The Daily Grind - Chapter 375 (Patreon)

"Well, I couldn't collect my pay because the run had been a disaster.  But after the explosion I got to ride in the front of the fire truck, and they gave me cookies and a blanket.  I wound up dating one of those firemen a few weeks later.  All things considered, it could have gone a lot worse!"  -Gobbet, Shadowrun Hong Kong-

_____

The Order of Endless Room’s current big issue was prioritization.

Money they could manage; the projects and resources the Order needed funded were met with multiple plans, including aggressive borrowing and betting against the oncoming economic disruption that was sure to emerge.  Magic they could manage; some delves required a personal presence, but others just took liberal application of the duplication ritual to make available, or, in some lucky cases, just more time to brew potions.  People they could manage; recruitment was already kicking up even just a day later, and while it seemed like every human had at least one friend that might be a good fit, it was the other species under the Order’s banner that surprised everyone with their response to the call, with the umbral especially being willing to take the risk.

Everything that wasn’t mortal peril, they could deal with.

But it all took time and effort.  Time and effort they were suddenly finding was in shorter supply than they needed, and those were things that they couldn’t just stretch thin if they wanted good results.  The list of things the Order wanted to take on was getting longer and longer, and their list of knights was becoming increasingly committed to long term tasks that meant they weren’t always on call to save the world

And not only that, but the biggest visible problem at the moment was the takeover of a nation by a magical group that looked like it was worrying on par with the Order in terms of capability.  A problem they could see from a long ways away, but didn’t really know how to approach at all.

Which was why they were having an all-knighted-hands meeting to make sure that, at a minimum, everyone was on the same page in terms of what the Order knew.

The first thing they absolutely had to cover was the Pillars.

Now known to the Order to be not a category of person, but actually a semi-allied group made up of a category of person, the Pillars represented the biggest threat to the planet that anyone in the room could think of short of full on nuclear war.  It was hard to explain why, exactly.  It was possible for enough camracondas staring at them to slow them down, and shooting them with magical bullets was an option.  The fact that they didn’t stay dead was a complication, but not an insurmountable one.

And yet, as their local expert reminded them, the kind of things the Pillars were did bleed when they ‘died’.  They just bled magic.  A leaking contamination that changed the local world, in ways that not even a pillar could predict.  They were going to have to treat it as a form of radiation, something that would render an unknown amount of area off limits until it could be investigated, if it ever could be investigated.

James was reminded of a conversation he’d had with Alanna a couple months back.  About how they’d fought Blitzkrieg in a hollowed out dungeon, and wounded her pretty badly.  And that, ever since then, James had carved a violent swath through his enemies, his offensive actions coming up just a little bit more powerful than they maybe should have.  Confirmation bias, or contamination?  It was impossible to tell, not even Kiki knew.

The information was further solidified by reports from three different sources.  The scout team sent to northern Siberia was the most obvious one, the group having teleported back late last night while James was still busy acquiring domain magic.  They could match proper nouns now; the Chain Breaker’s note about someone named ‘MoM’ likely paired to Mind Over Matter, whose gravesite sat in the crater there.  The warning about the false-dungeon causing biological-based telepathy in people triggered a different thought in James’ head, which he shared with the group.

The Order of Endless Rooms had started with a rescue mission.  Specifically, rescue of a bunch of people kidnapped by a dungeon life form that were networked together and used to ‘suppress’ the mind of Officium Mundi.  An ability that they’d literally never seen on any kind of dungeon life before or since, and something that suddenly clicked into place now.

Telepathy was on the Chain Breaker’s list of magical problems.  It wasn’t contained, or if it was, it wasn’t contained perfectly.  However long Mind Over Matter had been dead for, his last gift to the world had been spreading out for long enough that a likely case was that humans might be psychic enough that you could use a networked blob of a hundred of them to read minds or something.

Which, of course, meant that the other things the Chain Breaker had listed were probably also ‘free’ magics.  The thing about groups of three having some kind of nebulous advantage, they’d already known, but it did mean the Order was going to be arranging their knight teams in a specific way from now on.  The entry for necromancy would have been worrying, if not for the fact that Townton was packed with necroads, and the method of their creation was known and fixed, so… maybe that one wasn’t too bad.  And if they trusted the Pillar, then they could at least assume that ghosts weren’t real.

The other thing from the scout team’s report, given by a navigator who seemed like she was more at home exploring the Siberian wastes than doing any kind of public speaking, was evidence that whatever the Pillars were, they were very similar to dungeons.  Possibly even responsible for the creation of them.  But it didn’t seem like they had a handle on the process, and it didn’t actually change anything, except to explain why it was that Pillars always avoided dungeons.

They’d known for a while that they didn’t like the things, but ever since introducing Kiki to Clutter Ascent, and learning that it would have been very easy for the dungeon to rip the woman apart, it had become clear that the Pillars were looking at dungeons as their own kind of nuclear waste containment sarcophagi.  Useful, maybe, but not to be touched.

The other information, from a rogue that had been tracking Blitzkrieg, and from a pair of knights that had been on vacation up until the least convenient chance encounter, filled in more holes.

Pillars were their names.  And those names weren’t as malleable as James had suspected after talking to Aku.  The cognitive dissonance caused by trying to behave like a person, while an overwhelmingly powerful magical thing pushed you to behave like itself, was not something that anyone could weather forever.  Kiki confirmed a lot of that, too.  When she was doing what her capital-N-Name of Kill ‘Em With Kindness desired but doing it because she wanted to, then she felt more in control.  More alive.  It was only when she fought back or tried to force an incorrect use of her magic that she slipped.  Lost an amount of control, or started to feel her thoughts grinding away.  She was still powerful, but the fear she had of her personality being slowly ablated away was very real, and might actually be how Pillars died in the first place.  Actually died, not just took enough damage to leak some magic before reconstituting.

The briefing presentation did lead to a question for Kiki specifically.  They couldn’t keep saying ‘Pillars’ if they knew people like her existed that weren’t part of that pact.  So what did they call her?

The distressingly powerful grandmother hadn’t had any ideas, but a lot of other people had.  So she’d mostly just shot down suggestions she didn’t click with, like calling her a ‘saint’ or an ‘icon’, until someone suggested ‘embodiment’ and she had run out of protests.

Personally, James was with her on the icon front.  Apparently Blitzkrieg had used that kind of language when she was busy annihilating a perfectly good structure.  And while James didn’t really believe that using the wrong words could let people listen in on you, he did think that if the Pillars had their own jargon, that the Order shouldn’t copy the words without understanding the meaning.

The final breakdown, though, was this.  The Pact of Pillars knew about the Order, and whether by design or circumstance, wouldn’t or couldn’t destroy them.  The Chain Breaker was a potential ally, and Walkabout seemed to be an actual supporter of theirs, along with the Right Person At The Right Moment.  Though two of those three were clearly experiencing mental degradation that was hurting them more over time.  On the other side, the Long Arm Of The Law, The Last Line Of Defense, and Blitzkrieg, were all antagonistic or hostile to the Order.  A Necessary Evil, or Aku to his friends, was somewhere on the fence.  Not neutral, but not a problem for now.

