Rico's leveling expedition began with a declaration.
He stood on a crate in Fort Erymanthian's inner courtyard, one paw planted on his hip, the other raised toward an audience made of one unimpressed cat, one loyal dog, six fire chickens, and three Great Burrow mice who had stopped working because they sensed nonsense developing nearby.
Behind him, the baby treant on his back rustled its leaves.
"Today," Rico announced, "we begin heroic training montage."
Nyx, sleek and shadowy, sat with her tail curled around her paws and blinked at him with the full contempt of a cat who had never agreed to be commanded by raccoon energy.
Bruno wagged his tail.
The fire chickens stared. One pecked the ground.
Rico lowered his paw.
"Good. Morale is high."
The plan, such as it was, had Phong's permission. Nyx and Bruno had stayed in the level-twenty range for too long while the humanoid members of Team Nemean were flung from league battles to ruins to bosses to global political incidents. The animals needed growth. They needed supervised danger.
Unfortunately, their supervisor was Rico.
Fortunately, Rico was not stupid.
Chaotic, yes. Easily bribed by coffee, absolutely. But not stupid.
He had listened over the last few days. He had heard things. Especially things about a ruin where pixies dwelled, cosmic batteries sat on rooftops like treasure-shaped invitations, and a cryo-tomb stood guarded by a dog-headed angel in front of the door. More importantly, he had heard that Dominic had picked up his "cool shield" there.
That was enough.
By raccoon logic, the existence of one cool shield meant the area had proven loot potential. Therefore, any responsible Kamen Rider archaeologist should investigate it while also helping a dog, a cat, and several chickens gain levels.
Before leaving, Rico went to the H'Re.
Their settlement space within Phong's growing network remained dim by preference, tucked beneath a reinforced overhang where the canyon light came weak and indirect. Blind bandaged faces turned toward Rico as he approached. The worms beneath their wrappings shifted faintly, sensing vibration, heat, scent, or whatever strange world the Dry Sea had left them with.
Rico bowed dramatically.
"H'Re friends. I require escort to ancient loot nest."
One of the H'Re workers paused with a coil of enchanted rope in hand.
Rico continued, "Destination: pixie ruin. Features include cosmic roof batteries, suspicious tomb, dog angel door, and one hundred percent proven cool shield probability."
Nyx yawned at that while Bruno wagged harder. The fire chickens remained inheritably unimpressed by raccoon nonsenses.
The H'Re did not laugh. Rico appreciated that about them. They were a people who understood dignity, even when dignity was wearing a raccoon and shouting about treasure.
A messenger went deeper into the shaded area.
A short while later, the H'Re chieftain emerged.
"You go to the stone-nest where little winged ones feed?"
Rico saluted.
"Yes. Also leveling montage."
"The Green permits this?"
"Green Farmer approved animal training. Details of loot justice are spiritually implied."
The H'Re chieftain stood silent long enough that even Rico shifted.
Then he said, "We go."
That was how Rico, Nyx, Bruno, the fire chickens, the baby treant, a handful of H'Re, and the chieftain himself set out toward the pixie ruin.
The ruin had not become friendlier since Team Nemean last visited.
It rose out of the dungeon landscape like a memory refusing burial. Strange rooftops still held cosmic batteries, several interconnected metallic spheres and rings. Their surfaces gleamed with a cold sheen, as if still remembering a civilization that had made the cosmos a battery.
Rico stared up at them.
His paws twitched.
The H'Re chieftain became the voice of logic before anyone else could.
"No."
"I didn't say anything."
"You thought loudly."
Rico narrowed his eyes. "Rico not wood. Rico don't need talking conscience."
Absolutely no one presented get his references, displeasing the racoon even further. The cryo-tomb waited deeper in, one door stood, the other fell by Séline's punch. Rico gave it a long, reverent look.
"So this is where Dominic found cool shield."
Bruno sniffed the ground, then said there was nothing remain there that could be smelled. Nyx tickled his nose with her tail while shooting a glare toward Rico.
The chickens immediately began hunting, and that was when everyone discovered something important: the fire chickens were natural predators of pixies.
The first pixie came darting out of a collapsed upper window, its tiny humanoid body all wings, teeth, needle limbs, and vicious intent. It shrieked toward Bruno's flank, a blur of malice.
One chicken looked at it.
The pixie froze. Its wings locked, limbs stiffened, little mouth remained open in a hateful snarl. For half a second, it hung in the air like a bug caught in invisible resin.
Then the chicken leapt. It struck the pixie with both feet, pecked once, and the tiny monster died in a puff of foul dust and brittle limbs.
Rico stared.
