Chapter 9: Chapter 8

Hiro and Alphonse’s party of two became a party of five as they moved deeper into the dungeon. While they had agreed to work together, they walked with quite a bit of distance between, the pair of girls walked in front with their strangely silent friend in armor trailing behind, Alphonse and Hiro brought up the rear.

Alphonse grabbed Hiro’s earlobe and dragged his head closer, hissing under his breath, “Why the fuck did you sneak off if you were just going to group up with people later? Now we have to split the dungeon reward with randoms.”

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” Hiro pouted, “If we left now we wouldn’t get any dungeon rewards.” Chronically unable to be quiet, Hiro’s response echoed off the walls of the dark narrow passageway they were walking through.

Alphonse rolled his eyes, letting his arm slacken so Hiro could straighten up. He still kept his hand on Hiro’s ear, rubbing it absentmindedly. “What? You think three could clear this dungeon without us?”

Hiro put his hand over Alphonse’s on his ear and leaned in closer to whisper conspiratorially in his slightly too loud voice, “you think they need us to get through the dungeon?”

Alphonse let go of Hiro’s ear to flick him in the forehead, right between his thin, black brows, “What happened to all the ‘I’m going to do it solo’ confidence that you had before?”

Alyss spun around, her long red ponytail smacking the armored one in the helmet. They didn’t react, “you have a lot of nerve underestimating us when you were the ones half-dead on the ground.”

“After defeating the monster solo.” Alphonse tilted his head up. His glasses caught the torchlight, glinting strangely as his brows knit together haughtily, “would you like to take the next monster on all by yourself?”

Hiro grabbed Alphonse’s arm. When Alphonse looked down, he shook his head.

Alyss scoffed, “whatever,” before turning around and catching back up with Blaze.

With his hands still on Alphonse’s arm, Hiro asked the armored companion of Blaze and Alyss, “what’s your name?”

Almost at the same time Blaze said, “his name is Mo,” and Alyss said, “it’s just an automaton my dad made.”

Alphonse’s eyebrows jumped up, “an automaton?” Before he could ask anymore, the automaton, Mo, pressed Blaze and Alyss’s heads down as something came flying at them from the shadows.

*

Kelsi grabbed Suzie’s wrist, “I think they’re right. There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s just wait for them at the safe zone.” With her lips set in a harsh, straight line, Suzie looked from the androgynous stranger, to Kelsi, to the dungeon, and then back to Kelsi, focusing on her trembling bottom lip and the tears threatening to fall from her warm, brown eyes. Suzie sighed, “Fine, we’ll head back.” Suzie started walking back along the road, Kelsi following close behind, still holding on to her wrist.

She stopped when she was right in front of the white-haired stranger, “want to walk back to the safe zone with us?”

With an ever-present simple, they shook their head. “I’m waiting here for my party to let them know what happened. We’ll probably go on our way to the next dungeon.”

Suzie nodded then continued on her way, keeping them in her peripheral vision until they were well out of sight.

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