The Daily Grind - Chapter 398 (Patreon)

“The way I keep steering and pushing and pulling at things, someday, the whole sky is gonna light up and it’s gonna say TILT.  And that’s gonna be the end of the world.”  -Columbo, Columbo-

_____

It was funny how much everything could change.

Jory had never really figured his life would get that exciting.  He’d probably get some dumpster fire of a job, never see anything close to a scholarship that would let him go to a real college, and just kind of grow old while being poor the whole time.  Maybe get married, but probably just fumble it and end up paying child support or something.  Eventually he might have gotten enough saved up to help his mom move somewhere a little nicer, but… yeah right.

Then an angry living suburb full of diseased monsters had fallen on his fucking house, and he’d nearly died of what was generously referred to as exploding teeth disease.

And, now that it had been a little while and he was still alive, Jory could confidently say it was the funniest fucking way to seize his fortune in life.  Maybe a lot of people would disagree or find it weird, but to him and his mom?  A one way ticket to Townton and a place to live there was like winning the lottery, and all he’d had to do was make it through the apocalypse alive.  A small apocalypse, but come on, who was gonna argue with him on semantics?  It was a really shitty house anyway.

The whole place felt softer than the world he’d come from.  Like it wasn’t quite real.  He’d still gotten a job here though.  And maybe it would have been the same job he would have done anyway.  But somehow, it felt better.  All he did was drive a truck, but people treated him like he mattered, and god damn if that didn’t make all the difference.  And that casual respect and attention meant that, when the Underburbs came back, someone thought to ask Jory if he wanted to give them a hand with something that would piss the dungeon off.

It wasn’t a big deal.  He wasn’t a knight, and he never would be.  Didn’t want to be, unlike some of the thrill seekers here.  But the flatbed truck he maneuvered around the dead city currently had the largest and heaviest armed dragon in the Order sitting on it, and he knew how to floor it and drive in a straight line so that she and her knight could take off.  And when the call came across the radio, and the series of red flares cut a stairway through the sky ahead of them, that was exactly what Jory did.

He watched with a triumphant fascination through his mirrors as the dragon that someone told him was once the size of his hand and made of random office supplies flicked her wings outward.  Aluminum scales and paper pinions catching the air as he kept them at a steady fifty miles an hour racing down the longest road through their city.  The magical beast troop transport bucking up to her full height as she caught the air just right, and the setting sun behind his truck framed her like a living mural.

Then Pendragon was airborne, and Jory, the last one still driving, had to brake a little hard before he shot through the outer gate and ruined someone’s day.

He ended up turned slightly as he came to a stop, with his driver’s side window facing after the five winged creatures that represented the sum total of the Order’s air combatants, until someone figured out how to steal a fighter jet or something.  A feeling he’d never really known before hammering along with his heartbeat as he watched them climb; gaining altitude as they followed the line of guidance flares hanging momentarily in the air, wings and dungeontech bullshit beating in tune to push them higher and higher.

Some of them probably didn’t need the help launching, he figured.  Maybe none of them actually needed it.  But if it meant they’d be a little less tired when they got to their target, well, fuck.  Jory could drive a truck all day for that.  And it felt good to think that he wasn’t the only one.

Overhead, five dragons vanished from Townton’s airspace.  And a hundred people below who had watched them fly cheered after them.

_____

“Wing check.”  Dave/Pendragon spoke over a radio that was not a part of them, which meant it was a tool for the human side to make use of.  The training and cohesion was also the human side’s domain, but the drake half helped contextualize it, which was nice.

”Here!”  Myri/Elegan answered.  Their personalities were far too close together, they amplified each other’s enthusiasm.

”Good takeoff.  All set.”  Lumy/Max said.  Those were better.  Lumy was probably the most ‘professional’ drake, and his favorite knight was here to keep him steady.

”Gonna puke up my breakfast if we don’t die but we’re good.”  Jake said.  Dave/Pendragon shook the head that wouldn’t mess with their aerodynamics.  Despite being very well paired with his personal charge, Redding still hadn’t taken the plunge to full personality combination and it meant that his flying wouldn’t be as sharp.  But they needed the firepower, and he was dumb enough to overcome his fears and volunteer, so here he was.

”Here.”  Jubilance reported flatly.  She also wasn’t fully fused, but Rudger was a reliable drake and Jubilance apparently liked just letting the drakes she was learning to pilot take over when she was their knight, so that should work out.

Dave/Pendragon shifted a wing, adjusting their flight path and herding the others into something like a tighter formation.  They all knew the plan, they all knew what was expected of them and what was at stake, but they’d never done this before.  Not really, not flying as a squadron, even if some of them had encountered the Underburbs last time or been in combat in general.  This wasn’t a delve though.  This was something worse.

They felt their passengers shifting around in the side pouches.  Only two per dragon meant that Dave/Pendragon were very underweight compared to some other times, so their maneuverability was absurdly flexible.  But it also meant there was no full spread of magical backup to add to the collective.  And yet, they didn’t think that was going to matter this time.

The wing had two objectives.  Kill as many of the electrical towers as possible, and deploy their shield team to stall the Underburbs advance.  Dave/Pendragon wasn’t sure what ten people could do against that, but… well, it would probably be hard to be sure what five dragons could do either, for someone who didn’t know.

”Everyone hold on.”  They called back to their cargo, before clicking the radio again.  “Telepads in ten seconds.  Stay in formation, keep your eyes closed, and no one die.”  Dave/Pendragon commanded.  A few of them laughed, but… well, it wasn’t a joke.  They’d hate to lose people that it had taken so long to build up a rapport of any kind with.

Then Townton vanished from below them and the sliver of sunset was replaced by a slightly earlier version of evening as they warped to a more western time zone.

They kept their eyes firmly closed as they appeared over Washington state.  Even with shield bracers set to automatic, the towers could very likely kill someone before the defenses switched over.  Not everyone was as resistant to being killed by lightning as James was.  So instead, as soon as they appeared, all five drakes began launching camera drones.  There was no way that a civilian model drone would keep up with them, so these ones were mostly using their aerodynamics to stay steady while they were towed by the dragons, but it worked and that was all that mattered, even if it did look silly.

Images flicked into view, shared between all five of them.  Not current video feeds, just individual frames captured on three second delays between different drones.  Someone on the ground had figured out, somehow, that the towers took time to swap targets.  Against a single person who didn’t have a way around it, they were deadly, and the increasing line of wrecked cars and charred corpses on the ground proved it.  But they could only see you if you could see them, and by alternating who was taking pictures and keeping them from gunning down the drones, the wing was relatively covered.

It helped that, now that they were here, the Order apparently had complete air supremacy in the area.  No enemy fliers yet.

They were a quarter mile out from the highway that marked the line the Underburbs was pouring through, a wave of violence and rot moving like a river south into the unsuspecting human city.  And the dungeon had learned its lesson from last time too; protecting the breach itself there were eight towering constructs.  Standing like the skeletal towers that held up powerlines and sometimes sheltered substations, the things resembled in metaphor giant grey metal stick insects.  

One of them was bigger than the others.  The last one that looked like it was ripping the sky apart to step through.  Most of the things were forty feet tall, perfectly normal for the kind of towers that held up electric infrastructure.  The last one was more like the one James had originally reported seeing, and suddenly, Dave/Pendragon had to face the fact that their friend hadn’t been exaggerating.  It was two hundred feet of metal and malice, arcs of blue lightning dancing around its feet as it stepped through at the rear of the swarm, cooking a dozen other Underburbs creatures around its base before one of its legs carved a straight line through some kind of big building right by the highway. 

With that one exception, though, if they weren’t moving?  It would be impossible to tell that they weren’t just human constructions, and…

”Mark these two!”  Myri/Elegan sent the next snapshot with two of the towers circled in red.  “They’re real!”

”They’re all real that’s the problem!”  Lumy/Max replied.  “Oh you mean they’re normal.  Got it.”

Dave/Pendragon gave an internal grumble.  Flying blind was already scary as shit, so it should have been a relief to know that they had fewer targets than they’d thought.  But it highlighted the risk of using the drones this way.  They couldn’t see movement, and so the towers that looked normal when they were still and unmoving actually did blend in with the real world towers that weren’t moving.  Power lines would be even worse, on top of that.

A crackle of molten heat slapped into Dave/Pendragon’s flank.  Not an attack, just the aftereffects of one.  One of the camera drones that was keeping pace with them had been lit up by a titan tower noticing it; the next dozen images that came through were blurred and washed out, only one from farther behind catching the arc of blue-white lightning that coiled around the tiny drone before melting enough of it that it fell from the sky.  They were closing in on their targets, but they’d been noticed.  Or at least, their eyes had.

Another drone went out as it was picked off.  “That was too close!”  Redding called over their channel.  “Hot damn I can feel it.  You’re sure they can’t see us?”

”If they could one of us would be on fire.”  Jubilance replied.

”What’s the range on these things?”  Lumy/Max asked with the rising heartbeats of someone who wasn’t comfortable being shot at.

Redding’s reply was full of forced stoicism.  “Whatever it is, we’re in it.”

”Right, right,” Lumy/Max sped forward, “but I see planes up overhead, and it’s hard to tell, but I think one of them is falling!”

“Oh.”  Dave/Pendragon didn’t have anything to say about that.  “That far then.”  They settled on, voice flat, words just filling in empty air.

Jubilance’s voice suddenly cut back in.   “Wait.  Close.  I have a stupid idea.  Slow down.  Pull the drones in closer.”

