The Daily Grind - Chapter 387 (Patreon)

“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.“ -J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come-

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North Smiths had undergone what was, in James’ opinion, one of the great perils of city design.  Which was that it wasn’t really that designed at all.

Or rather, it was, but it was designed in developments.  In suburb communities with inconveniently winding curved lines of streets and cul de sacs that made every journey a biblical exodus.  In shopping havens that were meticulously sculpted architectural wonders, even after they had a hundred clashing sign designs put on their facades.  In office parks that were temples to the concept of business, and were located nowhere near public transport or any of those suburbs either.  In government buildings that would have looked a lot more towering and majestic if they weren’t next to equally shining parking garages for gyms and condos.

Everyone had really done a great job building their own individual parts of the thing, and had seemingly never once talked to each other about how those things would connect and interlink.  Oh, zoning laws existed, sure.  But if anything they made it all worse.  Segmenting things off and leaving big six lane roadways like scars between houses and grocery stores, each side beautifully crafted and almost maliciously separated.

”I can hear you writing a manifesto in your head.”  Alex informed James as they sat in the back of a van disguised to look like a local plumbing company.

Which was to say, the other paladins had taken it from a local plumbing company that had no more employees in the time window before James had arrived.  They’d also applied an emerald grown program to what James was concerned to learn was the phone company, so anyone calling the plumber to check on the presence of the truck would get redirected to one of Drak’s phones.  James figured that it was unlikely, but still possible, that someone would notice the somewhat organic security breach, and he was looking forward to wrapping this up so they could close off that thread.

Until then, he just grinned at Alex.  “What, did you also take Empathy?”  He asked her, glad to have something to do that wasn’t fidgeting while they waited for the other group to get in position.

She rolled her eyes from the other side of the emptied out van.  “That’s not even one of my options.  Nah, I took Memory.”

”Wait, from what?”  James asked.  He was pretty sure Alex’s Sewer Lesson was in home ec, which he knew didn’t have that.

”Math.”  She said with a morose shake of her head, fingers nervously tapping on the hard black shell of her armor.  Catching James’ raised eyebrow stare, Alex grimaced.  “I know.  I know!  It’s the Lesson people want!  Your boyfriend would drink it out of me with a straw if he could!  I get it!”

”I wasn’t going to say at least one of those things…” James cleared his throat.  “What’re the other options?”

”Memory, Conceptualization, Study.”  Alex fought through her awkward attempt at a joke as she let James steer the conversation.  “It’s fine, I guess.  Study felt like a bad choice for how things are going.  And I didn’t know what to expect from Concept, so I just took the one that’s useful now.”  She shrugged.  “It’s good?  I mean of course it is, it’s a stat point.  But it’s really good for operational stuff.  Building layouts and approach plans, remembering details of faces or overheard conversations, that kinda thing.”

James nodded.  “I feel the same way with the purple upgrade.  Though I’m still a dumbass so more wouldn’t hurt.”

”You have, what, three Lessons?”  Alex asked with a laugh.  “You’re not beating the scaling now.”

Ink-And-Key, currently staring out the heavily tinted back window, chimed into their conversation.  “Especially now that the Sewer has finally figured out how to do its own math.  Is that mean to say?  No, it is not, it is the Sewer and it is not here.  It learned math, good for it.”

”…explain.”  James commanded tentatively, checking his countdown and link to the other half of their team.

The camraconda, coiled up tightly so his length didn’t get in their way as they adjusted their armor and waited, hissed out as he turned away from the window.  “Your scaling problem was random.”  He told James.  “Or… new?  Some others in the early days were too.  The problem was there, but undefined.  Mysterious.  Now, it is fixed and constant.  Maybe we use the magic so much the dungeon cannot tamper as much anymore.”  He arched his head around in an aborted shrug as he almost hit the roof of the cramped van.  “Hm.”  The camraconda exhaled as he stared at the metal ceiling.  “Well.  It is a fifty percent increase per Lesson and level.  Multiplicative.”

”Yikes.  Wait, weren’t you on the testing list for stacking the same Lesson?”  James asked with another nervous check of the time.  Two minutes.  He tried to breathe normally, and maybe succeeded.

Ink-And-Key gave a limited nod.  “Yes.  Proprioception and Coordination have been marvelous for controlling my limb pack.  Or packs, now; I can manage two at a time if I focus.”

”What’s the last one?”  James asked offhandedly as he double checked the set of grenades on his belt and the clasp of his alchemy mask.

”Oh.  Do not worry about the last one.  It is fine.  No need to fret.”  Ink-And-Key said, returning to staring out the back window.  “Especially as we are-“

”It’s Pleasure.”  Alex informed James.  “He’s really embarrassed about how much he likes it.  I think it’s a failing of our Order to instill good cultural values.”  She said the words with the rapid pace of someone who had used that joke before, repeatedly.  “You guys ready?”  She asked as the time to go ticked closer to zero.

James looked forward at their driver, Myles staying silent and out of their antics, but looking ready to go himself and giving them a thumbs up.  He almost mentally prodded Zhu, before remembering the navigator was in the other car, currently folded around Arrush.

James trusted Arrush.  A lot.  But he also loved Arrush, and he was more confident in his own ability to get shot and walk it off than the ratroach’s.

”Ready.”  He said.

