The Daily Grind - Chapter 396 (Patreon)

Long one this week.

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"There's violence to knowing the world isn't what you thought" -Gloria Burgle, Fargo-

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James arrived in Redmond with an amount of property damage, properly heralding how he expected the day to go.

Technically he arrived in Bellevue.  The golf course that was currently in the process of having chunks scooped out of it by a logisticor and looking like a melon that was being carved up by the kitchens for a fruit cup while it happened was, technically, on the other side of the line dividing the two cities.  In practice, like many cities, the distinction was meaningless.  Humanity was long past the era of city-states and ungoverned frontiers, at least in this part of the world, for now.  Instead, a person could take a walk and cross through three different cities, two counties, an equal number of water districts, a special unincorporated township, and probably a whole host of secret lines on maps that denoted things that were much more practical than the abstract nature of what city you happened to live in.

The thirty meter wide bubble of space removed a section of the golf course that was going to be annoyed, probably, and deposited precisely that much of a fallow farm field from Yamhill in its place.  And out of that bubble, barely waiting for the process to complete so it was safe to do so, marched a couple hundred people that were here for a fight.

Well, marched or drove.  The territory of the Underburbs was a lot of things, but one thing that it definitely had was streets, and if it was going to be vehicle accessible in a way most dungeons weren’t, then the Order was going to bring in the delve vehicles they used for Route Horizon.

Vehicles that were often magically enhanced, and in one case, were a military surplus armored personnel transport of the kind that had been handed out to US police departments like candy over the last several years.  That had also been magically modified by Horizon dungeontech.  And was going to cause yet further issues for the green of the golf course.

But James was hard pressed to care.  He tried his best, most of the time, to respect the traditions and cultures of people who weren’t like him.  But right now, golf registered in his brain as the stupidest fucking thing on the planet, and if anyone tried again to tell him that the tax loophole that made golf courses possible was actually not that bad, he was going to just start setting random things on fire.

”I may be on edge a little.”  James said as walked alongside a slow moving jeep, looking up at the sky where a single contrail cut through the clouds like a knife.  He sighed.  It didn’t help.

”I can tell.”  Arrush said, nodding in a way that made it clear he was enjoying the sensation of having a custom fitted helmet that held the burrs of his antennae in place properly.  “Breathe.  You’re going to make Alanna break something.”

”Like you if you’re not careful.”  An Anesh said from behind them.  “I know her Empathy is one way but I think she’s trying to glare you to death and I can feel the laser vision sweeping over me every time I step in the way.”  One of him helped another one adjust the rifle strap he was wearing, the two iterations of the same person moving with a fluid unity that didn’t need a skulljack to facilitate it.  Just long hours of living together as the same guy.

Anesh liked to think that he owed a lot to James and Alanna when it came to getting along with himself.  They taught him a lot about how to avoid being jealous.  And what could be worse than being jealous of yourself?

After that though, Anesh fell into a tense quiet with the others as they walked at the lead of the column heading out of the golf course.  A couple people behind them moved to intercept - and hopefully evacuate - several employees or possibly just golfers that were slightly upset with the display.  But the coterie just moved forward toward where a steep dirt slope sat hidden behind some trees and tall grass.

The coterie, and Terror, who was following them for some reason.  James said it was fine though so Anesh tried to just give the umbral space.  Which was more than Arrush and Alanna were doing; the other members of Anesh’s polycule seemed like they were currently silently plotting a murder.  James might have forgiven the jackass that tried to kill him with fall damage, but not all of his partners had.  And Anesh had a hard time blaming them.

It took a moment to find a path for the vehicles to get up, so James actually got to continue on foot, ascending the slope with his coterie with a long trail of other knights in tow.  When he reached the top, he didn’t even slow for the chain link fence, instead using a charge of the Manipulate Asphalt blue that would be off limits in the Underburbs anyway to coax a line of material out of the street, into the base of the fence, and then sideways in a rapid yank that ripped poles out of the ground and flattened the obstacle for everyone behind him.

The street where the Underburbs started was already blocked off.  Responders and a shield team defending in layers.  Farther out, there were rows of traffic cones and construction equipment.  Spells identical to what James had just used had been put to work tearing up the street both for verisimilitude and to stop most cars from casually getting through.  Back here, though, things were a bit more militarized.

Red lines were spray painted in arcs around a formation of street lights that had arched over the road.  If a driver wasn’t paying close attention, it might not look like much of a dungeon entrance at all, but approaching it cautiously it was very clear that this was a twisting of the ‘normal’ architecture of the suburbs.  Streetlights never reached halfway out over the road, much less to the point that they touched and tangled with their counterparts on the other side.  And when James stared at the marked area long enough, he got the unnerving sensation that he was looking into a mirror that lacked his own reflection, rather than just staring down the street.

Around that open hole in reality, the shield teams had set up barricades, barbed wire, and machine gun nests.  There was a difficulty in it because the breach seemed to work from either side, so they had to kind of fan out to avoid potential friendly fire, which meant that they were often parked on the property of the homey three story houses that were just on the other side of the street.

There were still normal people here.  Not a crowd, exactly.  But the detour signs that were going up weren’t deterring every car, there were a lot of intersections to cover, and the families in the houses weren’t exactly thrilled that there was a paramilitary force occupying their local street.

Well, he had a minute before the cars caught up.  So James hopped off the curb and aimed for where one of the shield team was currently being yelled at by a middle aged man that was waving a phone around like it was somehow a more dangerous weapon than the battle rifle the Order’s combatant had.

”-or I’ll call the police!”  The man was repeating as James approached.

”Hi there.”  He interjected himself in the conversation, getting a look of melting relief from the young human man he’d just rescued.  “Let’s say I’m in charge here.  What’s up?  Why are you still here?”

The man wheeled on him, sensing the presence of a manager like a shark tracking blood in the water.  James was amused to see people that were likely the guy’s family behind him on the sidewalk, but less amused to think about the fact that there was an uncomfortable woman rocking a stroller, as he began to imagine the Underburbs eating a baby.  “What do you think you’re doing here?!  You can’t block a street!  I don’t care what movie you’re shooting, I’m calling the cops!”

”Oh, thanks.”  James nodded with a fixed smile.  “That’d be really helpful, they aren’t answering when we try!”

That was unfortunately true.  The Order wasn’t exactly cocky about the situation; last time, they’d actually only accomplished some of their tactical objectives because the local cops and firefighters of Springfield had thrown their combined weight behind the Order.  So they tried to just call ahead.  If for no other reason than to head off another encounter with The Long Arm Of The Law before he got pissy after the fact.

But no one answered.  And the effect that stopped people from teleporting into police stations seemed to have spread to an area around them now too, which was bad.  It meant that the rogues who had been deployed were still out there trying to open lines of communication, and that James’ delight with a random civilian calling the police was genuine.

”Who do you think you are, you can’t just take over a whole…” the man, who had started to invade James’ personal space like it was his own small attempt at recreating the Normandy Landing on James’ feet, stopped talking.

James followed the line of his sight to see Arrush had mostly kept up with him, and was now standing next to them, all of his armored arms crossed in an interlinked pattern across his chest as he looked down with a glowing snarl at the man.

”Hey.  You good?”

”Are you?”  Arrush asked.  “Why are there still people here?  Are they stupid?”

”Yes, but I figure I can just bribe them or something.”  James sighed as he turned back to the man who was taking unsteady steps back down the sidewalk.  “Look, if you could try calling the cops, I’d appreciate it.  Tell them we’re going to start shooting things.  With… with bullets.  To be clear.”  He realized he hadn’t planned this and wasn’t prepared for this encounter.

The man, meanwhile, was now pointing his phone like a weapon at Arrush, making confused sounds, and being completely useless.  Which was why it was a bit of surprise that the next word James heard was a rather young voice yelling out “Ratroach!”

”What?”  Arrush reacted first, looking over the man’s head, to where on the sidewalk, a child that looked like he was maybe seven or eight years old was pointing their way.  “Yes?”

”Mom!”  The kid yelled at full volume.  “Look!  See?!  Ratroach!  Ask if they have camracondas here too!”

James pressed gloved fingers into his forehead.  “I know I’m going to regret this diversion.”  He said out loud as the man whirled back to look between the kid that was presumably his son and the figure of a very confused Arrush standing in the road.  “But could you please ask your kid why he knows what a ratroach is?”