Dave/Pendragon caught on right away, blended instincts and knowledge opening up an obvious solution to how they were supposed to close the last gap to hit their targets without crashing.  “Shield bracers.”  They declared, happy to have something they could do instead of thinking about far away casualties.  “Set them to automatic!”  Doing so themself and tightening up the camera drones so they were almost at risk of being slapped out of the air with a mistimed wingbeat.

Toggling the feed to active video pissed off the metal giants instantly.  Two drones lit up, feeds going white for a split second before dying entirely.  Then another, and another.  So close that the melting metal and plastic and the popping batteries and lenses could be felt through the more sensitive parts of lamellar hide.

Not for nothing though.  Each of the lethal arcs of overcharged electricity killed an unliving tool, but at the same time, they also fed the shield bracers.  Those imperfect defensive screens that needed time, precision, and most importantly, to know what they were blocking.

Dave/Pendragon checked the shield bracer in their hoard.  ”Got it now.”  They told the team.  “When everyone’s ready, we’ll hit the big one and see how tough they really are.”

”All set!”  Myri/Elegan chimed happily, drifting high and over the left side of the wing that was drifting farther out of formation as they tried to fly relying only on snapshots.  “When do we open our eyes?”  She asked, the last of her camera drones burned away.  “And who’s going in first?”

”Hey!”  Came a voice from inside Dave/Pendragon, one of their passengers calling up to the pilot.  “Little hot back here!  Are we dying?”  Evans asked in a shout.

”No!”  Dave yelled back with his own voice, while he and Pendragon gave the others a countdown to work off of.  “And hang on!”  He added, hoping that the shield team duo hadn’t eaten a heavy lunch before this.

Their improvised timer ticked down, and Dave/Pendragon pitched upward, looking to close the last bit of distance without looking at the ground.  The other dragons followed behind them, trying their best to fall back into some kind of flight formation with two to each side of their leader as their sight opened back up into the evening sky.

For a moment, they hung there amid the clouds, not quite punching far enough through to get a good view of the sunset from overhead.  Just hanging, as wings flared out and caught the wind, and bodies of paper and aircraft aluminum and scaly hard plastic began to turn.  It was almost peaceful.

And then they pitched forward, and down.  The pressure of the air against them intensifying as they went from coasting to diving, a plummet toward the ground that not even Pendragon’s special hoard could mitigate the impact of if they fucked up the math and slammed into the street without brakeing.  And right below them, the singular titanic tall metal giant among giants moved with a heavy step that swept a dozen cars aside like toys before smashing the center of one more vehicle, uncaring what or who it was walking on.

It probably saw them as soon as they tipped toward it.  But, Dave/Pendragon had just enough time to think that it would actually be very funny if the Underburbs creature was a little surprised that a quintet of targets suddenly appeared directly above it.

The delay wasn’t enough to avoid contact entirely.  Their shield bracer lit up with a protective golden splash of light as an arch of white lightning played across it.  One of their minds wanted to know if it was just making the strike on top of them, or if it was some kind of invisible projectile, but then they were closing in on their target in a controlled fall going fifty miles an hour and that question could wait.

Dave/Pendragon flared their wings, the jerk of physics arguing with their body and their dungeontech that helped with maneuvering in the air as they arrested their fall.  And then, with a heavy crash, they slammed into the upper bars of the tower, just off center.  Up close, it looked wild; this thing was organic, its metal skeleton actually shaped like muscle, or maybe living bark.  It felt metal though.  And the interior of it held a cluster of cables and transformers that were well disguised from farther away, though even those looked kind of like sinew and flesh.  Electricity played in static arcs through it, impulses fired back and forth between the inner workings of the massive creature, beating in time to the pulse of the fleshy twenty foot wide organs that filled the space between bones.

Well fuck that then.

Dave/Pendragon opened their mouth, and pulled on the delicious feeling of Velocity in their chests.  The single most powerful secret magic of the entire Order of Endless Rooms manifesting in the back of their throat in the form of a simple cast of Exhaust Torch.

The secret was, unlike most other magics, the simple little party trick scaled off of the size of your body.  The orange glow matched the white flare of another lightning strike.  And then overwhelmed it.  And then, it was pouring out; an inferno large enough to envelop a city bus, carried forward by Pendragon’s roar and the crushing flattening force of gravity as it mingled with one of the first things she’d ever eaten into her hoard.  Flame swept through the skeletal structure of the titan tower, joined a second later as Myri/Elegan’s more brightly colored body slammed into the top of it hard enough that it probably rattled their soldier cargo, and breathed their own blaze down to meet Dave/Pendragon’s at a perpendicular angle.  Then more fire.  From Rudger, from Hermes, from Lumy/Max, the easily available Horizon spell pulled Velocity out of their own bodies, and projected it as repeated waves of killing flame, all of them howling together in the language of fury as they sought to erase this monster from the world.

And the thing died.  It wasn’t even hard, was the silly thing.  All that size, all that power, the ability to kill anything looking at it and the command of the primal force of lightning itself, and what did it fucking amount to?

A creature that wasn’t metal enough to survive being burned alive.

Sinew cables melted and sparked, transformer organs charred and crumbled, and while the legs and arms of its metal bones held strong, they got to do so as a standing corpse.  And when the pair of dragons that had hit first kicked off, wings pumping as they regained altitude, the titan tower didn’t even get to be an upright dead body either, the whole thing toppling over and slamming across the highway in a line that cut across the cars the things had been killing since they’d emerged.

[Killer : Aphotic : +40 Skill Points]

”I am going to turn you into carpentry!”  Myri/Elegan screamed their triumph out loud at the dead beast.

“Divert.  Kill the next one.  Clean them up while we still have the mana.”  Dave/Pendragon said, like they were telling someone at work that they needed to give one of the dogs their meds.  Just a simple task to assign to someone, while they handled their own thing.  Their own thing, in this case, was taking a wide arc to avoid hitting a cell phone tower that stuck up between a cluster of gas stations near the highway, and getting a good angle of approach on the one on the far side.

They couldn’t watch directly without taking too many hits, but maybe at this close range it was okay to distract the towers a little.  Still, they mostly only saw in high speed flashes as Rudger and Hermes pulled a strafing run on the next two towers, flames licking and coating their metal bones as the pair let out one sustained roar of fire that damaged two, maybe three targets.  Saw as Lumy/Max dodged a physical strike by one of the towers that moved with what felt like too much speed for something so big, burning a hole through the heart of the next one before losing too much altitude and skidding across a dozen rooftops with an indignant and injured squawk.  Watched as the towers tried to cluster together on themselves like a herd of spooked animals, their lightning flashing in frantic patterns against the wing’s shields, but also against surviving drones, or random vehicles or people down below; they didn’t seem to understand what was killing them.

Which meant they needed to be put down, fast.  They were a danger to everyone around them, and killing random civilians wasn’t allowed.  Dave/Pendragon had over half their Velocity left, they only had a small amount of screaming from the people riding in them, and they had maybe three more titans to kill.

Myri/Elegan’s idea sounded good.

They were going to turn these skill points into something useful.

The dragon let her pilot’s mind worry about the rapidly depleting count of shield bracer charges and the cohesion of their wing of smaller and less predatory companions.  And in turn, he let her feel the fluttering of dense paper telling them where the wind was pushing, and what angle their wings needed to be at to meet their prey head on.

More crackling electricity tried to burn their eyes out and boil their blood as they finished their arc and dove again.

A chorus of molten roars replied to the attack.  Red and orange painting a temporary new sunset for anyone stupid enough to be watching.

_____

Evans held on tight as his ride bucked and twisted like a roller coaster that had failed every safety inspection.  Opposite him in Pendragon’s body, his teammate on the shield team he led made some kind of choked sound as Gillar was slammed back and forth with slightly more force than he was, just because of the arc of the turn they were going through.

Both of them could feel the buzzing electricity in the air, and the heat of things nearby burning and melting.  And because neither of them were plugged in so that they could jump out at a moment’s notice, both of them were wondering if they were about to die in the next three seconds.

It was not pleasant.  Evans was glad that Recovery knew about his cat though.  If he did die, someone would take care of the furry terrorist.  Oh, and his family too.  So that was basically all his responsibilities covered.  He didn’t want to die though, so he held on and tried to guess which god he should be praying to in this moment of abject terror.

”Captian!”  Gillar yelled at him.

”I don’t wanna hear it!”  Evans yelled back, voice shaking with every bump and twist of their carrier.

”Captain I think we should get an easier job!” His nominal subordinate didn’t shut up.

Evans grit his teeth, making sure he wasn’t biting his tongue as Pendragon banked so hard that it flattened him against the dense inner bulkhead he was situated against, parts of his anatomy threatening to get crunched into unhealthy shapes as he resisted the inertia.  He didn’t want to hear banter, he just wanted this to end before he threw up into his own helmet and had to explain that to the people who supposedly looked up to him.

And, as if his random prayers worked, salvation arrived.  In the form of Dave’s altered voice echoing through the interior to them.  “This is your pilots speaking.  Your landing is clear, where do you want to be dropped off?”

The frantic maneuvers easing off to the steady beat of heavy wings wasn’t exactly relaxing; being in a craft that dipped up and down at regular intervals was a great example of why humans had built airplanes and not ornithopters, but it was better.  Evans shook that off though and answered as fast as he could.  “Just give us some altitude, so we can spot our descent.”  He called up to the pilot.  And also the aircraft.

Being in the Order was so weird sometimes.

“Rodger.  Steadying out.  Ready to jump whenever you are.”  Dave told them like this was a very casual Tuesday training run and not a war.

