of needy puppy, sniffling again.

Her expression slackened in understanding, and without needing more prompting, she continued her ministrations, pressing firmly down and through her hair.

She could easily picture herself in the goblin’s position, years ago, when her father had pet her head as a child. If she just removed some inhibition, if she added a dash of naivety, and removed the first few years of her life spent in happiness, she could very easily put her old self right where the goblin was, needy for a caring touch.

Goddamn it. For fucks sake.

She didn’t need more emotional connections. She really, really, really didn’t want more. It was both a weakness waiting to be taken away, and a rope around her waist that held her back from letting go completely, going with her wolfen friend the moment she could.

But the girl was just too adorable. She’d saved her life, and even held onto her belongings for what according to Katherine, must have been close to a week. Never letting go of the rumpled shirt, stalking around corners, holding onto her things for her until she asked to have them.

She let out a sob-sigh of frustrated resignation, giving herself over to the mercurial things known as ‘feelings’, and hung her head as she used her thumb to rub around the goblin’s temple, before thumbing at the base of her ear when she moved her hand forward.

The soft little sounds of contentment were not enough to mute the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps, and the moment the door opened, the goblin turned her face away, using one hand to rub at her eyes with a sniffle, but did not lean away from her touch.

Katherine paused at the door, staring, the bags in her hand swaying from her abandoned momentum.

Emhreeil wet her lips, before looking in her direction and shrugging helplessly.

Katherine let out a soft, bemused 'huh' sound.