The kid in question was already sprinting over, having dodged his mom’s grasp and only barely being grabbed by his father, who dropped his phone with a clatter to the road.  “Hi!  Do you know any camracondas?”  The kid asked Arrush with wide eyes.

”Yes.”  Arrush nodded.  “Do… do you?”  That seemed like a prudent question.

”Yeah!”

The mom, pushing the stroller and with an older kid in tow, made her way over with a shake of her head.  “I’m so sorry, he isn’t trying to be… rude?”  Her eyes focused on Arrush for the first time.  “Oh.”

”Hello.”  Arrush waved as things seemed to be calming down.  “I don’t think we actually have time for this?”  He asked James.

”Yeah, but we aren’t going yet and I gotta know.  How do you know what camracondas are?  Or ratroaches for that matter?”  He asked the young boy.

The woman answered with a dazed voice.  “He has a cartoon video game streamer that he likes…” she said, staring past Arrush to where her son was now frantically pointing, catching sight of many camracondas - heavily armed ones too - that were getting into position.  “But that’s… but they’re not… not real!”

James took a deep breath of grassy Earth air, somehow enjoying the moment before the oncoming chaos.  ”There’s not exactly only one option, but… it’s Dance, isn’t it?  I am glad that there is kind of growing recognition at play here, but I am filled with the sudden and all-consuming dread that Dance is the ambassador of our people to a generation of human youth.”

”It’s not a whole generation, the channel only has a few hundred subscribers.”  The man muttered, still holding his son.  And then looked affronted at the strange stare his wife gave him.  “What?  I pay attention!  I keep an eye on what they watch!”

”Wait really?”  The other older kid asked, suddenly nervous.

”A few hundred?”  James was torn between respect for Dance cultivating an audience, and that ongoing sinking feeling that the camraconda was a chaos goblin.  “Okay, good for her.  She’s not here.  Because…” he breathed again, and put his serious face back on, “because we are actually here to deal with something dangerous.  And Dance is a kid.  This is not a good place for civilians to be right now, especially kids.”  He met the parents’ eyes, speaking calmly.  “Please get clear of the area.  If possible, get out of the city.”

“Wait, what’s going on here?”  The man asked.

James turned back to him, most of his focus now on their vehicle line making it out of the golf course’s sand traps.  This was great, and funny, and exactly what he needed before he probably nearly died again.  But it was time to move now.  “If we’re on time?  Nothing.”  He said, before looking to the nearby shield team member.  “Get them some yellow orbs, just in case.”  He ordered.

”James!”  Anesh said, jogging up to them and spending only a small moment looking at the scared family before turning back to his partner.  “We’re ready to go.  Arrush, you’re driving the second… thing.  Technical?”

”Technically no.”  James and Arrush said at the same time, the two of them smiling at each other.  “Please get going, okay?  And actually do call the cops if you can!”  James told the family, the man now much calmer and retrieving his phone from the ground with a wide eyed nod.

”Wait!  I know who they are!”  The kid was still happily yelling, not affected by the implication of impending doom at all.  “Dance tells stories about Arrush!”

”…Terrifying.”  The big ratroach said with a glowing grin as he moved back through the shield team defensive line.  He said that, but James could see his armor-wrapped tails flicking back and forth in a happy animation as he walked.

A minute later, and he was swinging himself up into the driver’s seat of an armored jeep, James in the passenger seat, Terror and an Anesh fit into the back.  Behind them, a similar vehicle with Alanna driving two other Anesh and Watcher-Under-Stone, their substitute camraconda since TQ was still blind, started its own engine.  It had been an argument to convince Anesh that at least one of him should stay behind.  More of an argument for Anesh to decide which one, and James could understand why.  Going into a fight with other delvers was horrifying, but staying behind while your friends might die without you would be infinitely worse.

It was, however, very funny to James to see Arrush adjust his rearview mirror and make a careful check of the type of magical gas they had in the tank, before he looked over at the paladin with a steady stare of all the various eyes splashed across his face.

Outside the car, sound muffled through the armored doors and windows, hundreds of knights streamed out from the staging area.  Some of them were setting up fallback positions and medical quarantine sites, some of them were evacuating a spreading area around the breach, and some of them were racing into the city to hunt down the spikes that were going to disgorge the Underburbs into reality like a distention of space itself.

But there was one group that wasn’t going to be dealing with the defense at all.

James twisted his thoughts with the anticipation of a road trip, and gave Zhu a hand up into reality. The navigator’s feathers blossoming across his body, taloned hand emerging off his own arm, thick tail ruining the comfort of his seating position very thoroughly.  “We’re about to go.”  He told the navigator.

”Oh yeah, you think I didn’t notice?”  Zhu asked with a huff.  “I can feel Alanna’s authority already.  Ooh, others too!  Dammit, Harriet is already in charge, you took too long, I wanted to be in charge of… oh, whatever.  Don’t worry, nothing’s going to mess us up.”

“Confident for someone that was asleep until two seconds ago.”  Terror complained.

”Fuck off, you don’t get to whine now.”  Zhu shot back, Arrush’s agreeable nod silently backing him up from the driver’s seat where the ratroach’s paws were curled over the wheel.

James nodded and leaned forward, grabbing the radio and making sure it was set to the right channel.  “Final check.”  He called to the other cars.  “All aboard who’s going aboard, make sure your guns and mana pools are loaded and everyone has six backup telepads, if you need to throw up from anxiety now’s the time to do it.”  He paused, and closed his eyes for just a moment before opening them again in a hard stare toward the red spray paint.  “We’ve got twelve hours before the prognostication department we apparently have in our basement says this turns into a nightmare scenario.  Let’s use it.  Memetic defense up, all hunter teams, move in.”

He set the radio back as Arrush hit the gas, and the jeep shot forward through the false-mirror of the Underburb’s entrance.

Behind him, the people in the Order who were most comfortable killing humans followed, to do exactly that.

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The dungeon detectors everyone was wearing started going off immediately.  Which was to be expected; they were, after all, in a dungeon.

What was a little more dramatic was the kind of almost visible splash of intrusive thoughts against the defenses the infomorphs were holding up.  A dozen navigators and authorities and one particularly bold assignment putting up a cooperative shield that harnessed the senses and memories of the organic people they were teamed up with to create a defense against the crushing mental pressure of the Underburbs that would have just popped any natural thoughts like soap bubbles normally.

It was almost pretty, in a way.  To look out the windshield of an armored vehicle, and see what might be a thin crack in the air that somehow looked like fearlessness made physical.  Then it was deflected, splattering aside and leaving only the afterimage of an idea painting the sidewalk for a split second before it was gone, and James was left clutching the armrest on the door so hard his knuckles hurt.  Zhu’s talons layered over his hand punching holes into the already scuffed up padding with his own nerves.

“Alright love?”  Anesh asked from the backseat, mostly so he’d have something to say.

”No.  Which is good!”  James tried to smile.  “Because it means we’re through the entrance problem.”

They were.  And now that they had slipped through the fake mirror streetlight archway, they were well and truly in the Underburbs in a way that was weirdly normal for this dungeon.  No one went into the Underburbs through the front door, that was for real delves, not for this.  And yet, here they were.

Around them already, there was a suburban neighborhood.  Cookie cutter houses, pristine white siding and matching picket fences, lined the slightly curving road.  No straight lines here, the streets were always weaving back and forth to give the illusion of coziness; a tactic the dungeon lifted wholesale from the real thing, annoyingly.  It was dim here, but even without any glowing mist surrounding the entry street, there was light.  Most of it pouring through the dungeon’s entrance, the outside world bleeding illumination into a place that probably harvested that for future use too.

Around that illuminated window back to Earth, though, there wasn’t quite darkness.  It was dark back the way they came, yes, but if anyone had the dumb idea to try driving around the breach, they would quickly figure out the terminal velocity of an armored jeep, because there wasn’t any ground.  The entrance to the Underburbs had dropped them, much like Winter’s Climb liked to do, at the edge of a cliff.  The main difference was, there were dots of light out in the distance visible from this cliff; glowing orange specks of streetlights, and a few other small glinting points of light that were harder to identify.  They were just distant.  Miles and miles distant, and so far beneath them it almost felt like looking down from a mountain peak at a city.