Evans took deep, quick breaths.  There was a primal part of his brain that kind of knew they were up in the air, and didn’t like it.  And he was going to like it less when the scales peeled back to let him out.  But there was no getting around that feeling except to lean into it.  He opened his own radio channel, linking up to everyone who was still in the air.  “Shield team three, drop in ten, form up on me.  We’ll be aiming for the largest concentration of civilians we see.”

”Hey boss, you think we can look cool enough we can get them to start calling us by a special name after this?”  Pao asked back, violating radio protocols.

”Quiet on this channel.”  Evans sighed.  “And I’ll let you know how you look when you land.  Now.  Drop.”

The word was accompanied by cooperation from the dragons they were riding in.  Pendragon was the most spacious, but they’d been spread out just in case something had happened, like one of them tumbling through a parking lot and into a convenience store plate glass window.  So it was just Evans and Gillar who were there to feel the wind when Pendragon’s side scales snapped open.  A harsh pressure that would have stung the eyes and skin if they didn’t have special masks and armor for this.

Evans looked out, realized how high up he was, and nearly threw up anyway.  Then he did what his brain screamed was the stupidest thing possible and pitched forward out of the dragon, watching as her tail whipped through the air past him as he fell, wingbeats starting again as she went from gliding to flying as soon as he and his teammate were clear.

Evans held his limbs as tight as he could as he fell toward the ground.  And then, when he was sure he was below the others, he kept his arms clasped around his chest while he opened up two of his new limbs.  Great black feathered wings that practically outmassed the rest of his body catching him like a parachute, the jerk of air resistance and gravity steadying him out into a long glide as he started to sweep augmented eyes across the darkening streets below.  Gillar’s presence felt more than seen, a disturbance in the air to his left as his wingman glided into position, both of them looking downward.

It didn’t look good.

Mist was pouring out of the breach, with three blocks already consumed in the stuff.  It rushed forward like spilled flour, a slow motion grab of territory by the softly glowing vapor, the scale visible from their height making it clear this was a disaster.  And where the mist wasn’t, there was an inky sludge of darkness filling in, even where there should have been streetlights or homes.  From this height, it all looked so… clinical.  Battle lines and strategic angles.  A map of a war that hadn’t quite started yet.

But then Evans saw the people running.  Tiny figures from this height, but there were both drivers and pedestrians who were getting the fuck away from that encroaching front.  Or, more accurately, the things in it.  Because other figures moved like a swarm of hungry bugs, racing after and snapping up stragglers, or flanking groups that thought they were far enough away.  There were a few points of blazing red and blue where police had lit up their sirens, but those were going still faster than anything else, the noise drawing in the enemy.  And there weren’t enough.  Wasn’t a defense.

“Anyone see where Rada and Al went down?”  Someone asked.

”Here.”  Evans marked it through their skulljack link.  A green square on the ‘map’ of the world below, where the dragon Lumy had crashed.  Their teammates were alive, just rattled, and they’d need to hold out on their own for a while, because team three was needed somewhere else more.

Unless he split them up.  Evans raced through the options, but the biggest problem with someone putting him in charge was that he had to make the call.  Planner wasn’t here to give him a better idea.  He had the best view, and they trusted him to keep them safe.  Or… or to use their lives effectively.  Evans didn’t think he’d ever get comfortable with that.  Which was probably the point.

“Pao, newbie, split off, get to the crash position.”  He said as he tried to not get distracted by the feeling of the wind on his feathers and the elation of flying, actually flying.  He also didn’t explain himself, though he was thinking that two people could reinforce there since the Underburbs wasn’t flooding out equally.  They could handle what came their way, while the others stalled its main advance, and then the Order would have a small beachhead when they started to show up in ten minutes.  “Everyone else, we’re going here.  Lots of friendlies in the area, guns holstered until we cut through, got it?”

”Highlander bullshit, got it captain.”  Gillar answered him along with the others.

Evans rolled his eyes, and then, started his dive.

Flying was harder than a lot of people thought it was.  You couldn’t quite trust your eyes when you were falling from three hundred feet in the air.  The ground was at an angle, and your own approach would be too fast and too slow all at once.  It took a lot of practice, and enough broken bones to punch through all the purple orbs the Order had given him, to learn that.  But Evans had been jumping out of aircraft enough to have learned a little about how to do it better.  Hell, he’d written half the guides for it, along with the professional problem that was Momo.

There wasn’t anything like it though.  The feeling of controlled falling, of using your own body to steer through a medium humans weren’t meant to be playing in, and of watching everything come rushing up to you as you picked out details on the fly?  Evans wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was hooked on this.

Those details resolved as he whipped closer to the ground, the shadow of his wingspan lit up from behind with glow tags so that the others could see him in the darkening sky.  “Watch for the power lines!”  Was the last thing he had time to get out before he was there.  The street just one on-ramp and a couple blocks away from the highway that he was aiming for rushing up toward him, the faces and terrified shouts of people who lived there coming into sharper resolution as he tucked his wings tight, dipped hard to dodge the powerlines, and then spread his wingspan to its full fifteen foot width.  His body tipping back into a standing position as his feet scraped across the ground, the momentum carrying him forward at a speed where if he did slip, he’d need the mask to keep his face from being peeled off by the asphalt.

Then he didn’t need to lose more speed.  He needed to be going exactly this quickly, as he raced toward some kind of towering fleshy creature with a massive mouth for its whole body and hands that were reaching out for the people that hadn’t gotten out of their house in time.  The thing looked like if a garbage can was made out of a tumor, and had decided to punch through someone’s living room window.  Wings folded back, creating a black trailing cape behind him, while his arms and legs started moving in a sprint, Evans went in a straight line over a parked car and the splintered front yard fence of the house he was aiming for.

He didn’t slow his momentum as he closed on the eight foot tall Underbrubs monster.  Instead, he just called up the Garden spell he had in his solitary level three slot, advanced as far as it could go before he got brain damage.  It had a name, Evans didn’t like the name, and it didn’t matter.  What mattered was that the silver spear wreathed in its own wisps of grey fog settled into his hands like it had been forged there.  Which, in a way, it had.

The head of the spear cut through the soft and squishy flesh of the vague humanoid figure he’d targeted.  The flare of dull light that oozed from the injury probably mattered, but Evans didn’t know what it did.  No one did.  All he knew was that he needed to stab it again, aiming for the back of its mouth as it whirled on him.  These ones spoke, which was a nightmare all its own, but he ignored the way it demanded ‘more small bodies’, and instead whipped his spear around in a long arc that trailed sick blood, slamming its blade through one of the fat fingers down to the bone, before he ducked away and pressed the attack.

It took six stabs before the thing toppled, and it was the one that went into its throat.  Evans, breathing heavily in his mask and glad he couldn’t smell the thing, ignored the kill notification except as verification that it was dead, and looked up at the terrified faces of the people watching him through the broken door of their own home.  “Go!  Head south, car if possible!  We’ll cover you!”  He said.

”W-who-?!” One of them started to demand before a squeal of static cut off his voice, and then the static in turn was cut off by Gillar decapitating some kind of cat thing.

Evans didn’t have time to escort them.  Instead, he was already back in the street as the rest of his team started touching down around him.  One after another until six of them were racing past the fleeing Washington residents that had noticed something was wrong and were getting the fuck out of the area, summoned blades and spears out and flashing through the encroaching mist as they cut down anything that looked twisted and monstrous.

The things flowing into the suburbs weren’t slowing down.  But there were a lot of streets, a lot of territory, and this was just one.  Evans, jogging forward in the middle of the road, flashed across too much distance to intercept an upholstered dog lunging for a woman that was fumbling for her car keys next to a curbside car.  His feathers slapped into her face, sending her tumbling, but the dog he caught on the haft of his spear before shoving it off with a burst of strength and skewering it cleanly in the… face?  These things didn’t have faces.  He hated that.

Not that he didn’t hate most of the Underburbs.

Either way, he put his body between that dog thing, and the woman behind him.  And then the next dog, and the next civilian.  Every oozing Underburbs thing and every single living creature that didn’t ask to get ripped apart today.  Step by step, he and the other five cut down the disorganized packs that had made it this far this early.  It felt like an hour, but was really more like a few minutes, before they ended up covering the three incoming routes of a four way intersection.  Mid century two story homes stretching out in every direction around them, gardens both tended and overgrown dropped into darkness or the probably-toxic mist.  They split with quick pairings, two each on the incoming streets, wings held tight behind them except for Kent, the impossibly athletic man using his own whipping bat wings as just another pair of arms like he was born with them.

As a unit, they braced themselves, and did their job, and held that position.  Events started to blur together; attacks from singular beasts or packs of screaming grey alien child-things cut up by equally screaming civilians, or sometimes frantically driving cars that were just looking for a way out.  No one knew where the attack was coming from, no one knew where to go, and all Evans and his team could do was create a shadow of relative safety they could point people through.  He really, really wanted to switch to shooting, but there were just too many fleeing humans mixed in and while Evans thought he was a good shot, he didn’t think he wanted to test that in these lighting conditions when half their enemies looked like normal kids until they got closer.

”Keep moving!”  Evans’ voice boomed out with more confidence than he felt, as groups of residents would approach, see them, and then hesitate.  “Come on, keep going!  Don’t stop now, this place isn’t safe!”  He used one hand to hold his spear while the other motioned like he was directing traffic.  Smoothing out the flow of those fleeing their homes as they ran from the creatures that were snapping at their heels, while his teammates took those creatures and put holes in them.  “Check in!  How’re we doing?”

”Arm’s getting tired, captain!”  Gillar reported, while Visha just grunted at him as she shoved a dog corpse into a pile away from the storm grate that its blood was leaking into.  “How much longer?”

