CHAPTER 79: CHAPTER 79: THE ROYAL AMENDMENT.ENHANCEMENT SPA.

’’What is it, FaeLina?’ I projected back, a cold feeling starting to grow in my own core. ’What does it say?’

She didn’t answer. She just hovered there, her face was pale and she was staring at the golden, glowing letters on the bulletin board.

The confident energy that had filled the room moments before evaporated, replaced by a cold, creeping dread. Pip, who had been proudly fussing with Clank’s "GO TEAM NAP!" banner, now just nervously twisting a button on his tunic. Gilda’s hand, which had been resting loosely on her axe, now gripped it so tightly, her knuckles went pale. Zazu, who had been deep in meditation, let out a slow, troubled breath, his own peace disturbed by the sudden tension.

A shared, tense silence fell over the team. They weren’t watching the notice anymore; they were watching their new manager. They saw her confident energy vanish in an instant, her wings freezing mid-buzz. Her bright pink aura, which had filled the room with excitement, seemed to shrink and fade. Whatever the notice said, it was bad enough to silence the loudest person in the dungeon.

Finally, FaeLina turned to face them, her voice a tiny, trembling thread.

"It’s... it’s a notice," she whispered. "From the Royal Dungeon League Commission. Signed by the King himself."

"Is it the schedule?" Gilda asked, her voice a low rumble. "Are we first?"

"Worse," FaeLina said, her voice cracking. "It’s a... a ’last-minute procedural amendment’."

The team exchanged confused looks.

"A what?" Pip asked with his nervous voice.

FaeLina took a shaky deep breath. Her clever, loophole-finding brain had been replaced by pure panic. "It’s a new rule," she said, her voice trembling. "A special, one-time rule that only applies to our match tomorrow!"

Her professional composure was shattered, and now she was back to being a frantic, panicking fairy. She zipped over to the chalkboard and began scribbling furiously. Her chalk squeaked with the force of her panic as she drew a series of terrifying charts and graphs, labeling them with official-sounding but completely made-up rules like ’Clause 7B: Minimum Spookiness’.

"Don’t you see what this is?!" she shrieked, her voice echoing in the tense silence. "It’s a trap! That grumpy dwarf Thistlewick was so mad we won, he probably begged the King to invent a new rule just to make us look bad! It’s a targeted attack! A royal prank!"

She began to spiral, her imagination running wild as she scribbled her fears on the board.

"I bet it’s a ’Bitey-ness Test’ for all minions!" she wailed, drawing a picture of a sad-looking Sir Crumplebuns next to an angry-looking steak. "They’ll make him fight a steak! He’s a vegetarian! He’ll fail! And what about Clank? His lullaby isn’t scary at all! It’ll get a negative score on the ’Spook-o-Meter’!"

Zazu, ever the calm one, tried to intervene. "FaeLina, perhaps you should just read what the amendment actually says."

"I can’t!" she wailed, her voice cracking with stress. "That’s the problem! The wording is a legal nightmare! ’Enhance the entertainment value’? That’s a loophole big enough to fly a dragon through! What if he does add a dragon to our match?! How do we score that?! Is the dragon a guest or a hazard?!"

She took a shaky breath, her eyes wide with a new and even more specific terror.

"Or what if he replaces the Challengers with a troop of angry clowns?! They’re an unregulated form of terror!"

Pip, who had been nervously following her rant, let out a small squeak of pure terror and tried to make himself one with the shadows behind Clank.

’FaeLina,’ I projected, my mental voice a calm anchor in her storm of panic. ’Read the rules.’

She took another deep, shuddering breath, flew back to the board, and read the single, terrible line of the Royal Amendment aloud.

"...’For the match between The Comfy Corner and the Gloomfang Caverns’," she read, her voice barely a whisper, "’the event will now be a Head-to-Head Gauntlet. Two parties of Challengers will compete. Team A will begin in The Comfy Corner, while Team B begins in the Gloomfang Caverns. After one hour, the teams will swap dungeons. The winner will be the dungeon whose starting team is in the best final condition after completing both runs.’"

The team stared at her, trying to process the complicated new rule. But FaeLina understood it instantly, and her face went even paler.

"Don’t you see?" she explained, her voice hollow with defeat. "We don’t just have one plan anymore; we have two, and they have to be perfect, back-to-back!"

She pointed a trembling finger at the chalkboard. "For the first hour, we have to be a luxury upgrade service for Team A! We have to give them the perfect ’proactive pampering’ to prepare them for the poison dungeon. Everything has to be flawless to give them the best possible buff."

Her voice rose with panic. "But the second that’s over, the portal will open and Team B is going to stumble in here, covered in poison and spider venom! We have to instantly switch from being a five-star spa to being a battlefield emergency room! We have to heal them, cure them, and get their wellness score up, all in one hour, with no time to prepare!"

She threw her tiny hands up in the air. "It’s a logistical nightmare! We have to run two completely different operations with the same staff and the same room, with no break in between! What if Zazu’s tea is too strong for the poisoned team? What if Kaelen’s towels are too hot for their venom-fever? We’re not prepared for this!"

The reality of the King’s new rule landed on the team like a physical blow. The confident energy in the room vanished, replaced by a heavy, defeated silence.

Gilda’s proud expression crumbled, and she leaned heavily on her axe, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Beside her, Pip let out a small, hopeless whimper, his gaze dropping to the floor. Even Zazu, their calm anchor, seemed to deflate, covering his face with his hands.

All their hard work, all their clever preparations, had just been thrown into a blender by the whim of a very bored King.

’It’s over,’ FaeLina’s psychic voice was a tired, sad whisper in my mind. ’We should just forfeit. Cut our losses before we’re publicly humiliated. It’s the smart business move.’

I felt their despair, a cold weight in my own core. I thought of Lord Vorlag, who would be laughing at our failure. I thought of the King, who had just thrown our lives into chaos for his own amusement. They were loud. They were chaotic. They were the enemies of a good nap.

And a slow, cold, and very stubborn anger began to burn where my heart would have been.

’No,’ I projected, my mental voice cutting through the silence, quiet but firm as bedrock. ’We are not forfeiting.’

The team looked up, their eyes wide with surprise.

’The King wants a show?’ my thought continued, a hint of steel in it now. ’We will give him a show he will never forget.’

I turned my attention to the team. ’The plan has not changed,’ I announced, my voice a steady anchor in their despair. ’It has just become more complicated. Our mission is the same: to provide the most comfortable hours to these adventurers’ lives. We will be so overwhelmingly pleasant that the Gloomfang Caverns will look like a joke in comparison to us. We will win on pure contrast.’

A tiny spark of hope returned to FaeLina’s aura. Gilda looked down at her giant, intimidating axe, then back up at the team. A slow, dangerous grin spread across her face. "Aggressively nice," she rumbled, as if testing the words on her tongue. "Alright. I can work with that."

’Precisely,’ I replied.

_________

Author’s Note:

And the King strikes again! I love that he’s just changing the rules on the whem because he’s bored. He’s the ultimate agent of chaos in this tournament.

FaeLina’s meltdown was so much fun to write. Her mind immediately jumping to "a troop of angry clowns" is my favorite part. She always imagines the most specific and ridiculous worst-case scenarios.

But their brilliant plan is now a logistical nightmare! They have to prepare for two different teams with two different needs, all at the same time! How are they going to pull this off? The pressure is on! Thanks for reading!