And actually on their side, there was Kiki.  Kill ‘Em With Kindness.  An incredibly friendly high powered railgun.  And maybe Clutter Ascent.

It was possible to hurt an embodiment.  Or at least, damage them enough to slow them down.  But so far, they’d found the most success in attacking their names.  The Last Line of Defense could just be told to fuck off if you were already protecting something, because it conflicted enough with his name and he was unwilling to fight that battle.  Blitzkrieg could be stalled long enough that it was easier for her to just leave.  Aku… well, Aku was a moron, and thought that interspecies cooperation counted as ‘an evil’, so navigating that was easier than expected.

“I’m starting to think,” James said with a grimace as they finished going over every scrap of relevant information they had, “that the biggest threat to the world might actually be named The Pact of Pillars.  That maybe the ending they’re all predicting is a little bit self-inflicted.”

”Three people just took over the British empire and you still think that?”

”I think if the Chain Breaker wanted them dead they’d be dead, and the only reason they’re not dead is either we’re missing something or Rhonda is still napping in her private dungeonette.”  James stated bluntly.  “Actually, let me add one piece of speculation to the board.”  He tapped two fingers on his cheek as he stared at the big array of information, getting a go-ahead from Planner to speculate away.  “We met Blitz trying to kill the Sewer.  But does anyone want to bet her planned destiny for it was to end up as someone else’s safehouse?”

That raised a terrifying question.  How many dead dungeons were like that because Blitzkrieg had needed them for spare parts?  Was that what had happened in Oklahoma?  A million dungeon animals displaced into a wave of violent hunger because a pillar thought she needed the dungeon’s internal organs more than it did?

It tied back too clearly to the understood actions of the various Status Quo groups.  They killed dungeons, but the methods they used to kill dungeons were always suspect because none of their notes lined up with how the Order had learned dungeons worked.  Not perfectly anyway.  But they would line up if their practice of cordoning off dungeon entrances and starving the places out was actually just exposing a dungeon to conditions where it was isolated from both the public and its delvers, and easy pickings for a Pillar.

Of course it implied that Pillars could actually modify dungeons.  Though what Blitzkrieg did looked a whole lot like a lobotomy, but that still counted as a modification.  More importantly, with the evidence from multiple sources that dungeons were meant to be some kind of parallel to Pillars themselves, a way to contain something, it raised the horrifying question of what happened to the magic?  When a Pillar died the magic became everyone’s problem.  When a dungeon died, why should it be any different?

But it must be different, because between Blitzkrieg, the New York Status Quo, and just the ones they’d found on their own, the Order knew of way too many dead dungeons for people to have not noticed the ambient mana levels of the planet rising like some kind of extra nightmarish global warming.

James loved magic.  A lot.  But he could admit that a big part of why he loved it was that the magic in his life was safe.  Sometimes risky, like with the Climb, but always… guided.  Structured.  There was no such thing as wild magic.

Except apparently there was.  And James could tell that a lot of the knights around him had their own versions of concern for what it meant when that loose magic impacted civilization.  Because the results were either going to be bad for everyone due to the chaos of it all, or bad for everyone because somebody was going to find a way to turn naturally occurring telepathy into a weaponized breeding program or some shit.

The entire briefing, supposition or not, was sobering.  The room currently held about eighty knights, mostly human, and James was willing to bet that any one of them was a match for a random dungeon monster attack or a mundane assailant.  But it was hard for any of them to think they were ready to fight things that looked an awful lot like demigods, or to manage a global shift in the average number of literal wizards.

After that, the smaller things they needed to deal with felt a little less critical, though.  And it didn’t take long to start dividing up important tasks that the Order knew they needed to tackle.

Dungeon delving was still a very necessary part of their operations, mostly because any delve could end up giving them another magical problem solving tool.  So a lot of people got tasked with that, some knights that were unattached delvers being assigned to inducting new teams, and existing teams being tasked with longer expedition style delves to reach deeper parts of some dungeons and the more powerful artifacts that could be found there.

Pillar tracking and investigation was less necessary for development and improvement, but arguably a lot more required for continued existence.  So some knights were added to the ongoing task of monitoring and in some cases intercepting the agents of those Pillars.  As far as they knew, only Lloyd - James’ favorite derisive name for the Last Line - and the Long Arm used agents, and in most cases the knights would just be evacuating areas or stalling until a paladin arrived.  But still, it took a certain amount of courage to even be on the roster for that kind of action.  Though it probably helped that the task force had a secondary mandate of uncovering any Status Quo groups to be targeted by the Order, and no one liked Statuses Quos.

Oklahoma was still a massive problem.  Well, they said ‘Oklahoma’ as shorthand, but the truth was that animal level intelligences from a dead dungeon didn’t really obey state lines, and the swarm had extended well into northern Texas.  The best part of settling who was going to be the Order knights in charge of the local combat forces was not picking who was going, because very few people wanted to go.  No, the best part was James got to learn that they were calling the dungeon creatures that all had sound-based magic ‘the heard’, and that pun buoyed his spirit by a lot.

Then there was whatever was going on down in California with what James kept referring to as the ‘mannequin faucet’, and what Nate kept ordering him to stop referring to as the ‘mannequin faucet’.  Joking aside though, it was… a difficult situation.  It looked like winning the weekly fight too easily caused it to get harder.  Potentially a lot harder.  And the reward was nebulous enough that it was hard to say if it was worth trying to experiment with or farm it.  When Pathfinder pointed out that this might be the kind of loose magic that showed up when a dungeon died, no one really had a good argument against it.  They still assigned one of the shield teams to it though.

And of course, the scout teams.  They weren’t all knights, officially, but each team had at least one, and while they weren’t really an exception to the rule that knights were generally around to solve problems, they spent a lot of their time ‘out there’ somewhere.  Several of those teams had come back, having found terrifying secrets over the last week or two, and needed some time to rest, restock their Garden spells, and pick up some new tricks.  But others were actually still out there, and a handful of knights that were tackling things that were less all-consuming were given the specific assignment of being ready to bail any scout out when something inevitably went wrong.

Everyone else was on standby, training, and general operations and outreach.  “Everyone else” wasn’t that many people by the time they were done with the main things they needed handled.  But crippling their ability to react to a crisis was an insanely stupid idea, and also they needed to be prepared for a few problems they knew were out there waiting to strike.

”So what is our plan if a Pillar shows up… anywhere?”  Ethan asked toward the end, the guy not waiting for anyone to acknowledge his raised hand.  “Like if we’re down in Alice waiting on the entrance-“

”Beg pardon?”  Alice asked from next to him with an expertly arched eyebrow, the scout trying not to look like she was about to laugh.

Ethan, who had no idea what Alice’s name actually was, gave her a look of puppy dog innocence.  “Alice Springs, where the Climb is.”  He continued.  “But what if Long shows up and tries to arrest us?”

”Run like hell.”  James said.

”Oh.  Uh… Blitzkrieg?”

”Run like hell.”  Nate said in an identical tone.

”…Walkabout?”