”I will never really be ready for this kind of… oh, yes.  I am ready.”  Ink-And-Key trailed off at Alex’s exasperated stare into her coterier’s lens.  The camraconda irised his lens shut as the skulljack link alerted them to the other team beginning to move.  A whispered digital time to go, good luck passed between the groups.  “Let us begin.”  Ink-And-Key said, one of his mechanical arms sliding open the side panel door of the van and letting Alex hop out.

James was right behind her, with Ink-And-Key’s armored belly rasping against the pavement as he followed.  The driver’s door thumping shut as Myles’ boots added to their pack, before the four of them fanned out in the parking lot.

Doing this in the middle of the afternoon felt wrong.  It wasn’t warm or sunny, but it was broad daylight and there were cars trickling by on the road just behind them.  The medical clinic was part of a double horseshoe of buildings that were each bigger than the apartment building James lived in; high roofs and rusticated stonework parceled up into a dozen small businesses that all shared one mostly empty parking lot.

Earring charges ticked down on all of them as they approached, hostile notice being shunted away from them until they were almost to the door.  The door had blinds pulled down over it, as did the pair of windows set into this part of the building.  On the windows, those blinds hid metal reinforced bars, while the door was more or less just a normal door if you didn’t count the people inside.

”Confirm,” Rho said from the other side of the building as the second team slipped in the back, “five adult humans in the building.”  The totem the rogue was carrying strapped to his side giving technically perfect battlefield information once he was through into the clinic’s storage area.

James gripped the compact rifle he had - he missed his stolen UMP, but Nate had confiscated that from him for some reason - and tapped his alchemy mask with his other hand.  Off to his side, he saw Alex, and then Myles and Ink-And-Key, both vanish from sight, and he triggered the invisibility on his own earring in unison with them.

His steps felt light, almost jaunty, as he hopped up over a curb that surrounded a strip of loose coarse red rocks.  Stepping through them with crunching steps as he approached the building, James breathed deeply of the aerosolized potion flooding his mask.  Then he stepped through the wall twenty feet to the right of the front door.

Apparently some people liked walking through solid material.  James didn’t really have an opinion on it, but he did make it quick, emerging partway into an adjoining wall in a small medical exam room.  Or it had been that once, probably; the cabinets were still there.  Right now though there were four reclining padded hospital chairs with medical equipment and jury-rigged book holders at head height.  No books though.

He quickly and deftly moved through and then phased through the door of the room, emerging into a hallway with worn green carpet and landscape oil paintings on the walls.  The sound of group laughter echoed from the front room, and James angled that way, keeping himself out of intersecting with anything that had mass as he crept forward, using his skulljack to coordinate with the other invisible members of the strike team.

The main lobby looked… almost painfully normal.  The desk didn’t have any stacks of documents or forms waiting to be filled out on it, there were no computers or TVs anywhere, and the normal obligatory distracting child’s toy wasn’t there.  But aside from that, it had grey couches, potted plants, and a water cooler.  Also five men lounging around chatting.

“-bored enough already!”  One of them was saying.  The man had a face like a piece of construction equipment, and his smile felt a little mean to James, but that might just be projection.  The others, sitting on the lobby counter or the other couches or one just milling around, nodded along.  “I know it takes time, but I want this to be over with.”  He continued, clearly annoyed.

One of the other men spoke with a shrug.  “If it wasn’t this, it’d be something else boring.”  He offered concilitorially.

”You ever wonder,” a third figure spoke, peeking out through the front blinds, one hand on the holster at his hip, “why it is we live in a world with miracles again, and we’re stuck here?”

”No.” The first man chuckled.  “We’re here to do a job.”

James scowled to himself.  The job they were here to do was slavery, so he was a little less sympathetic to their boredom.  As the men continued to banter with each other, he pinged the others through his skulljack.  “Found all five.  Find anything else?”

”Room we can’t get into.”  Arrush reported, sounding confused.  “What do we do?”

”Circle to the other side of the lobby, there’s a door to the back half of the clinic I can see.  Ink, in position behind me.  Alex, Myles, cover behind the counter.”  James commanded.  “We’ll disable them before the invisibility wears off.”

”Moving.”  Spire replied, voice crisp over their connection.  “Ready.”  She added a second later.

James pulled one of the flashbangs out and prepared to prime it.  “Alex?”

”Yeah, hang on.”  The other paladin said.  “Something’s wrong.”

Everyone, without question, stopped whatever they were doing and moved back from the lobby a half-step.  If Alex said something was wrong, then something was wrong, and going ahead with an ambush was a stupid idea.  “What’cha see?”  Simon asked, trying to be casual as they all felt the invisibility timer ticking down.

Alex didn’t answer for priceless seconds.  But James could almost feel her working something out, and he was doing the same thing himself, watching the room and the men in it and listening in on their half-dead distraction of a conversation.

When Alex started talking, James felt like he knew something was suspect too, but couldn’t tell what.  “Two of them keep looking at the wall, the one behind the check-in counter.”  Alex reported.  “Like they’re looking at something.  Also their guns are unclipped in the holsters, but they might just be idiots.  And listen to them.”  She added.

James had been, and he saw the problem.  “They’re talking about waiting, but not in the future tense of having to do spell equipping.  They’re waiting now.  This is a trap.”  He jumped to the conclusion quickly, wasting no more time.  “Do we abort?”