That was just one strata though.  Thin glowing mist just barely illuminated the outlines of two massive rocky overhangs above them.  One could have been some kind of cavern ceiling, but the other was clearly unconnected from anything.  Floating pieces of the Stratified Underburbs, layers and layers and layers of identical neighborhoods, identical rows of buildings and streets and monsters with only the occasional quirk to break them up.

Though unlike everywhere else in the Underburbs that James and Zhu had seen, this street has cars on it.  Dozens of them.  The convoy didn’t stop until they were out of sight of the entrance, and they passed by a lot of cars that had been neatly parallel parked.  Even if they were covered in dents and gouges, or sporting broken windows where something smashed its way in and dragged a driver out.

The place was quiet.  No noise but the muffled sounds of the vehicle engines and the rasp of tires over asphalt.  Nothing jumped out at them, nothing ran in to suicidally slam into their convoy, nothing apparently poisoned them with some esoteric disease.  It was just… a neighborhood.

They came to a stop at a big traffic circle intersection.  The center of it a dome of dirt with some big rocks and plants on it that gave a vague impression of being alive, if that was an option here.  It was the first landmark that isn’t just more houses, yards, or streetlights, and it was also the first time they actually had multiple directions to choose from, which made it the ideal place to start their hunt.

The thing about going into a dungeon to find someone was, it was basically impossible.

James had done it once, because he had gotten absurdly lucky, and had a whole other dungeon helping him out and giving them a custom-grown navigator just for the purpose.  Alex had alluded to it recently, but James was pretty sure she’d been stalking someone and not looking for them.

Even with Zhu, even with all the navigators here, the cost to find a specific person within the dungeon would be potentially lethal.  Likely lethal, even.  Last time they were here, Zhu had barely been able to find them a mildly safe place to stay the night, and when he’d tried to find a building they could hole up in, it had gone so wrong that people had died.

So there was an obstacle there.  Ironically, if they’d been lucky, they would have been ambushed coming into the dungeon.  It could have gone bad, but having multiple targets show themselves right away would have solved the problem.  As it stood, they were short on options.  Drone scouting was also possibly lethal in here, so that was out.  Driving in random directions and trying to attract attention would likely just never actually accomplish anything except start to accrue skill points from kills.  Attracting attention via property damage might work better, but again, the dungeon was huge.  There was no promise that the enemy delvers were going to use this exit anyway, or were close enough to hear a building being demolished.

Which left one tool.  And it was, to be fair, more than nothing.  But it did expose a weakness in the Order.  Sometimes they got something that solved a problem, and they made it work for a lot of other things too, and kind of stopped looking so hard for alternate solutions.  Like with the telepads solving their mobility problems well enough that they’d maybe not been searching hard enough for a way to recreate the magical connected interstate doorways.

They had one spell that could find a person.  Kind of.  And it worked well enough.  The only problem was, it didn’t work across dungeon boundaries.  If you wanted to find someone with Call To Blood, you had to be in the same dimension as that person, and that had to be the dimension they were last wounded in.

You also needed a name, ideally a full name, and a face didn’t hurt either.  They had first names and faces for two people.  And that was what James started with.

Reya.  He had a pretty good mental picture of the woman, mostly because he’d thought he’d fucking killed her, and the image of her shocked face at the time was sort of seared into his memory.  He gave a brief verbal note to the others that he was casting, and then let the Breath pool up from his lungs to chill his skin before it snapped into the form of the spell.

Reya.  Such an unassuming name for a mass murderer.  Where, James asked through the medium of Climb magic, did this person last bleed?

That direction, apparently.

The magically added part of James’ brain that was honed for understanding his own relative position and was mostly where Zhu lived suddenly got a new task.  And so did Zhu.  “Shift to the left a little?”  He told James while the human held the Climb spell at a much steeper cost than just casting it again.  “Back to the right.  Okay.  Got it.”  Something clicked in James’ brain.  An implicit understanding of not just the direction, but also about how far from the thing he was.

”Good.”  James said.  “You can hold that?”

”Oh yeah.  Though that’s kinda far.”  Zhu said, gratified by how it felt like he had been able to use James’ spell like a focusing lens, spiking out with his restored strength and piercing a hole straight through the Underburbs to where he wanted them to go.  He didn’t even have to get them in any misadventures to do it, with the assist.

”We have a car.”  Arrush pointed out.

James let the spell go, taking quick breaths as he grabbed the radio again, no one wanting to do something as stupid as get out of their cars in here unless they were actually at their target.  “Got a direction for one of them.  Kirk, how’re you and Harriet looking?”

The other man’s voice came back with his usual flat tone, though James knew him well enough at this point from a few delves to sense that he wasn’t exactly calm in here.  “Assam is alive, and in here somewhere.”  Kirk informed them.  “We’re probably heading ahead and taking that vague left.”

”And we’re splitting right.”  James grimaced.  “Okay.  Everyone knows who they’re going with.  Remember, we don’t know how many people we’re looking at here, so don’t do anything stupid.”

”Bold talk for this outfit.”  Anesh muttered from the back seat, actually getting a tiny breeze of a laugh from Terror.

James just set the radio back in its mount and rolled his eyes as Zhu flowed over to Arrush, a spear of orange light jumping from one person to another, splashing down in a coat of feathers that was best at giving directions.  And then Arrush peeled them away from the other vehicles.  Half the armored delver jeeps and cars following them, while the others - and the more well-armed APC - broke off and went with the other group.  

And then Arrush, with Zhu helping him for directions, put the pedal down and started them toward their goal.

They’d hoped to hit whatever cluster of Underburbs delvers they could find with full overwhelming force.  But just in case, they had a plan for splitting up that involved dividing up the strategic assets of authorities as evenly as possible.  Everyone here was a dangerous combatant, but everyone here could also die to the magical version of the bubonic plague, so some kind of anti-infection screening was mandatory.

The biggest thing to take away from this was that they’d gotten very lucky.  Their targets were on this layer.  They’d confirmed that the other layers were, unfortunately, real.  So it was entirely possible this entrance might have gone to a part of the Underburbs that the people they were hunting just weren’t on.  And the repurposed APC was capable of a lot of things but it wasn’t exactly built for freeform flight.

But they didn’t have to worry about that.  They just had to survive to get to their targets, which was complicated by two factors.  And then, hopefully, ambush them with overwhelming force and stop this whole thing early.

”Driving here is easy.”  The factor named Arrush commented after the second wide turn of a street he’d taken them down.

Outside the armored windows, the uniform dead houses of the Underburbs whipped by.  Street lights and mailboxes and abandoned cars blurring as Arrush led their part of the assault convoy at a speed that would be best described as suicidal.  Behind them, Alanna and the other drivers in their half of the force did a frankly astonishing job of keeping pace, not wanting the vehicles to be out of sight of each other in the relatively dense streets of the dungeon.  But it didn’t change the fact that James found himself gripping the handhold on his door with white knuckles.

As they blitzed through an intersection in a way that all of the normal social reflexes James had screamed at him was wrong, they got their first taste of Underburbs hostility.  From a perfectly rectangular hedgerow, one of those bulbous dog things with skin like hard rind and a crust of dirt over itself wobbled out into the road.  Roots like lifelines connected it back to its hedge, but it had enough range of motion to pose like it was preparing to howl or lunge at the cars or something.

Arrush barely twitched.  Just a tiny adjustment of the wheel, and the reinforced corner of the impact bumper clipped the gourd dog’s head at fifty miles an hour.  The sudden lurch of inertia at the swerve was tumultuous for those in the car, but the hit was far worse the dog itself, which just burst open and splattered the wet sludge of its internals all over the bumper’s edge, before it was pulled under the wheel a split second later and had its head flattened against the road.

[Killer : Low : +1 Skill Point]

Arrush didn’t smile, but he did regard the notification with a little grim satisfaction.

”Do all of your kind drive like this?!”  Terror gave a static yowl from the back seat.

”No, just me.” Arrush answered far too calmly as they veered to the side of the street with no streetlights on it so that the hanging snapping plants becoming less and less visible as the gloom closed in couldn’t attach themselves to the jeep’s roof.  “I learned in a different dungeon.”

”We can tell!”  James gasped out as they took a quick left turn so hard it felt like his teeth rattled.  

