The Daily Grind - Chapter 395 (Patreon)

Daily double chapter part two.

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"Do you still read me Gene?  Just remember.  Outlaws never go down easy, no matter what happens to them." -Hilda, Outlaw Star-

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Sometimes, Order briefings held a lot of upbeat emotions.  They could be, especially for dungeon delves, fun.  Exciting, playful, filled with anticipation and just a little bit of nervousness for flavor.  The people involved would often throw around jokes and quips, setting newer delvers at ease as a mostly unintended consequence of feeling like they had the room to goof around.

During the push to put everyone through the Pylon for the initial wave of points, that had been a deeply needed thing, too.  Seeing experienced knights taking things earnestly but still having fun with the situation put a lot of the noncombatants in the Order at ease, and likely helped with keeping a calmer discipline through the whole weeks-long process of mass AP harvest.

Right now, though, the briefing warehouse was silent.  The seriousness that everyone was approaching the situation with this time made the atmosphere feel direct and crisp, just before the boundary of what might be considered cold.  The people lined up in rows of folding chairs and benches weren’t talking, weren’t bantering, and weren’t smiling either.  Because it was no longer an adventure.

The Order of Endless Rooms might not exactly have a standing army, but that didn’t mean they weren’t here to be briefed on a war.

At the front of the room, in front of a series of projected images that weren’t Planner’s doing for once, stood Ben.  The obligate friend looked perfectly normal, which, James knew, was a result of his aura.  Ben had been having a decidedly hard couple weeks, and was being pulled in multiple directions by too many different Rogue projects.  He was tired, and Alanna’s clandestine message to James confirmed it.  Her Empathy was strong enough at this point to punch through the false field that Ben put out, and even if out loud things were quiet, she and James were using their skulljacks to make plans to give Ben a surprise vacation after this.

“We’ve located the breach on the edge of Redmond and Bellevue.  Literally on the edge; the road where the Underburbs has begun its entry point runs along the side of a golf course that’s Bellevue land, dividing it from Redmond.”  Ben said, pointing to a satellite map with a red line running down a street labeled as 148th.  “Scout team Shadowjumper confirmed that the entrance is active, permanent, and memetically hostile.  Entrance into the Underburbs alters your mind state to be confused in a very specific way, leading to what we suspect is the impulse to just keep going forward on momentum.  It also purges fear, meaning that the usual red flags won’t scare people off.  Aside from that, it’s possible to just walk back out the way you came in.”

Accompanying Ben’s words were images taken from inside the Underburbs.  It was probably the closest James had been in a while to having a PTSD attack, seeing rows of uniform three-bedroom-one-garage houses with their picket fences and featureless lawns.  Dark streets with a thin mist, more uniform than he’d seen when he’d been trapped in there, giving a pale omnipresent light to everything.  Hedges and street lights and fire hydrants hiding predators, cars parked on the sidewalks looking like far too colorful objects in the otherwise deathly grey and white dungeon.

That last one wasn’t right, actually.  James raised his hand and waited for Ben to point at him before talking.  “The Underburbs doesn’t make cars.  What’re those?”  He asked directly and without any humor in his voice.  It took some effort to not keep talking, the mannequin energy in his blood making him feel like he should currently be jogging or something and not sitting in a half-lit warehouse space.

”Civilian vehicles.”  Ben answered with a frown on his face as he looked up at the projector screen over his head.  “It’s unclear why they parked, or if they parked and weren’t just dragged to the curbs.  But Recovery has positive ident on every car you see in these images.  A quarter of them have active missing persons cases attached, but followup checks from Recovery have found every one of them is associated with someone who cannot be located.  We are assuming they are at the very least in the Underburbs, likely dead.  This places our current known casualty count at forty six.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from some of the people in the crowd, and equally sharp hisses from multiple camracondas who had grown up over the course of years in a world where forty six people would have been the majority of their entire population.

Ben kept talking, looking more at the screens than at the fifty people sitting in quiet rows.  “Here’s what we know about the Underburbs’ attack patterns.  The dungeon shows up somewhere, seems to take some time to either digest its last incursion or to prepare for the next one, possibly both.  Next, it sends out agents, at least some of which are highly empowered humans, to deploy territory spikes in preparation.  They may also deploy antimemes or simple violence to destabilize the area.  After that, the human agents specifically conduct or activate a ritual, that begins to pull the Underbrubs ‘over’ the marked area.”  A click from the remote Ben was holding and the projections changed to images from Springfield.  “The darkness is unnatural, but not as powerful as in the dungeon, so we assume it would want to strike at night.  The majority of dungeon life that appears is from the Underburbs, not spawned outside, and can’t survive outside the dungeon’s borders.  Within six hours, the Underburbs fully consumes that claimed space, its breach closes, and without extraneous circumstances, everyone inside the marked territory is considered lost.”

The description was clinical and as precise as they could make it.  James should know, he’d help write it.  But that didn’t lessen the impact of the situation.  A lot of the people here had been there last time.  Some of them had seen knights die.  Most of them had seen civilians die.  They knew what the stakes were.

But for everyone who was new, it was almost worse.  This was the dark side of a world with magic and nonhuman friends and dungeons.  Sometimes, the magic was toxic.  Sometimes, the friends weren’t so friendly.  Sometimes, the dungeons were predators.

“We’ve observed each spike having a roughly two mile diameter around itself.”  Ben continued.  “We don’t know what direction the incursion will be projected, but with the average population density of Redmond and Bellevue, and the amount of geographical space that was targeted last time, we estimate thirty to seventy thousand human casualties if the Underburbs is uncontested.  Depending on time of day, direction, and a couple other factors.”

“Fuck me.”  James heard one of the shield team members in front of him utter under her breath, before she got elbowed roughly in the ribs by a teammate.