”We have the time and potion to retreat.”  Spire said, rapidly working through the situation.  “Is it a trap for us?  Or are they waiting to ambush whoever is bringing the eighth prisoner for Bell capture?”

The group took a long look at the men again.  Armed, a lot of them looking like they were military or ex-military in some way with their general demeanor and haircuts, all of them dressed so stereotypically Mormon it was almost a joke.  That could mean either that they were hostile to the Order, or in disguise, and there was no way to tell without just asking.

James was tempted to just ask.

“Do not.”  Arrush said, as if reading his mind.

”Alex, check the wall.”  James told her instead.  And, when he listened over the noise of the fan in the room and the ongoing low-level noise of five adult humans shifting around and messing with their phones or talking, he could hear her as she moved.  He just hoped no one else was as keen eared as he was.  “Anything?”  He prompted.

”It’s… fuzzy?”  Alex sounded confused.

”The room we couldn’t enter felt fuzzy.”  Rho stated.  “That wall is the other side, that fits.”

”I don’t like this at all.”  Simon bluntly informed them.  “No one here equipping, no sign of the prisoners except for one room we can’t get into in a way we’ve never encountered before, and these guys here talking about waiting?  No, James is right, this is a trap.  We leave.”

Alex signaled assent, but added, “Liette’ll be pissed.  We know they had captives here.”

It sucked to hear.  But the Order was done getting into fights with bad odds if they could help it.  Without another word, the group plotted out their paths so they didn’t bump into each other, and started making for their exits.  Both groups splitting around the outside hallways of the clinic, but heading for the back door and the little storage area there where Spire’s team hadn’t seen any cameras on the way in.

The invisibility timers on the earrings weren’t all the same, so they were operating against the clock on the lowest cooldown ones.  Not that they couldn’t refresh it, and they did, but the brief moments where Simon and Myles flicked into view were points of vulnerability.  Still, they made it through without anyone seeing them, since it really did seem like everyone they’d come here to fight was in that front waiting area.

Then James had taken another dose of ghost juice, and tried to leave through the back wall.  But before he could press his hand against and through the glass door, something intercepted him.  A kind of stinging pain, and a flare of grey fire and prickling thorns that got more visible and more painful as he didn’t immediately stop.

James didn’t swear.  Didn’t panic either.  Instead, he kept calm, and reported, like he’d practiced.  “That’s the same stuff that interdicts teleports.”  He told the others.  “But they couldn’t have targeted us.  So this place is really a trap, and-“

Before he could finish, a voice from up front yelled out.  An angry burst of indignation as one of their targets shouted a warning to his buddies.

”Go loud.”  Spire ordered.  “Defensive positions.”  That one might be tricky; they were in a narrow hallway sandwiched between a storeroom and a bathroom, they didn’t have a lot of terrain to defend.

Nor did they have time to find that terrain.  Because the stomping of loud footfalls, mixed with someone yelling, “Where are they?” as two men with guns rushed around one of the corners, stomping through the clean halls of the specialist clinic to burst into the back area.  The section was not made to hold a bunch of people milling around, and would have been cramped even before they’d realized they were actually caught in a trap.  The addition of two more people, who waded through the strike group unable to see them, did not help.

And, James realized, the presence of the other three, leaning around the corners and one doorway from the halls, was far too practiced.  These guys were, if not actual soldiers, at the very least a delve team that had learned to fight together.  “Flashbang.”  James stated almost casually, as he set the grenades and lobbed them, one through the propped open door to the right that led back to the exam rooms, the other down the more open hallway to the left that passed the small back office.  “Let’s see if we can keep them alive.”  He added cheerfully.

The two men who had charged forward and were sweeping their guns around the area didn’t see the flashbangs hit the ground, but their friends close to them did hear the impacts.  One of them went so far as to get a confused ‘eh?’ out before the things went off.

This close, it was impossible to avoid some kind of self-inflicted problems from the things.  Even knowing it was coming, the spike of pressure and sound still left half the team with ears ringing.  Rho probably had it hardest, but the inhabitor was already putting his body back to a functional state before the others had even uncovered their eyes.

The paladins were getting really good, in general, at ‘blindfighting’ while multiple people were invisible against their targets.  But right now, with so many of them crammed in here, it was easier to just drop the effect.  Suddenly, the two men who’d been mostly spared the concussive hammer to the eardrums found themselves surrounded, one of them tackled by Simon, the other by Myles, the two men slamming their startled targets into walls and ripping guns away before pinning their hands.  At least one zip-tie went on before things got messy.

The mess came in the form of the others.  “They’re here!”  One choked shout rose over the sudden burst of violence.  That man was silenced as he leaned around his drywall corner to take a shot at James’ head; Spire’s line of sight catching him and stopping him cold.

Ink-And-Key grabbed another one, the massive camraconda somewhat trapped in the exit hall by his own bulk, but still providing support, Alex rushing forward at an angle to his gaze as best she could in the cramped environment, taking one of the paintings off the wall as she slid around the enemy’s defense.  Just using her own normal speed here, no need to waste actual power.  In tandem, Ink-And-Key dropped the figure while Alex disarmed him, the man’s panicked scream of “Vulture!”  Cut off sharply as Alex choke slammed him into the floor with her momentum. 

