The Veiled Pinnacle was still, save for the rhythmic thunk of knives against wood. Eugene sat at a long, battered table, slowly chopping away at a pile of bizarre, hand-shaped root vegetables. The fingers twitched when touched. He tried not to think about it.

  Across from him, Krungus hovered over his own pile, humming to himself as he prepared to impart what could only be described as "wisdom."

  “Precision in magic,” Krungus intoned, lifting one of the hand-roots as if it were a sacred artifact, “is like precision in cooking. You must—”

  He brought the knife down.

  And completely missed.

  The vegetable flopped off the table, skittering away like a startled crab. Eugene blinked. Krungus acted as though nothing had happened, merely clearing his throat and reaching for another.

  “As I was saying. You must approach it with patience, control, and an understanding of its natural form.”

  This time, he made a perfect one-inch cube.

  Then, immediately after, he botched the next three cuts, leaving behind a pile of wildly uneven chunks. Without breaking eye contact, Krungus casually swept the deformed pieces off the table with his sleeve.

  “See?” he said, beaming. “Balance. Harmony. Precision.”

  Eugene stared at the pile. He’s trying to be Mr. Miyagi, he thought, but he’s more like the Cat in the Hat—grinning while the house burns down, making everything worse and calling it a lesson.

  “So, if I mess up a cut,” Eugene asked, picking up his own knife, “I should just pretend it didn’t happen and sweep it under my sleeve?”

  Krungus scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Eugene gestured at the table. “That’s exactly what you just did.”

  Krungus gasped in mock offense. “You wound me, lad! This is a refined and ancient method of pedagogy.”

  “It’s lying.”

  Krungus turned dramatically, placing a hand on his chest. “And yet, I endure.”

  Eugene smirked. He wasn’t going to let Krungus win that easily. “Alright, fine. I’ll play along. But if these things start crawling around the kitchen later because I didn’t cut them right, I’m blaming you.”

  “You should blame him,” grunted B’doom, who had been silently chopping with mechanical precision the entire time.

  B’doom, despite his usually quiet demeanor, had very strong opinions about the city's food systems. He didn’t trust restaurants or inns, and he definitely didn’t trust food stalls. The very idea of consuming something prepared by an unknown hand filled him with deep, existential dread. As a result, he had taken it upon himself to cultivate and process his own vegetables and fruits, ensuring that at least some of the City’s produce was grown under his watchful, ever-distrustful gaze.

  Recently, he had established a new garden near the location of the old Shroom Zoo, an area once designed for fungal tourism but now long abandoned and overgrown. There, his plants grew at dramatically accelerated rates, either due to his own druidic influence or simply out of sheer terror at disappointing him. Since Eugene and Krungus had found themselves partaking in B’doom’s produce on more than one occasion—often with begrudging acknowledgment of its superior quality—they had agreed to help him with some of the more tedious chores as repayment.

  Krungus merely winked. Eugene rolled his eyes and got back to work.

  Krungus continued chopping, getting increasingly theatrical in his movements, as if performing some grand cooking ritual. He exaggerated every slice, pausing dramatically before each cut, then shaking his head and making vague, mystical gestures over the vegetables.

  “The knife is merely an extension of your will,” Krungus murmured. “It cuts not because of force, but because of intent.”

  Eugene raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure it cuts because it’s sharp.”

  “Bah!” Krungus waved a hand dismissively, nearly knocking over B’doom’s perfect stacks of diced vegetables. The druid shot him a look.

  “You know,” Eugene continued, “if you actually explained things in a normal way, I might learn faster.”

  Krungus frowned as if this had never occurred to him before. “And yet, you are learning.”

  Eugene sighed. "Yeah. In the same way someone learns how to drive when their instructor is throwing fireworks out the window."

  Krungus grinned. "Excellent metaphor which barely makes sense to me! Shall I steal it?"

  "Be my guest."

  The peace was shattered by the heavy crash of the Veiled Pinnacle’s front doors being thrown open.

  Brenna and Rent, two of the city’s paladins, stumbled inside, panting and red-faced. Brenna doubled over, hands on her knees.

  “This is ridiculous,” she wheezed. “We need a better system for finding this damned magic tower.”

  “Agreed,” Rent muttered, before thrusting two newspapers onto the table.

  “We have a problem.”

  Krungus, who had just finished slicing a single perfect cube, sighed heavily before setting his knife down. He looked at the paladins with an expression that hovered somewhere between exhaustion and mild curiosity.

  “What kind of problem?”

  Brenna hesitated before saying, “One of your bridges collapsed. Three merchants died.”

  The room fell silent.

  Krungus stared at her, adjusting his glasses. “My bridge?” he repeated slowly.

