The Last Hero's Wasterland Sanctuary

The Price of Ruined Harvest

Chapter 7: The Price of a Ruined Harvest

The remaining Solarian knights shifted uncomfortably, their hands hovering over their weapons but refusing to take another step toward the young man with the wrench. Princess Lyra stood firmly between them and Aurex, her breath coming in ragged gasps as the smoking wreckage of her father's flagship loomed behind them.

"Do you want me to say it again? Arrest him!" Gregory roared, his face twisting into a mask of pure rage as his fingers clenched around his hilt. "He's just one man! Secure the area!"

"Wait! General, don't!" Lyra screamed, throwing herself in front of the advancing soldiers. "You don't understand what you're doing!"

"Get out of the way, Princess!" Gregory snarled, stepping past her. "This peasant thinks he can mock the crown because he knows a few mechanical tricks. I'll show him what real power looks like!"

He raised his broadsword, his muscles tensing as he began to channel his mana. "By the eternal flame of Solaria, let the heavens burn! Phoenix Flare!"

Aurex just stood there, his hands resting on his hips. He didn't even blink. "Hey, Vaelia, how long does the dampening field usually take to dissipate?"

"About three days, give or take!" Vaelia called out from the edge of the clearing, her arms crossed. "Why? Is the shiny man trying to play with matches?"

"Yeah, looks like it," Aurex said, tilting his head.

Gregory's sword sparked violently. A tiny, pathetic orange flicker danced on the tip of the blade, let out a soft sputtering sound, and died instantly, leaving behind a thin wisp of black smoke that smelled vaguely of burnt hair.

"What? No, that's impossible!" Gregory gasped, staring at his sword. He shook it violently. "My mana... where is my flame? Phoenix Flare! I said, Phoenix Flare!"

"You've got some soot on your nose, General," Aurex said, stepping forward. He casually walked through the dissolving wisp of smoke, waving it away with his hand. "And your sword looks like it needs a new battery."

"You cursed sorcerer!" Gregory yelled, lunging forward to swing the sword physically. "I'll take your head with bare steel!"

Before the blade could even come close, Aurex reached out, grabbed the dull flat of the blade with his thick leather glove, and twisted it sharply. The metal groaned, and Gregory, unbalanced and weakened by the mana drain, stumbled forward, faceplanting directly into a heap of mashed pumpkin.

"Ugh! What is this vile substance?" Gregory sputtered, pushing himself up, his golden armor smeared with thick orange pulp and damp fertilizer.

"That vile substance was my prize-winning hybrid pumpkin," Aurex said, pulling a small, grease-stained notebook and a stubby pencil from his pocket. He began writing. "And that's where we start our little chat. Let's see... one crushed giant pumpkin, that's easily fifty gold coins. The emotional distress of losing my future pie? Priceless, but let's call it another hundred."

"Are you insane?" Gregory screamed, wiping pumpkin pulp from his eyes. "I am a General of the Solarian Empire! You are listing vegetables!"

"Vegetables that you destroyed, yes," Aurex replied, completely unfazed as he scribbled in his notebook. "Then we have the fence. Thirty-six hand-carved redwood posts. Do you know how hard it is to find redwood in the Forbidden Zone? I had to fight off three pack-wolves just to harvest the timber. That's three hundred coins. Plus labor. I charge fifty coins an hour for manual labor, and since your giant wooden canoe flattened the whole perimeter, we're looking at a solid week of rebuilding. Let's round it up to a thousand."

"Fifty coins for a pumpkin?" Gregory gasped, his jaw dropping. "You are completely out of your mind!"

"Do you know how much fertilizer I had to shovel for that thing?" Aurex snapped back. "I spent three months cross-breeding Solarian soil with imported compost. It was a masterpiece, General. It was going to win the county fair, if we actually had a county fair here."

"There are no fairs in the Forbidden Zone!" Gregory screamed, trying to rub the mud off his breastplate.

"Exactly, which makes it even more valuable!" Vaelia added, walking back with a massive, rusted iron device that looked like a cross between a hydraulic jack and a bear trap. She dropped it on the ground with a heavy, metallic thud. "It was a rare cultural treasure!"

Gregory stared at the massive contraption, then back at Aurex. "You... you are a monster. You're holding the royal family hostage!"

"I'm holding you accountable," Aurex corrected him, tearing a page out of his notebook and holding it out. "Here's the invoice. Total comes to one thousand eight hundred and fifty gold coins, or the equivalent in raw iron ore, copper wiring, and high-density mana crystals. Unrefined is fine, I have a purifier."

Gregory slapped the paper out of Aurex's hand, his eyes burning with humiliated rage.

"I will not pay a single copper to a traitor!" Gregory hissed, his voice trembling. "The King will hear of this! He will send a legion to wipe this farm off the face of the earth!"

