“As long as you have problems, you're still fighting.” -Cameron Lauder-

  _____

  Pendragon touched down in the parking lot of a Wal Mart, instantly setting James’ teeth on edge. It was a joke, I swear. He tried to think at the universe as hard as possible. He deliberately avoided thinking about how they weren’t here at the corporate box store to get in a fight, instead just focusing on keeping his stomach from turning over as Dave and Pendragon lurched the last three feet to the ground and ended one of the most aggressive extraction flights James had ever experienced with the two.

  And that was saying something, because he’d been in Pendragon when she was taking machine gun fire once.

  But they were on something of a time limit. As the aluminum and indestructible paper scales that separated the little seating pod inside Pendragon’s flank from the outside world fanned open, James hopped out and hit the pavement on unsteady feet. He wobbled partly from the adrenaline crash he was still handling, and partly because he was nauseous from Dave’s flying.

  The mentally fused Dave and Pendragon didn’t even give them some kind of jaunty sign off as the passengers left. Instead, as a trio of medics in protective gear rushed to help the struggling Camille onto a gurney, Pendragon ambled forward and then flattened her body back to the ground. Paper wings raised upward to give access to her passenger pods, long neck stretched out to look down on the people around her as a rescue team ran to take the place of James and the others.

  The people about to take off included Alanna. And James felt his throat catch as he watched the woman grab the edge of the Pendragon’s aluminum scales with both hands, her armored head with the custom fitted potion mask turning to spy James and meet her boyfriend’s eyes.

  ”Good luck!” James called, his throat dry, and Alanna raised one hand in response before she pulled herself inside Pendragon’s flank, the scale covering the gap tight as the big dragon lowered her wings and began skating forward on her wheeled claws to take off into the air with powerful wingbeats. James watched them go, his head turning up into the darkening night sky until he lost sight of them. “Good luck.” He whispered again.

  His moment was cut short as Ben ran up to them in the wake of Pendragon’s departure. “Welcome back! Follow me, we need to make a decision, and fast.” The obligate friend turned and started jogging through the half-filled parking spaces closer to the store itself, heading for the automated doors that slid open to let him in like he was just another shopper.

  James and his fellow paladins followed, but were stopped as they got closer by someone in scrubs. He was pretty sure it was Aaron, the long time nurse looking on edge outside of his normal environment underneath the mask. “Hold it.” He said, pointing at Simon who was closest to him. “Step here,” another point to indicate a spot on the ground off to the side, “and hold still.”

  Simon complied, and Aaron wasted no time using surprisingly deft motions with his thickly gloved hands to pull sticky notes off a pad and slap them against every part of Simon’s armor. The paper seeming to sink into the kevlar and hard plastic shell, and vanishing along with large portions of the gore and sludge. After that was done, the hard physicality of a manifested authority scoured across Simon’s body in a rough top to bottom sweep. Everything it pulled away - which James noted with some trepidation included at least a little hair - was dumped into a medical waste container, sealed, and set aside.

  ”Go. Next, you.” Aaron pointed again, and one by one, rapidly decontaminated the group before allowing them into the building.

  Inside was… normal. It was just normal. Lights on, sanitized music playing, people were even continuing their shopping. Though not everyone; James noticed pretty quickly that the Starbucks had all its tables in use by civilians who looked like a mix of worried and completely shell shocked. And farther back in the store as he was led past some of the aisles, the entire home and garden section was being used for more seating and places for people to wait out the disaster outside.

  This was where the Order was bringing everyone who was evac’d from inside the zone, and also anyone who had been stopped at the blockade who was waiting for news.

  It also wasn’t where they were being led. Instead, James followed Ben past the returns desk, and up a narrow flight of scuffed rubber-coated stairs. Through a cramped and awkwardly placed break room, past a desk that looked like it was in use mostly for storing people’s bags that didn’t fit into the tiny lockers, and into a far nicer conference room that had a little window overlooking the interior of the store.

  The room was already occupied, and Nate, wearing camo fatigues and looking so weird to James in the uniform, looked up at him as he entered. “Good, you’re here.” He said with a commanding voice that James also didn’t hear from him very often. The stocky man jerked his chin toward the other people already seated. “This is Jonas Kep, Springfield P.D., Larry Hadov, fire and rescue, Mario Intoyo, militia, and Vex, militia but like us.”

  James looked at the four people who weren’t Order that he’d just been introduced to in rapid succession. “Hi.” He said, still rattled from the assault and not thinking at full capacity yet. “James. This is Simon, Alex, and Spire.”

  ”You named your drone?” Mario asked, the man shifting impatiently in his seat as he scratched at the side of his shaved head.

  Spire-Cast-Behind turned her lens on him, irising it to a narrow point. “Interesting fact,” she said with her rising and falling voice, “if someone does not acknowledge me as a person, it gives me the power to kill them whenever I want.”

  ”Yikes.” James let slip out without meaning to. He had just learned that Spire had the Climb spell that let her slice up people who were unaware of her, he just didn’t know it worked on people who saw her but thought she wasn’t a person. “Let’s gloss over that and move on. What’s the situation?” He asked Nate directly.

  Nate held up a hand, and the protest of the militia leader silenced instantly, leading James to wonder what the hell had been happening here while he’d been a few miles away fighting for his life. “Planner, please.” He requested, a collection of geometrically precise glowing tentacles forming around him and then framing themselves into a large ethereal pane that Planner used as a live-update presentation screen.

  Maybe this was what had been going on. James caught Alex snickering silently at the way the police representative was clearly uncomfortable about the display. He also realized he was still on his feet, and claimed one of the worn and ripped office chairs that surrounded the table, settling in for a rest that would let the exercise potion do its work a little faster. The other paladins sat too, while to his right, the heavy woman who’d been introduced as Vex gave him a nod, one hand resting on the motorcycle helmet she had on the table in front of her.

