"How long do you think he's going to stay locked in that place?"
Livina crossed her arms, her tail swaying with the specific cadence of contained irritation — not explosion, but accumulation.
"We could be exploring the coliseum. Conquering territory. Collecting Nectar Stones." — she paused. — "Gaining power."
Morgana breathed deeply before answering. It was the kind of breath from someone who had had that thought more than once and had arrived at a different conclusion from the one being proposed.
"Livina… I know our thoughts are similar. Our nature has always been to expand, dominate, grow. But I feel that if we only think that way, we will never go far."
Livina frowned.
"Never go far? Our race dominated the stars. Entire systems. We—"
"Were hunted to extinction." Morgana's voice was quiet. Final.
The silence that followed was brief. But heavy.
Livina looked away.
It wasn't surrender — it was the movement of someone who had received an argument they couldn't immediately dismantle and had chosen not to try.
"I understand we weren't lucky… but staying locked in that building for almost three months? That doesn't solve anything."
It wasn't just impatience. It was pride. It was instinct. Expanding meant power. Nectar Stones meant relevance. Conquering meant respect. But her Lord had chosen to stay still.
Or at least that was what it seemed.
Morgana observed the castle courtyard in silence.
The territory wasn't stagnant. The wall had risen two more levels. The castle had been reinforced — its stones stronger, its foundation deeper, bolstered by the evolution of every tower rising around it. New training fields appeared. Rooms dedicated to heroes had been built — something she herself deeply appreciated, with the specific quality of a construction that had been designed by someone who understood what heroes needed and not just what made Lords stronger.
But Livina wasn't entirely wrong.
They hadn't advanced a single meter beyond the frontiers. They didn't hunt. They didn't seek new creatures. Nothing.
For any proud race, that looked like cowardice.
And yet — Morgana closed her eyes for a moment.
She remembered the battles — against Tauros, against the Chimera. She had expected enormous losses. She had expected the kind of chaos that leaves territories functional but broken on the inside. Her Lord had led everything with surgical precision — minimal losses, recovery in days, absolute victory.
Nothing he did seemed random.
Everything had purpose. Even when it didn't seem to.
"I believe we should give him a vote of confidence." — she said at last. — "He has already proven more than once that he sees something we don't."
Livina sighed.
"You are growing too fond of this human. There was a time when such a creature would have been nothing more than a pet to us."
Morgana didn't respond.
Because, deep down, there was something disturbingly true in that. He was human — a race that, compared to theirs, was considered a child. Fragile. But his perception, his capacity to anticipate movements, was something that not even among the elites of their races was common.
"He is impossible to read." — Morgana murmured. — "But he is reliable."
Livina opened a half smile.
"Hmph. This human's charm has captivated you." — she paused. — "Fine. I will trust him… for now."
She turned her body abruptly.
"Now stop talking and try to defend against my lance."
Morgana raised an eyebrow.
"That's what I'm talking about, little one. Show me that heroine strength."
Livina let out a defiant laugh.
The tail rose. Morgana stepped back a few paces, positioning herself. The training field vibrated with magical energy — arrows, explosions of green light, treebeard trying to intercept movements that changed direction before finishing. Magic against magic. Proud warriors discovering, with mutual satisfaction, that the other was harder to hit than they had calculated.
On the other side of the territory, inside the Potions and Magic House, the smell of sulfur grew more intense.
A flame appeared.
And for the first time in three months, it didn't go out.
✦
"Finally… I'm done."
My hands were trembling.
The flask between my fingers was small. Ridiculously small for what it had cost to produce.
Months breathing sulfur. Months getting proportions wrong. Months nearly setting the laboratory on fire with unstable versions that exploded before the right moment or didn't explode when they needed to. I had underestimated the difficulty with a confidence that, looking back, was embarrassing.
Mixing four or five components seemed simple in theory.
In practice it was hellish.
Wrong temperature — useless smoke. Imprecise proportion — premature explosion. Incorrect reaction time — the mixture stabilized before being useful or destabilized before being controllable. Every mistake consumed supplies I had accumulated carefully and destroyed hours of work in seconds.
"I thought it would be hard to get the quantities right… but this was practically slave labor."
There was another layer of difficulty I hadn't considered sufficiently: the Oasis didn't allow anything external to be brought in without the system's permission. No modern weapons. No advanced technology. No shortcuts.
Ironically, that leveled the field in ways that benefited those who knew how to work with what was available. There were beings capable of destroying galaxies out there — here, everyone was limited to the environment. And creating something from scratch, with materials the environment provided, was months of work.
But now I held the first functional flask.
"Zeus, update the Potions and Magic House. Register this item as the first recipe."
[ Update initiated. Estimated time: 3 hours. Components recorded. Substrates saved. Enable automatic production? ]
My heart accelerated.
This was the moment that defined everything. The Oasis had rules about what it allowed — unwritten, unexplained, discovered in practice by Lords who tried and received silence as their answer. Gunpowder had been one of the first documented attempts. Former Lords with technical knowledge, resources, clear intent. The system simply didn't register it. Manual production was theoretically possible — but without automation, without scale, without the House functioning as a multiplier, it was decades of work for a quantity that wouldn't change any battle.
Forbidden not by decree. By calculated infeasibility.
