**Somewhere in the Sky Kingdom jurisdiction**
**Timeframe: a week and a half after the Blue Phoenix incident back in the Valley**
The Mist Flower Fields were silent—except for the sound of a girl waking up atop a large corpse.
She had opened one eye while keeping the other closed, slightly covered by her bangs that fell over her face. A trail of drool formed on the side of her mouth over one of the snakebite piercings that she had on each end of her bottom lip, with a finished popsicle stick hanging off from her mouth to the side.
Her hair was a short bob, black with a green ombre. The one eye that opened was a starker emerald green. A dark gray hood was worn over her head, with black fur on the edges of it, symbolic of a jacket worn by a certain Guild from the Valley Kingdom.
She was probably eighteen, and she let out a low moan like it was a drag to have just woken up. "Mmm…" she said miserably.
Another voice popped in, almost out of nowhere, as she continued lying on top of whatever she had decided to call her bed. The voice sighed deeply before speaking. "Miss Jo, please wake up now. We don't need to be here any longer—it's time to make it back to the De—"
"Ugh… shut up, Nyx… two more hours, please… Such a pain," the young girl interrupted as she turned her head away as if to fall back asleep.
"MISS JO, NO! BY THE KEEPER, YOU HAVE BEEN SLEEPING HERE FOR THE PAST DAY AND A HALF. THE MISSION WAS COMPLETED TWO DAYS AGO! CAN WE PLEASE GET GOING NOW?? MISS JO… MISS JO!" the voice shouted, then stopped in defeat as the female let out a soft snore.
Out of thin air, a small figure appeared next to her. It had short, stubby of arms and legs and small wings. The head was the shape of a dragon's skull with two horns, and black, hollow sockets for eyes. The entirety of its small toy-like body was made of ice and appeared almost transparent as it waddled over to the girl sleeping there.
"Oh, Keeper why do you make me suffer so?" the small ice figure, Nyx, complained as it attempted to move her with its stubby arms.
She moaned again as it moved her back and forth. She then took a drowsy hand and shoved the small ice anomaly away, bickering to her as she did.
She was petite, and wore mainly black from her cropped, oversized puffer jacket to her short bodycon dress. And underneath, she had straps that attached from the bottom of her skirt to her sheer black thigh-high stockings, ending in glossy heeled, platform Mary Jane shoes.
On the back of her oversized jacket was the faint symbol of a distinct wolf logo hidden behind a small green backpack with fake dragon wings flaring from it. Her hood even had custom stud-like horns built in, resembling the horns on Nyx.
But the part of her that stood out the most, and the part of her that was anything but fake, was a thick, scaly green dragon tail protruding out from behind a custom hole on the back of her skirt. It was quite long and whipped on its own every so often.
Still attempting to wake her, Nyx continued to bicker to himself inaudibly. There, as the scene of them expanded, the midnight-colored Mist Flower Fields glowed with a shimmering blue.
Frozen statues of both humans and beasts were scattered all throughout the field. Layered in between them were large, spiked pillars of ice, and the girl, in the center of it all, sleeping atop a Grade 1 Berserker—the kind that normally required entire squads to subdue—now frozen stiff beneath her like some massive, glittering bed.
Her yawn, followed by her soft snores, and Nyx's bickering were the only sounds filling the space in this sweeping landscape of cold, sparkling quiet.
She had just completed her solo mission here a week or so after the Black Wolves had finished dealing with the Blue Phoenix incident. And at this time, she had decided to take a 'short' break before heading back.
Her name was JoAnne, Jo for short, and she was the Black Wolves' 1st Ace.
"Mmm… See you soon, GG…"
Her tail flicked once—like the name alone was enough to look forward to.