The Alignment Chart of Maines

After the fight, the dining hall felt less like a family room and more like a crime scene.

Grease Tooth's people had failed to kill the party, but they had brought something with them that may have mattered more than the bombs.

Maine found a half-burned note on one of the goblin corpses.

It was not a simple order. It read like a tracking document, organized through alignment-coded versions of Maine. Tono was marked as compromised by emotions and removed. One lawful-good version appeared to have died in a lab breach. A lawful-evil version might exist. Maine himself was identified as the neutral-evil Gravenhurst-confirmed version.

The instruction beside him was not subtle.

He was expected to contact an outside force. If he did not comply, he was to be neutralized.

That changed the shape of the whole Point Pringle thread.

Grease Tooth was not only sending bombers at random targets. Someone in his network, or someone above it, was tracking Maine variants across a larger pattern. Tono had not merely resembled Maine by coincidence. PP5's dead lover, the mirror's eight versions, the Gravenhurst confirmation, and the Evil faction were now part of the same board.

The Ex Force had come to Point Pringle to secure a wagon and reach Stormcall.

Instead, Maine had become an active target in a mystery already using his face, his possible selves, and his alignment as operational categories.

The road to Stormcall still waited.

But Point Pringle had opened a second mission under their feet.