  ”Let’s start with the good. Your strike was successful in clearing the Underburbs out of this area. Roughly three square miles back from under its control.” Nate spoke as Planner shifted their protection into a split overhead map of the area and a video feed from a drone with significant altitude.

  Simon interrupted. “Plan don’t show that, there’s still watcher traps out there.” He said quickly.

  ”I am filtering. I have no bones to break nor skin to flay, do not worry.” Planner’s pen scratch voice filled the room.

  ”Kinda hot.” The woman next to James muttered.

  James leaned in to whisper conspiratorially. “Sorry, Plan’s ace.”

  ”How come everyone with tentacles is? This timeline sucks.” Vex sighed theatrically, and James decided he liked her with a wide grin.

  Nate ignored them, which was probably smart, just keeping up his speech knowing that they didn’t actually have time to waste on banter. “Now bad news. First, there’s a really strong ‘look away’ effect around the border. Our friends here” he jutted a thumb toward the cop and firefighter, “are the ones who happened to be approaching. We don’t have large scale backup.”

  ”Tried radioing the station, and calling.” Larry said, tugging at the suspenders over his navy blue shirt with the local fire and rescue emblem on it. “Sent someone, but he hasn’t come back.”

  ”We’re covered?” James asked Nate. “As in, this didn’t stop us from getting a call.”

  ”It is wide scale but weak.” Planner said, before pausing in their motions for a second. “That is inaccurate. It is wide scale, and I am stronger than it.” The infomorph corrected.

  And James suddenly realized that they had never really asked Plan just how strong he had gotten. He’d made a comment once to Jeanie that her daughter Ava was essentially walking around with the mental equivalent of a rocket launcher while she had Hidden with her, and that was still basically true. But Hidden was an assignment that was devoted to a single person, and didn’t seem even interested in spreading. Planner, though… part of Planner was with hundreds of people in the Order, and the assignment’s core self was distributed across at least thirty members of Research. If Hidden was a rocket launcher, Planner was probably more dangerous than the orbital laser the Order technically had.

  “Good.” James said. “Sorry, Nate?”

  “Good news,” Nate continued from the slight distraction, “the dungeon’s life can’t survive long outside of it. Bad news, ‘not long’ is still long enough to cause problems. Rescue teams are already moving in to get as many people back behind us as we can.”

  ”We’ll be part of that.” Jonas, the cop, said.

  ”Us too!” It wasn’t clear why Nate had introduced the rude man as ‘militia’, but James was a bit surprised at the vehemence of his statement. “This is my home, dammit! What’re the fucking guns for if not this?”

  That… was a surprisingly reasonable and heartfelt statement. James upped his estimation of him by a notch, and considered seeing how he felt about nonhuman life afterward. Just in case he wanted to do more recruiting.

  “The problem comes from here, and here.” Nate pointed and let Planner shift the projected map around. “Centered roughly three miles past your primary target, we’ve got the same expression. No natural light penetrating, mist building up, and we’re seeing fewer and fewer people coming out.” He took a fast breath, projecting a professional commanding mood into the room as he set aside any emotion that he might have had for the victims. “So we need to decide what to do about that.”

  ”Call the army?” Larry suggested. When the others looked at him, he shrugged. “What? You’re all immune to the… the thing. But you don’t have tanks.”

  ”The man has an excellent point.” Spire-Cast-Behind said with a bob of her body. “James, steal us a tank.”

  ”Please don’t say that in front of the literal police.” James said. “Also that is a good point. Why aren’t the national guard here at least? We were trying to contact… anyone.”

  Nate’s look was grim. “Something is disrupting every attempt. I sent someone directly via telepad to the nearest base and they haven’t reported back. That was half an hour ago.” He continued with similar bad news. “FBI contacts aren’t replying either. We’ll keep trying to reach out, but this situation seems self-isolating.”

  ”Sweet buttered Christ that’s spooky.” The firefighter muttered.

  ”What if… what if we weren’t asking for help?” James asked, voicing a stray thought. He got raised eyebrows from Nate, the thin lines of hair finally regrown to the point that he could do that and have it look like something. “We have one mortar shell left. But the local Guard base would have more, right? What if we rob them?”

  “…You can’t-“

  ”Kep, shove it.” Larry cut the officer off. “But also, kid, you can’t bomb people’s houses.”

  James set his mouth in a line. “It worked well so far. If we can actually find the targets, and they aren’t covered, we could just bomb them. Right? If that doesn’t work at least we can give people cover.”

  “I’m on it.” Ben said, leaving the room abruptly. “Keep talking, Plan will keep me informed.”

  As soon as the sound of his feet hitting the stairs faded, Vex looked around the room with a confused scowl. “Wait what the fuck.” She said, turning to stare after where Ben had gone.

  ”Don’t worry about it.” James told her, and then spoke up to project his voice. “Seriously. No one worry about that. Ben is one of ours, and he can’t turn that off. It’s not malicious.”

  ”It’s weird though.” Intoyo said, whining like he’d just had the last slice of pizza taken away. “You work like that?”

  ”Yes. So, Nate. Options.” James demanded.

  ”Option one. We shell the target sites and see if it works. If your- where’s Zhu?”

  ”Out of action for now.” James answered, hand running across an arm guard that should have feathers but was currently bare. “There’s other navigators though.”