”They actually might just be from Australia, given the name, but I was looking into the origin of the term and it seems like it could be one of those things where it’s an outsider culture applying a hostile coat of paint to something that’s seen as ‘barbaric’ mostly because of racism?”  Daniel, who had been silent for most of the conversation, decided now was the time to voice an opinion.  “Uh… not that Walkabout is a racist.  But I think a lot of people in Australia might know that the term is loaded, but people in the US might just think it’s a neat term.  So…”

”Daniel.”  James said with a sigh.

Daniel looked over at the paladin, then blinked.  “Oh, right.”  He turned back to Ethan, ignoring Pathfinder’s twitching suppressed laugh that was flicking her peacock feathers against his legs.  “Run like hell?”

”There we go.”  Nate grunted as he stood up.  “Anyone have anything else to say?”

From the back of the room where their group had uncertainly sat at the start of the briefing, Vex raised her hand.  “Hey, yeah, what the fuck did we sign up for?”

”Saving the world.”  James told her with a pained shake of his head.  “In exchange for a good medical plan.”

Vex paused, then glanced at her smaller girlfriend sitting next to her.  “Well shit.”  She said, lowering her hand.  “I guess people have done more for less.”

”That’s not… true, but okay, glad you’re achieving self-actualization.”  James clapped his hands, once, and then spread them out toward the rest of the assembled knights.  “Now go.  Get to work.  And don’t hesitate to yell at me if you need backup.”

A few too many of them looked like they were seriously preparing for that already.

Kiki shook her head as she stood behind James, arms folded, her hawkish old face watching the newest younger generation file out.  She didn’t say it, because she didn’t know what she’d even say, but it rattled her to see them treat heroics as a job.  They got up and clocked in to survive the kinds of things no one should ever have to face in the first place, and they seemed happy with that.

Kiki was going insane.  She already knew it, and the new knowledge about what embodiments were and how they worked only cemented that.  Over time, she was going to grind her soul away against the brick wall of the impossible power stored in her old bones, and there was no way around that.  She hadn’t told anyone in the Order her newest contingency plan, but having one didn’t mean she liked the situation.  And yet, despite losing bits of her focus and agency, tiny pieces slowly getting replaced by compulsions and more magic, Kiki was pretty sure she knew one thing about the Order that scared her even more than what was happening to her.

They were insane because they liked it.

The worst - or best, maybe - part was that it was hard to find that much wrong with people who tore up the foundations of their whole lives, just so they could be recklessly, aggressively, powerfully kind.

Maybe that was why Kiki was here at all.

_____

“So, this is it.”  Reed handed James a small crystal.  A pale pink with white lines running through it, looking mostly like mundane quartz cut roughly into one of those pointed trapezoid shapes that sold in tourist traps.  The impression was not helped by the flat silver chain wrapped around it and making it a pendant of some kind, the material definitely not real silver.  “The chain doesn’t do anything.”  Reed added, her claw nudging it as James held it up to examine.  “We just didn’t know that so we copied a bunch with it, just in case.”

”Probably smart.”  James acknowledged, sidestepping without thinking about it as a camraconda raced through where he’d been standing, a ratling and ratroach following in his wake like they were either responding to an emergency, or running from an emergency.  James had moved on reflexes honed through multiple trips down to Research’s main floor; this place never failed to have someone trying to take him out at the knees, and so he came in with paladin instincts turned on.  Also just in case.  “Do we know what it does yet?”

Reed turned her head back toward James with a forced slowness.  “Yeah, you’re too slow to ruin your magic this time.”  She said, before coughing nervously and flicking her eyes away.  “Sorry, that was-“

”Nah, I earned that one.”  James laughed, glad to know that Reed’s personality was almost exactly the same as before her transition between both genders and species.  “Was it Nik?”

”It was not Nik.”  Reed said, and then flicked two mirrored paws out to the side in a weird shrug.  “Okay I lied.  It was sort of Nik.  Did you read JP’s report?”

”On the… event?”  The regicide.  “Yeah.”  James nodded grimly.

If Reed was bothered by the public murder, she didn’t show it.  “So, Sartori said they felt ‘like authorities’.  And they definitely do, to the point that they don’t work if you have an authority.”

James held the crystal up, dangling it from its chain at eye level, his one biologically enhanced eye seeing clearly the almost artificial style of the imperfections on its surface.  “Okay, that’s weird.”  He said.  “We don’t normally get incompatible magic.  Actually I don’t think we’ve ever gotten incompatible magic.”

”Yeah, the worst we’ve seen before this has been the uptime drop.”  Reed nodded, nervous anxiety actively forgotten as she got into the pattern of talking about Research nonsense.  “So Nik broke a crystal and it ‘sloughed off’, in his words.”

”Gross.”

”That’s what I said.  Anyway.  We tested it again, and yeah, it just bounces off authorities.  They can’t even ‘eat’ it or anything like that.”  Reed’s tails slapped against the paved floor in an idle fidget, shifting around the base of the white coat she was wearing.  “On everyone else, it works okay, but they are copies, and we’ve got copy rules.”  She ticked off points on her claws.  “Same output, no stacking, but that means no real experimenting.  The magic is abstract, too.  Not like the Office where it alters actual documents.”

James nodded.  “So what does it do?”

”Oh, right.”  Reed flushed green around the eyes.  “Break the crystal, you get a Rank.  It works like Lessons; do things that embody the Rank, get points toward the next level.”

”How verified is that?”  James asked curiously.  There was a lot of wiggle room in the Sewer’s Lessons.  The way that you were supposed to ‘learn’ things to advance them seemed to have a soft spot for subconscious practical understanding, or muscle memory, for example.  Academic knowledge was only part of it, especially since Office skill ranks, which definitely gave a staggering amount of information, usually only upped a Lesson by fifty to a hundred points, which was just incorrect.

So when Reed said you got points for acting like the Rank’s job, it was suspicious.  Partly because they’d had these things for a day, at most, but also because dungeons were very often dicks about how they hid the real functions of their magic.  And worse, some of them were very clever dicks.

“Verified-ish.”  Reed admitted.  “The Rank we have here is yeoman, so there’s a finite amount of yeoman things to be doing around here.  Obviously there’s tests lined up to see if putting someone in an official position of both literal and similar titles makes it go faster, or if it’s just ‘doing yeoman things’.  Also, hey, uh, I’ve said the word ‘yeoman’ about eighty times today and it doesn’t sound like a word anymore?”

”I’m getting there myself.”  James laughed, setting the crystal down on the desk they were standing by as he watched some of the shellaxies and stepshells inside Research’s containment pen curiously move in his direction.  “Yeoman.  That’s a feudal non-conscript soldier, right?  Like a footman?  Or… no, an adjunct?”

”We’re pretty sure it’s that one.”  Reed said, brushing a paw on her coat.  “No one has leveled it up yet, though.  But it’s only been a day, like you said.  So we don’t know what the power is, or how it stacks.”

James frowned slightly.  “Hm.  I did talk to JP and Sartori, I know that the Tyrants had people with multiple crystals they were waiting to use, and also they were talking about some kind of connection.  Which sort of implies you can pair Ranks to other people’s?  Did we try that?”  Reed nodded at him, opening her mouth to say something, before James continued.  “I’m guessing it didn’t work because they’re all the same.  Or because there’s a trick we don’t know.  But at least we know there’s no cataclysmic penalty for multiple Ranks.  We should try to get more of these somehow.”