The briefing Ben was giving turned from broad information to more tactical concerns.  ”This time, we’re almost lucky.  The process hasn’t started, we have time to intercept it.  So, with that in mind, our primary tactical objective is to deny the Underburbs as much territory as possible.  Secondary objective is the preservation of civilian life, tertiary is the elimination or capture of Underburbs agents.  Collection of our own assets in the form of skill or power crystals is a non-issue; we’ll deal with that when cleanup starts.”  Ben finished, the friend pausing and turning to face the crowd, hands still at his sides, the goatee framing his frown making him look especially severe.  A raised hand caught his attention and he pointed again, silently.

Ishah spoke from where the ratroach was sitting at attention in the front row.  ”Have we found any spikes yet?”  He asked.

”None.”  Ben said.  “So we might be very ahead of things.”

”Wouldn’t that be a change of pace.”  James muttered.

Zhu, equally quiet, muttered back.  “Don’t jinx us.  We get one of these a year.  Don’t ruin this one.”

”We have a quota?”

The point of Alanna’s elbow found a gap in James and Zhu’s collective defenses, somehow jabbing both of them into silence at once.

Ignoring, or perhaps not even noticing their bullshit, Ben moved to the next phase of his briefing.  “Because of our unknown lead, we have a unique opportunity to take advantage of the situation.”  He said, turning now to stare at the audience that looked back with varying levels of determination.  “Containment and defense are still the top priority, but it is entirely possible we can stop the Underburbs before it attacks at all.”

”You want us to kill its agents.”  Ishah said with a knowing little nod.

”Anyone have a problem with that?”  Ben asked.  He wasn’t being sarcastic; there was a legitimate question for a lot of the humans in the room.  People like him, people like Ishah, they didn’t have the same mental hangups that everyone else did about humanity.  To them, monsters were monsters, no matter what they looked like.  It was the inverse of the equally valid truth that people were people, same qualifier.

James chose to voice what a lot of people were thinking.  “We don’t technically have to kill them.  Disable and or capturing is on the table.  But also, I feel like we don’t take half measures for the people attempting mass murder on a scale that even wars don’t normally get to.”  There was a rumbling of agreement from around him.

“Good.”  Ben said. “So.  Missions.  Rajesh, Anders, your shield teams are on perimeter duty.  Our construction team is getting camouflage ready for you, you’ll be responsible for sealing off that road, making sure no one else drives in and dies, and making sure anything that comes out that isn’t us gets shot.  Got it?”

”Got it, sir.”  Anders said without a trace of irony, getting a narrow eyed glare from Ben who was searching for any hint that the Kansas farmboy was messing with him.  One of the downsides to the Order’s gelatinous hierarchy was it was never clear if titles were jokes or not.

Deciding he was clear to continue, Ben turned his eyes to the next shield team captain.  “Evans.  Your team is to gear up and head to Townton, link up with our dragon pilots and prepare to provide air support.”

”Sir.”  Evans looked like he wasn’t sure what to take that as.  “When you say air support, are you talking about intercepting enemy air units?”  He looked a little annoyed, possibly at himself.  “Because we aren’t good enough for that yet.”

”No.  I’m talking about using you as reserve knights we can deploy at high speed if the Underburbs does breach.”  Ben told him.  “Next.  Everyone here has a squad assignment.  If you have a problem with it, tell Planner now, we’ll see if we can rearrange.  Squads one through five, you’re on scout duty.  Some of you will be paired with our scout teams as escorts, your job is to scour the local area for any sign of a spike, tag it, make sure the area is clear, and then demolish the target.”  He paused for only a moment.  “The last time we found these things, they were guarded.  Heavily.  Maybe they won’t be, if we’re early enough.  But don’t take chances.”

One of the camraconda knights signaled a question, their digital voice rising in volume to be heard in the warehouse space over the constant whirr of the overhead vents that were keeping them all from freezing to death.  “What kind of resistance should we expect?”

”Last time there was an Underburbs agent at one site, who took multiple paladins to kill.”  Ben said, which was not the answer anyone wanted to hear.  “Other sites deeper in the breach were covered by swarms of dungeon life.  Hundreds, possibly thousands of hostiles.  Smaller enemies are vulnerable to gunfire, but there were a number of larger foes that might require heavier responses.”  He clicked through some of his slides until he landed on a pair of profiles for the massive ball of floating cables Alex had called powerball, and a less concrete amount of detail for the towering power line scaffold structure that had tried to electrocute James for looking at it.  “You’re more likely to encounter human agents though.  Which means people with multiple stacked unknown power ranks.  Take no chances, and be prepared to switch damage types for maximum effect.”

James realized his own assignment was, again, in his skulljack.  Fine for him, but it prompted him to whisper down to Zhu.  “Squad six.  Our coterie.”

”Your coterie.”  Zhu whispered back.  “Also thanks.”

”Squads six through ten.”  Ben said with a kind of flat flourish, clicking to another slide that showed very human photographs and biographies.  “Hunter-killer teams.  Once we’ve secured the dungeon entrance, your mission is to enter the Underburbs, track down, and eliminate as many human agents as possible.  We have profiles on two known and three suspected collaborators, but it is likely you will uncover more information on your own.”  Ben crossed his arms, everyone’s best friend looking like he was considering fleeing to a tropical island and never coming back.  “HK teams have the hardest job.  Magic, and potentially even things like carrier waves, in the Underburbs runs the risk of being used as a disease vector, and you’ll need to prioritize the use of authorities as hazmat filters.  No domains, no matter manipulation spells, limit skulljack comms, no relying on anything you might have to consume.  Full hazardous environmental loadout.  Understand?”

James nodded, adding a “Got it” to a litany of other voices that were agreeing.  He noticed with what was almost a smile that Zhu sounded especially vicious about it.  Not that James could blame his friend; the Underburbs had fucked them both pretty badly the first time, and he’d really like this rematch to balance the score a little.

Ben nodded once, breathing out a long note of apprehension.  “Your loadouts are being prepped in the armory.  Border squads first, deploy immediately.  Seeker squads, gear up in half an hour, deploy after the boundary is secure.  Hunter killer squads, stay back for two hours until we can confirm there aren’t multiple agents already in the mundane area of Redmond that need your attention, then deploy.  If anyone has any personal business to attend to, do it fast.  Got it?”  He looked at them with eyes that even his aura couldn’t fully cull the exhaustion from.  “Good.  Go.  I’ve got two more groups to do this with after you.”

