“Second best mount? You mean Linnaeus is the best?” Nick asked.

“No, boss is. He’s the number one mount. I’d like to—”

“Easy there, Bonnie,” Lucas said, stopping her before she turned a pleasant post-battle congratulatory moment into an R-rated conversation needing adult supervision.

“Sorry, boss.” Bonnie looked down at the ground and tried to look abashed despite being betrayed by her still-wagging tail.

“Anyway,” Lucas said, stepping through the puddles of blood and over the bodies as he crossed the hallway to his crew, “you guys did great to make it here so quickly. Thank you.”

“Aww, is boss getting mushy?” Bonnie asked with a laugh, but her mocking tone was undermined by the fact her tail was now twitching around even faster than before.

“Yeah, just a bit,” Lucas said. Looking at the group, he was reminded of the board back when he started the company. The business had just been Lucas and Yu Hua at first, but the people he picked up, the people who were running it now, were all men and women whom he considered friends. They were also people he was currently ignoring as he wallowed away his time in the game. Well, it’s not like it really matters. With the way they were handling the company, it wasn’t like he was needed, and it wasn’t like he needed the job. He’d have just been dead weight in the company these days. But here? Here he was needed. This group of players he stood with now relied on him, and looking at them, he realized that he was starting to rely on them too.

“Umm . . . I . . . uhh . . . Thank you,” Katie said to Lucas while the rest of the group was just chuckling and chitchatting.

“Huh?” Lucas looked over at her, and then he saw Isabel’s Tears in her hand. “Oh, don’t mention it. It’s not a big deal.”

“No, I mean . . . umm . . . Really, I . . . Thank you.” She clutched the bow tightly to her chest as a red color stained her cheeks.

“Really. No big deal. Thank you for rushing over here,” Lucas said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Well, what’s next? Anyone left to kill?” Bonnie asked, looking at the slew of corpses. “There were more players here than I expected.”

“Yeah, there were a lot of players, but I don’t think that there are any left,” Lucas said. “As far as what’s next . . .” He looked over to the noble couple and let the unfinished sentence hang as he tried to figure out what he wanted to do.

Apparently, while Lucas had been greeting all the people that came to help him, Rowland and Dennings had started wrapping around each other against a wall with a few of the guards watching. Not far from them, Smash was busy picking up one body after another and eating each in as few bites as possible.