My breath was ragged, body aching, exhausted from the two consecutive fights I had. So was Morgan, who fought for the first time. They had kept the cuffs on our wrists, just removed the chain link so that we could move our hands freely. I did my best not to hurt her, as she wasn't a good fighter. Me neither, but I didn't know how I was able to do those moves, as though my body had been trained before.

  I was awkwardly on top of her, pinning her to the ground.

  "I guess it's over now?" I said.

  "I think so." She answered.

  I rose up, took a step back, and flinched when I laid my boot on the horrible-smelling corpse. I offered my hand to help Morgan stand up.

  The three guards posted at the door were waiting for us. We approached them, and suddenly, a guard fell down, and the others did too as Morgan leaned into them. She moved faster than normal.

  I noticed a cactus spine in her fingers.

  "How did you get that?" I asked.

  "From them." She pointed at the dead bodies.

  "Oh." I muttered.

  She crouched to get the keys from the guard's neck and took their whips for each of us. My palms hesitated to touch the leather because I knew it had been used to punish prisoners who misbehaved. Still, I gripped it hard as a weapon for safety.

  She thoroughly searched the guards for any other keys, then she found them. She unlocked the cuffs around our wrists, and they fell with a clank. I stretched my hands to use my ice abilities, but nothing came out. Turns out the enchantment from the cuffs didn't just turn off our abilities. It made them vanish. So we still had to find the metal boxes to get back our fruit cubes.

  Then, she pulled me to the doorway. "Let's go. We don't want the Sand King to get to us."

  Inside the room, we opened the trapdoor and went down the stairs leading back to the underground. The walls radiated a coolness that could only be caused by magic.

  "Did you purposely pretend to be weak? Because you don't want them to know your passive ability?" I asked.

  "You're correct about the second one. I really wasn't good at combat, but I have been calculating how to take advantage of them because they were careless enough not to inspect that my Magical Fruit is a drupe. They probably thought it was a pome, as if I would want a long lifespan! No way." She explained while walking with quick steps.

  "What's your Magical Fruit?" I asked.

  "A prune, I call it Waterprune."

  We passed through doors in the corridors and reached an intersection. We veered to the left, which led to the prison corner where my cell was located. She didn't bother to unlock the doors using the keys; they were too small for the locks.

  "Morgan." I whispered. "You've been here before, right?"

  "I know what you're thinking." She said. "Bad idea, but I say yes."

  "Shouldn't we go to the other path for an escape?" I asked.

  "Have you forgotten that you need to save the Plant Princess... and your Polarman?" She said. "I have seen your connections in Fresha."

  I felt shot right through the heart. She knew that I cared a lot about Skymint and my cousin. As much as I wanted to get out of this kingdom soon, I had to free them first.

  "We can't just go back to the prison without a disguise." I stated. "So we have to check first if there's a way out of here."

  "No one would believe we're guards." She said. "Especially not girls."

  "Maybe we could find something useful in a room here." I said.

  "We won't be able to open them. The keys were only for the metal boxes sealing our fruit cubes." She said.

  "Then we should really go back the opposite way." I insisted.

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  "We're not going that direction." She snapped. "What if it's a maze, tight tunnels, no air, stone pressing in from every side. I won't die buried in the dark."

  There was something off in her tone. A little too fast, a little too tense.

  Was she afraid of small spaces?

  The trapdoor we were heading to opened, bright sunlight entered the corridor, and a man stepped downstairs.

  A chill crawled down my spine. It was Jamaico, looking at us with frustration.

  "Little aristocrats." He hissed. "Don't y'all dare leave my kingdom yet when there's so much fun we haven't explored yet."

  "I thought you were busy watching." Morgan interjected.

  "Not until you tried to run off with the only Ice Princess I've got locked up." He leaned into us, his breath smelling of mangoes.

  "I would have sold you to Felipe if you'd succeeded. Anyway, I'm not letting what you've done go—"

  Morgan whipped him, and so did I. But his body glowed the moment it hit, and the whips turned into light particles and dissolved like fireflies dying.

  He grabbed Morgan by the neck, and her eyes widened in sheer panic.

  Then she started choking.

  At first, I thought it was his grip, until I saw her mouth.

  Sand.

  Grain by grain, it poured from her lips, crumbling down her chin like she was vomiting a desert. She fell to her knees, clawing at her throat, sand spilling across the stone floor.