James stood and began moving with everyone else, no one in this crowd moving slowly, but all of them bottlenecked by the finite number of doors.  “Hey.”  He told Alanna as she walked ahead of him, James’ own head turned to track wherever Arrush had gone in the press of bodies.  “Get everyone together for me, yeah?”

”Yeah.  Why, what are you doing?”

”I need to go talk to a guy about borrowing some fire.”  James said with a grin just as vicious as anything Zhu had on his glowing feathered form.

Alanna didn’t pause, but she did turn her head to give him a deeply concerned look over her shoulder.  “Are we all gonna die?”  She asked.  “From you I mean, not from the ‘Burbs.”

”Nah, we can teleport.”  James said unhelpfully.  “Seriously though.  I’ll be back in half an hour or so, just be ready to go.”

”Yeah, yeah.  Hey, who here has more experience riding to the rescue for this dungeon, me or you?”

Zhu’s dusty orange manifestation bristled against James’ neck.  “Not cool.”  He said, just barely loud enough to be heard, voice like crunching gravel as his glowing eyes pressed shut.

Alanna still felt the sense of despair from him though, and had just enough time to throw a “Yeah, sorry, that’s on me.” Back as the crowd split toward the doors that led back to the lobby.  She sped through with everyone around her, quickly acquiring Arrush and an Anesh that the big ratroach had been sitting with.  But when Alanan turned to try to find James, her partner and his navigator were already gone.  “Oh good, he’s entered his Batman arc.”  Alanna complained as she found them a place to sit in the lobby while they watched everyone else flow around the Lair.  Heading to the armory, or in to be briefed, or just people who weren’t involved in this mess waiting around and getting in the way as they tried to catch any information on what was going on.

”Oh don’t be absurd.”  Anesh told her as he shifted into one of the chairs Alanna had secured for them.  “James is perfectly fine shooting people.”

”Oh that’s reassuring.” Alanna grumbled back.  “Okay.  We’ve got an hour at least, I’m gonna use it on prep.  Either of you want me to grab you a spellbook?”  Both of the boys raised their hands, and Alanna nodded as she rose to her feet.  “Be right back.  Don’t go anywhere.”  It’d be a real shame if their whole group all ran off to do something and missed the part where they were supposed to fling themselves into mortal peril together.

It’d be funny, too.  But there was just something about the Underburbs in general that sapped away at how cool and fun the world was.

Alanna hoped whatever bullshit James was off doing, he had a plan to at least scar the dungeon.  Restorative justice was nice and all, but if something was going to act like a ravenous beast, then scorching its tongue would at least be a good way to teach it to fuck off.

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What did a knight take as equipment into something like the Underburbs?

Well, the answer differed by person.  They weren’t an army.  A lot of them were delvers, Responders, or even just members of the Order who had normal jobs but put themselves down for the needed training and potion-backed exercise regimens that let them slot into a formation.  But while everyone was as ready as they could be, it did mean they all had their own slightly different kits.

Still, similarities emerged in aggregate, even if there was no single standard.

Weaponry was mostly firearms.  .308 battle rifles, good for exactly the kinds of encounters that they were going into where there was a constant need to deal with exceptionally tough targets, along with the absurdly illegal modified P90s with their 5x7 flechette rounds for cutting down swarms of soft targets.  Most teams had at least one of each, with everyone also coming into it with sidearms of varying sorts, and backup melee options on top of that.

Gun bangles, though, were… less used.  The Order didn’t have a lot of them, unfortunately.  And the multi-year time to level up copies to even be able to have a single ability meant they were at a premium.  Even with blue imbuement letting the ones that had lost their paired weapon get bound to a crossbow of some sort, it just wasn’t the same level of firepower, and it was a massive point of weakness since the imbuement made them vulnerable.

The other firearm based magic they had, the memory bullets, were both easier and trickier to deploy.  Every squad had some, but they weren’t the kind of thing that was exactly simple to charge.  The 9mm rounds the Order had access to also seemed to have an upper limit on the power they could get from a memory; not that it was a small limit, but it did contribute to the fact that there was a finite amount of horrible trauma that people were willing to give up for the cause. Especially since they were trying very, very hard to not go down the Wolfpack route.  Still, a kill that thing now option was important, so the bullets they’d prepared were distributed.

Armor was different.  Armor for this was something they’d been planning and standardizing for months, ever since the last attack, long before they’d noticed the Underburbs’ new target.  Delver armor, with extra layers of sealing.  Masks hooked into the highest quality air filters they could get their hands on, every scrap of skin, settlement, or chitin covered twice over.  The armor was stifling, and it was heavy, but it was the best option, especially for the defensive squads that weren’t going to have to be taking miles long hikes into the dungeon.  Camraconda armor was both simpler, since they had less joints to worry about, and also more complicated, since the Order had to make it all themselves.  Even ratroach armor was often just one absorbed blue cast of Refit away from being field-ready.

While everyone else got goggles, camracondas needed specially handmade lens caps to protect their vision.  But it was, again, the best possible protection they could provide.

Camracondas also had armature packs.  With the option to resupply on the table, many camracondas were doubling up.  One heavy duty pack of the limbs that were starting to get up there in strength and leverage, and another of the weapon mount pack that let them carry and use a rifle just as well as any hand-gifted marksman.

Protection didn’t stop at the armor itself, though.  Every shield bracer the Order had was going into the field today, and they had a lot of them.  A lot of the levers were just barely at the point that they had a single charge of selecting what they could block, but every single layer of defense was something.  Kiki’s charms got passed out too, with the stockpile of those similarly being emptied into waiting hands.  The charms could prevent a single instance of injury or even death, but they were a little fiddly, and they took a while to regrow, so it was best to have them be the last possible option.