The chicken swallowed something crunchy, then started looking for more.
"Oh," Rico said softly. "This is beautiful."
It became less a leveling trip and more a poultry-led ecological correction.
The pixies came in waves once the ruin understood invaders had entered. Drones first, then larger workers, then soldiers with that broken skill that split themselves into three versions. Against Nyx and Bruno alone, they would have been annoying, dangerous, perhaps overwhelming in numbers.
Against the chickens, they hesitated.
Not all of them froze completely. Stronger pixies resisted better. Soldiers could twitch, drag themselves sideways, or break free if the chicken's gaze did not hold long enough. But the fear response was unmistakable. Something in Little Fireball's lineage reached down into them through the eyes of those ridiculous birds and reminded the pixies that small winged things were preys.
Bruno took full advantage.
The dog fought with delighted seriousness, lunging whenever Rico pointed and driving into weakened pixies with jaws and paws strengthened by repeated kills. His old level-twenty range began to shift quickly as he became a blur of loyal, happy violence.
Nyx was quieter and crueler.
She hunted the ones that tried to flank. The pixies that avoided the chickens often found themselves caught by bolts of spells shot out by her paws. She did not waste motion, or show excitement. She simply appeared where a pixie thought itself safe and made it wrong.
Rico supervised.
Mostly.
At first he stayed in Judgment Form, using physical presence to protect the backline of chickens and H'Re. When the pixie soldiers clustered too heavily on one roofline, he shifted into Fortress Form and let Enoki machine-gun fire and carrocket bursts scatter them from the ledges. He was careful not to damage the cosmic batteries after the H'Re chieftain turned his wrapped face toward him in silent warning every time Rico's paws twitched in an irresponsible direction.
The first day went well.
Nyx gained one level. Bruno gained one level too. Several chickens grew noticeably more aggressive, which Rico called "establishing the middle management caste" and the H'Re called "problem."
They camped in a cleared lower hall, away from the cryo-tomb and under H'Re watch. Rico tried to tell scary stories. The H'Re did not react, Nyx fell asleep halfway through, using Rico's tail as a pillow like she owned it. Bruno barked in support and demanded belly rubs from Rico. The chickens huddled around a heat-stone and occasionally pecked at invisible things in their sleep.
On the second day, the leveling accelerated.
Rico found a better rhythm. Chickens locked or frightened pixies, Nyx cut escape routes, Bruno burst into clusters. H'Re scouts marked nests without overcommitting. Rico used his forms only when necessary, allowing the animals to take the kills instead of stealing experience for the baby treant out of boredom.
Unfortunately, Rico became bored anyway. That was how he ended up poking dead pixies with one finger.
A pile of them lay near a broken arch, wings curled, little needle teeth exposed, bodies brittle and unpleasant. Rico crouched beside them, poked one in the face, then looked over his shoulder at the baby treant.
"Potential snack?"
The baby treant rustled uncertainly.
Rico picked up one dead pixie by the wing and offered it.
"Tiny flying enemy. Eat. Learn. Become flying form."
The baby treant leaned forward, sniffed, then recoiled so violently its leaves slapped Rico in the back of the head.
Rico froze.
"No?"
The treant shook its whole little body.
Rico tried another pixie.
The treant refused even harder.
Rico lowered the corpse, visibly devastated.
"No flying form."
Nyx, from a nearby stone, gave him a look that said this was the most predictable disappointment in history.
Rico dropped the pixie.
"My creative department is oppressed."
By the end of the second day, both Nyx and Bruno had gained three levels each. That was enough for the already bored raccoon. Phong had said safe leveling, not "continue until raccoon curiosity awakens another Pillar." Even Rico understood the difference, at least while under the H'Re chieftain's silent supervision.
They were preparing to leave on the third day when the ruin changed.
The pixies suddenly stopped attacking all at once.
The remaining drones retreated into cracks and windows. Soldiers clung to high stone lips but did not dive. The air filled with a dry wing-hum that sounded almost like chanting.
Then the queen appeared.
She crawled out from the upper hollow of a collapsed tower, too large to be called a pixie in any harmless sense. Her body was grotesque and swollen, larger than all her drones and soldiers, with a pale abdomen dragging behind her like a sack of eggs wrapped in translucent skin. Her wings were torn but functional, layered in too many pairs along her back. Her arms were long and jointed strangely, ending in delicate clawed fingers. Her face held something almost human if one had never liked humans very much—wide eyes, too much mouth, a crown-like ridge of chitin and bone rising from her brow.
She smelled of dust, old honey, rot, and somehow... lightning.