Anesh gasped out as the inertia faded.  “You know they might be deeper in, you don’t need to drive this way the whole time!”  He offered a lifeline.

Zhu’s cackling response crushed his hopes.  ”Nah, we’re good!  This is slow enough Alanna can keep up!”

”This is slow?!”  Terror demanded.  “Is this a plot to kill me where no one will see?”

”If it is they’re after me too.”  James said in a strained voice, teeth grinding at the violence of the passenger seat experience.

It was almost funny, he thought to himself.  Here they were, in a dungeon that was the worst they’d ever seen, and he felt like it was his boyfriend’s driving that was going to finish him off.  It was so normal, that even as they flew through another intersection of an identical narrow street filled with identical yards and driveways, even as the manhole cover behind them exploded in a cloud of green gas too late to catch any of their four vehicles, even as they passed by an empty lot full of telephone poles that loomed like a dark forest full of moving shadows, even as the darkness closed in and more shapes started mobilizing in the gloom around them…

James was just wondering if Arrush was going to hit a fence or something, and if the jeep could survive that.

It probably could, so that was good news.  The bad news was they had miles and miles and miles to go.

Going forty, fifty, sometimes seventy miles an hour in the narrow and increasingly hostile and trapped fake-residential streets meant that they would get there soon enough.  But every mile they crossed, the car falling into tense silence, their radios equally dead, just built up a fear James had been holding onto since someone had said the word “Underburbs” earlier in the day.

The fear that they were deeper and deeper in not just enemy territory, but a territory that was an enemy.  The fear that the gap between here and reality was getting farther and farther away.  And that no matter how many times James walked out of a delve with his phone shattered but all his telepads intact, he still felt like he was holding the precious vulnerable magical lifelines out over an abyss and feeling the call of the void to drop them.

The fear that this time they weren’t going to leave.

He was really, really glad Zhu was having a great time riding on Arrush’s arms and shoulders, because he would have hated to have his friend subjected to the screaming terror that was building in his gut right now.

”How much farther?”  Terror asked, and got groans from James and Anesh as he did so.

James was happy to have the distraction, at least once they got out of sight of the cluster of hoodie-clad figures standing like fleshy wheat in an empty lot on a corner.  He really wanted to lob a grenade as they passed, but didn’t want to ask Arrush to slow down.  “You can’t ask that.”  He told the umbral.

”Oh, I’m sorry, are there rules to your violence I was unaware of?”

”There are rules to road trips.”  Anesh said.  “And if you break them, Zhu will educate you.”

”Loudly.”  James added.

”Theatrically.”  Anesh confirmed.

It was actually kind of surprising that Zhu hadn’t started already.  But maybe he was just focused on helping Arrush navigate.

Terror shut up for a while, opting to not engage with anyone’s attempt at socialization.  James shut up too, trying to breathe evenly as he went over his list of spells and tried to make sure he wasn’t going to forget any of his magical Solve The Problem buttons mid-fight.

Outside, painted white siding and air conditioning units and screen doors twisted and wound through streets like rivers.  Endlessly parading the exact same scenery, over and over.  James had once thought the Underburbs must have had biomes, and that he’d just been teleported into a deep part of it, but clearly that wasn’t the case.  The dungeon wanted one thing, and it was, to someone who regularly fought the Status Quo, disgusting.

There were more living things as they progressed though.  More twisted and diseased beasts roaming the streets, some of them spotting the cars with enough time to run out at them and usually ending up run over by one of the drivers.  None of them were hefty enough to stop the Order, just enough to give people heart attacks from the suddenness of their appearance.

There were more traps too.  Or things that looked like traps at least.  Clouds of smoke or gas that threatened to envelop their vehicles, slick puddles of brackish liquid that flowed up from storm grates or were sprayed from ‘automated’ sprinkler systems, the kind of things that if someone encountered them in real life it would just be a shrug and a well that’s weird, but here was likely to give you aggressive contagious Parkinson’s.  James had seen too much of what the Underburbs could do to a person with its diseases to trust anything it had to offer.

And there were more deliberate violent traps too.  It was hard to understand what the dungeon thought ‘watcher’ style hazards actually were, or what tied them together in terms of threat, but it was a real problem when their route put them in view of a telephone pole covered in layer after layer of missing person flyers, that slowly lacerated anyone who looked at it.  It was, all things considered, the weakest form of the hazard they’d ever experienced.  A free skill point for everyone who didn’t get the warning to look away fast enough.

But it was still there in the mirrors.  Lurking.  Waiting to be glanced at again.  For some reason the thing seemed to be taller than when they’d passed it, towering up and up and up, thirty, fifty, a hundred feet of an old wooden pole that didn’t actually have the wires it would have been made for in the normal world.  It was like it was stalking them, but without the ability to move.

One more corner later, and it was out of sight.  No sign of it even over the rooftops where it should have been visible, just the memory and James efficiently covering the stinging slice on the back of his forearm down near his elbow in a bandage.

A bandage and a lot of disinfectant.  Because they were in the Underburbs, as the clicking of their dungeon detectors reminded them constantly.

More miles.  More houses.  They didn’t talk in the car, they certainly didn’t use the radio to talk to the other cars, they just let Arrush keep up their high speed charge forward.  His paws on the wheel the steadiest thing in the whole convoy as he led the others through sloped roads and uncannily placed street signs that said nothing and helped no one.

And then, very suddenly, someone said something.

”Shit, we’re close.”  Zhu’s voice rang through the car.

James sat forward, adjusting his gun so that he’d be ready to emerge from the car shooting.  Nate had failed to keep his UMP from him this time, and the compact submachine gun felt like the heaviest thing possible in his hand as it waited by the door.  “How close?”  He asked.

”Two minutes.”

Terror made a buzzing sound from his cramped position in the back seat.  ”Do we have a plan for this venture, or did you expect to just cause enough chaos to get away with it?”

”Yes.”  James said curtly.  “Terror, how many buildings can you burn down, and how fast does it go?”

”I have six placed on my… that doesn’t matter.  Six.  And within ten minutes.” The umbral answered, caught up in the flow of information.

”Pass one off to the other squad, we’ll rig the buildings around their place to burn behind us.  Leave them no escape route or extra cover.  Don’t just torch theirs though, until we confirm it’s empty.  Keep one ready though..”

”…you are worried about captives.”  Terror surmised.

Arrush nodded once sharply.  “They’re a familiar monster.”  He said in his vibrant voice.  “Someone will always try to eat someone else.”

”Wow that’s cynical!”  Zhu exclaimed.  “Let’s shoot them!  Park here.”

The ratroach stopped them in the middle of a street, and the group piled out, weapons out except for Terror who stood over them all like he wasn’t quite sure what the big deal was, despite having a shimmering slice along one of his thighs from the watcher threat.  The other cars behind them slowed and stopped too, the rest of James’ coterie emerging from one, while the other two cars disgorged Ishah, leading a group of other knights James recognized but wasn’t as close with.

The street was empty.  Though they didn’t look too closely at the buildings around them, because there was no time to be sucked in by one of the static ghost things.  That was the weirdest part of all this; not that the Underburbs was mostly empty, James and Zhu both understood that.  But that this place was preparing to bite down on miles and miles of neighborhoods and commercial centers and strip malls and fire stations and schools and a dozen other things, and it wasn’t prepared.  The last time it had done this, it had disgorged a small army into Earth to cover and convert the territory it seized.  But this time, there was nothing.

The groups formed up on either side of the street, with the exception of three people in the last truck, who would be serving as a mobile weapons platform with the heavy machine gun turret that had been modified into it, both with human engineering and Route Horizon parts for some kind of nonsense James was aware existed but didn’t need the details of.  They didn’t shut the doors of their cars; the Underburbs sometimes faked engine noises just to fuck with people, so their approach to this point could be covered.  But every loud sound was detection waiting to happen.

Which was why when a small pack of the dogs that looked liked they were covered in rotting upholstery raced at them, ‘mouths’ full of rusty nails opened from a half dozen of their bulging pustules, no one shot them.  Instead the combined force, unsurprised by the attack out of the darkness, dealt with it the old fashioned way.

Camracondas froze half the scattered monsters, their nails no longer scraping on the pavement but the texture of the fight’s sound otherwise not changing.  The more heavily armored figures intercepted the others; Alanna and Arrush handing it on their side, while on the other, Ann and Matt took theirs.  Ann looked like she had a riot shield of some kind, which she used to just nullify any attempt to get past her or bite her ankles.  And while that distraction happened, everyone else started cutting through the dogs.