Everyone got skulljack braid upgrades, too.  The newest model, put into production recently and, again, sealed against contaminants.  These ones include more expert programming and fewer weird dungeon UIX choices.  They also had a hard cutoff on their local networks, since no one trusted the Underburbs to not infect wi-fi.

It did mean the drone operators would have a harder time.  But the drones they were deploying with - not living drones, they’d be far too vulnerable - were often imbued, or strapped with dungeontech lenses over their cameras, or just very heavily armed.  The lasers salvaged out of 2.0 corpses weren’t quite as damaging as just shooting something in the head with a bullet, but they had zero recoil, seemingly no limit but heat on how long they could fire, and you could very easily rig up a drone to carry twenty of them and point them all at targets you wanted to catch fire.

Potions were on the table for everyone, also.  But the Underburbs-rated potion kits weren’t the same as what they used on normal delves.  Instead, they were individual doses poured into stainless steel ampoules, which were then fused shut and sealed.  The only way to drink one was with a cast of Jester’s Sip, which, thanks to the proliferation of spell coins, everyone had enough casts of to drink every one of their potions and another five or six on top of that if needed.  If an ampoule was ever breached, for any reason, that potion got thrown away.  There were no risks being taken there.

Some of the drinks, like the hardening potion, or the reflex coffee, got downed before deployment.  There were refreshes for in the field, but if people were going to be teleporting into a warzone, it was a good idea to have as many buffs active beforehand.

Dungeontech was out in force too.  While some things like telepads were handed out like candy, other items were at the discretion and training of various teams.  Leveler items like gloves and earrings went to anyone that knew how to use them.  Calming or mapping laser pointers, sticky notes that opened communication channels or patched wounds, pens that started fires, glasses that saw in infrared or time wasted, headphones that listened in to thoughts about you, cell phones that ate sound or broadcast psychic static, and a hundred other small personal treasures that didn’t fit in a copier ritual.  Dozens of different trinkets that were spawned by demiplanes, or even made in the Lair’s own basement as part of an experiment.  All of it got deployed.

Climb wands were some of the most valuable options too.  The ability to replace toxified or tainted blood was enough already for those that had the spell and were acting as medics, but for anyone to be able to do it could save a lot of lives.  Same thing for having ice arms to grab anything tainted with, or, possibly the best option, the series of baseballs that were full of the levitation spell.  On par with Momo’s grenade totems in terms of disrupting an enemy swarm.  A logistics line was already being set up to keep them full of Breath from the people who weren’t on the frontlines.

Speaking of the rear line, Sarah was somewhere in the Lair, already gathering to her the ever growing network of relationstick links.  Working with Moon and Karen to sort out who would be going into which network of avatar support, collective power ready to be pooled into any single person that needed it most right now.

What else did a knight need, but the backing of a community?

Well.  They could find some things.  Orbs.  Lots of orbs.  Orbs for survival, for problem solving, or for field imbuements if someone thought they needed a specific weird tool and also thought they could make it.  Spells.  Lots of spells.  Everyone who had open Utah spell slots was trying to cram in one or two more equips of Appointed Arrival or Visiting Tongue before they deployed, dozens of people sitting silently staring at nonsense runes in books while more waited for an open spot.  And while umbral magic wasn’t common yet, there were a lot of people in Townton with one or two levels, and there was a public call to muster for anyone willing to hand off their daily casts to a knight that might need a little extra push to survive.  Resistance spells especially were important.

The biggest umbral spell was one that only three people had, for a total of seven casts a day.  It was called Weaken Disease, and from the moment it was uncovered, it had been a top priority to get it shared with every single person who might be anywhere near the Underburbs as soon as possible.  There hadn’t been enough time, and a lot of people in the Order felt like there never would be enough time again, but there were over two hundred casts of Weaken Disease in the ranks, and that did a lot to buffer morale if nothing else.

Resistance programs were easier.  The Research department had been building some kind of ominous power-sink of a server room for a while now, piggybacking off someone’s weirdly inconvenient absorbed orange orb.  But right now, it meant that almost every one of the people going into the Underburbs could have a 20% immunity to venom.  Were Underburbs creatures venomous?  Probably.  So one fifth less of whatever that meant could only be a good thing.

One by one, knights stepped into the Lair’s armory, and stepped out carrying duffel bags that would outfit them for the fight of their lives.  Metal and magic, personalized and packaged up for each of them, to turn them from normal people who helped out where they could and sometimes had a few adventures, into knights.

It was easy to think that the Order had overprepared.  But it was more fun for many of the knights who were also looking for a little revenge in this rematch to contextualize it a little differently.  That the Underburbs was going to be incredibly confused about what was about to ruin its day.

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James didn’t waste time waiting for the logisticor, he just blipped into Townton near where he expected to find his target.  He was wrong, because the person he was looking for wasn’t home, but fortunately he knew someone that knew half of the city and could help him out.

Not Cam.  Cam, as well as apparently one of her sisters, were back at the Lair in a briefing.   And not Zhu either, the navigator both bad at finding specific people in public places, and also stress napping before their engagement.  No, James went to his own personally cultivated source, and asked TQ.

Or he tried to anyway.  The camraconda wasn’t home.  Cheha pointed James toward the cafe, but Cheha also fearfully asked what was going on, and it hurt James in his heart to tell her that the reason so many people were moving so quickly toward the logisticor point was that the Underburbs were going to try to eat part of the world again.  And that all of those people were the ones who were going to try to stop it in some way.

He’d promised her that he wouldn’t let TQ tag along, no matter what.  There was no safe way to deploy someone with a regenerating hole in their head to the Underburbs.  And even if there was… James was pretty sure he’d still try to keep TQ safe somehow.  The camraconda needed an actual rest.

With his timer ticking, he’d jogged across a couple blocks of Townton, dodging a paper drake the size of a minivan that was moving at a similar speed in the opposite direction, laminated wings flapping behind it.  James didn’t know most of the dragons by sight, but he was pretty sure that was some of their upcoming air support.