Evans swept his eyes over the streets.  He couldn’t tell how long they’d been fighting.  His skulljack log of his spellbook was starting to look a little thin, his arms hurt, his wings stung, and he was pretty sure something had bitten him.  No penetration on the body armor, but there was a scraping sensation like there were nails stuck in his leg plate and trying to punch through farther every time he stepped.

It had been a while since they’d seen anyone come through.  Or, as his internal clock said, it had been four minutes.  But also, the flow of Underburbs creations was slowing too, even if sounds of screams from nearby weren’t fading.

”Gillar!”  Evans yelled, his breath only coming easily thanks to one of the several potions he’d dosed with before dropping from the sky.  “Things are getting too easy!”

”…Captain that’s the stupidest…”

”Make some noise for us!”  Evans ordered, pointing down the street at where some kind of tumorous mass of interconnected humanoid figures was swaying toward them, frills that looked like unfashionable red hoodies splayed out in the glowing mist.

Gillar didn’t hesitate at the command, stabbing his sword a foot into the curbside lawn he was holding beside as his hands grabbed a different weapon.  “I hear ya.  Ringing the dinner bell!”  He announced, in case the rest of the team hadn’t caught on.

Automatic rifle fire was loud.  Louder than the screams, louder than the howls, not louder than the crash of one of the dead skeletal metal towers coming down as it sagged in on itself ten blocks away, but loud enough.  Evans forced himself to not look at the tower, just in case.  There was already at least one watcher-threat around here, probably, or else he just had a random headache from the fog, and even if the tower was dead he didn’t want to risk getting electrocuted from inside his own skull.

Instead, he watched the streets.  Watched Gillar’s shooting drop the first half of the overly fleshy figures, then the rest as they started to charge.  Watched as dozens, maybe a hundred more creatures broke away from the buildings they were trying to breach, leaving behind houses and cars that might have had survivors in them to follow the loudest human noise in the area.

Then he stopped watching as his team collectively opened fire, and he included himself in that equation.  His wings extended behind him to help balance the recoil from the heavy rifle, thick gloves still letting vibrations rattle his fingers, mask and augmentations dulling the flare of muzzle flashes and metallic hammering of gunfire as he overlapped his targeting with his team and turned the flood of flesh and disease coming their way into a secondary wall of dead meat across the streets around their intersection.

Evans’ world narrowed to the rhythm of calling targets, reloading his rifle, and cutting down the next thing attracted by their combat.  In the back of his head, he knew, everything that came to them was one less thing hunting, one less thing pushing farther into the city behind them.  But he also knew that there were only six of them, and it didn’t matter how dramatic a figure they cut with their Climb wings and blazing rifles, it didn’t matter that they could take a hundred Underburbs creatures with them before they ran dry on ammo and then keep going for a little while longer past that.  All that mattered was that there were thousands of the enemy.

And six of them.

It was attrition that was going to kill them, not skill or speed or firepower or even the fact that they were going to make it to Valhalla if it existed somewhere.  They could kill two of those stupid boba dogs with every single bullet they had, and they would run out of bullets way before the Underburbs ran out of dogs.

And then suddenly, that just wasn’t true.  A shout, out loud and on the radio, traced the thinnest line of attention through the endless shooting and screaming bleeding mass of monsters.  Friendlies on approach.

It had been what felt like forever since they’d seen a vehicle, but the next one that came in was practically military.  The delver APC customized for the Horizon, put to work here, bulldozing through a wall of melting Underburbs corpses to carve a path through.  After that, trucks carrying more knights flowed in, one of them clung to by a paper drake slightly larger than the vehicle itself, rolling along on the extended ball wheels of its claws.  And onto that drake, the rest of Evans’ team, who hopped off to come join them, looking much the worse for their own misadventure, one of them with their armor shredded and a foul smell clinging to them, but importantly, not dead.

And through the fog came the rest of them.  Not the whole Order, not for them.  This wasn’t a strategic location, Evans realized.  It was just a point on the line they were drawing.  They’d come from the side, relative to the highway where the real breach was.  The filtered reports flowing through his skulljack link telling him about positions taken and defenses put in place, more intersections and streets secured as the Order closed a wall against the lesser monsters that were the first suicide wave of the temporary invasion.

A hand from another winged figure settled on his shoulder, and he turned his masked face away from the carnage to see Cam standing next to him.  “Good work.”  She said simply, before nodding toward the APC.  “Resupply, let the medics check you.  Can you hold this position?”

Evans only had to think for a second.  His brain already knew, he’d been paying attention the whole time even as his world bled into one minor fight after another; he just needed his mouth to catch up.  “If we’re not the only ones?  Yeah.”  He nodded, and felt more than saw the rest of team three straighten up around him.

Cam’s own bright blue scaled wings shifted as she looked back down the wider road to the highway on ramp where the bodies of what looked like an endless hoard of mutated animals had fallen in their mad charge.  The mounted gun on one of the jeeps was still firing, buying them a reprieve, but signaling that this fight wasn’t done by a long shot.  “Good work.”  She said again.  “Now just hold on while we go rip out its claws.”

”Yes ma’am.”  Evans said, smile vicious under the mask.

He got about five minutes to get scoured by an authority, drink some water and more potions - in the wrong order, dammit - reload his ammo, and pull the nails out of his armor.  And then he was back in position.  Because even with its leadership decapitated, the Underburbs wasn’t going to stop until it was made to.

”Hey, you hear that?”  Kent asked him as they sat and let the medic authorities do their work.  “We did good.  Think we can get a raise?”

”Kent.”  Evans said with infinite patience as he sat on the bumper of a jeep that looked like it had hit a boulder at high speed.  “If you survive this, I’ll pay for the pizza myself.”

”Ooh, score.”  The big man nodded like that was an ironclad promise.

And that was all they had time for before the war continued, whether they were ready or not.

_____

It hadn’t made sense.  For the longest time, it had just read as nonsense to her.

Ami’s sister told her that their father was a bad defender, a bad guardian, and while she had said nothing and not argued, Ami knew in her core that her sister was insane.  He was the Last Line Of Defense, he was made to protect, made to secure, made to hold back the end of humanity on this fragile rock called Earth.

She didn’t think Cam was being intentionally antagonistic, but she didn’t understand how her sister could be quite so vitriolic in her dislike of their father.  Even if she did, admittedly, understand that if she had ever returned and been judged fit for service again, the Last Line would absolutely have repaired her armor and left her melted and whorled flesh as it was.  And she would have understood that, at least.  The armor was a symbol, her body wasn’t.  The armor became the body anyway, in the ways that mattered in a fight.

Even without sharing her sister’s views, Ami had changed.  Maybe it was exposure to the thing that wasn’t a pillar but still radiated like them.  Exposure to Kiki, who baked her cookies and listened to her in a way no one, not even Cam, ever did.  Maybe it was backlash from the moment when she realized what she had done in her life, looking at Townton’s collective people and seeing people instead of monsters, her thoughts going numb for a week as she came to terms with her own past complicity.  Maybe it was being treated like a person herself; given a bed and food and people who welcomed her in.  Maybe it was James’ fault.  Blaming James actually seemed like an excellent cultural tradition, and he was technically there when she’d been captured by the Order.

Over time, as she’d shifted, as she’d picked a name for herself and started to find her footing, Ami had come to see The Last Line Of Defense as something less benevolent, even if he was important.  But she’d never stopped thinking of him as her father, and as important.  Brutal, yes.  Violent, yes.  Callous, absolutely.  But he did actually try to protect people.

But now, the Underburbs.

It was the nightmare scenario that The Last Line had always quietly feared, quietly prepared all of them for.  A situation where the boundary lines were aggressively pulled into strange shapes.  Where his presence could be instantly lethal to him, and several, perhaps many Daughters would need to operate independently to purge an area before it got out of hand.  Before it gained a permanent foothold and turned a part of Earth into a permanent death zone.

Except, during the briefing, there had been almost no mention of that.  In fact, Ami had learned several things in rapid succession.  One was that this had happened before.  Two, the Last Line had been there last time.  The Order had met him, and sent him on his way, as if that were even an option.  You couldn’t do that.  She knew her father, she knew the thing he was and the power he held.  No one could dictate terms to him.  Which meant… he simply left.

He left the Underburbs to its rampage.  Because he knew that they weren’t scrambling for a permanent foothold.   It was here to pillage and then recede, and… and what?  And that wasn’t worth stopping?  And what of the city?  What of the people?

Ami had never heard herself ask that question, even in her own thoughts.  But she asked it now as she watched the feed of their tactical map, momentary snapshots used to try to track the flood of monsters into the real world so they could dodge most of the watcher hazards, movements translated to points of red on a simple map.

What was going to happen to the people?

And why wasn’t The Last Line Of Defense here?

None of them were here.  The Long Arm Of The Law, A Necessary Evil, The Chain Breaker, the surviving triumvirate of pillars that had made themselves sound like they would do anything for humanity, and they weren’t here.  Was Sammamish too small?  Too unimportant?  Was it too hard to hold territory that was half walking trails and placid parks, small ponds and old trees?

Or did they just not care?

Ami hadn’t understood.  That night, when she and the other crimson had stood in Cam’s home and told her they needed to leave, and her sister had challenged, challenged them to think, to change, to grow, Ami had been curious and almost willing, but she hadn’t really understood.  When Cam told her that she had done more real protecting with the Order of Endless Rooms than she ever had as a Daughter, Ami had almost attacked her out of indignant anger.

But now she was here.  Rushing through suburbs and commercial streets and a park that was more beautiful than any place Camille had ever been deployed to in her life but was now infested with the toxic blood of dozens of dead grey skinned creatures.  Racing against time to break the Underburbs’ hold on Earth, every second one more body of someone who mattered, every minute another fallback point the knights behind her had to retreat to.