One person got as far as pulling a trigger, before Arrush rushed him, ducking his friend’s frozen form and using both his limbs and Zhu’s in a combination of baton strikes and grabs that ended with the man he was fighting pinned to the wall, screaming with a muffled voice as Arrush’s armored forearm pressed into his mouth.

”Drop your weapons and surrender!”  James’ voice rose over the noise.  He was standing, calmly, in the middle of the floor, his own rifle pointed in what looked like a calm idle vector toward the face of the man Myles was struggling with.  The guy looked up at the stubby barrel of the gun, and froze, giving Myles the opening he needed to tie the guy’s wrists together with a sharp motion and a growl of annoyance.  “Oh.”  James looked around, all five of them were disabled.  “Okay.  Spire, I’m gonna get yours.”  He said, moving over and wiggling the pistol out of the frozen man’s grip.  “Ready?”  He called to Spire.

She kept her crossbow sighted on the enemy’s chest as James got behind him.  “Yes.  Three.  Two.”  The camraconda dropped the freeze effect then.  They had learned in training that actually counting down gave your opponent an equal amount of time to plan their action, and led to breakaways in situations like this.  This way, James had him zip tied in seconds as he failed to react fast enough.  “Next?”  She asked, looking toward the one Ink-And-Key had been holding and finding him already down.  “Oh.”

”You aren’t getting out of here.”  The heavily muscled man James had disarmed told him with his own kind of cold calm.

”Well, not through the door you trapped, no.”  James answered easily.  “But there’s other walls!  Also I bet if I just start breaking shit, the magic will drop eventually.”

”We’ve got people waiting for you.  Especially for the Vulture.”  The man’s smile was deeply unpleasant.

James blinked and turned to the others.  “It’s Alex, isn’t it?”  He asked.

The fact that Alex didn’t look back at him from the man she was kneeling on told James what he needed to know, but Myles still felt the need to speak up.  “It could be me, you never know.”  The rogue offered.  “But yeah, it’s Alex.”

”That’s hilarious.  Anyway, trap failed, ambush unsuccessful, drop the interdiction magic please.”  James politely asked the detained man, as he partly helped partly forced him to a seated position against the storeroom wall with two of the others.  “I promise we’re not going to kill and or torture you.”  He added, Arrush nodding along enthusiastically behind him.

“I have a better idea.”  The man said with that same unpleasant smirk on his face.  Nothing James ever heard filled him with quite the same level of sinking dread as an enemy that looked smug.  James saw the guy - he had decided to label this one muscles, to contrast with his near-identical friend or maybe brother who got to be called buzzcut - look over his shoulder, to the wall covering the space that should have led to behind the desk in the front lobby.  That same wall that was impassible on both sides, feeling as Alex had called it, ‘fuzzy’.

And then, the wall was gone.

“Found the captives!”  Alex burst out with a startled voice that verged on a laugh, as the inner chunk of the clinic was suddenly revealed to have been either an illusion or a very seamless spatial warp.

Inside the suddenly clear space, practically spilling out into the no longer quite so cramped hallways, there were eight inhuman figures.  As far as Alex and Simon had known, there were supposed to be seven, and they were waiting on the eight, which meant that this trap had actually been in planning for long enough that no one had realized that they’d already smuggled one in and stashed it here.

Three crocamaws, all holding automatic rifles which was a sharp escalation already.  Two of the big shaggy insectile segmented boar beasts.  A caribou from the Pylons, antenna horns seeming to have been bent back to keep it from crashing into things in a way that seemed disgustingly painful for it.  A shape that for a second looked like just a medical mannequin or something but quickly resolved itself into one of the Garden’s scarecrows, pressed into what had been the back corner.

And a dragon.

It was kind of hilarious that every dungeon seemed to make a dragon at some point.  This one was bizarre though, because it wasn’t clear which dungeon it came from.  And there was no other word for it.  Dragon.  The dragon was what everyone was really staring at.  It dominated the central space.  Its body and long neck were a geometric lattice frame of branches that grew too straight and too strong, but its constricted wings were covered in vibrant red and blue feathers that were glamorous even under the harsh fluorescents.  Rootwork limbs ended in metal hook claws that looked like they belonged on a heavy duty crane, and all its disparate pieces blended together at its face, where eyes like blazing red aircraft warning lights and radial antenna horns seamlessly fused with a long reptilian mouth and a mouth filled with a fleshy barbed tongue.

”Kill them!”  Muscles yelled, interrupted only when James ruthlessly smashed his knee into his throat.  Being cruel to prisoners wasn’t on James’ list of things to do today, but if someone was still actively trying to kill you and had the means to do so, then the presence of zip-ties didn’t actually magically turn them into a harmless noncombatant.

James got a reminder of that as the guy retaliated by spiking a fireball at James’ head.  He jerked in reflex, the fire splashing across the ceiling and hopefully not setting the building on fire even as liquid embers dripped down, but it was a reminder that these guys were enemy casters with unknown spell lists.  “Okay!”  He said, before he ran out of time to figure out what the rest of that sentence was supposed to be.  Then the man hit him in the face, directly, with the next fireball.  And though James definitely felt the kinetic impact as a slap, he was a little underwhelmed as the flare of heat just kind of brushed off his mask.  But that wasn't the real problem.