”You want to rob a government?”  Reed asked with a laugh that turned into a quiet cough.

”Constantly. “ James affirmed.  “Oh, wait, you’re joking because of the regicide thing.  Reed, I’m gonna level with you, regicide seems like the main way power has moved around in Europe for the last thousand years, and who am I to break from tradition?”

Reed stared at him, horrified.  "That... is a really shitty thing to say?  Even if they only took over the UK - and it looks like they didn't - that's still a modern democracy that just got stolen by some guys knifing a ceremonial figurehead.  You know just because they're imperialist bastards doesn't mean everyone who lives there deserves a mind control ray, right?"

"I... have been deflecting with humor a lot."  James said with a smile that was too ashamed to be real.  "Really bad humor.  Sorry."  He added quickly.

Reed kept staring before before shaking her head and then clutching a paw to one of her antennae.  “God dammit.”  She hissed.  “Can’t wait for this to be over.  Oh, uh, I’ll be gone for a week coming up here.”

”Surgery?”

”Yeah.  Is that okay?”

James rolled his eyes.  “Girl.  Please.”  He said flatly.

Reed’s flush was a brighter green than before.  “That feels way too positive and affirming.”  She muttered.  “Karma’s going to catch up to me for that.”  She sighed, something in her chest clicking wetly.  “Anyway, yeah.  We’ve got about ten people testing the yeoman Rank, but like I said, uh, no clue what the reward part of it is.  So you might want to wait?”

”How long, do you think?”  James asked.

”It’s been going pretty quick for a couple of them, especially Tyrone.”  She said, checking her battered and slightly singed notebook.  James gave the relic of the Research department a smile as Reed flipped to a page and then made a mark, updating it from something she was reading off her skulljack connection.  “Yeah, Tyrone is at thirty out of ninety six already.  But he is in a coterie.”

James had no idea why people around the Order had so quickly adapted to that title that they thought being in a paladin’s coterie gave anyone superpowers.  “Ninety six?”

”Uneven, I know.  Arbitrary, but at least it’s consistent though.”

”At least we aren’t playing by Lesson rules for copying.”  James sighed.  “Okay, I’ve gotta go check my demiplane for new problems, is there anything else I need to know before escaping this basement?”  He paused, and then added before Reed could say anything, “I already read the thing about priority.  Not that.”

Reed cocked her head at James, looking away from where Chevoy had just walked out of one of the labs with the sort of determined stride that meant she was about to ask her for more money to throw into space.  “Uh… what?  The what?”

”The… priority testing?  Did you not…?”  For once, it looked like James was on top of something.  “Right, you should probably read the full document, but the short version is that we know where three dungeons go on the ‘who would win in a fight’ scale.  Honestly the authority and Rank conflict sort of slots in there, so definitely edit that document.  Anyway.  Because Dorothy has that Horizon spell for moving gas or oil, and we have a blue absorb for manipulating petroleum, and Vex’s domain can do oil things.  So we can compare whose trumps whose.” James saw Reed’s face scrunch up, the ratroach forgetting that she didn’t really have eyebrows to raise anymore, and he smiled, taking pity on her before she distorted her muzzle into a weirder shape.  “It’s Horizon, domain, blue, in descending order, if you were curious.  Anyway, I gotta go.”  James started to turn, and then froze, his eyes widening.

”Uh…” Reed stepped forward with a worried look.  “You okay?”

”Back up a step.”  James said, clearing his throat.  “I’m fine, I just…” he watched Reed move, and then moved himself, stepping slightly sideways.  He’d felt something.  Something in his own new domain; that tiny patch of space on the very edge of it had triggered as he’d moved the part that he’d set the sense at past Reed.  But what had done it?  “Is it the coat?  No.”  James crouched and rose again, shifting his body to pivot where the tiny spot of domain sense was layered.  “What…”

Reed raised her paws, one of them clutching her notebook.  “Stay away from my coat, I just got this.”  She said with more passion than she’d used to talk about the magical Rank assignments.

James, though, had no designs on the coat.  Instead, his eyes locked onto the paw holding the notebook as it passed through the designated spot.  Turning, and turning his domain sense with him, James looked around the nearest desk and grabbed a stapled-together report.  Holding it at arm’s length, and moving it through the spot, he knew.  He could feel it.  Just a tiny sliver of the whole thing, but that was enough to identify what it was his domain was for.

Paper.

Well, no, it could be ink or metal or staple.  So James ran a further check.  And then determined it was paper.

”I’ve seen this anime.”  He told Reed, excitedly.

”I haven’t!”  The ratroach exclaimed, though she was relieved that her paladin wasn’t having a stroke or a complete mental breakdown or something like that in the middle of her cooperative Research space.  “What are you talking about?”

James checked the time and decided he didn’t have forever to chat about anime with Reed, which was disappointing, because despite having known the head of Research for most of the Order’s life, James didn’t feel like he actually knew Reed that well.  “It’s a thing I watched in my parent’s basement back when I was a kid, it’s called Read or Die.  I’m pretty sure it’s not as good as I remember, but I associate it with that early vibe of being a kid getting into anime, it has some cool music, and now I can finally live my dream of killing a cyborg with a paper airplane.”

”…was that on your list?”  Reed asked with a host of narrowed eyes.

James pocketed the crystal he’d been given, considering maybe using it later while shaking his head as he answered.  ”Reed you broke down and bought a lab coat, don’t get weird about my dreams.”  James scoffed as he made his escape.

“Okay, yeah, fair.”

_____

Updating his own magic took comparatively little time for James.

His demiplane only had a couple slips open, but one was conveniently located enough that it didn’t take him too long to visit.  The place had grown a lot from the bamboo path and walkable gravel disc he’d started with.  The additions from his last delve with Cam and Spire hadn’t moved anything around, but it did feel like the dungeon was trying to subtweet him with the way it had put a boxy spiral staircase ‘inside’ where the green orb added seating area was.

That spiral stair, a barely sanded wooden column with steps that felt far too rickety for something put together by magic and fused to him via a dungeon-granted tattoo, led down to… nothing.  The little landing at the bottom had an unpolished cobblestone floor, three doors, and nothing past those doors.  Though the fact that each door came with a key - modern style house key, specifically - kind of made James feel like he could guess.  He pocketed the keys, just to test his hunch.

Back ‘upstairs’, which was a meaningless distinction in this place where literal nothing surrounded everything that wasn’t forged out of the magic, James found the patch of gravel now bled into what looked like a sand dune, and climbing it revealed another three of the waves of almost pale white pure sand.  Somewhere in his brain, a skill orb for lens manufacturing started wailing about material quality, but as with basically every unnatural resource James ever found through his magic life, he had serious doubts that harvesting sand from his pocket dimension would be very effective.  Besides, another batch of skill orbs, along with his own life experience, was yelling at him about how much of a pain this was going to be to clean up if it got into anything.

He pressed on though, getting past the sand to where it bled into a pretty normal hardwood floor.  Feeling a lot less worried about falling into the distressingly finite nothingness around the demiplane, James relaxed as he poked around, and quickly located a standing cabinet, and a shelf that appeared to be properly braced and mounted to the empty air.  Presumably if he expanded the demiplane further, he’d see the wall it was supposed to be nailed to eventually.  But for now it was weird.