And Ami felt alive.

It burned in her, painful and scouring, as the truth refused to be pushed away anymore.  She was here to protect.  She was more a guardian than she had ever been.  Her hands were slick with oily blood from actual enemies to life on this world, her heart raced from something that had slipped through her authority’s plague screen, her ability to find the right words had crumbled away a half mile ago, and she was alive.

Ahead of the search team she was escorting, a pool of blackness loomed at the edge of the park.  Streetlights had their glow siphoned away, light seeming to flow like liquid up into the tips of long drifting cables that were barely visible in the unnatural night.  Farther above, those thick black power line cables spiraled together to form a tight ball that hovered in the sky, its tendrils slamming down to the ground to rip up any power source it could find.  And also Ami, if she wasn’t careful.

The powerball was ahead of the team.  It wasn’t ahead of her.  She was among the forest of crackling cables that it trailed across the sidewalk and down the steep embankment toward a commercial street.  The pleasantly designed staircase set into the hillside a moderately difficult obstacle for her to race up as she leapt over cords of a creature that had half-sensed her and was trying to grab her with enough force to rip rebar out of concrete.

On either side of that staircase, a massive beetle-like beast that resembled an RV if you took away every human touch and amenity raced through the greenery as they tried to pin Ami down.  An overwhelming amount of force for any single knight to deal with, for any single team to deal with.  So, she had to do something daring, do something stupid, or else none of this would matter.

Behind her, there was the sound of a thunderclap as the team’s 106mm recoilless fired.  And overhead, a sudden electric whine started just after the pressure of a blast that threatened to flatten Ami to the ground.  The powerball listed, cords going slack for a moment before it turned, grip lost on some of the power grid, sidewalk lights flickering back to weak life.  From the middle of the ball, a baleful red eye opened, cables swirling around it like hair underwater as it began to drift toward the armored jeep below that was already maneuvering to get clear.

Ami didn’t focus on that.  She had two things chasing her that could kill her if she wasn’t careful.  But only two now.

She cleared the top of the stairs, armored greave triggering to throw herself forward in a lunge that ripped a fleshier monster in half, the horde of the grey-skinned things only just starting to look up at her as she ran for the foot of a taller hill of what likely used to be a stone quarry.

One daughter and one mace was not enough.  Not fast enough, anyway, to kill the things chasing her.  So, Ami used her weapons more effectively.

Demolition sense gave her a target.  All of her supply poured into her mind as she asked for as much information as possible.  Where to strike, what the ripple effects would be, where the collapse vectors were, everything.  Aim gave her the ability to execute.  The Sewer Lesson in baseball that she had been gifted, the magic that empowered her beyond even her already weaponized self, letting her be perfectly on point.  And her body did the rest.  An arm that did not tire, a core that could put force behind any throw.  A weapon that was durable enough to make this work.

Her bladed mace left her hand, and crunched into the metal strut overhead.  A single rivet that had been just on this side of needing a replacement broke.  Something important bent.  A piece of infrastructure designed to last for a century with minimal maintenance gave way under Ami’s strength and precision.

The water tower bowed, held for an infected heartbeat, and then plummeted.  And she didn’t even look at it.  Just turned and faced down the two oversized bugs charging at her across the open ground of the parkway.  Listened to the thunder and watched the powerball in the distance have a hole blown through its eye, cords falling as someone on the team took in an abyssal amount of skill points.  Waited, patiently, for the vectors to line up.

Ami didn’t flinch as four million pounds of water and steel slammed into the mobile home twenty feet away from her.  The roar of the collapse drowned out every other sound as sure as the water itself drowned the grass around her feet.  The falling structure might have looked like it dropped almost in slow motion, if someone was watching from far away.  But up close?  Ami had just enough time to blink twice between her throw and two living vehicles being flattened into jagged corpses.

[Killer : Deep : +8 Skill Points]

[Killer : Deep : +5 Skill Points]

It took ten seconds to find her mace in the wreckage.  That, too, had been something demolition sense had given her the fall vector for.

It took her much, much longer to understand the way everyone looked at her, both the knights and the civilians sheltering in the structure she’d drawn the beetle-like creatures away from.  But by the time she did, they’d already purged the now-undefended spikes, and, as a bonus, Ami also felt like she might actually have realized what Cam had meant.

Then it was on to the next target, and she felt like she understood that far more easily.

_____

“Go, my scarab!”  Momo yelled in a manically hoarse voice as she pointed into the sky with an outstretched finger.  She did not have a mystical robe flapping around her, because El had told her that if she didn’t wear real fucking armor, El would break up with her and then kill her, so Momo was wearing the body armor.  But she still felt like she looked pretty cool.

The long range artillery of ice saplings surrounding her made her feel way cooler.  She had twenty of the things sticking up out of the back of the pickup truck, and stood one foot planted on the roof of that truck, hand outstretched to the sky as her supposed bodyguard panicked silently below.

Overhead, Pendragon pulled a corkscrew turn to dodge away from a strip of road, and the artillery that Momo was directing flashed past her.  And all of that required context that Momo felt like she was losing her grip on.

Okay.  Leviathan snake dragon thing made out of asphalt?  She got that.  That made sense.  Every dungeon needed a dragon, and the Underburbs version was apparently a mirror of the streets below.  Watching Pendragon tangle with one through their shared feed was wild, because the mean streets were so fucking big that at multiple points the paper drake dodged attacks by deploying her wheel claws and just rolling across the thing’s back.  It was, after all, a road.  But it also had manhole covers and fire hydrants and bristling stop sign spines, and when it opened its maw to fire off its own breath weapon, it had exhaled a belch of sewer gas that had turned the air within a half mile into a dank miasma and no one wanted to be near that.

Pendragon fighting it?  Also made sense.  The other drakes were out of the fight at this point, either hurt like Lumy and Hermes, or just exhausted.  None of them had the endurance or maneuverability Pen did, but it sucked that the enemy had waited until the Order’s air superiority had less oomph to contest the sky.

Magical ice tree artillery?

Momo was so fucking proud of this one.

Climb spell; Pale Hoar Lurker.  Purpose?  Make a tree that obeys orders.  What orders?  Surprisingly flexible for a tree.  How big of a tree?  You can use your imagination, but Momo had asked for saplings.  The trees in the truck weren’t hers, but everyone maintaining them had given them the general order to follow her orders, so as long as she could give them a sense she could work with, then she could tell them what to do, and she could also do that now too!

Garden spells; Granted Eyes and Jubilant Crossing.  Purpose?  The tree sense thing.

It had almost been a joke when Momo had started.  She’d put a bunch of trees into her focus totem, put the Visiting Tongue spellbook in the focus section, timed out exactly how long it would take to get it up to the peak of level three, and then fed the trees about twenty coins each of the level three coin that auto-cast other level three spells.  It was kind of meant to be a celebratory firework display, a proof of concept of how far she could stretch this because she didn’t want to accidentally bury the basement in towels or spoons or something.

She’d had an hour to shore up her dumb joke with a real plan, and then deployed into the Underburbs attack.  Nothing but a truck full of saplings and a driver that Momo was pretty sure didn’t like her.

”What the fuck does that mean?!”  Vex yelled at her from the driver’s seat as she commanded her firing squad.

”You’re a gen-X lesbian named Vex, you fucking know what it means!”  Momo cackled as the designated Lurker tree she had command of locked onto the target she was pointing at.

Behind her, the tree followed the prearranged command, and twenty high level fireballs fired like a machine gun up into the air.  The world’s most blazing tracer rounds curled in an arc as Pendragon barreled around the line of fire and the upgraded kinetic impact splashed against the face of the four hundred foot long serpentine street winding through the air behind her.  The fire caught some of the toxic gasses, lighting them off in a plume of orange flame that flashed across the sky, but the Underburbs dragon didn’t seem to give a shit about that too much.

Instead, it abandoned its hunt for Pendragon and Dave entirely.  Half the fireballs missed it, sure, but from the instant the first one touched it, the whole beast had turned so fast that pieces of it had broken off and tumbled through the sky to the ground, the sunset painting broken falling scales of asphalt and metal in silhouette.

Its eyes, massive unnervingly organic avian eyes, stared down at them.  The jagged edge of the road that formed its mouth opened in another roar of fetid air.  And it plunged from the sky toward Momo’s position.

”Sweet buttered shit, what did you do?!”  Vex yelled at her.

”Oh yeah!”  Momo’s breath came in rapid pants as she felt the high of unadulterated terror flow through her.  “At level three the fireball pisses things off!”

”It’s a fireball you lunatic!  It always pisses things off!”  Vex checked her mirrors and started to turn them around.  “We’re getting the fuck out of here!  Get off the fucking roof!”

Momo nodded, posture shifting to something less cool as she braced herself.  “Scarabs two through five, kill!”  She ordered, flicking her hand through the gestures needed to trigger the commands she’d set up with the trees, and aiming them out the back of the truck to barrage fire down at the enormous thing bearing down on them.

Vex’s voice barely reached her over the roar of the engine, the roar of the dragon, and the roar of fire eating up all the oxygen behind the truck.  “You’re so goddamn lucky Astra threatened to break up with me if I didn’t keep your ass safe!”  She screamed.

”I know, right?!  She’s so cool!”  Momo’s howling cackle broke over the noise.  “Hey, go faster, it’s gaining on us!”  She screamed as the dragon hit the real road like a cataclysm and started hauling itself forward on blunt stubby legs.  Cars, telephone poles, and sometimes the front half of buildings that were unlucky enough to be in its way simply crumbling away like they were made of plaster as it bulldozed through them, dead set on murdering the source of its sudden anger.  And the fireballs were doing zero damage, unless you counted the mental damage of keeping it really really really angry at them specifically.  Which Momo did, for personal reasons.