The trap sprung, and the hideout clinic devolved into a mad brawl for survival.

The menagerie seemed to be frozen in place for a beat, before abruptly exploding into a stampede of motion.  The dragon was frozen rapidly, while Spire flattened herself to the floor and rolled sideways as the crocamaws all started shooting wildly into the confined space.  They were, James forced himself to remember as bullets sparked off his and other’s shield bracers, children.  Kids who had been given machine guns and no training and told to kill via a magically enforced order.  Which made this a real fucking nightmare, especially because everyone was packed in very tightly to the back room.

Shield bracers flared to life, golden panes in their light lattice domes catching bullets but not the sound.  The mechanical rattle of the guns and the metal ping of bullet casings completely swallowed by explosive gunfire.  The panicked screaming from multiple sources - at least one of the bound men who maybe hadn’t realized he’d be in the crossfire, as well as Ink-And-Key, and also Myles - was similarly drowned out.

The shield bracers started blinking out before the guns ran out of bullets.  The child soldiers were armed with what looked like AKs, and while the gun’s famously iffy accuracy was mitigated by the fact that the shield bracer domes kind of were the broad side of a barn, the fire rate had absolutely no issues unloading their whole magazines at once.  Even James’ highest level shield bracer was down to three charges left by the time the opening salvo was done, and he’d barely started to move.

But no one died in that burst of gunfire.  James wasn’t sure if anyone got hit.  All he knew was, he didn’t have time to check, because even with the skulljacks enabling heightened battlefield coordination, there was only so much you could focus on when a murderous mind controlled pillboar was bearing down on you.

Toppling a metal cart that was thankfully empty, the pillboar’s stubby legs lunged it over the obstacle and toward James, momentum kept up in its segmented form as it rushed the nearest enemy it had been ordered to kill.  James got his arm up to try to deflect the pillboar’s tusk, before getting a blunt force reminder of what it was that made boars themselves dangerous; they were heavy, and fast, and generally pissed off all the time.  And while this one wasn’t as fast as a real boar that had time to build up charging momentum, it was also very heavy, and the paladin felt his arm sting as he was shoved backward.  He only broke the pressure by pushing off the tusk and sliding sideways along the pillboar’s bumpy furred flank, which didn’t help that much as it started thrashing to try to crush him anyway.

The problem, James decided with the single coherent thought he had time for, was that he didn’t want to kill any of these guys.  Even the pillboars were known to be capable of coexistence, so at most he’d consider lethal violence against the crane dragon thing, and the scarecrow.  And even then probably not.

He breathed potion, and let himself become incorporeal.  Pushing through the pillboar built up progressively more resistance as he got deeper through, but as he passed the midway point it was easy to pop out the other side.  A more corporeal mule kick to the side of its head stunned the beast, while James started flinging out Separate Alloy charges.  The risk of organ damage from doing it three times in fast succession was worth it, compared to the much higher risk of much worse organ damage if the crocamaws actually got to reload.  So he pulled their guns apart and dumped the useless lumps of metal around the smooth floor of the hidden room.

A lurch in his chest followed.  But not from anything hitting him.  James actually couldn’t tell what had done that, and he was too busy trying to judo throw the crocamaw that was snapping its massive fanged mouth his direction.  It happened again at the worst moment, distracting him from the teeth that crunched into the shell of his armored forearm and yanked James sideways, swinging him farther back into the other crocamaws that were trying to climb past the frozen dragon.

He’d forgotten, or maybe just hadn’t known, how much fucking force these guys could apply with their maws.  James actually found it easier to let the ghost potion take over, rolling like a smoky illusion through the enemies clawing at him and gaining his footing just in time to catch another crocamaw and this time properly flip it over the front reception counter with a scrambling thud.

The caribou, James noticed, was currently trying to stomp Spire to death.  This was bad, because there were two camracondas, and it really seemed like both of them were required to keep the dragon in place.  As Simon tried to take a swing at the caribou, James watched as the man suddenly found himself torpedoed backward, some kind of heavy invisible hit slamming him hard enough in his upper body that he almost did a full flip.  Then the caribou was gone, reappearing on the other side of the room, one of its partly wheeled hooves crushing the leg of one of the downed men who wailed in pain as the big beast emanated a radio static field before it started unleashing repeated fireball shots from between its warped antlers.

”Ow!”  Ink-And-Key yelled.  “Ow!  Stop!  Ow!”  The camraconda’s voice wasn’t really that pained, and it seemed like these particular low-strength fireballs were more in line with the ones James kept stockpiling rather than the napalm blast the other guy had thrown at him.  But Ink-And-Key still didn’t like it, and he started firing the exact same fireballs back, which even the compulsively murderous caribou took action to avoid.

James noticed that the fireballs were illusions; the bracer effect doing no damage except the most important kind.  Disruption.  Then he noticed that he had no idea where Alex was.  Or the scarecrow.  So that was terrifying.

It was also terrifying in a way he didn’t have time to deal with.  The pillboar, still giving approximately zero shits about anything in its way, had nearly toppled the frozen crane dragon over as it kept scampering toward James.  The way the thing ran really did look like scampering, too, but he had no intention of letting it actually get to him or crush the crocamaw it was almost goring either.  These guys were given the same order, but it was clear they weren’t on the same team.