The cabinet had several neatly arranged bags of white flour in it, and James promptly got a puff of the stuff directly in his face trying to pick one up.  It didn’t either kill him or give him a buff, so he just packed up a couple in the backpack he’d brought, and figured he’d donate it to the Lair’s bakery for later.  The shelf had a small ornate jewelry box on it, soft purple velvet and gold lines covering it.  James felt instantly bad as he opened it and left a white flour fingerprint on the side.  Inside was, of course, empty.

”Would it kill this dungeon to provide an instruction manual?”  He griped.

He knew from talking to Tylor and Jubilance - mostly Tylor - that they had seen someone get a desk that spawned notes about the rest of their demiplane.  But it hadn’t happened until the tenth floor, and James had struggled with the fifth, even with two incredibly dangerous people along with him.  The Order was going to need a concentrated effort for the Compiled Wastes, and he wasn’t sure they had the time for it right now, if it was mostly going to be making baking supplies and empty boxes.

James needed to get Research to part with their iLipede population for a day, just to scour everything he could from this place.  He was almost certain that some of the stuff he’d gotten so far was useful, but if you didn’t know how a tool worked, then it didn’t matter how big of a force multiplier it was.  Doubling zero was still nothing.

He stuck around his demiplane for a while longer, both doing a double check of everything, and just enjoying the strange scene that came together when the various disparate pieces of terrain drew lines across each other and painted a bizarre landscape.  It was so very unlike a dungeon; there was no rhyme here, even by accident.  This was a place that was made up of slivers of other places, and it wasn’t ever going to be its own thing unless James spent a lot of time and energy to reshape it with green and orange orbs.

He also took the time, sitting in one of the chairs that he’d painfully spawned in with a green orb the last time he was here, to get some spell studying in.  James was aware that there was a finite amount of air in here, but that was part of the point.  He had a high end air quality monitor with him, and seeing just how long a demiplane could sustain a human was an important part of safety testing.  Also he was one of a shrinking pool of people who breathed like a normal human anyway.

So the twenty minutes he spent studying a Visiting Tongue spellbook was doing two things at once.

He’d chosen that because, honestly, a fireball was kind of a useful tool, and it was one of the things James was more willing to link to the Pylon levels in Winter’s Climb spellcasting.  He’d tried to pair the new link with Breaking Forge, the spell to summon a sword that he already had paired with two other Pylon skills, but it just didn’t work.  Which sucked, but was also confirmation that if you wanted to stack links, you had to do it all at once, which meant refraining from any Garden spells until you were ready.

James could have waited.  But there was no telling when he’d have time to get back to the Pylons for more levels.  And this could be useful now.  That mattered.

So Visiting Tongue got paired with Winter’s Climb spellcasting, and James learned that the esoteric skill the Pylon had acknowledged had a fairly unesoteric effect.  Ten percent reduction in the requirements for air, temperature, and movement while studying the spell, which was a lower number than a more focused link, but hit a lot more options.  But also, every hundred and sixty Breath spent on a spell would advance Visiting Tongue a single time.  Two effects.

It was so nice that the magic told them so much, James mused as he sat in a chair in a place that told him nothing.  Though even as he had that thought, he was already wondering how wand charging counted, how it selected which equipped iteration of the spell it advanced, whether it had a safety shutoff for if it would level up a spell to a point that would injure him and lose the cast, and also if it the ratio of eight Breath per minute would change if James lowered his study time by some other means.

So essentially, it told them more, but still not anywhere near enough.  James almost missed D&D sourcebooks that explained in exacting detail what spells did and exactly what use cases they had.  Of course, his magic had the advantage of being real, so that was a point in its favor.  He was sure he could manage a little more experimentation to figure out the limits.

James had an expansive Breath pool from a nearly ten thousand foot climb up the Mountain dungeon, but a pool of that particular mana supply wasn’t as useful as it sounded, since spending more than twenty at a time could kill an unprepared person.  Still, though, he used up some more time in his demiplane trying out casts of Rot Eyes - there was no fungus in the demiplane, which was good - and Call To Blood - it didn’t work, the demiplane severed the tracker just like a dungeon’s threshold - in order to try out a few things.

His experimentation made it clear that his new domain was soaking up some of the backlash from the spellcasting, but it really wasn’t that much.  He was still chilly and panting after ten Breath spent, it was just less bad rather than a fast solution.  The other thing was, he was actually starting to feel what the spellcasting levels from the Pylon were doing; it was small, again, but it was there.  The thing was, it wasn’t in the effects of the magic, it was in the act of spellcasting.  James could manage it with less direct focus, he could recall the items on his personal spellbook more clearly and with better detail, and he found he could multitask a lot more effectively.

He wasn’t improving in the magic he was throwing around, he was improving in the act of being a wizard.

Somehow that felt so much better.

Since there was nothing tracking the Breath spent, and James still needed to linger for a while, he passed time loading up another Visiting Tongue cast with a single advancement this time, so he could hopefully start checking on the priority for the link’s bonus at a later date.

Eventually, though, he had enough periodic readings of the local air quality to plot out the total time limit in his demiplane, and decided to make his exit.  It was a nice little break where literally no one could reach him, but his anxiety that the world had caught fire had grown steadily as he waited.  Making sure to gather up everything he’d brought in - the demiplanes would eventually purge any unapproved foreign substances as they reset, and no one knew where they went - James said goodbye to his mystery snowball, and walked back through the hole in space into baseline reality.

Thanks to the skulljack braid he almost never removed anymore, his phone delivered all the queued up messages into his brain immediately.

_____

At least none of the messages were about something on fire.  This time.  James was still waiting.  His gut coiled like a spring into a shape that was prepared for when the call came that it was all crashing down.

It didn’t feel right.  The world was in peril, horrible things were happening, he had more power than he ever had before, and yet… it was all just pretending to be normal.  Or whatever normal had become for his day-to-day, anyway.  Yeah, there were wars and protests and changes in government and corporate atrocities and intentional systemic harms happening.  But Earth had those things before the dungeons, and unless James beat up a god and took their power for himself, it would probably have them after the dungeons too.  He didn’t know how to stop a war.  He didn’t know how to save everyone.  So he focused on what he could do, and tried to save anyone, and collect those anyones into enough someones to do a little more collectively.

Not a bad plan, but it did feel slow.  And there were times where he did legitimately wonder if maybe teleporting into certain strategic places and shooting certain strategic monsters in the head would do more good than evil.  But James had laid out a path for the Order that he was pretty sure was the only way to build a better world and not just a less shit world, and that was one where they outcompeted their opponents and didn’t just murder them,

And yet he was waiting.  Waiting for when it happened.  When he filled out the reports about spell links, he was waiting.  When he had a quick chat with Marlea about the ethics of integrating a ratroach, he was waiting.  When he made out with two copies of his boyfriend in basement hallway in wildly different ways just to confuse the collective Anesh, he was waiting.  When he remembered to check his apartment’s attic while he was grabbing his spare hand axe from his dresser and confirmed that, yes, Sarah had incepted a dungeon into his house, he was waiting.  And the whole time he was clocking in for his shift of dungeon critter hunting in the devastated farmland of western Oklahoma, he was waiting.  Waiting for when it wasn’t just a million small beasts.  Waiting for when it wasn’t manageable anymore.