  ”Yeah. Find the targets, send in teams to evacuate everyone still alive near them, then pound them into the dirt. That’s assuming we can acquire more ordinance.” Nate flicked one of Planner’s tentacles and the infomorph added a bullet point list to one side of his projection, along with a roster on the other. “Option two, for when it turns out that the National Guard base has fallen off the world; split you four up into two teams along with our best combatants, and press into enemy territory toward both targets. Hit them around the same time, make sure any delvers guarding them can’t reinforce each other, and knock them down.”

  ”I had to hit the spire pretty hard- sorry Spire, the… tower? It was a needle thing.” Simon shrugged. “I think most people would need explosives.”

  ”Explosives we have. Limited, but we have some.”

  ”We’ve got a winch on the engine, if that would do it.” Larry offered. “If you need something knocked over, it can do more than one guy can hit.” He said that, but he didn’t know exactly how hard Simon could hit something. Still, it was a maybe, and Planner put it on the board.

  James did some brief calculation of violence in his head. “How many people do we have here?” He asked. “Because the only reason we made it where we were going so fast was that we were lucky enough to not get swarmed, and when we did get swarmed, it was too late to stop us. If the places farther back are farther in, if they were taken first, then…” he clenched his hands into fists on the table, the dark reality that they hadn’t stopped nearly enough setting in. “Then they’re going to be more built up.”

  ”One hundred and sixteen combatants.” Planner said evenly. “Split among Responders, delvers, and shields. With a few unaffiliated knights as well.” They spun an eye-dotted tentacle to look at their own list. “The biggest problem would be coordinating large group movements. We have not trained for action on this scale.”

  ”Could you do it?” Alex asked.

  ”What?” Planner was momentarily taken aback.

  Alex pressed the infomorph. “Could you coordinate it. Us. If you were watching, and managing. Could you do it?”

  ”…Yes.” Planner said. “But I would do it badly. I am not a solider, nor a general. I do not know war. I could organize you and send you where you need to be, but if I did it as I know it, there would be unacceptable casualties.”

  To James, that meant there would be any casualties. But he was starting to realize that the Order was likely not going to get out of this without those. There was too much going on, too much required of them, and a cold pit in his stomach as he tried to push past that thought. “No news on why the dungeon is spreading? Also, hi,” he turned to the three normal men in the room, “we keep saying dungeon, have you guys been filled in on this, or do I sound like a fucking lunatic?”

  ”You guys have a dragon, I’m adapting.” Larry said.

  ”You do sound like a lunatic. But yeah, the dragon thing.” The militiaman said with a shrug.

  Vex rapped the top of her helmet. “What about me?”

  ”You fucking know what a dungeon is.” Alex shot her down rapidly before turning back to Nate. “What about containment? If… if we go in there, people are gonna get hurt. What if we box it in, and hold the line? Let it burn out? This doesn’t happen unless someone is pushing it, right? Eventually it’ll collapse.”

  ”Option three.” Nate said bluntly. “We fire off our one shot of the cooking spell, and burn the whole place down.”

  That was a very tempting thought. Well, the defensive action was, not the mass arson, especially not when there were people in there. “That sounds nice.” James said slowly. “But we don’t know what it’s doing, or why. And there’s a lot of space in each of those zones. A lot of houses. A lot of people we aren’t going to get to. Average population of a square mile in a place like this is about fifteen hundred. If we assume those zones have a… call it five mile diameter, we’re looking at… well, a good chunk of that is undeveloped nothing, but at least ten thousand people.” He splayed his fingers out on the table, wondering why his hands were itching so much in his gloves. “We can’t just leave ten thousand people to die.”

  ”It’s less than ten thousand by now.” Spire-Cast-Behind voiced the dark thought. “The Underburbs is moving fast. So we should stop talking and act.”

  ”Yeah. Let’s split up. Small teams with our most dangerous. I’ll take Cam with me, Simon can go with Alex and Spire, we can round out our numbers with a couple more. Do we have vehicles? I’d rather keep the dragons on search and rescue. They’re alive, I don’t want to risk them going too deep into the place that makes plagues. Maybe that’s dumb?” His question was answered as Planner ran off a list of the Horizon-modified delver vehicles they’d shifted over from Townton. “Alright. So…”

  Kep spoke up. “We can send a few patrol cars with you.” He said. “The lights will help, if it’s as dark in there as it looks.”

  ”That might be worth it.” Nate balanced the need for speed with the fact that the larger a group was, the more of a target it became. “You get it’ll be dangerous?”

  ”I’ll talk to my boys.” The man stood, and nodded at them. “If you’re sure…?”

  ”We’re sure.” James said confidently. Sure, at least, that every anchor they took out knocked the dungeon back. Sure that if they killed the Underburbs monsters, then fewer people would die. Sure that they weren’t going to be fast enough to save everyone.

  Twelve percent. The worst number of his life, omnipresent in the back of his mind this whole time, came to the fore of his thoughts. That was all the Underburbs had given him leeway to save last time, and even then, it had been disgustingly close.

  He refused to accept it this time. Refused to allow it.

  James stood up, exercise potion having run its course and leaving him feeling fresh. With no trace of blood or mud on his armor and boots, and his limbs feeling stronger than ever, it was almost like he’d be going into the next fight at his fully refreshed power. And really, that was true. He could do this. He could hit the Underburbs again and again, and as long as they had this fallback point, he could be his best doing it. Until it was off his fucking planet, and back in its own boundary.

  “What am I doing in all this?” Vex asked, standing along with James. “Me and my partner, we’re not… we’re not killers like you. But we’ve got some game.”

  ”Anything useful for decontamination?” James asked. “Cause this place fucking loves throwing plagues around, and we’re lucky it hasn’t had time to make any in its conquest zones yet.”

  ”Sorry, nah. My domain is oil, so unless that’s your problem, I’ve got nothing.”

