Regulus was playing with a copper Azul, twirling, tossing it, feeling the texture of its engraving. Grigori was watching him play with his copper Azul, wondering why his friend was so enamored with them. The children tried to give them silver coins, but for whatever reason Regulus always preferred copper.

  “So… Why you gathered all of us here, Paulie?” asked Kisara. Paulie had asked her, D’aka, Uri, Cooper, and Tera to gather together… and Bern too. He pretty much gathered everyone who was in leadership positions. He must have something important to say, especially since he gathered them in front of Regulus.

  “We need to discuss our future plans.” Paulie announced. “We’ve got a lot of things going now, so we need to split the responsibility.” Paulie's suggestion actually made sense. John usually just let them do their own thing, so it did not cross their mind to actually organize their operation.

  “Let’s tackle the easiest issue first… Begging. Are we still going to do that?” The children looked at each other. Before all of this, begging was one of their main operations, mainly for the children who were small and weak who were also not good at pickpocketing, that way they could earn some money to buy their own food. But ever since they met Regulus, the children had been well fed. They were no longer weak and could actually start to contribute to the more physically demanding operation. “I guess there was no longer any need to do it.” Kisara commented, but she was not sure if they should end their begging operation.

  “What the other think?” Paulie asked the rest. They all just looked at each other confused, most of them had the same opinion as Kisara. “Tera?” he asked Tera specifically, after all she was the representative for the prisoners. “Hmmm, some members of our group are still weak. So they could do some begging… but at the same time begging doesn’t give good returns does it?” Tera was also unsure whether begging was necessary or not, hearing Tera’s opinion, Cooper got an idea.

  “I think they should do it. But don’t focus on getting money. Ask them to gather information instead. Any information will do. Rumours, targets to steal, anything.”

  The kids liked Cooper’s idea. They all unanimously agreed to it. “Alright, then I’ll leave the begging operation to you, Coop. It will be our information gathering network. Tera, coordinate with Cooper.” Tera and Cooper nodded, Cooper was blushing a bit. He was proud to have such a good idea.

  “Now next thing. Drugs. We still have some leftover drug supplies. Tera, got any buyers… and maybe suppliers?” Tera shaked her head. “Not much luck there. We got some buyers, but not enough to make it a stable income. And no luck on suppliers. How’s your search? Did Jeremy find any?”

  Paulie sighed. “No luck. I guess we can forget having a drug operation.” He was a bit disappointed, he knew drug trade was a major money maker and he was hoping they could start one… maybe used some of the product along the way. He dreaded the day they ran out of devil lettuce. “Can’t we just grow one?” Grigori asked innocently. Paulie was intrigued with Grigori’s idea… but… “Anyone know how to grow one?” he asked the group, but they just shook their heads synchronously. Paulie sighed louder, false hope had driven him deeper into despair. “I can ask around, but… no promise.” Tera added. Paulie smiled wryly, he no longer had any expectations.

  “Alright let’s move on. Next is robbery. Cooper, any leads?” Cooper shook his head. “None right now. We’re still staking some potential targets.” The children understood why Cooper was having a problem finding targets. They had hit too many warehouses that more guards had been posted in every warehouse in the city. “That’s fine. Focus on setting up the beggar operation for now. If you find a good target, inform us. We’ll do a big raid together.” Paulie assured Cooper that it was not his fault, but Cooper was visibly dejected. He felt like he had let the group down.

  “Next is pickpocket operation. Anyone wanted to be in charge of that?” Kisara was about to raise her hands, she had experiences on that…

  “Oooh Oooh. Let me do that.” Grigori had volunteered himself. In all honesty, most of the kids did not expect Grigori to take any leadership position yet. But they all wondered if they should just let him do it. “I say we let him do it. I’ll help him in the beginning.” Kisara told the group. Grigori had proven himself to be reliable during the undead incident. He even won some of the older kids’ respect. Letting him slowly take on a leadership role would not hurt the group. And pickpocketing was a low risk operation. The worst that could happen was a bunch of them getting arrested — Regulus could easily free them.