It didn’t feel great.  But at least eating antacids helped.

So James distracted himself by chatting with the other people in his patrol.

”So.  Hey.”  He drew out the word as he walked next to Vex.  They weren’t the only ones here, but they were in a relatively safe area, and so the others with them weren’t all hardened killers.  Instead, this was an opportunity to get some newer people a little experience, as well as expose a few locals to more species variety.  That last part was… a process; Oklahoma was, it turned out, not the most welcoming place in the US, and it seemed like Alex had burned all their luck finding the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society already.  Half the people they’d been organizing into hunting teams and local protectors had a hard time with the presence of women or non-white people in the Order, much less ratroaches.

“Yeah?”  Vex asked, drawing James back from his stare out over the drainage ditch toward a farm field that had been mowed down to the dirt by the Heard.  “Why the fuck are you saying ‘hey’ in that voice?  You’re not gonna hit on me, are you?”

James laughed, before realizing she was serious.  “Ah, no.”  He shook his head, adjusting his rifle strap as he refocused on the area around them through his drones while he talked.  “I’ve got a whole… actually no, forget that.”  He realized Vex didn’t need to know about his love life.  “Lemmie start over and finish my whole thought.”  He glanced at the tattooed woman next to him.  “So hey.  You could have told me your whole polycule are noncombatants.”  James cut to the point he wanted to make.

There wasn’t a verbal response immediately, though Vex did bite down on her lip and twist to look out over the other side of the expansive farm they were sweeping, pretending to keep an eye on the row of silos that they’d already circled twice now.  Fifty feet ahead of them, in the other half of their group, Shallah’s variant double rodent tails leaving extra indents in the mud of the trail as the chitinous ratroach followed after a pair of exploring ratlings named Hon and Min, and a pair of local humans named John and Jon who swore they could tell the difference in their names when someone shouted for them.  James could barely tell the two of the men apart physically, but he did know that one of them was an asshole and the other was… trying.  Or had a bug fetish.  Either way he was keeping an eye on them.

Eventually, after maybe five minutes of silence from the other knight, James got a reply.  “You’re not gonna kick us out, are you?”  Vex asked.  Though she said it like a revelation, not a question.

”Obviously not, though I guess I get why you would have lied at first.”  He snorted.

Vex grimaced, and got defensive real fast.  “We didn’t lie.”  She bit out.  “It felt like… at the Underburbs, it felt like you thought we could do more than we could.  Dude I’d been in two real fights before then, and they were with humans.  But you guys were… were…”

”Running around with assault rifles and shield bracers?”  James asked with a sardonic smile.

“Basically.”  Vex relaxed as she realized she wasn’t in trouble and James was actually just making conversation.  “Fuck.  I knew you’d know, once you went through the gap, but…” she shrugged, before tugging at an edge of the light armor she was still not perfectly comfortable in.  Vex was the kind of person who would have worn biker leathers and hoped that would be enough, if given the choice.

But Oklahoma wasn’t a place where the Order was fucking around right now.  Oh, they were definitely treating it as a low-risk opportunity for hands on experience, but low-risk didn’t mean fucking around.  If anything, it was a good opportunity to learn why they had safety standards like armor.

Even Min and Hon had their own custom fitted gear, the stubby armed rat goblins looking particularly proud of how well they were keeping up while wearing that much kevlar and ablative shell.  Shallah’s armor was maybe superfluous, given how much heavy chitin she in particular had covering her body, but the other humans had already learned firsthand how the gear could stop a scythe rabbit’s blade from going into a sensitive bit of flesh, so they wore it without complaint.

”Yeah, your dungeon is cool.”  James nodded like that was what Vex was talking about.  “Exceptionally hard to talk about.”

”You know it.”  Vex’s smirk was a little sad.  “Never did find a way around that.”

”Path says she thinks she can cut that part up, but it’s so much around the dungeon, it might be a bad idea.”  James shrugged, closing his eyes for a moment to focus on one of the drone feeds while he kept walking, the slow pace letting him get away with not tripping over anything.  “But!  Got a skulljack?”  He asked.

Vex raised her eyebrows back at him.  “Yeah?”  It had been one of the first things she gone for.  Mags was holding out for paranoia reasons, Astra for medical ones, but once she’d seen just how much shit the Order got up to with the cyberware, Vex had wanted one for herself real fast.

But James just handed her a USB stick, and she hesitated for a significant moment before shrugging and plugging it into the limited braid she wore.  Nothing like James’ nonsense that he used for multi-piloting drones, but still, enough to make her feel like a real cyborg.

And then she got to review a whole delve, from his perspective.  Audio and visual only, the emerald chip program the Order had finally beaten into shape did a good job of making .mem files that were a lot more accessible.  But still, it was cool to see her ‘home dungeon’, and also, Vex realized, to communicate about it with someone.

Then she got to the part James had clipped and highlighted, where they’d gotten their first threshold and figured out their domains were alive.  And Vex started swearing.

”Three years!”  She yelled, before muffling herself at a startled look from James as his head whipped around to make sure they weren’t being tracked.  “Three fucking years.”  Vex repeated, quieter, throwing her arms in the air and letting her gun drop a little too hard to her chest.  “So long to find a secret, and you fucking stumble into it on your first time?!”

”Yeah I’ve been doing that lately.”  James said noncommittally.  “Jubilance yelled at me twice about something similar.”

”…what’d you do to her?”

”Uncovered a secret of their magic system that they’d never even thought to try, because of my amazing access to the cosmic power of friendship.”  James said evenly.

Vex’s face turned into a hyperbolic frown, and she flipped him off with both hands, one aimed at James and the other upward at his drones just in case he wasn’t paying attention.  “This is our fucking luck.”  She grumbled.  “Finally find mages that aren’t eating children and they’re all smug assholes.”

”Back up.”  James said with an awkward laugh.  “What?”

”I’ve been in two fights.”  Vex said with a flat lack of amusement.  Then she jerked her head to the side in a small shrug.  “Had been, at least.  Now I’ve been in more.  Bet we’ll get the number up before we’re done here.”

”Before that happens,” James said as they prepared to check the enormous barn on the end of the property that he was certain had one of those fights in it, “a question!  Does your dungeon have a name?”

Vex’s retaliatory smile was just a little mean.  ”Sure does.”  She told him.  And then, after not following up on it, she lasted a good two minutes of James looking like a kicked puppy before she gave an irate sigh.  “I’ll put it on a fucking USB stick for you, happy?”

”I am, thank you.”  He said, shifting his pace.  “I’m gonna go check on the others before we hit that barn.  No movement around us, you good?”