  ”…Oi… what fucking weird ass magic are you working with?” James gave her a slightly hypocritical look as he followed the others down the stairs, the rhythmic thump thump thump of Spire-Cast-Behind’s coils slamming into each step ahead of him.

  The new girl gave him an unimpressed look. “You have a pet ghost octopus.” She accused James.

  ”He’s not a pet, but fair. Healing? Scouting? Defense?” He probed. “I don’t need your secrets but I need to know where to send you so you won’t die.”

  ”We can… we can probably pull some kind of last stand, if that’s what you really need…” All the confidence and cock-sure attitude was gone now.

  James sighed. “No.” He said. “What we need is to get as much done with as little loss as possible. Nate didn’t give you an assignment, so…” he tapped into the local Order network through his skulljack and made a quick check. “…go find the mustering tent for Recovery. You can help with keeping this place safe, and if you’ve got some way to keep everyone calm, that’d help too. But they’ll figure out what to do with you.” He really, really wanted to ask her a million questions about her team, her dungeon, her magic, her life. But there was no time, and if someone was uncertain about going into battle, and James didn’t know them, then he didn’t want them nearby when he drove into a horde of exploding pus-dogs again.

  “You seem like you know what you’re doing, so sure. Why do you-” Vex said from behind him before stopping as something in her pocket made a jaunty little beep. “Oh hey. My… uh… my friend just…” she trailed off. “Hey, stupid question. Do you know who the Last Line-“

  ”Nate!” James’ sharp bark of alarm got Nate’s attention real fast. Which was good, because he didn’t have time to waste on a pillar right now.

  He had a dungeon to fight.

  _____

  Nate’s daily life had never really been pleasant.

  When he was assigned to keep an eye on the Order, going ‘undercover’ in the most flimsy way possible, he’d actually gotten a taste of a normal life. Cook to the best of his considerable ability, manage the kitchen shipments, do a little scheduling, done. And sometimes cater a delve, but that was the same shit, just somewhere else. A normal job for a normal man.

  He hadn’t allowed himself to love it. And he was right to do so. Because responsibility followed ability, and as soon as it was clear that he knew more than JP about sneaky shit, the knight was pestering him for tips and tricks. And more than that, for a partnership of sorts. Running his own intelligence agency, for their own purposes. Then there were other rogues to train, other people he was supposed to give a shit about, other species he needed to learn the dietary requirements for, and… and Cam. That idiot kid was so much like him it would have hurt if he’d let it, and she needed a lot more help than anyone else.

  Every day was a constant series of attempts from what was needed to get in the way of what Nate wanted. What he wanted was to be perfecting his barbeque sauce recipe, and seeing if he could serve a camraconda enough ribs to put them in a coma. What he got was literal magic that somehow created more headaches than it solved, and the task of commanding a full on defensive military action.

  He didn’t have time for a pillar. He didn’t have patience for a pillar. And, fortunately, he was too busy being angry to really feel the fear he had for the man standing in the middle of the street.

  The Last Line Of Defense was wearing what looked like samurai armor, though with the purple orbs he’d been sucking down in his free time, Nate could see that it was a far cry from the movie prop it appeared as on the surface. That was armor. Real, actual armor, and probably better at doing its job than it looked.

  Then it was a flak vest, which Nate was a lot more comfortable with. Yelling at a guy who looked like he was proficient in the way of the samurai would be either too easy or too pathetic. Yelling at a soldier he could do.

  “You’re in our way.” Nate called, stopping fifty feet away from the pillar. The man was currently appearing as a coffee skinned figure with a nose that looked like it had been broken a hundred times and a scar crossing one eye. At Nate’s words, the man shifted slightly, skin lightening, frame widening, eye sockets pulling deeper. Nate didn’t really notice it, but he noticed himself not noticing; a single blink and the Last Line was different, and he couldn’t remember how he had been. Only that he had changed. “How the fuck does James keep track of these things.” He complained.

  “Interesting.” The Last Line Of Defense said, voice carrying over the ambiance of hundreds of humans racing about nearby, and the crack of gunfire from the nearby defensive positions. “You aren’t quite like the others.”

  ”Thanks. What do you want.” Nate got to the point.

  The Last Line sighed and took a drink from a metal hip flask that looked like it had taken a bullet itself at some point. “The lengths that humans will go to, just to struggle for people who are already lost, never ceases to astound me.”

  ”Thanks.”

  ”It was no compliment.” The pillar kept his arm held close across his chest, but one finger pulled away from the flask to point Nate’s way. “Your attempt is noble, but foolish. Your simple tools are bound to fail, and with your loss, the demon will gain more momentum than you steal.” He paused, and something about it compelled Nate to wait; it was a pause that added weight to his words, with no room for an interjection. “A strange turn. Stealing seems to be all you are good for, as you have made a habit of taking my daughters from me.”

  Nate’s face kept its steady form; unhappy, but in the normal way he was always unhappy. His palm rested on the butt of the pistol he wore at his side, but his fingers stayed splayed out as he answered calmly. “You’re talking about people like they’re things.” He said. “Besides that, we only ‘took’ two of them, and they’re both welcome to return to you when they’re good for it. Not like you have a mailing address.”

  ”It’s too late for them now, they are no longer mine. You’ve taken them so perfectly they can never be stolen back. A pity.” The thing the Order mockingly called Lloyed turned at the sound of an inhuman scream that was cut short by gunfire. “What do you hope to attain here?”

  ”A tactical victory.” Nate was compelled to answer, but not compelled to answer helpfully. He wondered if this was what being a pillar was like; people said things you had to reply to, and you gave them cryptic bullshit out of spite.

  ”Yes.” The Last Line of Defense told him. “You are not going to find triumphs nor glories here. This is not a place of heroism, it is a sepulcher in the making. Remove yourselves from the field. My daughters and I will handle what you lack the power to.”