Some spells were off limits, but the fireball Visiting Tongue made was silent and didn’t leave much trace, and the combined group had a lot of them ready.  Winter Wroth was most effective when someone wasn’t paying attention to you, but the five or six dogs that weren’t frozen weren’t paying attention to them.  Not really.  They were focused on the people they’d been trying to rip at the limbs of, and so it was easy enough to open long cuts along their bodies.  And of course, the original silent method of handling something; stabbing them with spears.  The Order still used boar spears for dungeon delves fairly often, and now that they had a magical option that hadn’t really changed.  And once the ones that were allowed to move were dealt with, Ann and Anesh steadily moved between the camraconda stopped enemies, clean thrusts cutting their strings one by one.

[Killer : Shallow : +3 Skill Points]

“No time for a break, everyone good?”  James asked in a quiet voice pitched to carry exactly as far as the other people around him and no further.

The Anesh holding a familiar old spear flipped it back into a resting position and breathed out.  “Fine, fine.  Oh, don’t step on that.”  He said, pointing toward the lawn he’d gotten close to as he’d executed the last bulbous dog.

”Why?”  Ishah asked as the groups fell back into formation and started moving at a quick pace again.

”It’s not real grass.”  Anesh said.  “Good news, you can’t be poisoned through your domain.  Bad news, I think maybe one in three lawns here are beasties, traps, or both.”

Terror scuttled after them, positioned out of any kind of position somewhere between the two groups that had actually trained for this.  ”You are too casual for this.”  He waved one of his hands at the carnage behind them and the dungeon ahead as they skirted the center of an intersection, Zhu and another navigator hanging out in the vehicle behind them making sure they knew what way to go.  “What is happening here?”

”Oh.  I understand.”  Ishah said calmly from where he was covering their left flank, sighting down one of the pair of shotguns he was carrying with the sealed custom goggles over his eyes.  “You aren’t used to combat.”  He nodded.

”How dare-“

Anesh made a hissing sound all his own.  ”Terror shut up.”  He said.  “He means you’re not used to fighting a battle.  And if you keep yammering you won’t be familiar with it, because you’ll get us killed.” One of him glared at the umbral.  “Shut up.  And stay closer.”

For once in his relatively short life, Terror didn’t argue.  Just edged closer to Watcher-Under-Stone while twentyish people prowled down the dead false suburban street under an empty black sky and the light of thin mist and overgrown streetlights.

And a mile later, they saw the house.

”That’s it.”  Zhu said.  “Obviously, I guess.”

”Well fuck me when I said there were no biomes.”  James said, not really remembering if he’d actually said the first part of the thought out loud at any point.

The streets of the Underbrubs weren’t flat, not by a long shot.  They wound up and down in little bits of elevation, and the walking paths in the scars of dead grass behind them tended to be a lot more hilly.  At least as far as James had seen.  But this?

He was looking at a real hill.  A steep incline with a road that cut up it, going back and forth at sharp angles.  Lined with houses of course, but none of those houses were their goal.  That was, as Zhu had said, obviously the mansion at the top.

Just like the houses of the Underburbs were the twisted platonic ideal of the suburban family home, with their identical patterns of windows and porches and attached garages, this was the platonic ideal of a cheap mansion built to dominate whatever neighborhood was unlucky enough to host it.  Three, maybe four floors, perched on the edge of the hill overhead such that its multiple back decks stuck out over open air, geometry that obfuscated itself by how big it was, and, of course, it was the only thing at the end of a cul de sac that sat atop the hill like the final boss of a neighborhood environment.

”Defensible.”  Watcher-Under-Stone commented, the camraconda craning her armored form upward.  “One ‘easy’ route, several chokepoints, dominating view of the approach.  This would be difficult to assault, even if they did not intentionally plan for it.”

”Would be.”  James nodded in agreement.  “Joke’s on them, I’m a delver.”  He said defiantly, pulling out a Winter’s Climb wand in the form of a single double-purpose piton from the webbing on the back of his armor.  “Here’s the plan.  Terror, Anesh, Ann, and… Air?”  He pointed to one of the other camracondas.  “Signal our heavy weapon to move up.  When you’re ready, block the base of the hill, and start lighting up buildings.  The rest of us will hit them from behind while they’re distracted.  If anyone tries to rush you, you have a chokepoint.  And we’ll be behind them.  Got it?  Good.  Ear protection for everyone with ears, now.”

A simple plan.  Most likely to be adaptable when it went wrong, which James expected it to.

The back of the Underburbs hill wasn’t a sheer cliff, which was good.  But it was steep, and it was the Underburbs, which meant it could have any number of problems with it.  They discovered at least one thing, which was that some of the ‘dirt’ was actually swarms of insects so tiny they almost flowed like liquid.  The authorities of the knights who had them kept the things from crawling onto or into people, but Alanna described the feedback from her authority as unpleasant.  Well, she had also given James a look that promised a lot of profanity in the future, when she could yell more openly.

As for how they got up, it was actually really easy.  A few Climb wands, loaded with Updraft Gradient, the minor hover spell.  A spell that, when faced with a steep hillside and a proper amount of momentum, allowed just enough upward force to let a trained delver catapult themself upward instead of slapping their face into the mud.

It wasn’t quite flying.  But James sure fucking felt like it wasn’t not flying as he accelerated upward at the front of the group, the ground whipping by his face, his expanded accleration meaning he didn’t have to keep pushing himself forward like the others behind him.  It took twenty seconds before he was nearing the top, and he cut the spell just after clearing the edge, landing in a slide at the base of the oversized house.  Dry dirt crunched under his boots, and James made a point of kicking aside a stick that was down here underneath the shadow of the decks.

The Underburbs had no trees.  Any fallen branches were bear traps.

Alanna landed heavily next to him, one hand grabbing one of the splintery wooden support beams for the looming deck overhead.  Then Arrush, then Watcher-Under-Stone who landed with a slide of her armored underplate against the dirt and a steadying bob of the rifle mount she was wearing.  By the time the whole group was finished mostly-silently ascending, and Alanna and Ishah had stripped away the last of the tiny swarm of bugs they’d gotten coated in, James had rushed the sliding glass basement door and was standing to the side of it, gun gripped comfortably in his hands.

He tried really hard to not worry about the air conditioning unit growing out of the building five feet up the slope behind him like a fleshy metal tumor.  They hadn’t tried to kill him last time, and were actually one of the few things that hadn’t.  But he didn’t have to like it.

Ishah took the position opposite from him, more knights stacking up behind each of them as the human and ratroach silently met each other’s eyes, and gave a hand signal.  Below them, the orange light of flame was starting, the smell of burning structures overwhelming the sickly cleanliness of the Underburb’s for a moment as the distraction took hold.

The glass panel door slid open far too easily, making only a small rasp in its frame as James pushed at it, and then entered with his SMG raised into the dark room.  Flashlights from the others moving in a fan behind him played over what looked like… a normal basement.  It actually looked a lot like the vestigial basement in the Lair that he’d once found a purple totem being ‘tested’ in.  Like it came out of a normal, if upper-middle class, home.  Furniture, fireplace, a minibar with a worn cardboard Monopoly box sitting on it so you were reminded you were actually in hell, that kind of thing.

Empty of people though.

James moved to the foot of the stairs up, and froze as he heard voices, one hand signaling any of the others who didn’t have his level of hearing.

Someone, a woman, said something in what James was pretty sure was Russian.  But his Russian knowledge came from a few lessons off an incredibly hostile app, not literal magic, so he didn’t know what was being said.  Only that the tone sounded confused.

The reply that came back was in English though.  “I do.”  A man’s voice that sounded like the sort of person who was smug as a matter of daily life replied.  “Leon fucking around, you think?”

The woman snapped back at him, voice spiking angrily, and also moving.  Heading vaguely in their direction through the hallway at the top of the stairs, but she wasn’t coming down into the basement.  Just passing by.

”Well yeah, he’s supposed to be.”  The man shot back.  “But you know Leon.  Especially if he found a new plaything.”  The woman started spitting something back and the man cut her off.  “You know I don’t speak Russian, you worthless bitch.  Just use a real language.”