  Rent cleared his throat. “That’s what they’re saying. It fell last night. The morning papers—both of the popular ones in these districts—are already blaming you.”

  Eugene leaned forward, frowning. “Both papers?”

  Brenna tapped the first newspaper. The Aelintheldaar Gazetteer.

  Krungus let out a sharp breath through his nose. The Gazetteer was one of the city's oldest and most respected newspapers, which, in practice, meant it was painfully slow and infuriatingly thorough. Established over 800 years ago, the paper prided itself on "deliberate journalism"—a philosophy that insisted news should be aged for accuracy, like cheese. Unfortunately, this meant by the time they published anything, the entire city had already heard the news via street gossip, wizardly divination, or, in one case, an interpretive dance that turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

  Eugene peered over Krungus’s shoulder at the article. "Huh. Says here that your bridge collapse is being compared to some disaster fifteen hundred years ago."

  Krungus’s eye twitched. "Ah yes, the Gazetteer and their mandatory historical context rule. Why report on a single event when you can also include a 500-word essay on the history of bridge-making and a biography of the engineer’s great-grandmother?"

  Rent, looking mildly amused, added, "You made it onto page two as well. The Editorial Review Council apparently debated whether this warranted a full spread, but decided they needed at least five more footnotes before finalizing their position."

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  Brenna smirked. "Oh, and they included a sidebar questioning whether archmages of ‘advanced age’ should be allowed to construct public infrastructure."

  Krungus scoffed, tossing the paper onto the table. "And yet, when I fix broken things with magic, they also complain! 'Reckless wizardry,' they say. 'Unchecked arcane intervention!' But the moment I build something new with my own hands, suddenly I'm an incompetent old man making shoddy bridges!" He exhaled through gritted teeth. "And people wonder why I don’t read the bloody Gazetteer."

  Rent nudged the second paper toward him. The City Screamer.

  Krungus groaned audibly. "Oh, fantastic. The rhyming menace."

  The City Screamer was not just a tabloid; it was a theatrical production, a cult, and possibly a sentient entity. It had no known owner, no listed headquarters, and every issue appeared mysteriously overnight in stacks across the city. Some said it was run by a deranged ex-bard who had lost a bet against a fae lord and was now cursed to write in couplets forever. Others claimed it was secretly written by a rogue Jennie of Misinformation, committed to making the news as confusing as possible.

  Eugene raised an eyebrow. "Wait, doesn’t this paper only do rhyming headlines?"

  Brenna nodded grimly. "If it rhymes, it crimes. That’s their motto. "

  “What the hell’s that even mean?” Eugene laughed.

  “I dunno. But it does rhyme.”

  Eugene squinted at the front page. "So, let me get this straight—if someone can prove a story false within twenty-four hours, they have to print a retraction?"

  "Yes, in bright pink ink, and it still has to rhyme," Rent added. "The record for fastest retraction is twelve minutes."

  Krungus let out a heavy sigh, picking up the paper. "Mages’ Blunder Turns Bridge to Thunder! Innocent Plundered! City Encumbered!"

  He stared at the wildly exaggerated illustration of himself, drawn with glowing red eyes and arms outstretched, cackling as multiple bridges exploded behind him.

  “I do not cackle.”

  Eugene smirked. “Are you sure?”

  Krungus shot him a withering look. “And yet, this paper will have people believing I personally detonated the bridge while laughing like a madman.”

  “Technically, it doesn’t say that,” Brenna pointed out. "The Screamer never outright lies, they just phrase things so they sound worse."

  Krungus set the paper down with a huff. "Of course. Because when the choice is between ‘accurate’ and ‘entertaining,’ they always choose the latter."

  "To be fair," Rent said, flipping a few pages, "they once implied a giant rat was elected to city council, and it turned out it was just a metaphor for corruption."

  Eugene shook his head. "You live in a weird city."

  Krungus pinched the bridge of his nose. "Tell me something I don’t know."

  After a pause he asked,“And they know it was my bridge, how, exactly?”

  Brenna hesitated.

  “They, uh… both say the same thing.” She winced.

  “Which is?” Krungus asked, voice low.

  Rent sighed.

  “They say it was your age, sir. And your… shoddy craftsmanship.”

  Krungus stood motionless for a moment, gripping the edge of the table. His lips pressed into a thin line before he finally spoke, voice tinged with rising paranoia. “Fascinating. Truly fascinating. I build bridges, I repair infrastructure, I actually help this blasted city, and for years, neither of these papers could be bothered to write so much as a footnote about me. But now?” He gestured at the newspapers with a sharp flick of his wrist. “Now they’re the city’s finest sleuths? The Gazetteer, of all things, suddenly finds the motivation to report on time? The Screamer wastes its precious rhyming resources on me?”

