Rico came out of the lime-oak clone like a man fleeing responsibility. Which was accurate.
Behind him came the elf children, all of them yelling at once, their voices high and full of energy in a way only children with absurd stats and very little sense of moderation could manage.
Phong looked up from where he sat near the empty food stand and immediately understood two things: first, the children had finished training for the day; and second, Rico had lost another argument.
The elf children had started training daily with one of the Greencap knights, and the results were getting stranger by the day. Even at level 13, with their stats already brushing against fifty, they could give a level 36 bunny knight real trouble if the knight let his guard drop for even a second.
Not enough to beat him. Not even close. Still enough to be a headache, though. Enough that Phong had already caught one Greencap muttering under his breath about how elf children should not be allowed to hit that hard.
Still, the only reason the children stayed focused through training at all was simple. Rico. Or more precisely, the promise of playing horsy with Uncle Rico after training. With Rico being the horse, of course.
The raccoon skidded to a stop the moment he saw Phong, as if hoping the presence of an adult would somehow cancel his fate. It did not. The raccoon skidded to a stop the moment he saw Phong, as if hoping the presence of an adult would somehow cancel his fate. It did not. The children hit him like a tidal wave of leafy limbs and demands.
"Uncle Rico!"
"Horsy!"
"You promised!"
"Fast horsy!"
Rico threw both paws into the air in loud protest. "Raccoon oppressed! Child labor! Horse labor!"
"You are not labor," Nyx would have said if she were there. "You are entertainment."
Phong watched in silence for about three seconds. Then one corner of his mouth twitched upward. That was all the sympathy Rico was getting.
The raccoon tried to climb onto a crate to escape. One elf child grabbed his tail. Another latched onto his arm. A third had already started trying to climb onto his back with the confidence of a tiny warlord claiming a mount.
Rico looked at Phong with betrayal in his eyes. Phong looked back with the calm of a father who had learned long ago that some problems were self-inflicted.
"You enabled them," he said.
"I encouraged joy!"
"You encouraged this."
Rico opened his mouth to argue. Then, because his instincts were stronger than his dignity, he spotted the rest of Phong's coffee. That ended the conversation immediately. The raccoon twisted free from the children for exactly two seconds, lunged for the stash, and came up with it clutched to his chest like a dragon stealing treasure.
"Emergency ration!"
"That is theft," Phong said.
"It is survival!"
The children, seeing he had stopped moving again, resumed the assault.
By the time the scene settled, Rico had somehow lost both the moral argument and the physical one. He ended up on all fours with two elf children on his back, one trying to steer him by the ears, and the rest running around him in delighted circles.
Phong let them have it for a while.
The lake region had seen enough grief lately. If it got an afternoon of children laughing while a raccoon suffered, the world could endure that much absurdity.
Later, when the play was finally burned out of them for the moment, Rico dumped the children back at Phong's place like unwanted royal luggage.
The elves immediately swarmed their father and started talking over one another about training, the knight, who cheated, who hit harder, and how Uncle Rico was a slow horse and should be upgraded.
Rico pointed a paw at them in outrage. "Slander!"
Phong only nodded vaguely, already sorting which parts were complaint and which parts were actual useful progress. Then Rico left again. No drama this time. No explanation, either.
He just adjusted the little treant on his back, checked that his stolen coffee was secure, and wandered off with the air of someone very committed to private schemes. Phong watched him go and knew enough not to ask. He had already figured out what the raccoon was doing in broad strokes. Rico was training the young treant's stamina, trying to extend the duration of his Kamen Rider forms. The five-minute limit had clearly offended him on a spiritual level. Where exactly he went to train, though, Phong did not know. And that was fine. Rico was reckless in many ways, but not stupid about the big things. He respected Shifting enough to stay away from unfamiliar terrain unless someone stronger or more knowledgeable was with him. That alone put him above a surprising number of humans Phong had known.
So Phong let him go. Around him, the elf children were already tugging at his sleeves again, asking for food, asking if they trained well, asking if they could beat more bunnies tomorrow, asking if Uncle Rico could be a faster horse.