There was a moment of cold silence, and then the woman replied in exactly the same tone and cadence, but in French.  “I am going to kill you after tonight is over.”

”I don’t speak French either.”

”You won’t speak French.  Now go get our replacement Gregor and find what’s on fire, or I won’t wait until after the feast to gut you.”  The woman shot back, stomping away.  “Waste of my fucking free time!”  She shouted as she went.

“Wonder why she thinks she’s in charge.”  The man mused from near the top of the stairs.  James, peeking over the safety wall at the base of the stairs, saw him highlighted by an overhead light in the hallway, reach a hand up to stroke his chin.  “Now where the hell would Leon…”

In a moment of quick thinking, James reached out and rapped his knuckles on the wall he was standing next to.  The others looked his direction in the darkness for a moment, dungeontech glasses and navigator help giving the group an idea of what James was doing, before they all started creeping as silently as possible to stand in an arc around the room, using the minibar and one of the tables as quick cover.

”Leon?”  The voice came along with a sigh as footsteps started sounding down the staircase, a presence getting closer and closer.  “If you get some fodder’s blood on the carpet down here, Reya’s going to kill-“

The man’s hand hit the light switch, and he froze as he saw James standing directly in front of him.  Just for a moment.

”Hi.”  James said.

Then Ishah’s shotgun went off from a few feet to the left like a thunderclap, and half the smug monster’s head vanished in a spray of gore and bone shrapnel.

”One down.”  The ratroach spoke calmly, his armored chitinous form bracing the gun in his double right arms, racking another shell in while the other shotgun he had on the other side stayed steady and aimed up the stairs.  “Did they… notice?”

James stepped over the corpse, snagging the shining yellow crystal that hovered slightly over it, and flicked the light off.  “No time to find out.”  He said.  “Three others in here at least.  Let’s go.”  He started up the narrow steps, the worn old carpet feeling almost sticky under his boots and not just from the blood.

He cleared the top with Arrush behind him, twisting around the pitted and cracked drywall of a strange middle-floor hallway and into the flickering light that was left on here, just a split second before a woman James recognized dropped down a short flight of stairs to their right.  Thirty feet away and past multiple closed doors and faded and ripped wall hangings, the woman James had once gotten in a firefight with stomped forward, yelling in French.  “Reya, did you fucking kill another-“ she got out, before she froze.

Her eyes locked onto James, recognition sparking even through the layers of armor, and fear narrowing her pupils to dots.

James didn’t hesitate.  Or make a quip this time.  He just lunged forward, shoulder slamming into an open doorframe on the side of the hall as he took cover and started shooting.  He knew that at least her hands were bulletproof, so he went for his old strategy and aimed for her knees.

The woman let one good scream out as a bullet punched through her calf, before she toppled forward and punched the floor of the house with an open palm.  Her own blood that had painted it suddenly sucked away like it was draining into the old carpet, before that carpet bulged and swelled like an insectile egg sac in front of her.

James kept shooting, bullets punching wetly through the cover while Arrush pressed in behind him, and the others raced up the stairs.  Two iterations of Anesh leaned over the stairwell’s bannister to aim in unison at a higher angle, their heavier rifles cracking loudly in the confined hall as he further complicated their target’s life.  He got about ten shots in each before the oozing carpet split open, a trio of those upholstered dogs emerging from it covered in wet slime and already tearing down toward James.

He added ‘summoner’ to the list of problems, and shot all of them.  Well, two of them.  Ishah got one with a shotgun slug that went through its front bulbous face and splattered out the side in a spray of fluid that would have been so infectious to anyone not coated in an authority.

”Reya!”  The woman screamed in terror, scrambling back toward the steps and trying to kick herself upward with one wounded leg while she kept herself in a low enough profile to block any shots with her bulletproof hands.  “Reya fucking help me!”  She shouted as she missed a bullet and the fabric of the camo-pattern jacket she was wearing got a new hole on her upper arm.  Almost instantly, she threw herself to the side, slamming the wound against the wall and leaving a blood splatter that began to sink into the drywall.

A door slammed from the other side of the hall, but was answered by the double whump of the grenade launcher Alanna was carrying going off.  The biting pressure and noise from the flashbangs she fired stinging everyone who was filling out the hallway and taking up firing positions in the small rooms that lined it, but really fucking up the woman that they’d tracked here who stumbled blind and shouting out from around a corner.  She looked like she was born to play a character in a Conan the Barbarian film; perfect sculpted muscle and flawless dark skin, though the elegance of her body was broken up a little by the bloodstained white tank top she had on.

Her arrival wasn’t much of an ambush, even though the Order team was technically flanked now.  But the crack of her handgun, even firing wildly and blind, did keep them on their toes.

A shield bracer flared.  Bullets started getting exchanged both ways, though Reya seemed a lot more durable against them than her ally did.  James trusted the others to cover his back, while he kept up the pressure on the first target, not wanting to let that monster escape again.

Then suddenly the fire from behind stopped, as Watcher-Under-Stone dared to roll herself out into the hallway and simply freeze that particular attacker.  It wasn’t perfect; Reya kept actually repositioning herself, even if she wasn’t moving.  Every half second, the woman would flicker like a TV failing to get a signal, and then be just a little bit somewhere else.  Her gun laboriously coming around to bear on the camraconda on the floor, whose own rifle wasn’t doing any damage to anything except the target’s clothing and maybe hair.  Repeated fireballs or Pave casts didn’t seem to faze her either.

When the temperature of the battlefield spiked suddenly, the Order team stopped shooting in that direction, though.  And before Reya could shoot Watcher-Under-Stone in the eye, she flickered into an expression of screaming pain.  And then was slammed sideways into the wall, her head grabbed and impacted repeatedly on the corner as the camraconda ‘let’ her move again.

Ishah and Matt themselves popped back into visibility, one of them having slammed a sharpened lance of lit thermite through the woman’s heart, the other having finished the job.  Ishah, not convinced that their foe wouldn’t get back up, shot the woman point blank with one of his shotguns, the lack of a bullet resistance power and the scattering of both blood and skill crystal indicating her demise.

James saw almost none of that.  Instead he just heard the yelled “Target down!” From behind him, while he swapped mags with shaking fingers, and started spraying another fifty nine millimeter bullets into the feet of the woman who had now turned and flung herself up to the hardwood floor of the next story of the building.

He also only barely saw Arrush grab something that emerged out of the dirty white wall of the little laundry room they were in.  It grew like the same thing that their enemy had done to summon the dogs; like a humanoid figure pressing its way out of drywall that slid like a gelatinous surface and not a construction material.  His boyfriend knifed the grey skinned childlike humanoid in the throat, the thing’s wiggling long fingers scraping on armor but failing to find purchase.

”Anesh, Arrush, with me!”  James called.  “Matt, Ishah, sweep this hall, see if it loops!  Everyone else, secure this level!”

Matt’s voice replied before James could move, shaking with something worse than adrenaline.  “I think I need to leave.”  He said, tugging on his armor.

”He’s hit.”  Ishah said, sniffing through his filter mask.  “Rotting.  He is rotting.”

”Shit.”  Alanna ran over, the green flare of her authority coming to her call.  “It went right through!  Hold out your arm!”

”No.” Matt jerked back and shook his head, one hand fumbling an emergency telepad out.  “Deb can… Deb can fix this.  Oh shit I can feel that spreading.  I gotta go.”  He looked up and met James’ eyes.  “Get ‘em.”  He told the paladin, before vanishing with an uncharacteristic crack of air.

James swallowed hard.  He knew how bad the disease bullets from this place could be.  Research hadn’t even hesitated to pitch the ones they’d ‘liberated’ into an incinerator last time, once it became clear what a bioweapon they were.  ”Same roles.”  He said.  “Go.”  He pointed at the stairs, Anesh moving past in silent and speedy crouched walks as he covered himself running up the short steps.  James followed sweeping around a massive open floor room as he emerged from the dingy hall.

It even had a fucking chandelier.  Layers of glittering glass and dim bulbs making the interior feel almost cozy against the creeping glowing mist pressed outside the windows like it was trying to crawl in.  It fit perfectly into the dark wood furniture with burn carvings of horses, the couches and armchairs that looked like they’d offended the fifties and been summarily exiled from the era, and the big circular glass table just around the edge of one of the central walls that sort of divided the room up.