“I don’t want to make this too obvious!”  James shouted over the building full of the sounds of struggling combat.  “But if you kill someone using Bell, their mind control drops!  And this is now a very pointed fucking threat!”

”You’re not leaving here alive!”  One of the men challenged James, having staggered to his feet even with his arms behind his back.  He was clearly straining to snap the bonds, but didn’t let that stop him from kicking at Simon’s head.  An attack that the paladin caught, and used as leverage to stand up, shoving his assailant back down as he did so with a bony crunch.  Just before the caribou slammed into Simon again, sharpened plexiglass face skidding against his armor as it made a bellow like a car horn and tried to crush him against the back wall.  At the same time, another of the ambushers, who had actually succeeded at breaking his cuffs, grabbed Myles from behind and started struggling to take the gun that the rogue had.  He in turn was slammed into by Rho, the inhabitor having much less of an issue clamping overpowered canine jaws around the enemy’s leg and getting a shrill scream of pain in response.

James couldn’t worry about everyone amid the chaos.  Although he did feel a bit of relief when Arrush and Zhu emerged around the corner, familiar grey longsword in the ratroach’s favored double grip.  Which meant that the sound of metal on metal was Alex fighting something, which was… probably bad for whatever that thing was.

The sight of the sword reminded him of his own iteration of the weapon.  Something Arrush had already realized, but James was a little too busy to keep up on magical options under his present circumstances of phasing in and out of solidity.  He used the trick again to brush past the pillboar, came out the other side with a sliding leg sweep that flattened a crocamaw that was crawling toward one of the dropped handguns, and almost seamlessly drew the blade from the sheath on his hip.

Almost seamlessly, because he slammed his elbow into the corner of the hallway wall, which would have hurt like a bitch if he’d not been wearing armor.  James hated fighting in cramped confines like this.  It wasn’t that he wanted every battle to be the Underburbs, but space to maneuver was nice.

The impact didn’t stop him from crossing his legs over the crocamaw’s body, pinning it’s muzzle down against its form as it tried to hiss and claw at him, unnaturally sharpened claws digging gouges in his armor that would have been bloody wounds otherwise.  Bringing his sword up, James gripped the hilt tightly as he held the point firmly to the nude crocamaw’s shoulder.  “Sorry about this.”  He wasted time saying, seeing no reaction behind the dungeon creature’s dull eyes before he started pressing down.  The tip took some effort to punch through the outer layer of tough, lightly scaled hide.  And the crocamaw’s thrashing amplified as it happened; pain still worked, even if it was completely dominated.  But nothing else happened.

Wincing, James shoved the blade deeper.  Into the meat of the unfortunate creature, and then another sharp press forward until it scraped against bone.  And it was only then that a flare of grey fire licked out of the wound, the pale green crocamaw abruptly going from thrashing struggles to screaming terror as the force controlling it was burned out.

James was trying to roll off when something slapped into his face like a phantom punch, snapping his head back and spraying a mix of potions through his mask as another impact hit the side of his head and the row of small buttons there.  The crocamaw he was no longer really trying to fight kept screaming and clawing at him anyway as he tried to stagger to his feet, feeling that irritating yank in his chest as another strike nailed him in the stomach.  Putting distance - and the tail of a dragon - between himself and the crocamaw, James saw the caribou focused on him, bent antenna horns flickering with static, and realized something very annoying.  It was shooting him with his own fucking Paves.  A thing that it definitely should not be able to do, he decided; that was magic from a completely different dungeon.

Trying to retaliate with a weak distraction fireball informed James that it had, in fact, not just been throwing fireballs like his earlier.  It had eaten all of his Visiting Tongue casts too.  And there were two fights and a lot of valuable people that he didn’t want to risk shooting between where he was and where it was standing and glaring at him while trying to kick Simon to death.

And that wasn’t actually the worst part of this.

”Breaker!”  One of the men that was still conscious yelled.  Two of them were definitely down for the count, dazed but hopefully not dead.  One had been trampled by the caribou though, and those things were actually insanely dangerous if they got on top of a person.  “Ken, they got a breaker!”

The bigger man that James had thought he’d hit hard enough to shut up spat to the side and took a deep breath to yell.  “Demons!  If they hit you with the swords, kill your-!“

The strategic value of ordering your combat force to commit suicide was questionable.  The moral value of it was deep in the negative.  But neither of those things really mattered, because two people on the Order team reacted faster than Muscles could actually finish talking.  Myles and Spire shot him at the same time, one of them jerking the arm his opponent was trying to use to get his own gun back outward and forcing a pull of the trigger, and one of them just snapping off an almost blind fired shot with her crossbow that punched a cleaner yet equally lethal hole in the man’s skull next to where Myles’ own shots had gone.

“Ken!”  One of the surviving men screamed, lunging forward to try to… James didn’t even know, bite Spire?  Flop over her helplessly?  It didn’t matter, Simon, having gained his footing, intercepted him with a tight grip on the back of his shirt, and flung him against the big corrugated metal door with a bang that rivaled any gunshot that had sounded back here so far.

