Chapter 60: Aisha’s Adventure the little leader

—

[Aisha POV]

The Junior Unit was Arbalest’s worst-kept secret.

Officially, we were the Youth Education Program, a charitable initiative providing literacy, basic combat training, and life skills to children rescued from difficult circumstances. The kind of thing that looked good on reports.

And made the organization seem wholesome.

Actually, we were the kids who refused to stay out of trouble.

There were twelve of us, ranging from eight to twelve years old—orphans, mostly, former slaves who had nowhere else to go, children who had lost families to dungeons or bandits or the thousand other dangers that made this world cruel to anyone without power.

And somehow, I was in charge.

“Led” was the word the adults used. Led implied control.

Control was theoretical, very theoretical.

“Today we’re practicing stealth,” I announced, standing on a crate so everyone could see me properly. Height was a problem when you were trying to command people only slightly shorter than yourself.

“Can we practice sword fighting instead?” That was Tomas, eleven years old, obsessed with blades to a degree that worried the instructors.

“No.”

“Can we practice fire magic?” Sara, ten, had discovered she had a tiny spark of magical talent and wanted to use it on everything.

“NO.”

“Can we—” Marcus started.

“WHATEVER YOU’RE ABOUT TO SAY, NO.”

Marcus closed his mouth. Opened it again.

Closed it.

“I was going to ask if we could get lunch first,” he said quietly.

I paused. “That’s… actually reasonable. Yes. After stealth practice.”

“Why does stealth practice matter?” Tomas again, always questioning. “We’re going to be fighters, not spies.”

“Because sometimes the best fight is the one you avoid. And because sneaking past the patrol guards means we can get to the good food in the officers’ mess before it runs out.”

Suddenly everyone was paying attention.

“Stealth practice,” I continued, “begins now.”

Sometimes I thought back to how I got here. How I went from being a half-sister maid trying to earn her place in a household to leading a group of chaotic children in an organization that didn’t officially exist.

It started with letters. And a brother who made sure I never felt like I didn’t matter.

—

The memory still made me smile sometimes. Big Brother Rudeus breaking his legs to save me, then spending weeks recovering while complaining about the pain. Mother scolding him for being reckless.

The absolute chaos that followed as Arbalest operatives swept in to “officially” resolve the diplomatic situation.

That’s how I learned that Claude’s organization had actually known where we were the entire time.

They’d been preparing a proper diplomatic solution, working through official channels, trying to avoid creating international incidents.

And then Rudeus crashed through like a bull in a china shop, rescued us with explosive magic and broken legs, and forced everyone to scramble to clean up the mess.

It was very on-brand for both of my brothers, honestly.

When the dust settled, Mother and I had choices. Return to what remained of the Greyrat household. Wait for Father to find us. Or…

“You could stay with Arbalest,” Claude had offered. “We have facilities. Training programs. Safety.”

Mother chose to wait for Father. I chose to stay.

Not because I didn’t love my family. But because I’d spent five years being the half-sister maid, always second place, always careful about my station.

And in those cages in Shirone, I’d promised myself that if I ever got free, I would become someone who could help others get free too.

Claude understood. He always did.

That’s how I ended up leading the Junior Unit. How I went from rescued child to rescuer.

—

The thing about being a kid in Arbalest was that nobody took you seriously.

Adults talked about important things where we could hear, assuming we weren’t paying attention. They discussed missions and targets and threats, thinking that children wouldn’t understand.

They were wrong.

I understood perfectly well that a group of smugglers had been spotted two miles from camp. Understood that they were moving goods through territory we claimed as ours. Understood that the patrol schedules meant nobody would investigate until tomorrow morning.

I also understood that “smugglers” in this region usually meant slavers. The words were practically synonymous.

“Did you hear what they said?” Marcus whispered after the adults finished their conversation and moved on.

“Smugglers,” I confirmed. “Two miles east.”

“Smugglers means—”

“I know what it means.”

Silence fell over our little group. We had all been slaves once. The word carried weight that outsiders couldn’t understand.

“We should tell someone,” Sara said, but her voice was uncertain.

“They already know. That’s why they were talking about it.”

“Then they’ll handle it.”

“Tomorrow. Maybe.”

More silence. The kind of silence where everyone was thinking the same thing but nobody wanted to say it.

Tomas said it. “We could go look.”

“That’s stupid,” I replied immediately. The responsible answer. The adult answer.

“But we could,” he pressed. “Just look. Not fight. Just… see what’s there.”

“If we get caught—”

“We won’t. We’re practicing stealth, remember?”