  Nate chewed on nothing as he thought about it. “One of your kids is in the medical tent. This one we didn’t ‘steal’, but she got hurt during our first sortie. If you can do something for her, it would help to have another super soldier back in the field.”

  The Last Line inclined his head. “It is within my power to strengthen our world’s defenders.” He lowered his chin back to spear Nate with a gaze, both of them largely ignoring the shield team and a handful of locals moving hotwired SUVs out of the way so they could set up a resupply and fallback point. “But I will be direct. You are scratching at the door of affairs larger and more cataclysmic than you will ever be prepared to handle. Your kind are nothing new. You believe that having armed yourself, it makes you a soldier. But you are all fools for it. There is only one source of real soldiers for this battlefield, and you are nowhere near the threshold for it. You say I am in your way?” The hand holding a little tin cup gestured to his right where the repurposed police APC was idling and waiting for a paladin’s team to board. “Let me tell you this. You are in my way. And I will have you out of the place not meant for you, or suffer the cost.”

  Nate nodded. And then jerked his thumb to the side. “Let me tell you what I know.” He said, mouth dry, wishing he had his own stupid fucking shapeshifting flask. The piller probably had magic booze too. “You’re not the fucking first line of defense. If you want to work with us, coordinate, then cut the shit and let’s get to work. If your ego can’t handle it, then you know where the last line is? It’s five miles that way. Get marching, soldier.”

  “Insolence is for those with the strength to back it up.” The Last Line of Defense told him, perfectly audible over the rumble of the heavy engine. “You are only human. Every moment you waste here is a moment that costs ground.”

  Nate shook his head at the man. Because suddenly, he realized, that’s all the pillar was. Just a man. An absurdly powerful one, one who was only talking because using his powers to cut through and get what he wanted would cost him, but still a man at the core of it all. The pillars were human. Or maybe it was more precise to say that whatever they were was just a highly modified human; the pillars themselves were a faction of those changed people, but their humanity wasn’t gone, just different.

  And with all that in mind, Nate found this particular person, who felt like a fucking mountain about to crash down on this hallowed Wal Mart parking lot, who didn’t carry a weapon because he didn’t need one, who he knew from Cam’s debrief was actually capable of leveling a ten mile zone if his daughters were in place…

  This man was contemptible.

  He was wasting Nate’s time. He wasn’t even attacking, because that would weaken him or some shit. He was just standing there bandying threats about.

  ”You’re right.” Nate said with the cruel cadence his father used to use when he wanted to express exactly how disappointed he was. “Go fuck with someone else. I’ve got work to do.” Following the blunt words, he did the stupidest thing he could think of. He turned around, and started walking away.

  Behind him, clear as anything over the ambient chaos, he heard the Last Line snort. “Very well. Daughter, test this one.” The words were scornful, and Nate knew exactly what they meant.

  He turned his head to see a Camille - color unknown, but like all the sisters she was wielding a five foot long bladed mace and dressed in plate - lunging toward him out of Lloyd’s shadow. The girl, who he knew would look like an underfed and traumatized teenager out of the armor, right now looked like some kind of valkyrie almost flying across the gap between them, a single kick off the ground enough to accelerate her to lethal speeds.

  Nate didn’t have a lot of tricks. He couldn’t hide people in his shadow, for example. That was what the APC was for.

  Cam grabbed her sister’s leg, the one that was elevated in her charge, as she blitzed out of her hiding place. The silver-tipped fingers of her gloved hand tightened around metal that was meant to stand up to anti-tank rounds, and began to crush it like a tin can. The Camille that was charging Nate had just a moment for surprise to flash across her helmed expression before her erstwhile sister arrested her movement, and then swung her in a wild arc through the air to slam her into the pavement with a noise like a car crash, drawing screams of alarm from half the people within earshot. The mace she was holding stayed in her grip for an admirable amount of time until she was impacted against the parking lot’s surface again at a weird angle, and Cam caught her wrist on the rebound to wrench the weapon out of twitching fingers before aggressively dropping the attacking sister back to the ground.

  ”Test concluded.” Cam said, combat boot stomping her sister’s head back into the asphalt when the new Camille tried to get up. She glanced in the Last Line’s direction, but didn’t hesitate before turning away and looking at Nate. “Are you alright?”

  ”Not a scratch. She gonna be okay?”

  ”If she isn’t, I’ve been lied to about more than I expected.” Cam said, keeping up the pressure on her struggling sibling.

  Nate nodded. “Great. Let her go. I need your help organizing search and rescue patterns before you deploy with our stupidest paladin.”

  Cam looked down at the armored girl she was pinning to the parking lot, and then nodded. Stepping away, and using a soft kick to fling the Camille back toward the Last Line of Defense like an armored rag doll, she ignored both of them and strode after the person in this conversation who actually mattered.

  It helped that she knew - and so, everyone else in the Order knew too - that ‘testing’ was how her estranged father murdered people he found inconvenient. And that once someone had passed, the Last Line was significantly hobbled in how he could interact with them.

  It also helped that it felt so very good to block her own peripheral vision of the man with her wings, ignore him completely, and imagine that he was impotently upset with her as she walked away.

  He could help or he could fuck off. She had actual important things to take care of.

  _____

  Deb ran through a rapidly assembled prefab medical structure. Calling it a ‘tent’ would be rude to the people who had thrown it together as fast as they had, but calling it a building would be a lie. It was mostly just a series of rooms, large and small, that were capable of slightly more secure quarantine for people coming out of the Underburbs.

  And they needed it. Because people were coming out of the Underburbs.