That table was where their target had gone.  The scattered pile of paper, laptops, and a few other odds and ends on the floor made it seem like she’d swept the table clean to draw on it, apparently in her own blood.  James couldn’t see what she’d drawn, but he could hear her before even getting into sight, and so he’d caught the start of her ‘conversation’.

”-in your domain!  Your enemies are here!  They are killing your tools!  Stop them or your feast won’t be- oh fuck!”  She broke off as she caught sight of Anesh’s gun barrel, and only barely got a hand up to deflect the shots he put toward her head without hesitation.  “You’re too late!”  She yelled, rolling to the side behind a marble kitchen counter for cover, the gunfire taking chips out of the stone in puffs of dust and shrapnel as James tapped his boyfriend on the shoulder and bolted in the other direction to get to the other side of the kitchen and flank.  “It knows now!  If you think you can kill me, do it fast, because your time is up!”  She punctuated the words by shooting back.  Some kind of submachine gun she must have had stashed here rattling like a badly maintained engine as she sprayed down the corner wall that one Anesh was in cover behind.

Enough of her bullets ripped through one of the couches with stray fire that the whole thing even just gave up; upholstery and cushioning melting away before the frame splintered too, all of it collapsing into a pile of debris with a glowing yellow crystal over it.  It didn’t change the battlefield much, but it was one less piece of potential cover.

“Terrible idea time!  This way!”  Zhu’s light flicked in Arrush’s vision, and Arrush, shoulders against the wall right behind Anesh, got the human’s attention and made a quick jerk of his head, while at the same time tapping the button on the potion mask he was wearing.  Breathing deeply, he felt for the moment the ghost potion took hold and his body was no longer required to obey physical objects.  Anesh waited until Arrush was ready to move, then blindly popped off a few shots, the rifle bucking in his hands as he used it around the corner without properly bracing the thing.  The point wasn’t to hit anyone though.

Just to keep her distracted from the ratroach coming through the wall.  Or James coming up behind.

Both of them burst through their points of entry at the same time.  The woman had been waiting for James, and her gun sprayed over the metal basin of a sink on the central island of the spacious kitchen, bullets splashing against the golden glowing dome of a shield bracer and forcing James to either stop or take cover.  But what she had no way to prepare for was Arrush silently coming through a solid wall and set of cabinets, and then becoming solid himself just in time for an armored knee to connect with her jaw with a crunch.

The ratroach didn’t even flinch when she wrenched the sword out of his paws and flung it backward so hard it pierced through a big bay window and hung there like it was stuck in jelly.  He was never really disarmed, and while the mask meant he couldn’t bite her throat out, his gloves were fingerless specifically so he could sink multiple sets of claws into his enemy as he let momentum roll him over her, slamming her head into a kitchen counter as he ripped at her flesh.

She was too durable though.  Arrush was drawing blood, but not as much as he should have been.  Though she did scream in rage and pain when he got one of her eyes, she followed it up by grabbing him by the back of his helmet and jerking to punch his head through the low cabinet they were fighting against.  Arrush missed ghosting through her grip, but got it in time to not impact the hard wood, fluidly pulling back and punching through the block she tried to make with her forearm.  Organic matter slowed him down,  but his claws extending to gouge out more of her face was the real goal anyway, and he did that just fine.

Then, abruptly, he was snared.  He didn’t understand how exactly, but she grabbed him through the incorporeal buff of the potion, stood up, and slammed him into the bullet-scarred marble countertop so hard he was pretty sure he felt one of his tails snap off from the impact.

”Arrogant little beast!”  She screamed in a language that Arrush pretended to not understand.  “You-!”

He wasn’t wearing goggles, so he closed his eyes as James, positioned directly behind the distracted enemy delver, shot the woman in the back of the head.

”You okay?”  James asked Arrush with adrenaline-fueled fear as he landed an overly powerful kick on the corpse that dropped to the ground, the thing that had once been a human being clattering against the loose doors of the cabinets.

”I need a towel.”  Arrush said, rolling sideways and toward where the woman had been doing her ritual.  The Garden spell he had prepared calling into his hand a towel calibrated to exactly the rough texture he liked, using it to wipe the blood off his face and mask before he discarded it.

Anesh stepped up with all three of his rifles fanning out around the room.  “Isn’t there one more?”  He asked.

”I think so.”  James said, looking down at the glass disc of a table.  “I know this isn’t the time but I’m really, really fascinated by the fact that the Underburbs… sigil?… is the neighborhood watch silhouette.  That’s almost clever.  If this were anywhere else, I’d respect it.”  He shot the tabletop, shattering the whole piece of furniture and sending a cascade of glass shards down into the pooling blood.   “One more.  Let’s go-“

He stopped as the unique sound of someone being repeatedly hit by fireballs sounded, along with gunfire and a small explosion.  Then, quiet.  “Got him!”  Alanna’s voice shouted from deeper below in the house.

”Okay.  Let’s check this place over, then get the fuck out of here.”  James said, exhaling until his lungs caught.

Upstairs was a circular hall with three palatial bedrooms, all of them a weird mix of personal and dungeon-y in a way that made it clear this was a place that these people were camping and not living.  Still, anything that looked even remotely like it had been set aside because it was useful got shoved into a duffle bag to be examined later for potential magic.  James wasn’t above looting the bodies just because the bodies were human this time.

There was another floor above that, too, but it was almost like a little tower.  A single room attic thing that mirrored the fancy bedrooms, so that got scoured too.  From the vantage point and the windows, James could also see the growing blaze at the bottom of the hill and the position where the other delvers were still in formation and doing fine, though the armored vehicle’s heavy machine gun looked like it had been put to use if the ring of monster corpses was any indication.

Maybe the Underburbs actually had tried to send backup to its delvers.  Too bad for it, James thought with a bitter snort.

When he headed back downstairs, still alert for anything jumping out at him from the house that was after all one of the dungeon’s bits of architecture, he ran into Alanna at the front of the hallway.  Alanna, who handed him a piece of paper she’d rapidly written something on, and met his eyes with a silent shake of her head.

”What…” James started to say, too focused on the fact that Alanna’s armor was just gone to read what she’d handed him.  Her chestplate, shell and kevlar alike, had been discarded, and he could see what looked like corrosion on the edges of some of her straps and buckles.

”We found prisoners.”  Watcher-Under-Stone told him, her own armor intact, though her mechanical arms were making precise movements to reload and check her weapon.  “We will need to evacuate them manually, teleporting may be… too much, for some of them.”

”And th-“ he started to say as he walked, but Alanna shook her head and tapped the paper.  James looked down at it, and actually read it, eyebrows going up.  He doesn’t recognize us.  It said simply.  He almost wished Zhu was here and not helping Arrush sweep the ground floor, just so he could get confirmation on how ominous that sounded.  “Okay, let’s go make sure everyone we can get out of here is good, yeah?”  James said with a forcibly steadied voice.

”This way.”  Alanna said, leading him down the hall, around two corners, and across enough scuffed carpet that James became certain this house was bigger on the inside.  Not by enough to feel like a dungeon, but just enough to feel wrong.  He gave it an A for mood, and then deducted several letter grades for it being the Underburbs.  When Alanna knocked on one of the doors to what looked like a small bedroom, though, he suddenly felt a weird sense of deja vu.  “Yo, Ish, how are they?”

They, in this case, were humans.  People of a variety of ages, though the youngest looked like he was maybe thirteen or so.  All of them a little too skinny for it to be coincidence, all but one of them staring at him with eyes that were still clouded with confusion and terror.

That last one, though, was going to be a problem.

”Bad.”  The ratroach said as Alanna and James entered.  “Malnourished, infected, injured.”  He glanced toward the door to the room’s adjoining bathroom, and several of the survivors flinched.  “They have been used as sacrifices.  They need help, quickly.”

None of the survivors spoke, though the way they were looking at the ratroach without any fear despite where they were was kind of weird.  Though James figured that question was answered as he stepped farther into the room and saw the blood splatters that looked suspiciously shotgun-esque.  He could understand people being a little less uncomfortable with someone who looked like Ishah when that person kicked in the door and executed the guy that had been torturing them for who-knew how long.

”You look like you’re doing a little better.”  James said to the far too familiar man sitting on the edge of one of the beds, sipping from a water bottle.