I should have said no. Should have reported the conversation to an adult. Should have been the responsible leader that the instructors expected me to be.

“Just look,” I said instead. “No fighting.”

“No fighting,” everyone agreed.

I ignored the small voice in my head that suggested this would not go according to plan.

—

The forest east of camp was dense but navigable.

We moved in single file, trying to use the stealth techniques we had theoretically learned. Step where the leaves are thin. Avoid dry twigs. Watch for animal trails that might be clearer than the undergrowth.

In practice, twelve children moving through forest made approximately as much noise as twelve children moving through forest. Which was to say: a lot.

“Quiet,” I hissed for the tenth time.

“I’m BEING quiet,” Tomas protested, stepping on another twig.

“That’s not quiet. That’s the opposite of quiet.”

“The twig was hidden!”

“Then LOOK for hidden twigs!”

We were terrible at this. Absolutely terrible.

If the smugglers had any sentries at all, they would hear us coming from half a mile away. But we kept going anyway, because the alternative was admitting defeat, and I wasn’t ready for that.

Two hours of stumbling through undergrowth brought us to the edge of a clearing. I held up a hand, the universal signal for stop, and everyone froze.

Well, almost everyone.

Marcus bumped into Sara, who stumbled into Tomas, who grabbed a branch that snapped with a sound like thunder.

“Sorry,” three voices whispered simultaneously.

I peered through the bushes at the clearing ahead and felt the fun drain out of our adventure.

—

There were supposed to be five smugglers.

That’s what the adults had said. A small group, manageable, not particularly dangerous.

The kind of thing a routine patrol could handle.

There were twenty.

Maybe more, it was hard to count from this distance. Armed men moving between tents, checking equipment, preparing for something.

A caravan of wagons sat at the clearing’s center, covered in canvas that hid whatever cargo they carried.

And cages. Three of them. Iron bars on wooden frames. Full of children.

“They’re slavers,” I whispered. The word had weight.

Behind me, I heard the others processing what they saw. Soft gasps. Muffled sounds that might have been crying. The particular silence of children remembering things they had tried to forget.

These weren’t smugglers moving goods. These were hunters who had caught prey. Children, taken from somewhere, destined for somewhere worse.

“We have to tell the adults,” Sara said. Her voice shook.

“We should go back,” Marcus agreed. “Right now.”

They were right. We should absolutely go back. Report what we had found. Let the professionals handle it.

But the cages were right there. And the children inside them were looking out through the bars with the hollow eyes of people who had given up hope.

I knew those eyes. I’d seen them in mirrors in Shirone.

“How long will it take to get back?” I asked.

“Two hours,” Tomas calculated. “Maybe less if we run.”

“And then the adults have to mobilize. Plan. March here.”

“Another two hours, probably.”

“Four hours total. What if the slavers leave before then?”

No one answered. We all knew what happened to children who were taken. Some of us had lived it.

“We should still go back,” Sara insisted, but her conviction was fading.

“We’re kids,” Marcus pointed out. “What can we possibly do against twenty armed men?”

I studied the camp. The layout. The positions of the guards. The cages at the center, surrounded by activity but not constantly watched.

“Distraction,” I said slowly. “We don’t have to fight them. Just get them away from the cages long enough to open them.”

“That’s stupid,” Tomas said.

“Do you have better?”

Silence.

“Then we do stupid. Carefully.”

—

Operation Loud Noise was simple in concept.

Step one: Make noise on the far side of camp. Draw attention.

Step two: While guards investigate, approach the cages.

Step three: Free the prisoners.

Step four: Run very fast.

The plan had approximately a thousand potential failure points. I ignored all of them because thinking about them would mean not acting, and not acting meant leaving those children in cages.

“Ready?” I whispered to the team.

Tomas nodded. He and three others would handle the distraction, running through the forest making as much noise as possible, then disappearing before anyone caught them.

The rest of us would approach the cages.

“On my signal.”

I raised my hand, held it, watched the guards’ patrol patterns, waited for the moment when most of them were facing away.

Dropped my hand.

Chaos erupted.

—

Step one worked perfectly.

Tomas and his group crashed through the undergrowth on the far side of camp, screaming nonsense at the top of their lungs.

It sounded like a forest fire made of children—loud, alarming, and completely incomprehensible.

The slavers reacted exactly as I had hoped. Shouts of confusion. Guards grabbing weapons. Most of the camp rushing toward the noise, assuming an attack or an emergency.

Step two worked partially.