Vex felt like she was going to die.  She was here to be a driver, a helper, support.  And she was going to die, and god dammit if she wasn’t going to strangle Momo for this.  She felt the oil around them, and had to hold herself back from flexing her domain to fire spikes of the stuff leaking from all the shattered cars backward.  It wouldn’t do anything anyway, and Ben had been real serious about no one using magic like domains here.  But it meant she had barely anything to except drive while something the size of a mountain tried to eat her.

She saw a plume of nuclear orange light as Pendragon strafed over the back of the much larger dragon, but it didn’t do anything.  Didn’t hurt it at all.  Didn’t even distract the fucker.  “Hang on!”  Vex screamed, wrenching the wheel hard to the right and seeing a few of the chunks of ice in the back go over the side.  Momo hung on though, which was good; she fucking hated Momo right now but she didn’t want either of them to die.  “What are we doing?!”  She demanded, voice cracking.

”Floor it!”  Momo screamed back.  “Straight ahead!”

”That’s a fucking lake!”

”Trust me!”

Vex did not trust her.  Vex did not want to drive into a lake.  Vex wanted more than anything for Momo to stop shooting the fireballs that pissed off god at the monster closing in on them.  But she’d take the lake over being eaten by the maw that smelled like fermented shit opening up behind her with massive stalagmite asphalt fangs.

She hit the gas and wondered what death would feel like as tires hit the curb next to the little park.  She was almost resigned to it, by the time they’d dug furrows through the muddy grass, and went off the lip of the water feature at fifty miles an hour.

And then the car stopped neatly in a sheet metal garage that smelled like lilies.

Vex blinked.  “This wasn’t-“ her voice was way too loud in the abrupt silence.  She bit down in embarrassment that her first words in the afterlife were awkward, and tried again.  “This wasn’t on my list.”

”Oh shit it worked!”  Momo exclaimed from behind her, hopping out of the truck.  “Fuck yes!  Hey, high five!”  She said, circling around to the half-shattered window that Vex hadn’t even noticed breaking.

Vex stared at her, then down at her hands still clamped like metal bands around the wheel of the unmoving pickup truck.  “Why are you in my afterlife?”

”You’re in my demiplane, dumbass.”  Momo pointed at the hand she still had held up, waiting for a high five.  “Come on.  Hit me, and then tell me that was so fucking cool.”

There was a moment when Vex considered murder.  In a demiplane, no one would… know, right?  But no.  That would be rude.  And Astra’s threat was probably accurate.  Also Mags would know instantly, that was just the way her older girlfriend was.  If Vex tried to lie about anything, Mags would do that thing where she’d grunt and then walk off and not talk to her for a week, and she’d feel like shit until she apologized.

Fuck it.  Vex high fived Momo.

”So what now?”  She asked, wondering why the world was spinning.

”Now, we wait for the adrenaline to wear off!”  Momo declared.  “And then I take my painkillers, we check to make sure the mean streets down which a man must go are either drowned or left or whatever, and then we get back out there!”

”Are you,” Vex tried to ask politely, “out of your goddamn mind?”

”Yes.”  Momo said with quiet confidence, looking back at the point at the end of a sandy path that was where the car had left reality and entered this absurd little garage.  “Are you kidding?  Of course I am.  I’m… I’m thinking about going back out there armed with a gun, a few magic tricks, nerve damage, some floating pencils, and half a truck full of trees.  I’m insane and I’m clearly falling apart.”  She turned a sad smile back toward Vex.  “But what happens if we don’t, right?”

Vex didn’t get it.  She didn’t understand how anyone could do that.  She got that Momo was being a hero or something, but that was a thing that people wanted to be.  Not a thing that clicked into place when it actually came time to throw down.

“Kay.”  She said in a shaking voice.  “Uh.  I’m gonna… go throw up over the edge of your portable world, okay?”

”Yeah go for it.  It gets banished to the shadow realm anyway.”  Momo said.  “You need some aspirin?  Water bottle?  I’ve got extras."

Vex hated how much that sounded like a responsible adult thing, coming from Momo.  It just… didn’t fit.  It was too… too…

She looked at the short armored woman with the stupid pixie cut neon green hair and the water bottle that seemed to be hovering in place so she didn’t have to touch it with her hands.  And Vex wondered if that was her fate, if she stuck around the Order too long.

And didn’t die, obviously.

_____

The Order ran into a problem as they hunted for the anchors that were pulling the Underburbs out into the world.

The last time they’d done this, they’d been too late.  Whatever ritual had gone off had already happened, the dungeon had started its conquest, and the priority was on evacuation and stopping the ripping away of as much of Springfield as possible.  It had been a scramble, but, ironically, because of how the anchors worked, it had been a scramble that had let them pinpoint their next target every time they gained ground.

This time, the Underburbs hadn’t even reached half its own anchors.  If there was a ritual, it was in progress, if there was a process, it was ongoing.

So actually finding the fucking anchors was giving Planner a headache.

Along with the watcher hazards, which were giving them a headache as well.

The Underburbs had a lot of different watcher-class problems, and Planner had a deep fear of all of them.  They’d needed one encounter with the exploding eyeball variant to decide that ‘looking at things’ was an unacceptable risk when it came to the Underburbs.  But the assignment didn’t really have much of a choice this time; they had to check some stuff at least.

Fortunately, they could don several pieces of dungeontech eyewear across their manifested body, and rotate out which eyes were used for which purpose.  Not to mention, only a few hazards actually seeped through the film of a still photograph.  Though the fact that any of them did that at all was a nightmare.  There was going to be video of this attack, and Planner was going to need to try to purge it from the internet before it killed someone.

Planner tried to keep from appearing frantic as they examined the map of the city, looking for obvious points where the anchors might have gone down.  Teams had located two so far, and James’ coterie was en route to where one of the Underburbs predators had been stupid enough to take a shot at Pendragon from, likely a third site.  That allowed for a little extrapolation, but it wasn’t certain.

This city wasn’t huge, it was mostly homes for those that commuted elsewhere, but it had sixty thousand people in it.  Multiple schools.  A Starbucks.  Sushi.  Planner couldn’t let a good sushi restaurant fall, that would be terrible.  Oh, and obviously all the people.

They were trying to joke to themself as they worked, using humor as a screen for the dire nature of the situation.  And Planner had failed to notice that the other Rogues and knights in the command tent were half-listening to the things they were saying out loud while staring at drone shots of the streets.

The thing that made this challenging was that those streets weren’t dark.  The Underburbs had marched its monsters out of the lush treeline around the highway, clawed through four or five ‘rows’ of homes, and then met the Order.  Not head on at first, shield team three hadn’t held any kind of line; but they had drawn attention, and they were still there.  As more knights poured in, Planner distributed them to choke points and kill boxes.

Here was a road that funneled the enemy toward where they could bring their heavier weapons to bear.  Here was a golf course that offered long lines of sight.  Here was a neighborhood, isolated, lower income, situated farther west of the main spidery web of the city’s sprawl, that needed its own defenders.  Here, just to the east of Evans’ team, was an open field in a slight depression, tucked inside a ring of roads and houses so that the only people who would ever notice it would be the neighborhood kids, and the several hundred Underburbs monsters that died there without cover.

But where the hell were the anchors?

Planner kept looking.  Planner, pointedly, did not flinch when one of the people that housed them died.  That had been happening a lot today.  And it was undone a moment later by the charm Kiki had made, one of the truly exceptional ones that must have come from a weapon of actual importance.  Planner measured from the points of the anchors and what they knew was the range from last time, and tried to guess where to send the next team.

Yin, unfettered by her exile to the medic station, caught Planner’s attention with a sharp spike of excitement before she started talking.  “Alanna says they got theirs!”  She announced.  “Address!”  The notecard in her hand was extended into the air for Planner to see with a flourish, held almost daintily between painted fingernails that you almost couldn’t tell she’d been bleeding from an hour ago.

”Perfect.”  Planner’s voice was the rasp of the last line drawn in a ledger.

There it was.  Was it the last one?  Impossible to know.  But it was one Planner could find, and it also appeared to be located tucked between a Hindu temple of sorts and a water utility office.  Unless, of course, they were wrong, and that was a cell tower.  The Underburbs anchors looked mildly distinctive, but it was possible they could have been disguised, and while disguised, they weren’t much different from the strange false-tree of a cell tower.

Planner almost sighed when the several drones they’d redistributed over the area were picked off, one by one.  “Well.  No one can accuse our enemy of being subtle.”  They said.  “Nate, please send a team to…” Planner started paying attention to their human counterpart in this operation, and noticed Nate in a glaring match with someone.  “Nate, this will need to wait, we need a team to move.  Quickly.  I will resolve your argument.”  Planner picked details out of minds and media, and assembled a picture of what they were getting into.  They didn’t like it.

”Ah, good evening.  Well, evening I suppose.”  Watcher told Planner as Nate stalked off, only barely restraining himself from slugging the slimmer man.  “Planner, yes?”

”Yes.  I believe you are called Watcher?  That has been, I will admit, an additional confusion this night did not need.”  Planner was perfectly capable of sorting things out mentally, but when there was a Watcher, watcher-class hazards from the Underburbs, and the camraconda population having the same ratio of people with ‘Watcher’ in their name as humans had ‘John’, it began to irk them.  “Why are you back, and not with your forces?”