”I’m good.”  Vex waved him off.  “You know… eh, nevermind.”  Even now, she still felt like they’d been too open with the Order, and it kept catching her annoyingly off guard how easily James got her talking.  Like now, how he had paused a few steps ahead to give her a raised eyebrow over that stupid fucking golden eye of his that looked like a goth kid had just learned about colored contacts.  And Vex reacted almost automatically, saying what she’d been thinking.  “You know I’m kinda into the knight thing.”  She said, looking away from him and out into the shredded field of the farm, dotted with bloodied bones from where the local ranch animals had been devoured by the Heard.  “I dunno man, fighting isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever done.  So don’t get all sad about it, yeah?”

James chuckled before picking up his pace.  “I know what you mean.”  He said in a quiet voice that Vex still caught before he jogged ahead and caught up to the other chunk of their party.  Shallah was walking in the middle of the group slightly apart from the others, her steps nimble despite her heavy frame.  “Hey.  Everything good?”  James asked.

The ratroach nodded at him, pausing in the humming she was doing.  “There is a crython somewhere.”  She said, punctuating the words with a hissing through her teeth that James was pretty sure was her mimicking her camraconda friends.  “But it’s hiding.”  She added, eyes flicking past him to the drainage ditch beside the muddy road they were walking as she tightened two of her paws on the spear she was carrying.

Crythons were the dungeon’s version of snakes that everyone had become familiar with by this point.  They swapped around sound sources, in a way that was incredibly disorienting, but not disorienting enough to compensate for their berserker style of ambushing.  “Hey, look at it this way;” he told Shallah casually, “if they’re hiding, they’re not the ones that’re killing people.”

Shallah’s eyes widened for a second, before her armored shoulders slumped.  “Oh.”  She said with bitter realization.  “S-sorry.  I wasn’t thinking.”

”Nah, you’re fine.”  James tried to play it off with a laugh.  “I mean, yeah, if they are hiding then they’re probably okay, but listening for them isn’t a bad idea when basically every one we’ve met so far tries to bite our legs off.”  He reminded the ratroach.  “Besides, you’re thinking now.”

”I am thinking n-“ Shallah’s eyes narrowed, flicking around them as her words came out in James’ voice.  Her hearing wasn’t anything special, but she hadn’t heard her own muddy steps distort and shift, and the training she’d been eagerly enjoying for dungeon delving had sharpened her mind to realize very quickly that she knew what direction the snake was coming from.

As the sound-manipulator burst out of cover from the other side of the road where it had been trying to sneak up on them, Shallah met it by slipping past James and swinging her spear down in a long arc, jamming the now twisting and writing creature into the mud before its strike could try for their shins.  Before it could slither back, she lunged forward herself, stomping a boot onto its back and crushing bones, holding it in place so she could raise her spear, brace all four paws on it, and strike it cleanly through the snake’s head.

”Aaaaand they’re not learning anything.”  James said, toe of his own, much more mass produced, boot tapping the dead dungeon creature’s bloodied head as Shallah collected both the orb, and the body.  “You okay?”

”I am vindicated.  That’s better than okay!”  Shallah said cheerfully.

”I feel like you’re also learning the wrong lessons.”  James said, but the ratroach had spent enough time delving with him through Officium Mundi at this point to understand that he was joking, and her boisterous clicking laughter followed him as he moved on to check in with the rest of the group.

When he caught up to the pairs of humans and ratlings at the front, James was actually surprised to find them having what seemed like a friendly conversation.  “-when I was in my twenties.  Dumbest decision of that year, but I still have that car.”  John was saying, his hunting rifle held easily across one arm as he chatted.  “Old wrecks like that are great for learning on, if ya’ll wanna come see it sometime.  Not like my kid’s ever interested.”

”Would enjoy that!”  One of the armored ratlings replied, though James would admit he didn’t know how to tell them apart yet.  He usually went for fur color, but they were both an almost glossy black.  The short dungeon escapees who had wanted to join the Order were mostly around to learn how to work as part of a team in an environment that was less constantly dangerous than a dungeon, but they were still armed and had combat instincts that their own dungeon had planted in their minds.  They just happened to be armed with crossbows, to maximize their own innate ability.  “Cars are fun.”

The other ratling nodded excitedly, though the human they were talking to couldn’t keep looking down at their shorter forms and the motion probably went unnoticed.  “None of them work, at home.”  Ah, that would be Hon then.  Min called the dungeon ‘that place’, and she clearly had a lower opinion of the Pylon than her brother did.  “Fake shells for fake machines.  The real ones fascinate!”

”Well don’t get too fascinated."  John cleared his throat on that last word.  “It’s an 88’ Yugo, one bad day and it turns into a fake machine.”

James raised a hand as he approached, smoothly interrupting. “That car’s the same age as-“ he saw the pained look on John’s face, the bushy beard not doing much to hide his grimace, and paused to consider his next words.  “-as… Star Wars?”

”Star Wars was way before that!”  The other Jon interjected.

”Oh, then it’s younger than Star Wars, so it can’t be that old.”  James felt like that was the smoothest recovery he was going to get.

Hon then absolutely obliterated it by adding, “It is sixteen times older than I am!”  He said happily.  “I like that.  If something can survive that long, maybe I can survive that long too.  Aspirational!”

John gave a long, long sigh.  “I’m older than that car…” he complained.

”Well, at least you’re also aspirational.”  James patted him on the shoulder as they came to a stop where the mud road turned into a muddy gravel lot, dotted with puddles of brackish water and tire tracks from heavy machinery and smaller cars alike.  As Shallah and Vex caught up, and the group secured the cart they had with them that was getting increasingly weighed down with orbs and slain creatures, James assessed the barn ahead of them.  “Looks like there’s a lot of gaps here.”  He pointed, indicating the cracked open main barn doors, but also two different side doors that had been battered off their hinges and not just left open.  “If they scatter, we’re not going to be able to cover all that, especially if there’s more doors.”

”Damn monsters only scatter before they try to bite your dick off.”  Jon contributed.

”Oh good, the important people here are safe.”  Vex sniped back as she nudged Shallah with an elbow, and James honestly couldn’t tell if she was having fun trading rude remarks with Jon or not.

James tried to keep them on track.  “The problem is that if they scatter, they’ll be back.”  He said.  “I’m assuming there’s still a bunch of things in there, obviously.  But I want us ready to go before I send a drone in, and I’m hoping to draw out whatever there is into our sights.  Vex, John, take that tractor as cover.  Min, Hon, Jon,” he tried not to smile saying their names in a row, “my condolences but you get the ditch.”

”Not the first time.”  Jon muttered, but still jerked his head toward the spot, readying his own gun.  “Come on, mud won’t kill ya.”  He told the ratlings who hadn’t even really been complaining in the first place.

Pursing his lips, James shook his head and looked at the ratroach.  “Shallah, we’ll take the corners, don’t let anything circle around.  Got it?” She shot him a pointed thumbs up, and James nodded and started moving to the right corner of the barn.

The thing was big.  Like, he knew barns could be large, but in his head they were always red painted boxes that you could see the entire inside of no matter where you were standing.  This thing was more like an aircraft hanger, covered in corrugated metal and looking more like an industrial plant than some pastoral structure.  Once the group was in position, James held up a hand as a signal, and sent one of his drones through the main door, getting a good look inside and seeing that it also kind of looked more industrial than agricultural.  Or at least, to his own biased mind.  He kinda knew from some skill ranks that modern farming and ranching techniques were more sophisticated, but that didn’t mean his biases caught up instantly.