We crept into the camp while attention was elsewhere. Six children moving between wagons, using cover, making our way toward the cages.

I was proud of how quiet we managed to be—no twigs, no stumbles, no accidental collisions.

The cages were twenty feet away, then ten, then we were there.

Step three hit problems.

The locks were iron, heavy, secured with mechanisms I had never seen before.

“Open it,” Marcus hissed.

“I’m trying!”

The lock didn’t budge. I pulled at it, twisted it, tried to force the mechanism with pure determination.

Nothing.

“They’re coming back,” Sara warned.

Through the chaos of Tomas’s distraction, I could see guards returning. The noise had moved deeper into the forest, but some of them had realized it was just a diversion.

“Come ON,” I muttered, yanking at the lock with increasing desperation.

“Use the key, ” a voice said.

I looked up. A girl in the cage, maybe my age, was watching me with an expression that mixed hope and exasperation.

“What key?”

She pointed. There, on a hook near the nearest wagon wheel, a ring of keys hanging in plain sight.

“Right. I knew that.”

I did not, in fact, know that, but there was no time for embarrassment.

—

The keys worked.

Three locks, three clicks, three cage doors swinging open. Children pouring out, eight of them, thin and dirty and blinking in the sudden freedom.

“Run,” I ordered. “Into the forest. Follow us.”

They ran. We all ran.

A chaotic mass of children sprinting for the tree line while shouts rose behind us and adults who could definitely run faster began to pursue.

We weren’t going to make it.

We were too slow, there were too many of us, the guards were closing the distance with every heartbeat.

Then I heard it.

Hoof beats. Lots of them.

The Arbalest patrol burst from the forest on our left flank. Real soldiers, adults with weapons and armor and the kind of training that we could only pretend to have. They must have heard the commotion—Tomas’s distraction had been loud enough to reach the patrol routes.

The slavers tried to fight. It didn’t go well for them.

We kept running until we reached safety, then collapsed in a heap of exhausted children while professionals handled the actual combat.

“That was amazing,” Sara gasped between breaths.

“That was terrifying,” Marcus corrected.

“Both,” I agreed. “Definitely both.”

—

Claude found me afterward.

The rescued children had been taken to camp for medical attention and processing. The slavers had been captured, those who survived the patrol’s assault. The Junior Unit had been rounded up and sequestered, awaiting judgment.

Claude stood in front of me, just stood there, staring.

It went on for a long time.

“That was dangerous,” he finally said.

“I know.”

“And stupid.”

“I know.”

“You could have been killed. All of you.”

“I know.”

He kept staring. I tried not to fidget, tried to look confident and mature and like someone who had made a calculated decision rather than an impulsive one.

“And it worked,” he said quietly.

“…I know.”

“Those children would have been gone by morning. The patrol would have found an empty campsite. You saved them.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. The praise felt uncomfortable, tangled up with the knowledge of how badly things could have gone.

“Don’t do it again,” Claude said.

I nodded. The appropriate response. The expected response.

But we both knew I would. When it mattered enough, when children were in cages and adults were too slow, I would make the same choice again.

Some things mattered more than being safe.

Even Claude knew that. It was why he had built Arbalest in the first place. Why he’d trained me and Mother and given us the choice to stay or go.

“Go get cleaned up,” he said. “And tell your team they did well. Stupidly, but well.”

I saluted, the sloppy version that kids used, and ran to find the others.

Behind me, I could have sworn I heard Claude laugh, but when I looked back, his face was perfectly neutral.

—

Later, in the Junior Unit barracks, we celebrated.

Not loudly, not obviously, just a quiet acknowledgment among ourselves that we had done real work, rescued real people.

Eight children were safe because we had refused to wait for adults.

Just like I was safe because Rudeus refused to wait for diplomats.

“Next time,” Tomas said, “I want to do more than make noise.”

“Next time, we should have an actual plan,” Sara countered.

“We had a plan!”

“Operation Loud Noise is not a plan. It’s barely a concept.”

Marcus raised his hand. “Can the next mission wait until after lunch? I’m hungry.”

I smiled. My team. Chaotic, undisciplined, completely incapable of following orders.

But they had done good work today. We all had.

“Lunch first,” I agreed. “Then we practice stealth. For real this time.”

“Can we practice sword fighting instead?”

“NO.”

Some things never changed.

But some things did. Today, eight children were free who wouldn’t have been otherwise, because a bunch of kids decided that doing something stupid was better than doing nothing at all.

Months ago, my brother broke his legs to save me from a cage.

Today, I helped break open three cages to save eight others.

I’d take that trade.