I had bet that Greek Fire would pass where gunpowder hadn't — natural components, organic process, nothing the system could classify as external technology, and above all, an end in itself. But betting wasn't knowing.
When the update was accepted with the recipe recorded, my knees gave out.
It wasn't a decision. It was the weight of three months arriving all at once — the exhaustion, the relief, and the confirmation that I had calculated correctly, all together, without order.
That was it.
The great advantage of that construction Livina had called a waste. It could only register one recipe per update — a terrible limitation in any other context. But once registered, automatic production as long as there were supplies. Without supervision. Without manual proportions. Without the risk of human error.
All of that for just three level-3 workers.
"Yes. Prioritize production for the next two months."
[ Confirmed. ]
I closed my eyes for a moment.
I stepped outside just to breathe air that didn't smell of sulfur while holding the item I had requested to be replicated.
Catapults were heavy. Turrets were static. Ballistae required structure, positioning, reload time.
But this fit in the palm of a hand.
"This little beauty is going to ruin a lot of enemies' days."
✦
"My Lord…" — Morgana appeared with the punctuality of someone who had been waiting without appearing to wait. — "I see you've finally come out of that place. What is that?"
She had been curious for weeks. I could see it in the questions she didn't ask — the kind of restraint that isn't disinterest, but respect for process.
"Greek Fire."
She took the flask. Observed the viscous, slightly amber substance with the concentration of a healer who had learned to evaluate compounds by appearance before any analysis.
"Is there fire in there?"
"Yes… and no."
Livina appeared before I could explain — with the specific timing of someone who had been closer than she had seemed.
"You finally came out, Lord. I was already getting bored." — she stopped when she saw the flask. — "That's the so-called magic?"
"Yes. And we're going to test it now."
"With what?"
"With one of your summons."
Silence.
Livina stared at me with the expression of someone calculating whether they had heard correctly.
"Lord… the treebeard is extremely resistant. Even against ordinary fire, it would hold up for a long time." — she looked at the flask. — "And that container is far too small. I don't want you to embarrass yourself."
I smiled.
"Trust me."
We went out through the gate. We went to an open area near the diverted river — enough space for what I had in mind, far enough not to hit anything I didn't want to hit.
"Bring one of the smallest ones."
She chose the smallest treebeard. Even so — nearly twenty-five meters tall, trunk with the thickness of a tower, roots disappearing into the soil like the foundation of a permanent construction.
Livina positioned it at a distance. Clearly thinking I would need space to "activate" my magic — the kind of consideration from someone who had seen magic work and was generously allowing the ritual to happen.
I found it endearing.
The treebeard began to advance. Heavy steps. Trunk creaking with the frequency of something that had grown to be immobile and had been summoned to move.
"Lord…" — Morgana was tense. — "It's getting closer."
When it came within throwing range, I launched the flask.
It shattered against the creature's torso.
For a second — nothing.
Silence.
Then the substance adhered.
And the flame appeared.
It didn't explode. It made no sound. It didn't produce the fireball that anyone present had imagined when they heard the word fire.
It simply was born.
And grew.
The treebeard began to struggle. First confused — the kind of confusion of something that had been designed to resist and was encountering something that resistance couldn't solve. Then desperate.
"What is happening?!" — Livina fell to her knees.
It wasn't a reaction to what she saw.
It was the bond.
Summoners didn't just command — they felt. The connection that linked Livina to her summons transmitted presence, intent, state. It was what made control possible in battle: she knew where each treebeard was, what it was resisting, what it was yielding to, before her eyes could confirm it.
Now it transmitted something else.
Burning. Slow. Constant. Not the kind of pain that has a peak — that rises, reaches a limit, and recedes. It was the kind that had no receding. That had no negotiation. That continued with the same intensity at second thirty as it had at second one, as though the fire didn't know there was a limit to what living matter could endure and had no intention of learning.
She pressed her hand to her chest.
"Break the bond!" — Morgana shouted.
But Livina couldn't. That was what the shock did — not paralysis of the body, but paralysis of instinct. She had lost summons before. She knew how to break the bond, knew the gesture, knew the minimal cost compared to the cost of feeling everything until the end. But the body wasn't receiving the command because part of her still hadn't processed that this was real and hadn't been designed for situations where the real didn't make sense.
Wide eyes. Irregular breathing. Her tail low for the first time since I had known her — not posture, not gesture, but pure reflex of something that had been struck in a place armor didn't cover.
The river water was instinctively drawn by the creature. It tried to throw itself in. Tried to extinguish the way burning wood should be extinguished.
But the more it was wetted — the more the flame grew.
The fire stuck. Spread. Climbed the trunk like a living parasite that had found the ideal host and had no intention of abandoning it.
There was no excessive smoke. There was no explosion. Just constant and inevitable burning.
Forty seconds.
They felt eternal.
The treebeard´s cry echoed through the territory — a sound I hadn't heard before, with the specific quality of something very large encountering something that size couldn't resolve.
Then silence.
The creature fell.
Charred from within. From the outside, still almost intact — as though the destruction had happened in layers that the surface hadn't yet registered.
Livina was breathing with difficulty. Wide eyes. Hand on her chest where the bond had just ended.
"What… did you… do to it?"
I looked at the still-smoking wood.
Then at the two of them.
"This" — "is Greek Fire."