"Oh, he could try," Aurex said, his eyes narrowing as he leaned in close. "But here's a fun fact, General. The defensive turret up there? It's on a sixty-minute cooldown. In exactly forty minutes, the automated system is going to run a self-diagnostic. If it detects any unregistered foreign military vessels—like, say, a shattered flagship sitting in my backyard—it's going to fire a secondary sweep pulse. And since I bypassed the manual override, the next pulse won't just damp your magic. It'll vaporize everything within a two-mile radius."

Gregory's face went completely pale. "You... you're lying."

"Am I?" Aurex smirked. "Ask your princess. She saw me dismantle the interface. I'm the only one who knows how to fool the scanner. So, here's the deal. You and your boys grab some shovels, start digging post holes for my new fence, and maybe—just maybe—I'll remember how to input the safe-zone coordinates before the timer hits zero."

"This is extortion!" Gregory hissed, his voice shaking. "We are knights! We do not build fences for peasants!"

"Then you can be vaporized knights," Aurex said, turning his back on them. "Vaelia, let's go make some tea. I think we have some leftover squash we can roast."

"Wait!" Lyra called out, stepping forward. "Aurex, please. We'll do it. I'll help. Just... please don't let the turret fire."

"Princess, no!" Gregory protested. "You cannot submit to this madman! We have a mission! We have to bring him back!"

"Bring me back for what?" Aurex stopped, turning his head slightly. "I've been asking myself that. Why would the King send a whole fleet, led by a high-ranking general and the crown princess, just to drag one zero-mana exile back to the capital? It doesn't make any sense."

"Because you are the last one!" Lyra said, her eyes filling with tears. "You're the only survivor of the thousand heroes summoned from your world!"

"Yeah, I got that part," Aurex said, his voice cold. "But why do you care now? When we were summoned five years ago, your King threw us into the front lines like cannon fodder. He didn't care about us. He didn't send rescue teams when my squad was wiped out. Why now? Why am I suddenly so valuable?"

"It's... it's because of the war," Lyra whispered. "We are losing. The demonic hordes have breached the northern wall. We need the power of the heroes again."

"Then summon more," Aurex shrugged. "You did it once. Just pull another thousand poor souls from Earth and let them do your dirty work."

"We can't," Gregory muttered, his voice suddenly losing its arrogant edge. He stared at the dirt, his shoulders slumping. "We can't summon any more."

"Why not?" Aurex asked, his brow furrowing. "Did you lose the instruction manual for the ritual?"

"Because the ritual requires a sacrifice," Gregory whispered, his voice barely audible over the crackle of the dying flagship engines.

Aurex stiffened. He turned around slowly, his eyes locking onto Gregory with a sudden, dangerous intensity.

"What did you just say?" Aurex demanded.

"General, no!" Lyra gasped, grabbing Gregory's arm. "You're not supposed to talk about that! It's a state secret!"

"What sacrifice?" Aurex asked, stepping closer, his casual demeanor completely vanishing. His voice was suddenly sharp, cold, and heavy with a quiet fury that made even Gregory flinch. "Tell me right now."

Gregory let out a bitter, hollow laugh, looking up at Aurex with dark, haunted eyes. "You think your friends died in battle, boy? You think the other nine hundred and ninety-nine heroes were slain by monsters in the dark?"

"They were," Aurex said, his fist clenching around his wrench. "I saw the reports. I saw the casualties."

"Those were lies!" Gregory snarled, his voice rising in a desperate, mad crescendo. "Fabricated by the Ministry of Magic to keep you fools compliant! They didn't die on the battlefield, Aurex. They were rounded up, one by one, when they became too weak, too injured, or too rebellious to fight. The King... the King ordered them taken to the deep chambers beneath the royal palace."

"Why?" Vaelia asked, her voice trembling as she stepped closer to Aurex's side.

"Because the summoning ritual doesn't just run on mana," Gregory whispered, a look of pure terror crossing his face as he remembered. "It runs on soul-force. Specifically, the soul-force of those from your world. To open a portal large enough to bring through what the King truly wants, he needed a massive catalyst. He sacrificed all nine hundred and ninety-nine of them."

Aurex felt the air leave his lungs. The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the whistling wind.

"All of them...?" Aurex whispered.

"Yes!" Gregory nodded frantically. "He used their life essence to power the Great Dimensional Anchor. It's already active. But it's unstable. It needs one final, perfect catalyst to lock the coordinates. A survivor who has adapted to our world's atmosphere for five years. That's you, Aurex. You are the final key."

"The final key for what?" Aurex asked, his voice deathly quiet. "What is he trying to summon?"

Gregory looked up, his eyes wide with a mixture of awe and absolute dread. "Not more lost teenagers with wooden swords, Aurex. He's summoning a modern army from your world. An army with iron beasts that spit fire, flying metal dragons, and weapons that can level cities in a single blink.

He's going to drag your entire world's military into our war, and he'll burn both our worlds to do it."