  Eugene and the paladins exchanged wary glances, but Krungus was already on a roll.

  “Oh, but of course,” he continued, pacing now, glasses glinting in the lamplight. “They don’t write about the actual threats in this city, no, no. They don’t report on warlocks selling hexed trinkets in the market, or how the city’s sentry spells are degrading far faster than anyone expected. But the moment I’m an easy target? The moment they can paint me as a bumbling old fool?”

  He jabbed a finger at the table. “It’s coordinated. Someone’s turning the city against me. And I swear by the Almighty Weave, I will find out who.”

  Brenna hesitated. “I mean… it’s just bad luck. Isn’t it?”

  Krungus slowly turned to her, eyes narrowing. “Nothing is just bad luck.”

  He resumed pacing, hands clasped behind his back, muttering furiously. "Did they park something extraordinarily heavy on it? Did some idiot merchant stack too many crates of enchanted anvils? Was there a goblin tunneling operation beneath it? No, no, they would have left pamphlets. Did some upstart wizard try out a weightlessness spell and accidentally cause structural collapse when it failed? Or was it sabotage? Gods, what if it was sabotage? What if this is all part of some grand scheme to erode public faith in me? First the bridge, then the slanderous headlines, next thing you know, I’ll be arrested for high treason because someone trips on their own robe and blames my ‘reckless arcane presence.’”

  Eugene gave Brenna and Rent a look, but neither of them seemed ready to comment.

  “Maybe we should… look at the bridge before we assume there was a coordinated attack?” Eugene suggested cautiously.

  Krungus stopped mid-pace, inhaled deeply, then let out a long, weary sigh. He adjusted his glasses. “Fine. Show me the bridge.”

  The bridge was gone.

  Where there had once been a sturdy, if unremarkable, stone crossing, now only jagged remnants jutted from the riverbanks, like broken teeth in a ruined mouth. Chunks of masonry lay scattered in the shallow water below, some half-submerged, others still slowly sinking. The current carried smaller debris downstream, the remnants of a structure that, according to the newspapers, had betrayed its builders and collapsed in shame.

  Krungus stood at the edge, hands on his hips, glasses glinting in the dim light. He frowned deeply, inspecting the destruction with an expression that hovered somewhere between insulted and mildly inconvenienced.

  “Well,” Eugene said, glancing at the wreckage, “it’s definitely broken.”

  Krungus huffed. “Yes, thank you, boy. I can see that.” He took a step forward, peering down at the stonework as if it had personally wronged him. “But the question isn’t what happened. The question is how.”

  Brenna and Rent, still catching their breath from their frantic journey, exchanged a look before Rent cleared his throat. “How doesn’t change the fact that it happened, sir.”

  Krungus ignored him. He turned on his heel and started pacing, waving a hand toward the wreckage. “This wasn’t my fault.”

  Eugene raised an eyebrow. “I mean… the bridge is in the water.”

  “And that proves nothing!” Krungus shot back, pointing a finger at Eugene as if he had accused him of high treason. “Do you know how many things could have caused this? Do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Some fool could have overloaded it with cargo. A poorly-tuned levitation spell could have interfered with the weight distribution. An errant elemental, a rogue time dilation, a particularly aggressive duck—the possibilities are endless!”

  Brenna crossed her arms. “The stones cracked clean through. That suggests structural failure, not an outside force.”

  Krungus turned sharply, robes flaring. “Oh, does it, Inspector Brenna? And I suppose you’re an expert in collapse patterns, are you?”

  Brenna narrowed her eyes. “I did take a class on battlefield fortifications.”

  Krungus threw up his hands. “Oh, wonderful! A single class on battlefield fortifications? My mistake! Clearly, I should defer to your superior knowledge of architectural catastrophe! Shall I summon a chair for you to lecture from?”

  Rent sighed. “Sir, you built this bridge yourself last week. No one else was involved.”

  Krungus spun back toward the rubble, muttering under his breath. “I refuse to believe that I miscalculated.” He crouched, running a hand over one of the severed stone edges. His fingers traced the break, his brow furrowing. “Something isn’t right.”

  Eugene watched him work, arms crossed. “So, you do think something happened to it?”

  Krungus was silent for a long moment. Then, without looking up, he muttered, “This shouldn’t have happened.”

  Brenna and Rent exchanged another glance, this time more uncertain. Brenna shifted on her feet. “Even if that’s true, the city’s already made up its mind.”

  Krungus exhaled sharply through his nose. “Then the city is wrong.”

  Eugene glanced at the water, watching the current tug at the shattered remains of the bridge. “What are you thinking?”

  Krungus stood up, dusting off his hands. His expression was unreadable. “I’m thinking,” he said slowly, “that if someone wanted to turn public opinion against me… this would be an excellent way to start.”