The cafe where he was looking for TQ turned out to be an unexpected boon, though.  Because inside the layered tent flaps, James found exactly who he was originally here for.  Ignoring time wasting behaviors like social decorum or tact, he marched directly to the table of his target and cut into the conversation going on.  “Hi Terror.  I need a favor, and… sorry, hi Three Oh Six, why are you?… no, not the time.  Terror.  A favor.”

”Hey man.  I’ve been hearing about some wild shit about you!”  Three Oh Six said, before James turned to position himself so he had his back to her and was just staring at the umbral.  “Hello?  Hi?  Okay rude.”

Terror’s sigh was laced with the increasingly familiar umbral static.  “What do you want now, paladin?  More of my blood?”  He asked like he was an exhausted old man and not the two year old dungeon life that James knew him to be.

”More…?  No, I refuse to get sidetracked.  Hey, you hate the suburbs, right?”

”Yes.”  Terror slowly shifted from angry to openly suspicious.  “Why.  Did one of them go away, and you wish to blame me?  Perhaps it was your fault for not being there in time, again.”

”That’s what I’m fucking trying to fix you asshole.”  James snapped suddenly.  “For once in our lives, we have a window to kill a problem before it kills a lot of people, likely including some that’re from dungeons just.  Like.  You.”  He did his best to flatten out the snarl on his face.  “Now are you going to help me or not?”

Terror looked around the cafe with his colored oval eyes, as if realizing for the first time that there was an unusual tension in the air.  And through the clear windows to the outside, there were certainly more residents of the city running than normal.  “What do you want?”  He asked, pulling himself together and dropping the needling.

”Your demiplane.”  James said quickly.  “It makes fire that kills a building, right?  How thorough is that?”

”You should know, you took one from me.”  Terror said, still suspicious.

James waved a hand.  “Yeah, we kept that stored very securely in a hole.  I’m asking how much damage it actually does.”

There was little reason to hold back information now, Terror supposed.  “It lingers.”  He said.  “Not as fire, but damage.  Even if extinguished, it keeps hurting a place.  Makes repairs impossible for weeks, even just to clear the land.”

”Great.  How many do you have?”

”What?”

Speaking slowly and deliberately, James met Terror’s gaze.  “How many terrariums full of fire do you have?  I know you at least a little bit.  I know you’re not going to let your respawn go to waste, and I know you’re probably thinking you’re some kind of safeguard for a hypothetical when-not-if situation where the Order turns on the umbral.  I’m not mad.  I am asking you.  Please.  How many do you have stockpiled?”

Peeking around him, Three Oh Six ignored the way that Terror’s stare was going from annoyed to really quite concerned with what the human was saying.  “Hi, yeah, hey!  What the fuck?   Aren’t you supposed to be an American or something?  You guys love letting people stockpile weapons, what’s with the interrogation?”

”I wouldn’t call me that right now.”  James said without looking at her.

Terror wasn’t satisfied yet though.  “I need to know.”  His voice was a whisper of distant static.  “What is going on?”

”The Underburbs are back.”  James said.  “You missed it, the first couple times, thank fuck.  It’s a dungeon that shows up, rips chunks out of the world, eats everyone inside, and then teleports to another city to do it again.  It’s weaponized diseases and the concept of looking at things.  It is horrible, and I want it fucking dead, and in ninety five minutes I am teleporting to Washington to go into it, find the humans helping it do all those things, and shooting them.  It would really help if I had a large supply of fire to go with me.”  He found himself breathing a little too fast.  Not for lack of breath, but more for an abundance of trauma that James would really have preferred to never have to remember at all.

“That’s an option?!”  Three Oh Six asked.  “Like, a homeworld just eating property?  That’s cool!”

”Shut up.”  Terror and James found themselves saying at the same time, in only slightly different tones. while still staring at each other.  Rising off the chair he was resting on, Terror stretched out his long crustacean-esque legs to tower over the human, James not breaking eye contact as he did so.  “I have several.”  He said.

James let go of the breath he was holding.  “Thank you.”  He said quietly.  “I’ll-“

”We will find a use for them.  I am coming with you.”

”No way.  You’re not…”

”Like you?”  Terror asked.  “No.  I am not.  I am not one of your knights or heroes.  I don’t care.”  The umbral’s voice rose to a loud enough volume that people around them in the cafe stopped speaking to watch.  “You were far too late with my people, and you told me then, you never wanted that to happen again.  But now you are planning to waste time arguing when-“

James cut him off.  “No, yeah, great point.  Let’s go.  You’re going to need armor.  Do you want your sniper rifle back?”  He had already turned and was heading for the exit.  “Come on!”  He called back at Terror.  “Stop wasting my time!”

Still leaning back in her chair, Three Oh Six gave the big umbral a shrug, face twisting and rippling like she was biting back a grin so hard that it was disrupting her camouflage.  “Oh I get it now!”  She said coyly, blanching slightly as one of Terror’s big eyes shifted to lock onto her.  “Hey, can I come too?”

”No.” He said bluntly, tendrils curling along his back as he stared striding after the paladin.

When he got back, Terror was going to interrogate what exactly she thought she ‘got’.  But right now, he had a series of structure fires to start.

_____

Research currently looked like someone had kicked a wasps nest, except without any of the people there being wasps or wasp-adjacent life forms.  Yet.  Reed assumed that at some point within the next decade, they were going to have crow-wasps in their roster, and it was only a matter of time before some kind of actual full on eusocial insect hive species joined the Order.  They were too cool to not attract that sort of thing.  She felt this very strongly.

She also felt like they hadn’t run enough drills.  Or any drills.  Not for this.  A lot of Researchers were also delvers in some way, but it was very clear in this moment that there was a massive blind spot in their training.  And Reed should have fucking done something about it after the Cassleton incident, where it had started to show the edges of potential failure, but she’d just not thought it through all the way.

So Reed was busy running down a hallway like some kind of anime character late for class, lab coat fluttering on her body and a cardboard box full of orange orbs cradled in most of her arms as she ducked and wove through armored knights and hustling Researchers that were just as panicked as her.