The unfortunate thing was, the death of the man giving commands didn’t break any of the mind control effects.  Though Arrush’s rapid slashes from a sword that was clearly more magical than the one James had were still doing the job.  He struck a gouge through the side of the caribou, which flared with grey fire and definitely changed the creature’s behavior, but didn’t stop it lashing around and kicking at people’s heads.  And he moved across the back area like he was dancing, following Zhu’s lines of approach with the almost casual grace of someone in complete command of their body and all its strength.  A dip, a weave, a quiet apology to match a quiet thrust of the blade as he nearly severed a crocamaw’s forearm and left it screaming and dripping red sludge on the floor even if it was no longer forced to try to kill them or die trying.  

Arrush moved with confidence that James couldn’t match as he was much more focused on continuing his frantic perpetual slugging match with the pillboar.  Phasing through it again, James was annoyed to find that the creature was learning, a thing he thought was unfair given it was mind controlled.  But it waited for him to roll off its side, and just as he had his sword up to try to jam into the plates on its back somewhere he hoped wasn’t lethal, before rolling, slamming its whole body into the still-frozen but now very-falling-over dragon, stubby legs jerking back and forth in the air as it tried to simply smash James through the floor.

Fortunately that didn’t work.  For all the spells the caribou had stolen from James, he still had a lot of prepared Appointed Arrival casts, and he used one to vacate the area, though he did nearly slam face first into the far wall as he did so.  It gave him a good view down the hall back to the front area of Alex and the scarecrow apparently locked in some kind of samurai romance duel to the death though, so that was… occurring.

James didn’t have time for that.  He had to stop a pillboar before it trampled Spire, Myles, and anyone else between itself and him.

Appointed Arrival would move him too far, so Move Person did the job instead, shifting him forward in his still-crouched position to the other side of his allies.  His sword braced to catch a charge, but that charge suddenly having a lot less power behind it as he got to the pillboar too soon.  This time, the blade punched through the hefty grey plating under the mane on the front of its body, and James tried to not let it get too deep after he saw it burning away the magic already.  But it still ripped out with a spray of red sludge, part of the pillboar already dissolving into the sickly sweet red substance that Garden life burst into if they were too heavily damaged.

It also didn’t stop trying to kill him, which, well, fair.  James figured if he got stabbed out of being mind controlled he’d probably still wake up kind of irate too.  But he didn’t want to get gored, and the sensation of long tusks ripping through his selectively ghostly body was still kind of uncomfortable.

Okay incredibly uncomfortable.  It felt like his insides were being rearranged, and not in the fun way.  Even if it didn’t cause any damage, James didn’t like it, and he didn’t have a clear escape plan anymore.

Fortunately he didn’t need it.  With nothing left to be a problem, the caribou bullied back through the door of one of the exam rooms, the crocamaws all injured and broken free, and at least fifty percent of the human enemies unmoving, Simon had a clear window to just walk across the storage room floor, brace his feet on the tile, and shove the pillboar back until it hit the drywall and struggled against the force he was putting on it with ineffective wiggles.

”Arrush!”  James called, pointing over the counter on the other side of the ambush room.  “Alex!  Help Alex!”

The ratroach nodded and planted two paws on the counter, preparing to leap over, but was interrupted by an out of breath Alex slapping her palm on the surface.  “I’m good!”  She gasped out, sheathing her own sword with a flourish that went unseen by most of them, and that she didn’t even really do on purpose anyway.  “I’m… alive!  Is everyone alive?”  She asked.

“Sound off!”  James ordered.

”Fine.”  Simon grunted.  “Arm broke.”  He added with a strained voice as he held the pillboar in place, its own struggles slowing down.

”Stung but whole.”  Ink-And-Key called.

”Bleeding but not… seriously.”  Spire said, looking back at a hole that had been punched in her body armor.  “Painfully though.”

”Someone shot me!”  Myles’ voice was a high pitched manic laugh.  “In… in the leg.  And the stomach.  Armor stopped it I think?  I’m f-fine!”  He did not sound fine, he sounded like someone who wasn’t actually used to fights like this, having just survived a fight like this.

”Okay.”  Arrush said, tapping one of his paws on Zhu to get the navigator’s attention.

”I’m good too.”  Zhu added.  “Those… actually I’ll tell you later!  Also the ceiling’s on fire!”

James looked up at the dripping embers that had become chunkier as the spell had mostly fizzled out but the burning had kept going.  ”Oh so it is.”  He said with bland interest.  “Ink, check the door.”  The big camraconda bobbed a nod, keeping his lens on the still massive problem of the dragon as he shoved his tail back onto the door’s push bar.  It didn’t move.  “Okay then.”  James continued, standing up and brushing himself off.  “Actually, Arrush?  Stab it.”

His boyfriend stared at him for a moment, then his eyes lit up and he nodded, jogging in a low crouch so he didn’t block either camraconda’s eyeline, and getting past the bulkier of the two with just enough space to make a tight slash of his sword across the door itself.

There was a flare of light, but the door itself didn’t open.  Arrush kept trying though, hitting the magic and trying to figure out if it was doing anything each time.

One of the surviving captives laughed, the cruel tone rising over the sobbing of the crocamaws and the more bestial noises of the other two dungeon life forms.  “You’re not getting out of here, traitors.”  He spat out, looking up at James with a death glare.  “No one is going to miss you.”

”…Are you trying to provoke me into shooting you?”  James asked curiously.  “Because that’s really stupid.  Also Arrush how’s it going?”