  “Alright, you got the job kid.” Paulie said. Grigori jumped up in excitement. “YES!!! Kisara, let’s go and plan the whole thing.” He was too eager, enough to bring smiles to the entire group. “Wait, we still have stuff to discuss. Why don’t you go find Carl and find some people for the pickpocket operation.”

  “Will do! CARL~” Grigori rushed away, leaving to find Carl and started his new venture. Regulus was about to follow him, but Paulie grabbed his arm before he could go, “we still need you, Regulus.” Regulus sat back down, but he looked a bit dissatisfied. “Alright. But do you really need me? you all were handling things just fine without me.”

  “We need you for this one.” Paulie assured him. “Our protection racket. Our new source of income. Bern, tell us how many stores are paying us right now.” Bern frantically went through his notes, trying to find the pages where he put the summary of their protection racket. “Uuuhm. We have 71 stores in the port area under our control. And 44 outside of the port area. Total is 115 stores.”

  115 stores, that sounded like a huge number to the children. “Alright. Good. Tera, can you handle the weekly collection?” Paulie asked Tera. “You want us to do the collection?” Tera was a bit confused, she did not think the children would trust them with handling money, she thought it would be either D’aka, Kisara, or Uri who would do the collection. “Well, you guys are the one who knows how to count… and we need D’aka, Uri, and Kisara to handle something else… gang wars.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  When they heard those words, their faces became more serious. “We don’t need to worry about any big gangs… for now. But smaller gangs started to pop out everywhere. If we want to establish our territory, we need to handle them, and most of the prisoners still can’t use [Iron Body], so I rather not have them involved in combat.”

  “Is the small gangs situation really that bad?” Kisara looked at Cooper, seeking confirmation that he answered with a nod. “Yeah, small gangs started to encroach on our newly established territories. Selling drugs and even extorting some of the stores that ours.” D’aka was thinking of a solution as he heard Cooper’s report. “For now, me and Uri will create combat groups to deal with any small gangs in our territory… but we’ll need a more permanent solution.”

  Everyone looked at Regulus. If anyone could offer a permanent solution — it was Regulus. “You want me to kill all of them?” Regulus asked innocently. He was not the slightest bit troubled with the idea of massacring countless people, enough to give the children goosebumps. “Not all of them… just enough to cement your reputation that no small gangs would dare to mess with our territory… unless someone else got a better idea.” Paulie tried to… reduce the amount of future bloodshed.

  No one in the group had any ideas on how to dissuade the smaller gangs from invading their territories. In the eyes of the criminal underworld, they were still a bunch of street urchins. To establish themselves, blood must be shed. The question was… could they do it?

  “Why don’t we just mark our territories with piss?” Regulus suggested. The children tended to forget that Regulus had quite a wild mindset. “That’s not gonna work, Regulus. Us humans don’t mark territories with piss.” Kisara tried to explain to Regulus, luckily he seemed to understand it because he did not push the issue further.

  “So… our best solution to this issue is to have Regulus slaughter a small gang while letting one or two witnesses alive to spread a rumour… and we rinse and repeat till nobody dares to mess with us. Is that pretty much how it goes?” Uri gave a recap before the conversation went in a weird direction. The rest pretty much agreed with Uri’s conclusion for none of them had better ideas. “Yeah… pretty much. Anyone else got something to add?” Asked Paulie before he wrapped their discussion.

  Kisara raised her hand, wanting to say something, “Paulie. There’s something that I wanted to do… But I’m not sure if the group could.” Paulie wondered what Kisara wanted. “What is it?”

  “I want to recruit more street urchins to our group. There’s still a lot of other urchins groups outside of us… and if we could… I wanted them to join us” Kisara was a bit hesitant in saying her idea. This was her own selfishness, and she did not want to burden the group with more mouths to feed. D’aka wanted to agree with Kisara’s suggestion, but he looked at Paulie first, he was the one who got a handle on the group situation — and his face showed some uncertainty.

  “Of course we can.” Regulus was the one who answered Kisara. “We can add as many younglings or humans as you want to the group. It’s no issue.” he said confidently. The groups looked at each other, were they really fine? Could they really increase their numbers without any problems?

  “Wait, wait, wait. Wait a minute, Regulus.” Paulie tried to put a halt into it. “Bern, how are we doing on our foodstocks?”