“Nik!”  She yelled as she shouldered her way through a group of ratlings that were just standing in the hallway.  “Nik, I got the orbs!  Where’re the templates?!”

”On the way, calm down.”  The worst human in the world to tell someone to calm down told her.  

Nik was currently staring at his cell phone like it was more important than preparing to deploy a wall of defensive orange totems.  Now that Research knew they could use the things more proactively in the field, it only made sense to do so.  Especially for the Underburbs.  Orange totems to throw up walls, purple ones to offensively seed inside the Underburbs itself if the opportunity came up.  Stacks generators to spawn autonomous defensive units - or, as some people might call them, bears - and also to compliment the totem walls with their own much more physical barriers.

But all of that took preparation.  They needed to have the right documentation for reference, the right pieces for assembly, the right orbs.  There was no such thing, yet, as a totem made for this.  Reed realized now that there should be, but it was way too late for that.  What they should have done was learned something from Momo, and had premade totems that could be assembled in a hurry.  Instructions printed into the metal, simple and robust designs for when they didn’t give a shit about ripping up buried power lines or putting holes in nearby buildings, just the most basic formats that were ready to go, and shoved inside a Pringles can if possible.  Instead, they had to actually build what they needed almost from scratch, and fast.

Experiments and test totems were in the process of being dismantled so they could be moved, and the pieces of a dozen others were being etched and shaped by a couple dozen Researchers and their assistants.  But this was one thing you really didn’t want to just slap together, and who even knew how much time they actually had?

So it annoyed Reed a little bit that Nik was on his phone.

“Are you playing Wordle? It’s mocha today, there, you’re done, come on.  We need to move!”  Her voice cracked into the kind of vibrating chitter that ratroaches often had going on, but which Reed was still embarrassed by as someone in the process of letting go of the habits of humanity.  “Nik!”  The latest exclamation of the man’s name was more of a sharply frustrated squeak than anything else.

Nik looked up at Reed with the slow motion of someone who wasn’t in a rush, but not because he was being lazy, and more because he was in the process of making a very horrifying discovery.  “I figured this one out.”  He said simply, holding up his phone.

Reed’s newly sharpened eyes picked out the tiny circuit board pin legs and charging cable antennae that marked the phone as an iLipede and not just a normal piece of mundane technology.  It was placid in Nik’s hands, but he seemed distressed all the same.

”Okay, we’ll update the score chart.  Can you please help me?”  Reed asked, shoving the box of orange orbs further onto the table to make room and waving with two paws at Paper-And-Words who was dragging a cart laden with metal plates toward them.  “It’s the Underburbs.  Come on!”  Her voice cracked again.

”It’s ‘cause the dates keep changing.  You’d think that would make it easier to match them up, but we’re not omniscient, you know?”  Nik asked, like that made any sense.

”I’m going to bite you.”  Reed threatened as the camraconda hauling a disassembled totem dropped it off with a hiss and slid past the duo, its head ducking down as a flight of living drones whirred down the hallway overhead.

Nik shook his head, blinking like he was just waking up from a daze.  “Oh, sorry.  The dates.”  He turned the iLipede toward Reed.  It was the black and silver one that just had an app on it where you picked a number, one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, multiples of ten all the way up to a billion.  And then it gave a date and time.  Or returned an error.  And of course, sometimes it gave a different date and time than the last time you checked it.  Research was mostly just letting it live its best life.  “I figured it out.”

”I don’t care?”  Reed was surprised to hear herself say that.  “Can you please go check on Thermoclese and see if she has the projectile memeplexes ready?  Or if that just never happened because they’re memeplexes.”  Reed knew without knowledge that it was the second one, she just didn’t want it to be.

”The ten thousand result is tomorrow.”  Nik said with a dead toned voice.  “Four AM.  Has been for the last two weeks.”

”Okay?”

”It’s the Underburbs.”  Nik said.  “I figured out where to start looking.  It’s predicting mass casualty events.”  He looked down at the iLipede’s app, which was currently ‘loading’ and didn’t have the power to select anything, though he could still see the ‘one’ option that always returned an error.  “Or just casualty events.  Deaths.”

Reed froze, and turned her chitinous triangular muzzle toward the exhausted looking human who was still trying to grow inadvisable facial hair.  A single long inhalation of the filtered air of the Research basement filled her lungs, before she reached out, and took the iLipede from him.

”If you don’t get moving on the memeplexes,” Reed squeaked out, trying her best to intimidate from a body that wasn’t quite five feet tall, “then you’re going to become a singular casualty event!”

Nik snapped out of his dread daze.  “R-right!”  He lurched to his feet and nearly slammed into Halo who was running by in the other direction carrying something in his unfurled heavy hands.  “I’ll be right back!”

As calmly as possible, Reed replaced the iLipede in its terrarium with a muttered apology.  And then she took another deep breath, checked what they had, found that they were missing all the carved base pieces for the Stacks generators, and took off at a sprint to go grab those before any of the crew got back.

She still had thirty other things to do, and she kept remembering more as she ran through the stupidly extended hallways.  They still needed to hand out dungeon detectors, for fucks sake.

Reed could worry about tens of thousands of people dying later.  Hopefully after they stopped it from happening entirely.

Sorry, she thought silently in the iLipede’s direction, we’re gonna mess up your prediction this time.

_____

The Order’s paper drake population was a little eccentric.

Or at least, that’s what Dave had been told.  Personally, he didn’t see it.  The paper drakes had a perfectly understandable and consistent life cycle; at least so far, none of them had died of old age or anything yet, and it was likely that they were pretty long lived.  They grew fast, but Pendragon was several years old and still developing instead of in decline, so the smart money was on her having over half her expected lifespan left at least.

From Dave’s perspective, the paper drakes were pretty normal.  They were kinda smart for animals, but he’d met dogs that were more clever than Pen was sometimes.  Their biggest weirdness, aside from being made out of thick paper and an assortment of metal and plastic that grew in shapes reminiscent of common office materials, was that they had a magical hoard.