”It worked!”  The ratroach declared with a massive glowing grin under his mask, shoving open the back door to the clinic and letting in an aura of much more natural grey light from the overcast day.  “So you’re wrong.”  He told the man on the floor with a short little nod that somehow conveyed complete smugness even through the mask.

And just like that, all the fight went out of the men that were left there.  Maybe they’d assumed the wall would hold, maybe they were waiting on reinforcements that weren’t arriving, maybe they just thought the camracondas would get tired.  It didn’t really matter, because the team was suddenly managing cleanup and getting it done fast enough that if there was backup coming, it wasn’t going to find them.

Step one was getting everyone injured, out.  Simon volunteered to teleport away with the pillboar, getting to a secondary safehouse where they had medical help on standby.  The crocamaws, with a little coaxing, were eventually convinced or just bonelessly moved into the vehicles to be driven back to the library outpost.  The caribou and the dragon were a bit harder though.

The caribou did not want to be near them.  And neither did the dragon, really, which they’d tested by letting it go for short periods.  Move Person also didn’t work on the dragon at all, which didn’t specifically mean it was stupid, just that it wasn’t a person by Officium Mundi internal definitions.  But it also meant they had to break the lock on the rolling door to make room to let it out.

And honestly, with the options they had, letting it out was kind of the only real compromise they had.  They couldn’t exactly bully it around; it just ripped through one of the walls when it had time to move.  If it didn’t want to go with them, it wasn’t going with them.  But it also felt wrong to just leave it in the clinic to cause more property damage on the way out if it managed to escape at all.

The next part was the prisoners.

While one vehicle would be returning to base, the other, driven by James and with Alex riding along, would be moving their surviving captives out of the range of the local dungeon memeplex.  This would have the rather inconvenient effect of absolutely ruining their ability to come back.  Even though they lived here, their thoughts would be deflected from considering coming home, and from the various factors that would make them want to.  For people who were heavily invested in the local conflict, the memeplex hit a lot harder, because there was functionally more to hit.  Alex and James had some protection, in the form of an authority, and Zhu, respectively.  But for their captives, it meant they were out of this war, and… for now that had to be good enough.

For the dead, they called the police.  Two of the men had died, Muscles and Buzzcut having been shot several times, or lethally trampled by the caribou.  James felt slightly bad for one of them, but…

Actually, no, he didn’t.  He just didn’t feel bad at all.  Killing shouldn’t be easy, and he didn’t like the thought that it felt like it was getting easier even if he hadn’t pulled the trigger, but that was personal.  These guys, as far as he was concerned, could get absolutely fucked.  They were keeping child soldiers and slaves and who even fucking knew what else.  Not that there needed to be anything more; that was kind of enough already.  Muscles having died because he was stupid enough to, out loud, order the dungeon life to commit suicide rather than be freed, was especially something James refused to feel bad about.

He still didn’t know where his line on what was self defense fell, but he knew for a fact that someone who had the power to get a person killed actively using that power was well over it.  The line in the sand wasn’t thin, here.  It was a mile wide and glowing neon, and this dumbass had still hiked across it in full sight of the Order.

Anyway the police would get an anonymous tip, which would lead to them finding the bodies, and they could deal with it from there.  It wasn’t James’ problem, honestly.

What was his problem was that there was, bizarrely, loot from this fight.  The ambush had actually been set with real bait; the faction trying to snare Alex specifically had really been using this place, and had really kept it stocked with spellbooks.  A few new titles, a handful of known ones, but most importantly, eight copies of Bell By Midnight.

They weren’t going to use them.  At least, not the same way these people did.  But the intel the rogues had put together seemed accurate; this was a significant percentage of the number of these books in circulation down here.  And now this chunk was off the table.

There were also spellcoins, from the Garden life.  The dragon’s allowed escape and the pillboar’s more enforced leaving had left behind a clinking scattering of level one coins, one of the crocamaws had dropped a modified level one, the scarecrow hadn’t dropped anything but Alex explained that it’s own mind control had died with Muscles, and that’s where their fight had ended.  But the real prize was, surprisingly, from the crocamaw that James had disabled first.  Not from the fight, but instead from after it had been carefully led back to the van across the lot, been bandaged, and given a blanket and a juice box with a long straw.

A level three coin.  The second ever that the Order had found.  The shining metal of it hitting the floor of the van barely audible over the crocamaw’s crying.  Modified, of course.  And James couldn’t wait to hear about what was wrong with this one.

The group split up to get their cleanup tasks done, and then to meet up later for food and full checks of their bodies to make sure none of them had been shot and not noticed.  That was actually a thing, James had learned about recently.  Adrenaline in a fight could do a great job of blanking out pain, and if a bullet hadn’t hit anything critical, what a knight thought was an itch or abrasion could turn out to be a gunshot wound later on.

He was pretty sure he wasn’t bleeding.

But he made Zhu look inside his armor anyway, as he and Alex drove the hogtied men toward the memeplex border, and the seedy hotel where Alex had apparently been dumping exiles.

Plenty of time to needle bits of information out of their temporary captives.  And also, to figure out how Alex had earned some kind of nemesis nickname before he had.  James was a little put out by that.

Not enough to take his eyes off the slave owners in the back seat though.