Watcher’s forces, the mind controlled Coalition soldiers, had only just begun entering the field.  Military troop trucks rolling in from the direction of Sea-Tac, the mostly empty airport apparently having no issue landing the massive cargo planes of an armed power that must obviously have some kind of government backing.  Though Planner understood that at least one of their pilots and possibly several of their puppet soldiers had been killed midair by the towers before the Order stopped them.  They were coming from the west, and while most of them Planner had spotted were on the highway, they were spreading out in a dense web along side streets and into a similar pattern of open fields and choke points.

They were also doing an adequate job of stopping the Underburbs.  Their kill count was lower than the Order, simply because there were fewer things flowing their way, but they were securing a whole cardinal direction from the breach into the dungeon.  And their numbers were only growing over time.

”No need to be rude about it.”  Watcher laughed easily, and Planner had to remind themself that this was not a friend.  This was barely even an ally of convenience, for all that he composed himself so fluidly in the presence of something like what Planner was.  “I’m here to coordinate.”  And then Watcher’s face turned sour.  “And to investigate why you have a spawn in your company.”

Planner knew exactly what was meant, and went for precision targeted ignorance instead, using hostility to mask information.  ”If you are speaking of Ishah, or any of the ratroaches, I will be removing your memories of how to chew solid food.”  Planner threatened glibly.

Watcher shook his head, snorting at the small bit of unplayful humor.  He lowered his voice, leaning over the map that Planner considered screening parts of with their tentacles as the human muttered to him.  “The thing that looks like a girl.  This one has wings for some reason, but… it's a saint-spawn.”

”Saint… your term for paladins?”  Planner inquired.

”Like the kid that saved my ass?  No.”  Watcher exhaled.  “They’re… James, right?  Your paladin is more like what I am.  We’re just good at our jobs.  Saints are something else.  Not like you, or me, or anyone that’s alive.  They’re walking natural disasters, and-“

Planner grabbed an opportunity, and attempted a social parry.  “Oh, you are referring to the Last Line Of Defense.”  And now, the riposte.  “You will not find him here, I do not regret saying.  He has been unhelpful in handling the Stratified Underburbs in the past, and our habit of stealing his… I will not call them spawn, even if you will… but stealing away his people has made him rather upset with us.”

Watcher leaned back, tipping his head with a brief look of raised eyebrow confusion, before he brushed at his bloodied lapel.  “You’re stealing spawn?  What does that even…”

”Sir, please.”  Planner said with a rippling sigh from all of their manifested tentacles around the table and tent.  “Cam is a valued member of our organization, and also the adopted daughter of the man who is going to repeatedly hit you in the head with a chair if you do not stop using that term for her.  Her breakaway from the Last Line took an effort of will and a leap of faith I do not believe I would be capable of myself.  It would be polite to call her something else.”

”…Well.  I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve seen something new.  Might as well be today!”  Watcher cheerfully recovered from his discomfort.  “You say the saint won’t be here?”

”Unlikely.  Shall I take this to mean that you are ideologically opposed to their kind?”  Planner asked.  “The Order of Endless Rooms knows of several.  I could monitor the local area for their presence.”

Watcher brightened up.  “Now that would be rather helpful indeed!  Our own information gathering capacity took a bit of a hit recently.”  He shook his head with a theatric sigh that Planner saw the false emotion of.  “I can’t say I approve of a… of your association.  But it really isn’t a priority.  And even it isn’t what the Coalition is for, we aren’t going to sit here and let people die.  What can you tell us about this bastard of a genus loci?”

There was a begrudging amount of respect that Planner could bring to bear on that particular sentiment.  These people, from everything they understood, were rather evil.  They used human bodies as mindless weapons, the true person suppressed, locked away.  And they had no discernment when it came to the embodiments; their saints.  But Watcher at least was practical, and not a true monster, only part of one.  And unlike an embodiment, they could prioritize.

Also, Planner held no animosity for the victims of the Coalition.  And they deserved every edge that they could give them.

”Raindrops-And-Gloom, please produce copies of our documents on known watcher and survivor hazards.  And mister Watcher, if you step over to the side, mister Chen will provide you with details on our deployment and where your forces would be most helpful, if you wish to supplement our teams.”  Planner coiled their tentacles in sharp right angles, boxy spirals forming around the edge of the table.  “But I hope you are capable of hurrying.  Because larger things and more things are coming through, and we have only so much ammunition.”

While Planner’s subordinates moved to their direction and Watcher moved to try his casual charming attitude on other people in the Order, Planner refocused on the map.

Hopefully, whoever was available had just been sent to the last anchor.  Hopefully that would be the end of it.

But Planner didn’t even know who was left for Nate to send.  And that was an issue they needed to rectify, right away.

They couldn’t shape a conflict if they didn’t know what the pieces of it were.

_____

Daniel was having a very, very bad day.

Someone had told him the other day that he’d been in the Order since before the Order had existed, and Daniel felt like that was an insane thing to say.  It was wrong, at the very least.  He’d come creeping back well after James and Anesh had started using the weird business flex space as a clubhouse and called it a Lair.  Well after everyone had started to solidify.  And also after he and Path had fucked off to go… just… away.

He wasn’t a stranger to the concept of running away from stuff.  The Order was kind of the first time he’d come back after fleeing, though.  And since then, it had felt like everything had gotten easier.

It was so weird how the simple decision to turn around, a decision he’d made alongside Path and had told exactly one other person about, had cascaded into him being a whole different person than he ever was before.  Daniel knew it was kind of funny that every time he talked to James, he coincidentally had some kind of recent story about going camping or delving or something that he got to use, and he knew Path thought it was hilarious the way Daniel balked at the other newer knights looking up to him.  He put up with her teasing though.

Actually he loved her teasing.  And she loved his.  And they loved each other, somehow having inexplicably found each other in a world where their situation required a kidnapping, a dungeon intervention, and a cascade of insane circumstance in order to come to be.

He kind of wished Path was still manifested around him right now, but that would be a bad idea, because he’d probably end up bleeding on her feathers.

Daniel was laying propped up with his back against a big blue metal water tank, in a parking lot that he was pretty sure was supposed to have fewer cigarette butts in it.  One of his legs sat twisted underneath the other, something broken there that shouldn’t be, while a pair of bullets sat buried through his armor and in one of his lungs.

It had been going so well.  It had even still been a little daylight on the way in, though as soon as they’d gotten too close to the spike, the natural light had been purged by the Underburbs’ growing control.  Even if it hadn’t linked up to the dungeon’s own breach yet, it was like the area was mimicking what the Underburbs would eventually try to make it on purpose; walls turning into white siding that slid and writhed like it was settling organically, darkness shading out what lights were on even if it couldn’t crush the illumination entirely.  No monster spawns at least, but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that Daniel had been separated from his small team, and ambushed.  And the ambusher might look human, but Daniel knew that didn’t mean shit.  He’d worked with a human for months and that guy had still tried to feed him to a dungeon for fucking money.

Fortunately for his immediate survival, much like Frank, this mother fucker just had to gloat.

”Well well well.  Look at what we have here!  A fucking twink!”  The man sauntering over looked like if someone had skinned a human down to the bright red still-living flesh, and then dipped them repeatedly in a vat of skin substitute until they were mooooostly covered.  Angry red cracks that were almost glowing in the false dusk covering his hefty face and hands as he approached Daniel, a hand cannon spinning irresponsibly on one finger.  “Bet you’ll be a prize, huh?  Won’t cha?”  He stopped just outside kicking range and stood with one hand on his hip, looking down at Daniel and the trail of blood that had been left as the knight had dragged himself in between the water tanks that took up half this weird L-shaped parking lot.  “Well?  Fucking say something, twink.”  The Underburbs delver kicked Daniel’s leg.  The unbroken one, fortunately.

Daniel looked up at him with watering eyes.  Part of him felt like something had gone incredibly wrong in his life.  Part of him felt regret, that this might be all he ever got to do.  Part of him felt like sighing, but he slammed that part behind a locked door before he ripped something in his lungs.

”Hey, can you hand me my gun?”  Daniel asked.  “I need it for something.”

The predator’s gaze moved through confusion, and then he started to laugh, before catching himself and kicking Daniel again, harder.  “Hey fuck you!  You lost, yeah?  You fucking lost!  That means you’re mine.  And I’m gonna take my time on you, before I cut the gem out of your neck.”

Daniel nodded.  He’d already heard about where power crystals came from, and what these guys did to get them.  No one actually knew if there was some kind of special interaction with other delvers, but they seemed to think so.  Of course, he also knew his own loot drop would look like an orb, and that it would cause crippling pain to whoever used it, so he considered just letting them deal with that.

”Yeah, I-“ Daniel coughed, the spike of agony going through his chest reminding him that he wasn’t allowed to banter like everyone else always got to.  “I disagree.”  His voice shook.

”Oh?  Yeah?  What the fuck are you gonna do about it?”  That gun came up to point at Daniel’s face, and with it came the fear he’d probably never be able to get rid of, the fear that came with someone who was willing to kill you having the power to do that with the push of a button, and then holding that button up into your line of sight.  Daniel fucking hated guns.  “Yeah, you’re probably not worth it, are you?  Kill you here.  Solve a problem.  Sounds fun.”  The delver licked his lips, his tongue covered in the same meaty red cracks as the rest of him.  “What do you think about that?”  His voice oozed malice.

Daniel closed his eyes and smiled.  “I think…” he gasped out, “I think my wife is going to make your day worse than mine.”  He said with the last solid breath he could get.

The other delver went quiet.  And then started bellowing out a laugh that Daniel heard shift away from him slightly.  “Oooooh, your wife!  How big’s your wife’s dick, huh?  Fuck you!  You don’t get to make jokes when you’re dying, I make jokes when you’re dying!”