It had taken a little while to figure out that Pendragon’s thing of eating dungeontech and incorporating its powers into herself wasn’t just a one-off quirk.  All the paper drakes did that, and they did it at a pretty consistent rate; as they grew past certain thresholds they would surreptitiously select and devour various priceless irreplaceable artifacts so that they could fly better, survive more, or annoy their handlers at a more effective rate.  It was actually proven now that they didn’t like copied items, too.  It was very rare that one would be enticed by the flavor of a copied item enough to swallow it, they really did seem aware of the rarity of their meals somehow.

They’d eat anything too.  Anything magic, anyway.  It did seem like Office dungeontech had a lot of unintended synergies with living paper drakes that made even bizarre stuff like the wallet that couldn’t move left into a useful maneuvering tool.  But different drakes had eaten everything from Climb wands to shield bracers, and it all kind of worked out.  Though usually with less control than they had of their Officium Mundi sourced hoard.

It was just one of many small things that Dave, in his job as animal expert, had to consider.  There had also been a concern with the drakes that they were somehow bonding to a single ‘pilot’.  But that had been proven false too.  Elegan let basically any knight that showed up with an orb snack pilot him.  Pendragon liked him, but he could ask her to act as a training dragon for the other pilots.  And some of the drakes weren’t being raised by a single handler anyway, so who even knew how that would turn out.

All of this musing was Dave admittedly trying to distract himself from the ice cold pit of terror in his chest.

Dave didn’t really like thinking about the Underburbs.  He’d talked through his and Pen’s experience with it, multiple times to multiple people.  Therapists, friends, even to Inkblot when he was alone at night except for the newer paper drake that was still small enough to comfortably fit on his pillow and not shatter his bed.  But that didn’t fix anything.

The last time the Underburbs had shown up, Dave had nearly died.  Pendragon had nearly died.  Just going outside had been hard afterward, let alone getting back into delving, even just for things like the Pylon that weren’t toxic.

And now Dave was standing at the end of one of Townton’s longest cleared roads, next to four other people and the five paper drakes that topped the leaderboard in terms of size.  He was also wearing armor again, this time a lot less flexible as it was supposed to be more sealed against infectious agents, but still armor all the same.  Well, okay, Dave was standing on the sidewalk, because walking in the street felt wrong.  But he was wearing armor, and was watching Pendragon lightly adjust the position of another paper drake with the long loops of metal that came off the back of her hardened plastic skull.  And was panicking, on the inside, where you were supposed to panic.

The Underburbs were back.  And Dave was here for some reason.  Which meant he was probably going to die soon, and he didn’t know why he wasn’t taking Pendragon and Inkblot and running in the other direction until the nature of the curvature of the Earth put him at a point where there was no way to get farther away from that thing.

In the abstract he understood he was doing something important.  But he didn’t want to do something important.  He wanted to leave.  He wanted to quit the Order forever.  He wanted to be somewhere else and never think about magic again except for his drakes.

“Yo.”  The voice from next to him drew out the word.  Lumy’s latest pilot, Max, stepping up next to Dave and giving him a curious look.  The knight’s long curly hair was pulled back in a tight bun over his head that looked kind of silly, but Dave had learned to never say that kind of thing out loud, and it was also probably useful when you were flying a dragon.  “You doing okay?”

”Sure, I’m fine.”  Dave answered with a shrug.  

“Really.”  Max sounded like they didn’t believe Dave, which was a little insulting.  Even if it was actually correct.  “Well if you say so.”

”Yeah.”  Dave nodded.  “Are you ready?”  He asked, trying to be polite.

Max shrugged.  “I’m freaking out a little bit.”  The knight took a long shaky breath, looking at where the cluster of vehicle-sized paper drakes were now shifting around in the road as they played with each other.  They weren’t nervous, not in the same way that their pilots were.  “Who isn’t, though, right?”

”I’m not!”  A camraconda voice joined them, Myri slithering over the black surface of the road to stop far enough away from the curb that the accrued organic debris didn’t touch her plate.  “I’m excited!  This is gonna be so cool!  I can’t wait to see Seattle!”

”We’re going to Redmond.”  Dave reminded her.

”Pre-Barrens Redmond, even!  A historical artifact!”  Myri declared, arching her body and then wiggling herself from side to side as she tried to get the sealed armor to stop itching around her neck.

Max leaned closer to Dave, prompting Dave to take a half-step back.  “Do you know what the hell she’s talking about?”

”Yeah.”  Dave said.

There was a pause where Max did that thing where they raised eyebrows and stared at Dave like they expected something.  A silence that was conversational only; the rest of the soundscape filled by the other pilots talking, and the arrival of several motor vehicles that were important for the process of takeoff.

Paper drakes couldn’t do standing takeoffs after they grew past a certain size.  Once they were in the air, they could gain altitude easily enough, and some of them would eventually probably have the right hoard combination to liftoff at will.  But Pendragon was a long way away from back when Dave could throw her like a paper airplane to send her soaring.  So they needed a launch system.

Which was why they were on the longest stretch of cleared road.  Half of Townton’s public safety group currently out making sure no necroads wandered into their path, the other half making sure no one who lived in Townton did the same, though presumably for less malicious reasons and more just by accident.

”Well?”  Max asked.

”Well what?”  Dave blinked.

”Well what the heck is Myri talking about?”

Dave nodded.  “Oh!  Shadowrun.”

”…Are you allergic to explaining things?”  Max inquired rudely as one of the trucks stopped near them and a shield team started piling out.

Dave shrugged again.  “People don’t like it when I overexplain stuff, and you didn’t ask.”

”I can tell you about Shadowrun!”  Myri told Max.  “I’d love to tell you about Shadowrun, but we’ll have to do that after we get back, because now we have to go be really cool!”  The camraconda gave a little bow motion to them, before slithering off toward the person that was in charge of dramatic timing for the day.