  In Deb’s medical opinion, the Stratified Underburbs were the worst place to go if you wanted to not have health problems. Followed shortly by a visit to a nuclear waste sarcophagus, and a hike through an active minefield. The highly contagious diseases it inflicted on people were only survivable as a species because they burned themselves out on a rapidly accelerated timeline, and the ones that didn’t appeared to not be spreadable. Some of them were just painful, others were almost intentionally designed to cause maximum chaos, and for some, if untreated, they were just outright lethal.

  Which was why she was running. Sprinting, really. Scrub, her authority, was spending all his focus on keeping her clean of contaminants, and Deb hadn’t realized how much she’d grown to rely on the passive physical boost the authority normally provided. She felt like she was a little too sluggish as she bolted down the hall past the main triage room and toward where they were keeping a few bad cases.

  She was trying not to think about the material sliding off of Scrub’s protective shell, or the hazmat suit the authority was woven into. Trying not to do the mental math on how much was human vomit, and how much was human shrapnel.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  ”Move!” Deb’s command and pointed hand to the group of people being taken into decontamination through the hall ahead of her as she turned a corner was a sharp barked word. And everyone who wasn’t confused by her appearance complied rapidly, pressing against the rough wood walls to let her dodge past the last few who were too slow. They’d need to be checked over extra close in case she’d infected them anew.

  Deb’s hands deftly grabbed the plastic sheets that covered the door to her destination, flinging them aside as she flung herself through. Eyes flicking across the beds and the bloated bodies of the humans that were laying there before meeting the eyes of the other doctor in the room. “It’s getting wor-“ the man started to say before Deb cut him off.

  ”Induce vomiting. Now. All of them.” She ordered, moving for the first woman who was infected with this particular Underburbs nightmare.

  Already moving to the first patient’s bed, looking at the bulging stomach and swelling limbs of the man who would normally be a pretty skinny guy, Deb snapped a pair of sterile gloves onto her hands. One hand gripping the barely conscious man’s chin, eliciting a meek groan of agony as she pushed his mouth open, before her other hand shoved two extended fingers down his throat.

  The man began gagging, thrashing weakly as he tried to bat Deb away with his bulging hands where the skin distended into tight bubbles. “You need to vomit.” Deb said calmly, ignoring the impacts on her chest and arms. “Trust me. This will help.” He stopped hitting her, but kept writhing against her grip, the human instinct to not have a stranger shove fingers down your throat stronger than his willpower.

  Deb curled her fingers, hearing the gagging become wetter, and then yanked her hand out, turning the man’s head so the flood of bile from his stomach splashed onto the concrete floor. Protected from the smell of it, she still dodged away from the spreading puddle.

  Letting go of the man, Deb watched carefully as the swollen bulges and bloated stomach began to rapidly deflate. Leaving behind stretched skin that would require some kind of fixing later, the act of emptying his stomach had been sufficient to trigger the eradication of the disease from his body.

  And this time, before it got to the stage that part of him burst like an explosive charge.

  One life saved, and the other doctor working on the third patient, Deb moved to repeat the process to the man in the middle bed as a pair of ratroach helpers that had been called rushed into the room to start careful cleanup and also getting the patients some water. Maybe a skin care potion too.

  ”Standard procedure from now on.” Deb said out loud, while adding it to the medical link via her skulljack at the same time. “Anyone has these symptoms, get them to vomit immediately. The sooner the better.” She looked back at the first man who was being allowed to sip on a small cup of water, too shaken to be nervous about the ratroach holding him steady with several hands on his back. “Did you get a survivor notification?” She asked.

  He nodded weakly, and Deb sighed in relief.

  Three lives saved. No matter what the Underburbs had to say about it, it was Deb who got the last chance to keep one of their rescues alive. And she was collecting more knowledge with every case that came in.

  The medical link alerted her before she could really catch her breath. Another fifteen people coming through triage. Response was bringing their best today, which, it turned out, was far too much for the medical staff to keep up with. They’d never been tested like this, not like the other knights had in their own fields. And the cracks were starting to show.

  But Deb could worry about that later. Right now, she had somewhere else to be.

  _____

  Arrush had no idea what he was doing.

  It shouldn’t be hard. His objective, as outlined in the briefing where he’d been paying incredibly close attention, was simple. Deploy via drake, find people who were still in the dark zone, handle any immediate threats, and then telepad back with them in maximum sized batches now that they had an address to telepad to. Go through decontamination, rest, rearm, then repeat. There were an estimated ten thousand humans in the area the Underburbs had claimed - and more still in the space it had tried to take and been rebuked from, but they were safe enough for now - and so there was no shortage of work to do. The improved telepads could move ten people at once, which meant… which meant a thousand perfect trips.

  Even with the number of knights acting right now, that was not possible. That was twenty trips each, assuming things went flawlessly, and assuming the number was a reasonable estimate. It would be past dawn tomorrow by the time they were done. And the time it would take would cost more and more lives.

  But beyond the logistical hellscape, Arrush didn’t know why he was doing this. He’d fought before. He’d been training, too. He was confident he could kill anything down there, whether it was known to the Order or not yet. He might be more of a person than he had ever been before, but he was also still a keenly sharpened weapon, and for the first time in his life he was proud of that. But all the times he had fought before it had been for something.

  For Keeka, out of love and fear. For himself, out of a survival instinct he couldn’t repress. For James, out of misplaced obligation and later a growing compassion. For anyone in the Order, out of respect and a sense of community. He would easily find the will to fight for the chanters, or the camracondas. Or for anyone who he’d worked with in the kitchens.

  But these people were just humans. James wanted to help everyone, and when he said everyone, he meant everyone. But Arrush didn’t even know if he wanted to help every ratroach, much less everyone in a species he had barely met. They were strangers, and a lot of them were going to be afraid of him, or hate him on sight. And no matter what his loves thought of him, he wasn’t heroic. He wasn’t someone who would have been driven into a situation like this of his own accord.