  Bern frantically parsed through his notes. He fixed his glasses once he found the right pages. “Uuuhm… based on my calculation… we should be fine for a month or two with our current supply… probably.” Bern sounded very unsure. “What kind of calculation is that?” Uri asked, he was skeptical they were truly capable of feeding themselves for that long. “A very rough one… I was an accountant… accountant apprentice. So I could do calculations on money… but counting our food supplies and how much we’re gonna use… I don’t have experience with that.”

  Kisara was a bit disappointed, but at the same time she did not want to burden the group. “It’s alright, we can forget about—” She was about to give up on the idea before Regulus cut her off. “It’s no issue. If we don’t have enough food, we can rob more warehouses. And if we can’t do that — we’ll hunt.”

  “Where would you even hunt Regulus? Is there even enough Sewer Kings to feed us all and the extra mouths we’ll bring? And our city is not exactly close to a forest either… so I kinda doubt we can hunt enough wild beasts.” Uri challenged Regulus’ simplistic solution.

  “Uri… the underground is full of food — more than you think. Excluding the younglings and the adult humans… how many of us do you think there are?” The children understood that Regulus was talking about the molrrets’ under his control… and now that they thought about it… they never really thought about how much molrrets were part of the herd… or how Regulus been feeding them.

  “Actually… how much are there?” the group asked curiously. Regulus seemed troubled on how to answer them. He had a general idea on how big the herd was… but he had not learned to count above ten yet. “Hmmm… enough to crowd ten of our caves system… probably even more.”

  The groups’ jaws dropped. That was not a precise number… but they could tell that was a lot of molrrets. “Wh… where are they right now?” The usually timid Bern could not help but speak up. That amount of molrrets sounded absurd to him — judging by his rough calculation, there should at least be around 300,000 molrrets under Regulus. All this time and based on what he had seen, he thought Regulus had around 1,000 molrrets — 10,000 at most.

  “They’re deeper underground, all over the city, and outside the city. The entire herd is not concentrated in one place, but we are close enough that we can smell each other.” The group was shocked. They were struggling imagining it… but they all came to a realization; there was a giant underground tunnel system that covered the entirety of Hazen, and probably beyond its outskirts. How large and wide was this underground system? They might never know.

  “H… How do you feed all of them?” That was the question everyone wanted to know now. Regulus and the molrrets barely ever touched their food supplies, if anything they added to it. How did they feed themselves?

  “As I mentioned before. The underground is filled with more food than you all think. You can find huge long creatures if you dig deeper. There are lots of them and hunting one can feed the entire herd for at least a week. There are also many former human cities buried underground. There’s also a lot of big creatures who live over there, not as big as the long one, but big enough to feed a small group for a few days. You can also find some spots where a lot of mushrooms grow. As long as you don’t eat all of them, most of them will grow back given time.”

  That was a lot of information for the group to process. They were all stunned silence by the revelation that the underground was more dangerous and filled with lives than they originally thought.

  “... Let’s agree to never go deeper underground or go to any underground cities.” Paulie suggested, the rest of the group nodded in agreement except for Regulus. “So… I guess it’s not a problem to recruit more street urchins?” Kisara added. Most of the group was still a bit unsure, but judging by Regulus’ words, food was no issue.

  “Of course not. You can do it, Kisara.” Regulus had given her tacit approval. The others had no reason to disagree, “That’s it then. We can wrap it up unless someone has something else to add.” Paulie wanted to end the meeting, and most of the group had nothing else to say, “I do.” But Regulus still had things to say.

  “Bern,” Regulus called Bern’s name and he did not expect it. Unlike most of the prisoners, Bern did not treat Regulus like a God — he was afraid of Regulus. He was grateful that Regulus spared him from his fate of being an undead… but at the same time, he could not stop his body from quaking in the presence of Regulus. “Ye… yes?”

  “Bern, I need you to gather all the adults who know how to count like you.” Bern’s quaking subsided a bit. At the very least, he knew that Regulus was not going to kill him or send him to his death. “I can… but wha… what do you need us for?”

  “I want you to teach all of us how to count more than ten.” It was a surprisingly innocent request from Regulus.