  I froze. My whole body locked up in terror. That's what he did to the guard, back when I first met him. I felt sick all of a sudden.

  "And now, you." He gazed at me. "Go back to your cell. You are valuable compared to this noble." He said while Morgan still choked on sand.

  He was in a bad mood and would be able to kill me anytime. On the contrary, he wouldn't be able to do that because of Felipe. I wanted to get out of here to avoid getting the same treatment, but at the same time, I didn't want to leave Morgan here. I crouched to level her.

  "I'm not leaving her as long as she's not fine." I said with determination.

  Her chest rose and fell, until she only started spewing small amounts of sand.

  Jamaico spread out his hands. "I assure you she will. It will just take some time to recover. If she had just stayed well-behaved, she wouldn't have gotten that. Troublesome, isn't she?"

  "This is trouble." I yelled. "You let your prisoners suffer. That's unfair."

  "You're getting the wrong idea, Ice Princess. I'm merely exposing everyone to the Sun God. He simply empowers people who fight beneath the sunlight, and you already have received a fragment of it. For sure you understand that." He smiled.

  "I'm idealistic, but I'm never that lunatic. Now, I can clearly see why you never got the outer village of Glacia." I blurted out before I could stop myself. His ideology was annoying me.

  "Was that a result of being in your cold, gloomy kingdom for too long?" He asked, voice dripping with mockery. "To be honest, I was really shocked to know that your royal bloodline... still runs after the incident. Two occurred so far."

  My brows furrowed. I felt a stab of anger. This man frames it as though they were holidays and not some traumatic events. It's such a disrespectful thing to say to someone who's lost her relatives because of the Glaciouso Massacre.

  "Arie, don't listen to him." Morgan whispered, her voice hoarse.

  Jamaico tilted his head with a smirk, eyes narrowing.

  "Brave." He said. "But unnecessary."

  He stepped back and the glow from his body dimmed. "Go. Take your little friend and crawl back to your corner before I change my mind."

  I helped Morgan to her feet. Her legs were trembling. She didn't look at me, but her fingers gripped my arm tightly.

  We turned toward the stairs. The light from above was already fading as the trapdoor creaked shut. Behind us, Jamaico engulfed in light and vanished, probably back on his balcony to watch the ongoing battle.

  The guards who were waiting at the ground escorted us back to our cells. Too bad Morgan was on another block of this prison, the opposite of mine. I forgot which block Caron's cell was located in, not that I would remember it with all the yelling and tension brewing while I fought for my life, so I requested her to look for him on her way to her confinement.

  The day passed like a wind brushing my hair. My mind kept replaying the moment I ended Pyrovanth's life, and I had nobody to talk to about it. Carrie still hadn't sent her plant to speak with me, and Skymint's on the other side, and communication is only possible by shouting, and we obviously haven't done that.

  The window's still closed, so it must still be dawn. No battles yet. I wondered if we were going to get hauled into the arena again after our spectacle yesterday. Hopefully not.

  My head's still foggy, thoughts unclear. The sound came again. A sob, low and wet. Then a giggle. Muffled through stone, but somehow closer than before.

  I pressed my ear to the cold bars. "Hello?" I whispered, but no one answered. Only silence, or worse, that distant laugh, floating just behind it.

  I pulled back quickly.

  Was that real? Maybe there were prisoners losing their minds nearby. Or maybe I was the one starting to lose it. It has only been three days since I became a prisoner. That thought lingered longer than it should have.

  If it's real, the only prisoner beside my cell was my cousin.

  Is Carrie okay? I suddenly remembered that her wounds were never healed. She's still in agonizing pain. She's not a citrus fruit user, so she doesn't have the passive ability of faster healing.

  As I turned away from the closed window, I noticed another writing on the metal wall:

  "Stay strong. They want to break you."

  When did it get here? I don't know, but these words made me feel slightly better, because somebody watches over me. If I were as lunatic as Jamaico, I would believe this is Megaverse's doing. But I know better. This must be a sorcerer. Magic exists in this world, after all.

  An idea popped into my mind. I should try casting a spell. It wouldn't hurt to say something that won't work. It's just that I would feel stupid.

  I imagined the metal cuffs around my wrists to be gone, and spoke, "Remove the cuffs around me."

  A moment passed. Nothing happened.

  Then, the window opened, and my heart almost jumped. I wasn't expecting it after doing something silly. I always knew that I'm magicless.