The financial stability of the Cerberus Syndicate was a carefully curated fiction.
While the commoners of Sameroth traded tales of us reclining upon hoards of dragon-gold and skipping platinum coins across the river, the reality was far more abrasive. Thanks to Mrs. Higgins—a woman who viewed a "Paint Scratch" with the same legal gravity as high treason—the Syndicate was currently reduced to a singular, fossilized loaf of barley bread for breakfast.
Crunch.
Leon the Vanguard's jaw worked with the mechanical force of a rock crusher, reducing the petrified crust to fine powder. Beside him, Leonel the Archmage stared mournfully at his own portion, which sat submerged in a cup of lukewarm water like a drowning sponge.
"We require a contract," I (Leo) declared, my gaze fixed on the oak grain of the table. "One that pays before the sun sets. No drakes. No politics. No sentient wardrobes."
Nugget, our resident magma-potato, sat in the center of the table, happily gnawing on a chunk of charcoal. He was the only one in the room currently enjoying a five-star meal.
The door swung open with a violent cheerfulness. Clara, her silver robes shimmering with a fresh, crisp press, struck a pose of unearned confidence. "Lord Leo! The hour of my ascension is upon us! The Guild has cleared me for the D-Rank Promotion Exam!"
"Congratulations," I said, my voice hollow. "Try not to perish."
"It is a solo subjugation under veteran oversight!" She slammed a parchment onto the oak. "I humbly request the Cerberus Syndicate as my official proctors!"
I surveyed the target: Five Blue Slimes. Location: Whispering Woods (Safe Zone). Payout: Fifty Silver.
Fifty silver—the exact ransom required to satisfy Mrs. Higgins's "Staircase Wear-and-Tear Fee." To earn it, we merely had to stand in a sunny clearing and watch a teenager poke gelatinous blobs with a stick.
"We accept," I said.
Disguising a Calamity Griffin in a high-density apartment block was a task for a master of espionage. Leon unlatched his massive steel breastplate, tucking Nugget into the padded tunic beneath. The result was a walking, armored incubator. Within minutes, Leon's chest plate began to glow with a dull, cherry-red heat, and a thin, incriminating wisp of smoke curled from his gorget.
"Hot," Leon grunted, his eyes watering.
"Endure," I commanded. "The rent demands a sacrifice."
An hour later, the Whispering Woods greeted us with an insulting level of tranquility. The air was a cocktail of pine and sunlight. A lone Blue Slime, roughly the size of a watermelon, bounced through the tall grass with the rhythmic, brainless joy of a wet pillow.
"Engage," I intoned, taking my place upon a fallen log.
I arranged my extensions. Leon sat to my left, a smoldering monolith of iron. Leonel leaned against a tree to my right. It was a perfect scene of stoic observation. But the Whispering Woods possessed a hidden predator: the mosquito.
Bzzzz.
The insect landed on Leonel's pale forearm. It struck.
The [Trinity Soul]'s sensory feedback followed its usual, cruel arithmetic. A single, insignificant itch was multiplied by three and injected directly into my central nervous system. It didn't feel like a bite; it felt like a needle of liquid fire was being threaded through my shared arm.
Stoicism, I coached my fractured mind. The proctor must remain a statue.
Meanwhile, Clara launched her assault. "HAA!" she yelled, swinging her wooden staff.
Smack.
The staff connected. The Slime jiggled with indifferent elasticity, then bounced forward to nudge Clara's shin.
"Tough armor!" Clara gasped, leaping back. "I must employ the Syndicate's psychological shroud! Rule #4: The Slumber of Dominance!"
She dropped her staff, curled into a fetal position upon the moss, and squeezed her eyes shut. The Slime, possessing no cognitive capacity for intimidation, simply rolled forward and began to methodically envelop her head like a giant, blueberry-flavored jelly mold.
"Mmph!" muffled sounds emerged from the Slime's interior. "I... mmmph... yielding!"
She is going to suffocate in a puddle of jello, I realized. Panic flared across the network. I threw my processing power into a two-stage rescue combo. Leon, the shield-toss! Leonel, the Empower buff!
But the itch on my shared arm had reached a crescendo of distributed agony. As I issued the commands, my main body reflexively reached out to scratch Leonel's arm.
The movement threw our physical geometry into a tailspin. Leon unclipped his massive tower shield and hurled it with the force of a trebuchet, but my main body's lurch bumped his shoulder. The hundred-pound slab of steel soared in a magnificent, tragic arc, violently decapitating a pristine pine tree behind us.
Leonel raised his staff to cast [Empower] upon the Knight. But with my primary fingers currently digging into his forearm, his targeting matrix shifted. The golden beam of Tier-6 Enhancement Magic shot across the clearing and anchored squarely into the Slime's gelatinous core.
Flash.
The Blue Slime didn't just grow; it mutated. Its bubbly exterior hardened into an armored, crystalline shell. Its core began to pulse with a dark, rhythmic purple mana. With a gurgling roar that shook the pines, the Carriage-sized Titanic Crystal Slime locked its mindless gaze on the gasping Clara.
"Spontaneous A-Rank mutation!" Clara shrieked, scrambling back through the dirt.
I have created a god of jello, I thought, my soul beginning to drift toward the afterlife.
"ATTACK!" I (Leo) bellowed.
I commanded the triad to charge. But the Whispering Woods held one final trap: a moss-covered root. My main body tripped. Because my nervous system demanded total synchronization in moments of high stress, my clones mirrored the failure with haunting precision.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The Cerberus Syndicate performed a flawless, synchronized face-plant into the loam. We lay there, three legends biting the dust, while the Slime leapt into the air to crush our squire beneath ten tons of magically enhanced vitriol.
Then, from the dust of our failure, the incubator unlatched.
"Peep!"
Nugget rolled out of Leon's armor like a glowing, feathery bowling ball. He was annoyed. His nap had been interrupted by a rhythmic vibration of the earth. He shook the dirt from his wings, glowing with a furious, blinding white heat. He looked up at the descending blueberry god.
"PEEEEEP!"
Nugget opened his beak and released a condensed needle of pure, Calamity-class thermal energy. The beam pierced the Titanic Slime. Slimes are largely aqueous; when ten tons of water meets the temperature of a collapsing star, physics demands an exit.
FWOOSH.
The anomaly didn't melt. It flash-vaporized. A wall of steam exploded across the clearing, followed by a deafening whistle as the A-Rank threat was boiled into a memory. A single, glowing purple crystal dropped from the sky. Nugget caught the core in his beak, swallowed it with a satisfied burp, and waddled back to Leon's leg, demanding re-entry into the warm metal.
I lay in the dirt, the mosquito bite finally a dull throb.
"I... I understand," Clara whispered into the silence.
I pushed myself into a seated position. My clones mirrored me, rubbing their respective bruised noses.
"You do?" I asked.
"It was the ultimate gauntlet of resolve!" Clara cried, her quill a blur across her notebook. "You deliberately mutated the beast to A-Rank to force me to confront my mortality! You feigned a physical collapse to test my willingness to stand alone! And you only commanded your familiar to strike at the exact heartbeat of my spiritual awakening!"
She fell to her knees in worship. "Rule #33: True pedagogy requires the threat of total annihilation. The Cerberus method is... terrifying!"
I looked at Leon. He was opening his breastplate so the bird could climb back into its "disguise." I looked at Clara, whose absolute fanaticism had just rationalized the fact that I accidentally buffed a monster, tripped over a root, and let a chicken do all the work.
"Yes," I (Leo) intoned, standing with a pained, SSS-Rank dignity. "The pedagogy. You have passed, Clara. Your resolve is... adequate."