Inside the barn, metal fences marked off milking stations for the farm’s long since eaten cows, the spaces lined with the simple but effective machines and tubes for getting maximum value from a dairy cow.  A lot of it had been knocked over, with a couple stainless steel carts blocking the central aisle where they’d been toppled, but it didn’t really look destroyed.  Just messy.  Like it could be put back to use with just a couple days of simple rearranging.

The corpses in the barn were less easy to fix.  Calling them corpses was kind of a misnomer itself, too; there were bloodstains that splashed across the concrete of the floor and darkened patches of the stored feed, there were shattered remnants of gnawed down bones, and there were scraps of flesh mixed in with shredded clothes.  One particular scene turned James’ stomach more than any other for some reason, the simple presentation of a trail of dried red on the concrete that led to where a person had obviously been brought down and devoured, with an almost pristine iPhone had survived being dropped, left untouched by the creatures that had taken literally every other part of its last owner.

A grisly reminder, but one that reaffirmed James’ decision to put some of his time into hunting here while there wasn’t a crisis that needed him immediately.  The Heard was lethal.  They might just be hungry animals, and not deserving of real malice or hate, but they were still animals that would kill people without a second thought.  And their numbers needed to be dropped, especially the bigger specimens.

James didn’t see any of the bigger ones in the barn, but he did see about thirty of the scythe rabbits that a lot of the Order had taken to calling caerbannogs.  Not an overwhelming number, if they were careful, but if every one of them charged at once, it could get messy.

So his goal was to bait them out in bits and pieces.  James signaled the others, using the hand gestures everyone had to be trained on before being allowed to go on patrols against the creatures that regularly made speaking impossible.  Hands and paws clutched weapons as conversations stopped, even the small skirmish bringing anticipation from the people who hadn’t actually been in that many fights.  Then, lowering his drone, taking care to not clip it on any of the posts or hanging tools, he found a cluster of five or six scythe rabbits, and buzzed them.

They reacted instantly, springing up, the bone blades of their arms lashing out at the flying drone.  James’ enhanced hearing lost the light hum of his tool inside the barn the instant the dungeon creatures were active, as they created their bubbles of silence, but he didn’t need that at all to pilot the drone out through the main door, the rabbits in hot pursuit.

They picked up a few more members of their assault on the way, but it was still less than a third of the creatures inside that burst out into the open in a wave of grey and white fur, having only picked up a little speed as James had led them through a couple corners with the drone before taking it out the doors and launching it straight up.

The hunting team opened fire as soon as the creatures following the drone came into view.  The crack of gunfire would definitely draw the rest of them, but staggered out, it wasn’t going to be a problem.  The more experienced human hunters picked off rabbits with their rifle shots, while Vex’s fire was better described as ‘suppression’, though she did get a few hits in.  Hon waited until the charging rabbits were a little more out in the open before firing his compact crossbow, a lucky shot with the altered physics of the object sending a black bolt through three of the rabbits in a row before it stopped buried in the last one.  His sister got less lucky, her shots missing or only wounding, but it didn’t matter with the more accurate human rifles at work, and soon the gravel field was made even muddier with the blood of their targets.

The rest of the rabbits in the building responded by racing out toward the noise, but they came in ones and twos, and were easily picked off.  James was keeping count, knowing there were probably more than thirty but still having a rough idea of how many they’d taken down.  He and Shallah weren’t firing at all, just lurking around the sides of the barn and waiting for whatever was going to go wrong.

What went wrong happened around rabbit number twenty.  The wall next to Shallah’s corner suddenly shook with an unheard impact, and James watched her flinch back just before another heavy thud broke through the interior frame of the barn and ripped down a bunch of the metal siding.  A brown furred six legged form the size of a small car with a furred spire coming up from its middle burst through, one of its legs nearly clipping Shallah’s head as the creature did end up trying to flank them.  Just… unpredictably.  And badly.

It got caught on the metal, was the problem.  As James flicked himself across the field of fire the rabbits were running into using a Move Person charge, Shallah was already stabbing into the beast’s underside with her spear.  It had come through at an angle, and was bleeding from both her stabs and the unsafe slicing edges of the barn’s wall.  But it managed to rip itself forward before it died, the furred spire in its middle that was vaguely shaped like a standing bear opening its ‘mouth’ to deliver what James knew was a potentially deadly sonic blast.

So he punched it.  It was lined up almost perfectly, and his gloved fist connected with way more force than a normal human could manage, thanks in part to the Boxing levels he kept picking up.  The mouth jerked upward at the impact, and while James could feel his whole arm vibrating as the blast went off, it didn’t hit anyone and instead left a cute little round hole through the grey clouds overhead.

He and Shallah took a little longer to dismantle the creature, but it was still stuck and bleeding and they couldn’t use the same scream attack more than once in around twenty minutes.  So it was mostly a matter of dodging the legs and teeth, and stabbing until it went down.  James only had to fire his pistol once, and it was to pick off a scythe rabbit that had tried to rush through the new hole in the barn.  The others trusted them to handle it, and so they did, and kept picking off the other rabbits in their disorganized wave until eventually things stopped being quiet.

Which was to say, there was nothing left to silence them.

”Good job folks!”  James announced when his voice was no longer being bubbled.  “Alright, Johns, you’re on rabbit duty.  Vex, come help us haul this thing to the cart.  Hon, Min, if you two could get all the orbs, that’d be perfect.”  He nodded with satisfaction at the results.  Half an hour of checking this place, and they’d probably dealt with about forty or fifty of the Heard in total, including one of the more dangerous - and more rewarding - bigger forms.  And all it cost was some ammo and having to listen to Jon complain about having to carry rabbit carcasses; a complaint that was completely pointless coming from a man who was already a hobby hunter before this started, which made it a lot more irritating to James.

They teleported their loot back to the knight station just inside the cleared and partially fenced area, dropped off what they’d gotten to the professionals that were starting to make a business out of processing magical animals, and took a few minutes to rest and grab some food.  The orbs from the Heard weren’t the most useful thing in the world, but they were a piece of solidified magic, and that meant they had the potential to be something absurdly useful later on.  Especially if someone could figure out imbuing with them.  And besides that, the cube from the bear… thing… would be actually good for wherever they tested it, and maybe more spaces beyond that,

Then they were back out.  Because no new crisis had hit James’ phone yet.  Which meant he could still get his utility quota for the day filled up here.

He was still feeling that low sense of dread about… well, all of it.  But at least they got a surprise break when the patch of forested land they were patrolling next already had a bunch of the creatures killed.

The break was a little less fun because they’d clearly been killed by local wildlife.  Trampled or gored, from the looks of how things had ended up with bloodstains and bodies between the trees.  Mostly.  There were also signs of some kind of sharper cuts in the hides of the bodies that were left behind, and what looked almost like a camouflage blind that had been trampled in the fighting.  And of course, the loot drops were nowhere to be found.

James decided to preempt this particular distant onrushing problem, and requisitioned full packs of language, etiquette, and civics orbs.  Just in case.

If the future, for some reason, held several hyperintelligent feral boars, he’d just kind of prefer if they owed him a favor.