  Arrush would hide. Or run. Or fight back when it closed in, but not before.

  And yet, here he was, mounting up on the third saddle of a growing supply drake named Elegan, behind a human he’d never met, ready to… to what? To save lives?

  The ratroach felt an acid in his gut that he thought he’d left behind when he’d been changed into what he was now. His own tails, wrapped for protection but less armored than the rest of him, lashed against the string of heavy black plastic clips that made up Elegan’s own tail in nervous twitches. As they moved out to the cleared strip of road for the drake to get a running start for takeoff, the surprisingly hefty paper creature shaking all three passengers back and forth as he trundled across the parking lot, Arrush reached forward to nervously tap the arm of the human ahead of him.

  ”I don’t know what I’m doing here!” He said, panic creeping into his voice as the Responder turned to look back, one hand holding fast to the saddle even though he’d been strapped in.

  The human looked back ahead of them, to where Elegan and his ‘pilot’ were lining them up to lunge forward into an almost solid wall of darkness that was inky black even against the night itself. “Yeah man!” The Responder called back. “I kinda hate this too! But hey, people need us, right?”

  Arrush froze briefly, claws tensing their grasps before relaxing. People needed them. That was something he’d never actually considered, never even been in the realm of what he would think would be possible. He’d needed everyone else, even before he’d been taken in by the Order. He’d needed so much, for so long. He wasn’t someone that other people needed; at most, he was just mildly useful.

  But all these humans, hundreds, thousands of them, their lives in peril because of no fault of their own? They needed the Order, right now. They needed someone, the way he’d needed someone. And a lot of them were going to die if they didn’t get what they needed.

  And that was wrong. The thought burned through Arrush like lightning. This was not right. This wasn’t the kindness the world had shown him when he’d escaped the Sewer. This wasn’t the paradise promised. This was cruel and hostile, another vicious and shitty dungeon lashing out. It was like the Akashic Sewer, only bigger, and meaner. And, also, it was right here.

  Arrush was confident he could kill anything in the dark zone. And he was going to test that if it meant denying this monster what it wanted. Maybe he wasn’t a hero like James was, but he knew what he hated, and he could work with that.

  The thought came as Elegan took a running start down the road, wings tucked in before suddenly flaring out with a snap of motion that shook the riders. And then, they were airborne. Wind whipping past Arrush’s masked muzzle as the magically enhanced drake accelerated, banking slightly to aim them directly into the dark zone.

  The line where the light stopped came and went without any sensation. The man in front of Arrush yelled something with a laugh, but he didn’t hear it. He was too busy watching below them; a dangerous prospect in the Underburbs, but a risk they had to take if they were going to spot survivors. The glow from streetlights and headlights and the windows of homes illuminating less than it should, showing trails of blood and broken glass, smashed front yards and damaged walls.

  Arrush kept his with the best night vision open wide as Elegan flared his wings and slowed them to a cruise over their target neighborhood. “Entering unswept area.” Their pilot sent through the skulljack. That was something he hadn’t trained with yet, and Arrush wished he’d not shied away from the tool before now. “Totem going up.”

  A click of a tube shaped contraption Momo had built later, and all four people knew how many humans were within range of the totem. Arrush’s eyes extended farther, though, so he kept looking. Rooftops passed by below, a pack of things with glinting eyes looked upward from their meal to howl after them, a few cars in motion fled through darkened streets. At one point, he caught sight of motion to their left, and after jerking his eyes away before it could form anything, used a claw to tap the man in front of him. “Something bad that way!” He shouted. Actually shouted, like he never could before.

  Through the skulljack, there was suddenly an overlayed hazard marker for all of them as the trained Responder flagged the area as no-look. Arrush let his claw drop, nodding his thanks even if it went unseen.

  A burst of gunfire erupted from a few blocks away; practically nothing from the perspective of a flying team, and so the pilot angled their ride that direction. Two seconds later was all it took before the totem lit up information in their minds; eight humans, abruptly changing to seven as the gunfire stopped. “Eric, you’re up!” The pilot sent them. “Five seconds, ready?” The man was already pulling flares from a bandolier and dropping them, red burning stars falling behind them in a trail of illumination.

  ”Ready!” The responder - Eric, apparently - undid his harness and flipped one leg over the side of the rippling flank of the drake. “See you back at home!” He said before the count hit zero and he dropped over into the night.

  They weren’t that high up, but still, a fifty foot fall was lethal to most humans. Of course, most humans didn’t have the magic the Order did. Arrush had just enough time to see the man’s equipped greave flicker with light in the gloom before he accelerated downward and out into the red glow. Humans huddled in a group against a prowling black skinned thing with too many sunken spiral patterns in its flesh having just enough time to realize they weren’t about to die as the Responder slammed into the ground, and then straight through the dungeon monster, like it was all one planned motion.

  Arrush didn’t watch. He had spotted something else. “T-two streets that way! Left!” He yelled as loudly as he could at the pilot. It was on the edge of where they definitely couldn’t look, but he was checking anyway, just being careful. “Car!”

  The car in question was being pursued by a pack of things that Arrush only caught glimpses of; short creatures with white flesh and foot long curved fingers. They weren’t that fast, but the VW bus they were chasing was forced to slow down repeatedly to dodge downed power lines or other crashed cars, so they were gaining.

  ”I gotcha.” The pilot said, veering Elegan around in a wide arc. “How good’s your falling aim?” Arrush had no idea how to answer that. But it didn’t really matter; he’d either hit the target or he wouldn’t. His stomach lurched for a completely different reason as the drake dipped downward, wings the width of the street itself risking hitting something as they came in directly toward the fleeing bus. “Now or never!” The pilot sent as Elegan flared his wings to slow them down as much as was safe.