Phong sighed and stood. The day was not done yet. It rarely was. Phong fed everyone before he let himself think again. The elf children came first because if they did not, they became a natural disaster in small bodies. Nyx got hers with the calm dignity of someone pretending she had not already been waiting in the best possible spot. Bruno wagged so hard he nearly upset a stool. Little Fireball perched on the edge of the table and chirped until Phong slid a portion her way, then acted as if it had been her right all along.
The meal had barely started before Little Fireball tried to expand her faith. She hopped closer to the elf children, pecked at the tablet screen, and proudly showed them one of her treasured K-dramas. The screen lit up with beautiful people, tears, and the kind of emotional misery only television could stretch into several episodes.
The children watched for all of twenty seconds. Then one of them frowned. "Too whiny."
Another looked up at Phong with complete sincerity. "Why they not talk together?"
Phong blinked.
The child pointed at the screen, where two tragic idiots were clearly suffering from a misunderstanding that could have been solved in one conversation.
"You and Alex talk all time," the child said. "Why these people not do that?"
That was... a very fair question.
Phong looked at the screen. Then at Little Fireball, who chirped in scandalized protest. Then back at the children. He had no good answer.
So he just shrugged. "Bad writing."
Little Fireball gasped in bird. The children ignored her and went back to eating.
He had just started relaxing into the simple rhythm of feeding them when a figure approached the edge of camp and waited with the careful politeness of someone who understood Timatoes existed nearby.
It was one of the andromorphic mice from the Great Burrow. Small, neat, alert-eyed, dressed in practical gear with pouches and wrappings that suggested travel and trade more than war. The mouse bowed slightly.
"The Farmer," it said.
Phong glanced up. "That's me."
The envoy stepped closer only after the Timatoes rolled aside with visible disapproval. "We come to ask for trade."
That caught Phong's attention fully.
The mouse laid the offer out simply. Medicinal roots. Useful minerals. In return, they wanted food, surface soil, surface seeds... and to be taught how to farm.
Phong did not answer right away. Not because the offer was bad. Because something in it bothered him.
"How do you know about soil and seeds," he asked, "or me teaching that."
The envoy twitched one whisker, then explained. The Great Burrow did not exist only here. Like the Scale Throne of the lizardmen, their tunnels and settlements stretched across floors. But unlike the lizardmen, they were weak. Too many of their people lacked combat classes. Too few of them could hold territory by force. So on Floor 2 they had become vassals of the lizardmen for protection. On Floor 3, they gave tribute to the Greencap Kingdom for the same reason.
One of their scouts, it turned out, had learned of Phong's deal with Pioneer Squad Twelve of the Greencap Kingdom when the mice had gone to offer tribute to the Greencap King.
That made sense. Too much sense! Phong's eyes narrowed anyway.
The mouse did not flinch. It continued and finally reached the heart of the matter. The Great Burrow's soldiers and knights received a buff tied to the size of their kingdom. The more mice they had, the stronger their defenders. But in famine, population fell. And when their numbers dropped, so did the strength of the very forces meant to protect them.
A bad harvest did not merely make them hungry. It made them weak enough to be prey. That was why the mice had come. Not from greed. From fear with numbers attached.
Phong sat with that for a moment. Then realized, with a slow and unpleasant clarity, that he had made a mistake. He had distributed food equally. One portion here. One portion there. One line, one measure, one reasonable handout at a time.
Equal. But not fair. Not when one race's stability depended directly on population in a way another's did not. Not when different cultures, classes, and biological pressures turned the same amount of food into wildly different outcomes.
The realization sat bitter on his tongue. He looked at the envoy again. Then nodded once. "I'll help."
Relief flickered across the mouse's face before discipline pulled it back under control.
Phong held up one finger. "One condition."
The envoy waited.
"The Great Burrow listens to human divers for me."
Now it was the mouse's turn to pause, calculating. Then it nodded. "Agreed."
That was that. A trade. Food and farming for intelligence.
Exactly the kind of thing Phong had learned to build his life on.
The envoy bowed again and withdrew, careful not to turn its back too quickly on the Timatoes. Phong watched it go, then looked down at the children finishing their meal, at Nyx licking one paw clean, at Bruno trying to look as if he had not already checked whether seconds were possible, at Little Fireball still offended on behalf of dramatic television.
Tomorrow's food stand would have to change. New rules. Not simply equal shares.
Phong leaned back and exhaled through his nose. Another day. Another lesson in how feeding people was never just feeding people. Especially down here.