The chickens went still out of alert. Rico, with the dignity of the bravest raccoon to ever live, which admittedly nothing to write home about, stepped forward, one paw lifted.
"Hello, large wings mayor."
The queen ignored him.
Her eyes fixed on the H'Re chieftain. The air between them tightened with recognition.
"You," she said.
Her voice was not as tiny as the others. It rasped through the ruin like brittle leaves dragged across stone. "Dry Sea's gnawed child."
The H'Re chieftain lifted his bandaged face.
"Winged hunger."
The queen's head tilted.
"You walk with a raccoon. Strange era."
Rico placed one paw on his chest.
"Kamen Rider raccoon."
"Stranger era."
The H'Re chieftain took one step forward. The pixie soldiers twitched on the walls but did not attack.
"We have found the Green."
Every pixie in the ruin reacted. Wings buzzed. Drones pressed closer to openings. The queen's swollen body shifted, claws sinking into the stone beneath her.
"The Green," she repeated.
"The one who feeds," the chieftain said. "The one who opens water roads. The one who speaks with the mushroom sky and is not eaten. The one destined to end the eyes."
Rico blinked.
"Mushroom sky?"
"Mushroomkhan," Nyx reminded him softly.
The pixie queen descended lower, claws clicking across stone.
"The Green is real?"
"Yes."
"And he walks with fire bird's children?"
The queen's gaze slid to the chickens.
All six of them puffed up, a habit they had picked up from watching Little Fireball, and several pixies recoiled by instinct.
Rico noticed and immediately stood taller. "Chicken battalion respected. When is raccoon's turn?"
The queen ignored him again, which was deeply rude but perhaps politically necessary.
"Promises," she said. "The star people promise stability. The hippo riders promise safety. All failed before the Night Kings. All succumbed to the lure of the Nine and turned on each other. All became Night Kings once the seven colored road dimmed and an emperor ascended. Only hunger remained."
Her words were hard to follow, but the feeling was not.
This ruin had survived on predation and decay. The pixies had nested in leftovers from a civilization that died before they were born. They had fed on what entered and likely on one another when nothing else came. The idea of "the Green" clearly meant more to them than simply a farmer.
It meant food. Maybe safety. Maybe a change in the shape of their miserable little world.
The H'Re chieftain said, "The Green has made Yuè."
The queen hissed softly.
"Moon-root kingdom?"
Rico tilted his head. "You know about that?"
"Little wings hear mice," the queen said. "I let them live because they carry angry red ones."
That was unsettling enough that Rico decided not to ask follow-up questions without caffeine.
The queen crawled closer until the H'Re around the chieftain shifted his hands. She stopped just before that became a mistake... for the pixies.
"Bring us," she said.
Rico blinked. "Bring who?"
"Winged hunger we were called," the queen said. "Me. My swarm. Bring us to the Green."
The H'Re chieftain did not answer immediately.
Rico looked at the queen, then at the soldiers lining the walls, then at the chickens, then at the baby treant.
"Phong will ask whether you eat people."
The queen smiled. It was horrible to look at even for Nyx, Bruno and Rico, whose beauty standards had nothing in common with that of a human.
"We eat what is weak."
"Bad answer."
"We eat what is permitted," she amended.
"Suspiciously fast correction."
The queen's wings shivered.
"Bring us to the Green."
Rico scratched his chin.
On one paw, Phong had a habit of turning former enemies into neighbors, trade partners, citizens, or problems with assigned housing. Trolls and lizardmen had eaten human once, so it was no real excuse to turn them down by raccoon logic. On the other paw, pixies were awful. On the tail, which Rico found useful whenever he needed to count to three, this was exactly the sort of absurd diplomatic discovery Phong somehow turned into infrastructure.
The H'Re chieftain spoke quietly.
"The Green decides."
The pixie queen bowed.
It was enough.
Rico pointed at her.
"No eating chickens."
The queen's many eyes narrowed. The chickens stared back.
After a tense second, she said, "As long as they don't eat my children."
"No eating dog, or shadow cat. Or raccoon."
The queen paused.
Rico raised both paws.
"Especially raccoon."
"No eating raccoon," she rasped.
Rico nodded gravely.
"Then diplomatic escort may proceed after coffee break."
Nyx walked past him toward the exit as if already tired of the entire civilization. Bruno followed happily.
The chickens strutted with newly confirmed geopolitical importance.
Behind them, in the old ruin of cosmic batteries, cryo-sleep, and a dog-headed angel's door, the pixie queen gathered her swarm.
And Rico, who had come looking for leveling, loot logic, and perhaps a flying form, realized with some horror that he had accidentally found Phong another species to negotiate with.