”Yes, well, I was only captured recently.  I haven’t had nearly the ordeal these poor folks have.”  Watcher said to him.  The man who was supposed to be dead, the man James had killed, sitting there like his biggest inconvenience was the rope burns on his wrists.

”Right.”  James nodded slowly, looking back at Alanna, who shrugged.  “Well, we’re here to get you all out now.  Is anyone going to need help walking?  Also Anesh!  Fire a flare, get the others up here so we have a car!”  His boyfriend called back an affirmative while James tried to act as normal as possible.  He looked over at the prisoners, people who had been kept here in the Underburbs, some of them with black lines creeping around their eyes under their skin, some with blood dripping from their fingernails and ears, none of them looking like they were ready to survive a trip down the stairs, much less Arrush’s driving.  “I know you don’t have any reason to believe me right now,” James said in the calmest voice he could, “but you’re going to be okay.  We’re going to get you out of here.”

”And I for one appreciate it.”  Watcher said, standing up and stretching.  “I don’t suppose you’ve found a firearm around here?  One of them took mine.  Handgun, etched with a little bit of a diagram?”

”Haven’t seen it here.”  James said honestly.  “You’re taking this well.”

”Yes, well, it may surprise you to learn that you aren’t the only organization that’s operating behind the veil.”  He extended a hand to shake, then paused.  “No, your friend already told me not to risk infection, apologies.”  Watcher gave a sad nod toward Ishah, who was distributing small water bottles.  Small, because you had an estimated two minutes in the Underburbs before unsealed food wasn’t safe anymore.  “You can call me Watcher.  I don’t suppose you have room in your car for all of us?”

It was a surreal experience.  James could, with only the tiniest bit of experience, tell that this man was rattled.  His humor was muted, his speech too fast.  Someone who had been almost sarcastically at home in a battle royale dome situation was, here, shaken up and trying to hide it.

”We’ve got a few.”  James answered.  “I’m James, I’m with the Order of Endless Rooms.  Have we met before?  You seem familiar.”  He asked, and could practically feel Alanna choke off a laugh from where she was standing guard in the hall.

Watcher shook his head.  “Not to my knowledge, though it’s possible.  The world is strange sometimes, and I have some extenuating circumstances I won’t bore you with.  For now… can you be trusted?”

”You can trust me to hate this dungeon.”  James said honestly.

”Good.  These people… well, myself, too… the ones working for this place have been infecting and exposing us to things, before killing us off.  They’re farming, you see.  Harvesting the specific boons they get when one of them kills someone who has this place’s skill points.  Do you understand?”

”Yes.”  James snarled.  “That checks out.  Good news, they’re all dead.”

”Mixed news,” Watcher said, “they have all their stored little crystals in the closet two doors down.  I was planning a mild heist during my escape.”  He admitted with a delicate smile.  “Assuming the Coalition didn’t come to get me first.  Oh.  That’s my side.  The Coalition, no fancy title.”

Ishah looked up, chitinous head focusing on the human.  “You s-shouldn’t mock our name.”  He said coyly, the ratroach sounding so offended that he even got a little giggle from the elderly woman he was helping to bandage the arms of.  That giggle turned into sobbing really quickly, and Ishah and Watcher-Under-Stone found themselves busy trying to check and console people at the same time.

”Fair enough.”  Watcher said, trying to stand and then sitting heavily, hand on his chest.  “Ah.  Ow.”

”Yeah, wait here.”  James said with a wince.  “You say your people are coming.  What kind of force are we looking at for backup here?”

”Well.”  Watcher said.  “If they can find me, quite a lot.  Though if you can get me out I can call  them more clearly, of course.  They were talking about a feast, tonight, I assume you’re here to stop that?” James nodded in reply, and Watcher shook his head before clutching his forehead with a clammy hand.  “Ah…” he hissed in pain, “I’m afraid you’re too late.  Or will be too late.  But don’t worry.  We have six thousand troops landing, as our forward force, we just need to… just need to get them into the proper position to fight.”  He said.

Six thousand wasn’t the number James wanted to hear.  That was insane, that outnumbered the whole Order at least ten times over and it was their vanguard.  And every single fucking one of those people was a prisoner in their own body that the Coalition had somehow taken control of; a monstrous act that apparently they were too lazy to do by just recruiting normally.  But also… it was.  It was what he wanted to hear, because it was what would be needed to hold ground against the Underburbs, if the Order’s teams didn’t find and break the dungeon’s claims.  And even if it wasn’t enough on its own, it would be way more than the Order could bring to the party.  And James was just getting fucking sick of compromising with people who thought nonconsensual mind control was the solution to their problems.

Maybe he should shoot Watcher again.  Maybe that would make him feel better.  After they got some answers though, hopefully.

But it also raised a new question.  How fucking big was the Coalition?  Actually Watcher being here raised a million other questions, but he just didn’t fucking have time for it.  He thought about Alanna’s little note.  This man, whoever he really was, whatever he was, had no idea who James was, or what had happened.  He had no grudge, no animosity, no guilt.  All he had was the thing James had seen in him initially.

A willingness to do what was right.  Oh, and a fucking army at his back, apparently.

”Ride’s coming up.”  Anesh said from the hall.  “And I’ve got their whole… collection… packed.”

”Good.”  James said with a sigh through his mask.  “Okay.  Alanna, help me start moving people.  Everyone!  We’re getting the fuck out of here!”  He paused, and then met the eyes of the few of the survivors who had the strength to look up at him.  “So hey, as a treat… who wants to be the one to kick over the magical fire that’ll turn this fucking place into rubble?”

It wasn’t a health potion, not by a long shot.  But there was a magical power all its own to the strength of a good burst of spite.  And before they left, James convinced Terror to let one of the humans be the one to set their prison ablaze, the mansion on the hill going up like a fucking flaming beacon in the dark gloom of the Underburbs.  Taking with it whatever the Order had missed, along with the corpses and plans of the half dozen monsters that weren’t native to the Underburbs.

As he stood in the doorway with the kid who everyone had agreed should get to be the one to light this place up, James said one last thing to the house that was now empty of anything but the strange stuff in the walls.  “This is not yours anymore.”  He announced to the dungeon.  “If you want this place, come and try to take it back, if you think you can get here quick enough.”

Hurt, sick, starving, and terrified, the kid next to him still had a fucking great sense of dramatic timing.  And the little terrarium that Terror had passed off with an almost respectful attitude was thrown overhand into the foyer of the twisted prison of a hilltop mansion, glass shattering like it was made of barely solid air as soon as it landed.

The fire inside seemed to hesitate.  A palm sized flickering flame that landed amid the broken container, and almost felt like it was looking around.  Maybe it was waiting for permission, or verifying that it was free.  Either way, it took a few seconds for it to start to burn.

But then it did.  Orange light licking out from the impact point in spiraling lines along the floor, crawling up the walls and over what furniture they hadn’t destroyed in the fighting.  Heat building, almost pleasantly against the chill of the lightmist they were standing in that was leaking through the door and shattered windows.  And then, it wasn’t building anymore, it was there.  The fire going from trailing lines like traced oil to a flare of light and heat as it transitioned into an inferno.  Ropes of thick flame that disobeyed physics wrapping around support beams in burning hugs, puddles of liquid fire undermining staircases and corners, and a blast of heat that felt like falling into an oven as the flame reached out and grabbed the house.

The fire roared.  Not just as a flame, but as a great beast, a thing that was hungry and vicious and was sinking long teeth into its prey.

Down the hill behind them, other ‘houses’ died in similar infernos, the whole street lit up with pyres from where the other half of their squad had formed a choke point at the bottom of the street with fire and machine guns.  Ash and smoke was already starting to choke the air, and that meant it was time to go.

”Woah…” James heard the kid who’d thrown the fire murmur over the blaze.

”Yeah that’s fucking awesome.  Now we need to get out of here before it falls on us.”  James said, gently placing a gloved hand on the kid’s shoulder and steering him away.  Back to the cars they’d brought up, back to the escape route.  Hopefully, back to an Earth that the Order had made safer already while he’d been in here dealing with a deeper root of the problem.

Now, he thought as he rode shotgun, much more willing this time to gun down anything that tried to ambush their vehicles, now came the hard part.

Getting out of here without getting his hopes up too much.