Cross the threshold of the Sameroth Adventurer's Guild, and the air grows heavy with the scent of spilled ale and the weight of impossible legends. To the common sellsword, the Cerberus Syndicate isn't just a party; they are a living pantheon.
In the corner booth, wreathed in the orange glow of the hearth, sits Leon the Vanguard. He is a monolith of iron and silence, a Knight of the Realm whose gaze possesses the chilling stillness of a frozen lake. Beside him, Leonel the Archmage exists in a permanent haze of arcane static, his lips moving in a frantic, silent rhythm as if reciting the very blueprints of the cosmos. And at the center sits Leo, the relaxed mastermind, whose eyes remain half-lidded in the face of apocalypse—a man so transcendent he seems to have transcended reality itself.
They call us the continent's finest. They speak of telepathic synchronicity and a shared soul.
The truth is much louder and significantly more embarrassing. Behind the veil of myth, the Cerberus Syndicate is a three-headed disaster. Leon and Leonel are merely magically tethered extensions of my own consciousness, and right now, the divine link is experiencing the magical equivalent of a dial-up connection in a thunderstorm.
Move the left foot. No, that's the Mage's foot. Lift the Knight's chin. Dammit, I just made the Mage wink at the receptionist. Stop winking, you're making it weird!
I stood at the Guild's polished oak desk, a cold sweat prickling my hairline. To my left, the Knight clone stared with terrifying intensity at a structural pillar. He hadn't blinked in four minutes. To the onlookers, it was the "Gaze of the Unwavering Executioner." To me, it was a mechanical failure; I was simply too busy trying to coordinate the Mage's fingers to count copper coins to remember to pull the Knight's eyelids shut.
"So, Lord Leo," the receptionist, Marie, whispered, her eyes wide with a devotion that bordered on the holy. "Will the Syndicate grace the Kingdom by accepting the S-Rank subjugation of the Hellfire Drake? Ten thousand gold is yours upon its head."
The refusal was primed in my throat. No, thank you, we are currently seeking a mental health retreat.
But the [Trinity Soul] is a cruel mistress. Processing the world through three sets of eyes is like trying to play three different symphonies on one flute. My IQ didn't just drop; it fragmented. My mental bandwidth was a single, overtaxed wick trying to sustain three separate fires.
The vocal cords misfired across the network.
"We," my main body (Leo) managed with a smooth, baritone confidence.
The Knight (Leon) let out a guttural, unintentional grunt.
The Mage (Leonel) slammed a fist onto the counter and shrieked with the passion of a dying star: "TURNIPS!"
The Guild Hall plunged into a silence so absolute you could hear the dust motes colliding. Marie blinked, her jaw hanging at a slight, confused tilt. "T-Turnips?"
Stupid! Stupid! Idiosyncratic disaster! My internal monologue was a chorus of screaming voices. My gaze had snagged on a D-Rank flyer for Farmer Jenkins' Moon-Turnips, and my cross-wired brain had simply chosen the path of least resistance.
"Yes," I (Leo) said, smoothing my cloak with a hand that only trembled slightly. "The Drake is... a triviality. A distraction. Today, we harvest. A true master never forgets the soil from which he sprouted."
Marie's gasp was audible. "Incredible... The Drake ravages the border, yet you prioritize the humble hunger of the common folk! Your benevolence is as vast as your power!"
"Precisely," I nodded, snatching the turnip flyer.
I turned for a dramatic exit. Leo stepped left. Leon stepped right. The collision was a symphony of clanking armor and tangled robes. To arrest the fall, I overcompensated by lurching the Mage forward, resulting in a three-man human avalanche that tumbled through the swinging doors in a groaning pile of SSS-Rank limbs.
"Such eccentric formations!" a rookie whispered in the wake of our departure. "They moved with such blinding speed I couldn't even perceive the technique!"
Ten minutes later, the "gods" were staggering down a dirt path toward the fields.
Walking in a straight line felt like trying to pilot a giant robot where every limb had its own distinct sense of gravity. I found that narrating our movements aloud helped bridge the lag between my three brains.
"Twenty turnips. Twenty gold. Stew. No explosions. No holy smites. Just... the earth."
The Knight nodded with stoic grace.
The Mage nodded with frantic energy.
I felt a fleeting surge of pride. In the stillness of the countryside, we actually looked like the legends the bards sang about. Then we reached the patch.
I focused my will into the Knight. His base strength was a terrifying thing, a physical constant of the universe. I reached for a leafy green top, but my adrenaline-spiked brain forgot to dial back the output.
RIP.
The turnip didn't just yield; it surrendered. A ten-foot crater erupted in the loam, a geyser of soil and shattered root vegetables raining down like organic shrapnel.
"Oops," I muttered.
Clean it up! I panicked, shifting my focus to the Archmage. Wind magic. Low output. Just a breeze!
I raised the mythril staff. I channeled the mana. But my focus was still reeling from the Knight's explosion. Instead of a cooling fan, I summoned a Tier-7 localized hurricane. A roaring funnel of wind swallowed the farm, uprooting the remaining crop and spinning it into a frantic, leafy vortex.
"NO! OUR STEW!"
I leaped into the air with my main body, hands outstretched for the flying produce. The Knight lunged to assist. The Mage attempted a levitation spell to catch us all. Instead, our limbs knotted together mid-air like a Gordian tangle of idiocy.
WHAM.
We hit the dirt in a synchronized thud. A single, pristine Moon-Turnip descended from the heavens, bounced off the Knight's helmet, skipped across the Mage's nose, and landed squarely in my lap.
Three overpowered paragons of humanity lay defeated by a root vegetable.
"I hate us," the Mage whispered.
"Agreed," the Knight groaned.
"Shut up, me," I sighed, clutching our lone prize.
A roar then tore through the atmosphere, vibrating in our very marrow. The forest edge disintegrated as a scaled titan of crimson flame burst into the clearing. The Hellfire Drake. It had likely sensed the Archmage's reckless mana spike.
The dragon locked eyes with us, its throat glowing with the orange heat of a forge.
I looked at the dragon. I looked at the single, mud-streaked turnip—the fruit of three concussions and a ruined reputation. A dark, crystalline rage settled over my shattered mind. The lag vanished. For one singular, terrifying second, the three brain cells aligned into a hyper-focused beam of pure irritation.
The Knight unsheathed a broadsword that hummed with divine light. The Archmage raised a staff that bled raw arcane power. I drew my twin daggers.
"You're stepping on the farm," we said in a perfect, haunting unison.
Less than four seconds later, the Drake was unconscious, trussed up in its own tail like a Thanksgiving turkey, with a "PROPERTY OF JENKINS" sign hammered into its snout.
I dusted off my hands and tossed the turnip into the basket. "Good job, team."
On the walk back, I treated my bodies to ice cream. I took a massive, triumphant bite with the Knight's mouth. A millisecond later, a piercing, icy needle of brain freeze lanced through my shared consciousness.
"GAAAAAH!"
All three of us shrieked, collapsing into fetal positions in the center of the town square.
"Look at them," a passing villager whispered, bowing low. "The Cerberus Syndicate is performing a high-level ritual to commune with the Elemental Lords of Frost!"
I am an idiot, I thought, clutching my three aching heads. We are all idiots.