There was a single gunshot.

Daniel shifted himself up on his right side, adjusting where the gunshot wounds were tugging on his skin.  Another gunshot went off, and he tried sliding his leg into a better position before it fell asleep and was broken, but that didn’t work so he gave up.

”What the fuck?!”  Came a shout.

He opened his eyes, and looked at where a human monster was almost methodically putting bullets in a line across the water tank he was sitting against at head level, and then repeating the process after turning away and picking a new metal cistern to shoot.  “Need help?”  Daniel asked, wincing in pain as he remembered the anti-banter curse he was under.

”What the fuck are you doing?!”  The delver screamed kicking Daniel in the head except actually slamming his boot into the metal pole of a chain link fence instead, bowing the hollow post over and nearly hitting himself in the head with it as he flailed.  “Fuck is this?!”

Daniel shrugged, though the delver didn’t see it.  He was busy charging at the fallen knight and then running past, into the strip of trees that separated this place from some kind of colorful culture center, and vanishing out of sight with a scream of frustration.

It took two minutes for him to get back into sight, and by then, he was smoking from his own fury.  Literally, smoke spilling out of his wound-like flesh as he stomped toward where Daniel was laying.  Or tried to.  It didn’t work.  He ran headfirst into a pipe that crossed between two of the tanks and jerked back with a howl of profanity.  One of his hands grabbed his forehead while another grabbed the two foot thick metal pipe and ripped it in half like paper, his gun dropped to the side as he lashed out.

Whirling, he spotted Daniel again, who gave him a small wave.  “What the fuck are you doing to me?!”  The predator delver demanded with a shout.

Daniel rolled his eyes.  This guy was acting like his mass murdering ass had any right to be indignant.  “I’m not doing anything.  Oh, I’m going to my kid’s play rehearsal later, though, after you fuck up killing me.”  He baited with a bloodied smile.

“You little shit!”  The man started to stalk forward, deliberately bringing each step down closer and closer, his casual sneakers that would have gotten anyone in the Order kicked out of a Climb delver hammering into the pavement.

He didn’t actually approach Daniel at all.  Instead, he was walking in place, face twisting into further rage as he struggled to progress anywhere.

He was still doing that, one hand reaching out like he was trying to force choke Daniel and failing at that too, when he got hit.

Daniel had not known how fast necroads could move.  He’d been in Townton, even done security and fought more than a few of the things that had gone berserk and tried to rip their way into the inhabited part of the city.  But he’d never seen them move like the one arrived bearing one of his teammates.  The reanimated constructs usually floated over asphalt with two of their claws, sometimes gliding in an almost beautiful fluid way as they spiraled around or over obstacles.

This one didn’t do that.  It showed up with all four claws not just hovering, but dipping into the mundane asphalt of the road.  Its central core, a double yellow slash of chipped paint crossing it on both sides, sat parallel to the ground to allow an armored figure to cling on curled over the rough black material.

And the necroad struck the locationally challenged Underburbs delver going eighty miles an hour, instantly shifting after the impact so that it was stretched out sideways, all four claws digging in and bleeding momentum off, its rider leaning with it with one of her feet touching the parking lot to help the effort, the sudden inertia not seeming to phase them in the slightest.  The sudden braking had the extra effect of making the bouncing body of its target look like it rocketed away before cratering the other length of the chain link fence covering this parking lot.

Then Cam flicked her leg over her volunteer mount, the necroad rising up to ‘standing’ behind her as she dismounted and started shooting the downed body of the mouthy would-be predator.

If Daniel had learned one thing tonight, it was that the Underburbs delvers were all assholes.  Which was perfect for the Order, actually.  Not just because killing them felt deeply justified, but also because while the Order’s policy of sharing everything and optimizing each other’s collective magic meant they all grew together, the Underburbs delvers were obviously not doing that.  As evidenced by the fact that this guy made the critical mistake of not being bulletproof enough in the face of a full magazine of flechette rounds.

“Don’t move.”  Cam said loudly as she turned from the dead delver and his own loot drop, running toward Daniel.

An orange lance of light, traced with lace plumage, shot past her from where Pathfinder had been hiding on the man’s back, and slammed into Daniel in a furtive embrace.  “Yes do not move.  For a very long time.”  Pathfinder ordered him.  “Please do not move.  I had to draw too much for that.  Borrowing against all future travel.  It isn’t safe, just… just stay here.  Stay with me, please.”  She spoke in a fast paced hammering of words as her peacock feathers and dozen balanced eyes and arms bloomed across his damaged body and armor.

”Moving sounds awful, yeah.”  Daniel didn’t nod.  His neck was way too stiff for that.  “Wait, how not safe this time?”  Navigators could do some amazing stuff, real magic in a way Daniel loved, but the mana pool they drew on was, as Path had said, future travel.  A misadventure or two was fine, even fun most of the time, but…

”If you take a step, you are going to die.”  Pathfinder told him with utter certainty.

”Ah.”  Daniel caught the hand Cam was using to check his pulse and unhook one of his armor straps.  “Over there.”  He pointed across the lot to where the detonator he’d been holding was sitting.  “Probaly easier than…”

Cam nodded, and moved with the same speed she did during an actual fight.  No hesitation to trust him that he’d be okay while she got to the simple little trigger mechanism and hit the button on it.

Behind Daniel somewhere, the charges placed on the Underburbs anchor went off, and the whole thing toppled.

Injured and bloody, and starting to really legitimately fear that he was going to miss Nipi’s theater thing, Daniel flipped off the sky.  “Get out.”  He told the Underburbs.

[Intruder : Deep : +9 Skill Points]

Daniel closed his eyes again.  He wasn’t going to die here.  That would be way too stupid after all this.  He was just going to sit, and listen to Pathfinder fuss at him, and Cam talk into her radio from twenty feet away.

”Anchor down.  Three predators killed.”  There was a pause from the vaguely draconic valkyrie they’d sent Daniel along with.  “Okay.”  She said with overt relief.  “We’re on the way back to… hm.  I will be back soon.  I need to move a wounded knight to the quarantine area in a way that does not involve actual moving.”

Daniel liked the sound of that.  It probably meant he could take a nap before he had to go into surgery.  “Hey.”  He tried to tell Pathfinder through shallow breaths.  “Hey, you have to go to the play tonight.  It’s important.”

”I have to stay with you.”  She retorted.  “Until someone replaces your blood.  And your sense of timing.”

”I have great timing, I’m hilarious.”  Daniel said, looking over at the shredded corpse of their ambusher.  “Look, my jokes are killing ‘em tonight.”

Pathfinder’s wide peacock feathers shivered with laughter she tried to repress, small beaded tears of glowing liquid smoke forming in the edges of her eyes. ”Shut up.”  She told him.  “Just shut up, until we’re home, or I’m adding you to the list.”

Daniel had never gotten a clear answer on what that meant, whenever she said it.

But he still shut up until he was laying on something less awkward than a parking lot that someone really needed to sweep more often.

_____

”That’s it?”  James asked, looking out at the pure unadulterated perfect sliver of totally normal sunset.

”That’s it!”  Anesh laughed with relief.  “Alanna.  Alanna look, that’s it!”

Alanna looked.  Both at the ruin of the building they’d gone through to kill this last anchor, the smoke in the air, the fire that was still going, and the corpses of humans and dungeon spawn alike they’d left in their wake.  Looked at Arrush sadly staring at yet another ruined sword, looked at one of Anesh picking at the stinging disinfectant on his arm, looked at James grinning like an idiot at the sun, looked at another Anesh trying to collect the dozen blue orbs that had dropped from either a split pouch somewhere or a lot of destroyed dungeontech.

Then she looked at the sunset herself.

She supposed, somehow, that was it.

It didn’t feel like they’d done enough.

But then, she remembered something important James had told her, either yesterday or two years ago.  The whole point of preparing was to do the effort ahead of time.  They’d ‘done’ way too much, or maybe exactly enough, it didn’t matter.  What mattered was the effect.

The effect, in this case, was so few casualties that most of their costs on this operation were going to be hiring contractors to unfuck damaged homes.  The effect was a city that barely knew it had been targeted for death.  The effect was a maybe-sort-of contact and possible line of investigation into another group like them, a real bounty of information more powerful than any magic.  The effect was an Underburbs that had just been kicked in the teeth and weakened in its capacity to do this again, losing over twenty of its pet delvers to the ruthless determination of the Order’s response.

The effect was that… yeah.

”That’s fucking it.”  Alanna said, slinging an arm around James and Arrush’s shoulders.  “Anesh!  Anesh get in here!  Give me an 80’s movie ending!”

”…what does that mean?”  One Anesh asked, while another opened up his mind to the internet now that the potential infection vector was gone.  “Do you want me to play that Don’t You Forget About Me song?  I can’t do that, I don’t have a speaker.”

”I do!”  Watcher-Under-Stone offered up that information, and then continued with, “And it is for personal use only.”

Anesh nodded appreciatively to the camraconda, and then stopped nodding, huffing out a laugh from all his present bodies as the quintessential ending credits music started playing anyway.

James didn’t hold back his own laugh.  “Okay.”  He didn’t give a shit anymore if he overused that word.  “Let’s go get scrubbed down, and clean this mess up.  Oh, wait, better idea!”  He snapped his fingers as he untangled himself from where Alanna’s armor had caught on his own.  “Let’s tell Watcher he has to do it!”

”…That is going to get confusing.”  Watcher-Under-Stone said.

”I know, but it’s a tradition.”  James smiled.

And then he stopped wasting time, and got his coterie moving.