Well, no, that wasn’t fair, Dave thought to himself.  They were in charge of making sure that the timing minimized the amount of exposure the flight had, as well as keeping the whole thing organized.  At a small scale, Dave was aware, it was possible to give delvers a general direction and let them kind of figure stuff out.  But paper drakes could fly at a hundred miles an hour sometimes, so there was a bit of an incentive to have a control tower that made sure none of them slammed into each other.  Or any buildings, or power lines, particularly tall trees, things like that.

It being Karen doing the organizing felt weird, but Dave didn’t really know Karen that well.  Maybe she was good at it.  Her voice rose over the engine sound and stilled any of the nervous conversation.  “Shield team, please split into pairs, two per drake.  Pilots, get ready.  Myriad-Shining-Sparks-Overhead, do you need any help?”

”Nope!  I’m good!  Elegan knows what to do!”  The camraconda said as she butted her head against the paper drake’s neck, and then slithered over in front of him, rising up on her tail to the full height a normal camraconda could manage.  “Watch!  Come on Elegan!”  She called back.

The drake behind her also reared up, and split open.  Not from his mouth, but down an otherwise invisible seam in his chest, revealing a depression inside the dungeon life that was sized to fit approximately one whole person.  Huffing lightly, Elegan’s front claws crashed back down to the street with a clatter, the ball wheels in them depressed so he didn’t just slide wildly around, while Myri vanished into the open part of the drake.  A second later, the reinforced laminated paper and aircraft aluminum scales sealed back up, trapping the camraconda snugly.  Elegan shook himself slowly, flat head and metal loop horns twisting back and forth before he - they, now - focused on Karen.  “See?  All good!  Ready to go!“  Myri and Elegan said together.

”Good, thank you Myriad.  Please take on your passangers.”  Karen nodded professionally, pointing at two shield team knights that jogged over to where Elegan was settling down to open panels along his flank that revealed similar small pockets.  “Quickly everyone, please.  We aren’t in an emergency, but I would appreciate if no one wasted time.”

”That sounds like a threat.”  Dave heard Max mutter as the knight started walking toward Lumy.  They turned to wave back at Dave, calling out a final, “Good luck!”

”You too.”  Dave said, watching the other pilots approach their drakes, going through small motions that were, to each of them, familiar pre-fusing rituals.  Redding, a man who looked like he belonged on the other side of the planet rather than here, almost gingerly boarding Hermes.  And Jubilance, who Dave felt really didn’t belong in the Order, but who had been doing a great job getting to know the Climb drakes since she was trying to never talk to another real person again or something, sliding comfortably into Rudger’s pilot cradle.  He didn’t realize he’d been standing still the whole time until it was just him and Pen left.

”Dave, if you could…” Karen didn’t sound upset with him as she looked between Dave and the last unpiloted dragon.  But Dave didn’t want to waste any more time.

Stepping up to his largest friend, Pendragon curved her neck down to stare at him.  She might not know what was going on, but she could feel the tension in the air.  “Hey girl.”  Dave said out loud, setting a hand on her jawline.  He thought about trying to explain things to her, or maybe just turning and booking it, but there was no real point to either action.  “Time to fly.”  He quietly told Pendragon.

She poked her snout into his shoulder, almost like she was being sarcastic.  But then she settled back, her schoolbus-sized body settling into place as the undisputed queen among the other drakes here, before the seam of her chest pulled apart to reveal a simple leather jacket and skulljack cable, along with bits of other stuff she’d been snacking on and collecting over the last couple years peeking out from her internal body.  It was perfectly sized for Dave, though he did have to navigate through the ribcage of flexible metal lamp bars to get in.

And just as he threaded his arms into the comfortable supporting pilot’s coat, and clipped the cable into his skulljack, Pendragon’s body sealed back up and left him in darkness.

But only for a second.  Because then he wasn’t in there.  In fact, he wasn’t him, and she wasn’t her; they were them, and something very, very interesting shifted.

Pendragon was kind of an animal.  She didn’t understand long term planning, not in the way that even Dave did, and Dave was really bad at it.  But like this, they both understood two different things, that flowed from different directions.  One, was that there was such a thing as revenge.  Something Dave never really thought about, but Pendragon suddenly had the context for, and found to be enticing.  And in the other direction, the knowledge that no matter how hurt anything had made them, they were a predator.  Something Pendragon often didn’t act on, because she got everything she wanted without it, but that Dave suddenly felt as a wash of hot confidence that shoved away terror, apprehension, and especially the desire to flee.

How could they ever run from this fight, of all things?  Especially when they might get lucky and eat one of the monsters shaped like humans, and Pendragon could see what a power crystal tasted like.

”We are prepared to fly.”  Dave and Pendragon’s mixed voice boomed over every other sound in the area, their tall viewpoint looking down on the humans wearing high-vis vests and carrying guide lights and flare launchers who were scurrying around the area.  Two more humans, the newer ones, the shield team, approached Pendragon a little more cautiously as the others had to the four other smaller drakes, but the duo settled to the street and opened the two more spacious rider cabins for them, one on either side, wings that stretched across the whole road rising up to give clear space to enter.

Properly loaded up, the fused pair followed one of the humans on the ground that was guiding them with a signal light and called words.  Stepping gently up and onto the back of a flatbed truck trailer.

Soon, the truck would get them up to a speed where they could spread their wings and simply fly.  Soon, they would teleport with the others to a place that would hold violence and prey in equal measure.  Soon, they would have revenge.

Dave and Pendragon, as a single entity, settled into the flatbed, and traded thoughts with each other as they got ready, planning out their violence while they waited.

The Underburbs was back.  And they were unhappy.

_____

The Underburbs, with at least a few hundreds of miles of depth to its monoculture neighborhoods, deadliest predator of its species, lingered just outside of a thin patch of air on a road in suburban Washington.

Insofar as a dungeon realized things at all, it did not, yet, realize that someone had taken offense to this.

Which, a lot of people in the Order of Endless Rooms would agree if asked, was a big mistake on the dungeon’s part.