  Arrush had already unstrapped himself. Suddenly, presented with the actual situation, he realized that he knew exactly what he was really doing here. No one deserved this, but the universe was unfair.

  Which meant it was up to them to make it fair.

  The fall meant very little to him; his bone structure was very good at absorbing impacts like that. The big question was if he’d judged the speed right, and if the driver would panic seeing Elegan fly overhead through his windshield. There was just enough time for the totem to tell him there were six new living humans in range - probably in this vehicle - before Arrush’s paws slammed into the roof of the bus. Then his knees, then two of his hands as he stopped himself from sliding off the back.

  Someone below him screamed, but that was a secondary concern. Pulling himself up to a crouch on the moving vehicle he’d just dented the roof of, Arrush’s claws fumbled only for a moment before he grabbed the p90 slung across his armored chest, two hands keeping it steady as he sighted on the first thing that was closing into the red glow of the bus’s brake lights.

  It looked like a human child, almost. Or maybe closer to a ratroach child. Monstrous, but perhaps that was just a veil. Then Arrush saw the eyes; filled with nothing but hunger and malice, some vile motivating force pushing the naked figure to throw itself across a breaking city in pursuit of any survivors, to add their blood to the stains already around its fanged mouth.

  He started shooting, the first burst going wide as he fired on reflex before remembering his training. Grip the weapon, hold it into the pocket of his flesh that worked like a shoulder. Breathe deep, hold the breath, then steadily pull the trigger so as to not jerk his aim off. Use the sights but also keep your eyes on the target itself.

  That last part let him see the monster’s arm explode in a spray of gore before he flicked his aim slightly to the right and finished the job. More screams came from below, and the bus started to slow. Arrush looked in front of them, but there was no obstacle. As he shot down another thing coming out of the gloom behind them, he slammed a paw twice onto the top of the vehicle. “Drive!” He yelled at the humans, trying to sound as confident as he could and hoping they heard him.

  Something else started screaming. Something in the night around them. A dozen voices, high pitched and hungry. And then their owners rushed the old bus, from several directions and not just behind them.

  Arrush could solve this problem, though. Breathe, focus, look, depress the trigger.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  Breathe. Look at the next one. Ignore the shredded corpse of a cat dangling from its claws. Depress the trigger.

  Spot three of them gaining on the right side of the car. They’d come from inside a house, the windows smashed in, the residents likely dead. Arrush needed to cover both sides, so he switched his p90 to his dominant hands while his secondary rear arm drew his sidearm.

  Breathe in. Eyes can split vision but can’t aim as well like this. Use the extended limb as an aiming guide. Pull the triggers.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  Keep shooting.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  Reload the p90. Turn the pistol on the cluster behind the bus that were gaining on them, the monsters loping over the easy ground of the road like they were pretending to be wolves. Wing one. Hit another more directly, but kill neither. Ignore the crying from the car, because the humans wouldn’t be okay if Arrush stopped.

  Empty the pistol. Switch what weapon was being reloaded. Coordinating all his limbs had never been so smooth as it was now that his brain was made for it. Resume killing before they got close.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  Something slammed into the van on the side Arrush hadn’t been covering, and he jerked in alarm as a clawed hand wrapped around the metal rail on that side, one of the things pulling itself up with a toothy smile as it screamed at him with a high pitched wail.

  He kicked it, and it tumbled back to the street, dazed, but not dead. Arrush didn’t have time to shoot it, he had more targets. There were more and more of them coming in now, and he didn’t know how large the pack was; there was no clear way to tell, so he just kept shooting into the denser clusters of the twisted children.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  Abruptly, something changed. A static at first, followed by a squeal of feedback. First from the car’s stereo below where he was crouched, and then, painfully, from inside his head as whatever it was interfered with his skulljack directly. He almost didn’t hear the thud as the driver tried to swerve to avoid an onrushing beast, and the furred quadruped assailant leapt onto the hood of the vehicle.

  But he didn’t miss when he felt the pulse of interference from it as it tried to smash through the car’s windshield with its paws. Turning, Arrush saw one of those black furred things, covered in depressed whorls with an eyeless face. His inattention let one of the child attackers clamber up and almost slice into him, and he tumbled rather than lunged as he slid down the windshield of the bus. One free paw holding back the face of the grey skinned monster trying to bite him while the other pressed the pistol to its head and splattered the windshield with gore.

  [Killer - Low : +1 Skill Point]

  And then the black mass of the cat thing that was causing him to hear static turned its attention to Arrush. Which was its mistake, but it could be forgiven. He looked like he was reeling and stunned, and his bullpup had been knocked from his hands to twist in its strap against his side. His pistol was empty too, so he must seem like easy prey.

  Arrush braced two hands on the windshield wipers of the bus as the cat lunged to try to bite him with teeth that emerged from one of its whorls, the depression in its skin snapping shut as it came at him from a weird angle. But Arrush had already drawn the short blade from the sheath on his hip, and the momentum of the creature combined with his own long practice in using the weapon up close made it almost easy to slide it through the gap of it’s ‘mouth’ and impale it deeply.

  It struggled as Arrush used the sword as leverage to pull himself over the monster, another paw drawing a combat knife and plunging it into what would be the chin on any normal animal, dragging the weapon downward to snap small bones and tear open flesh. Blood, or something close enough, splattering in thick waves against the windshield and hood of the bus as he ripped the creature open.

  [Killer - Shallow : +3 Skill Points]

  Arrush pulled the knife out, rolled off and back onto the hood with a metal thump as he left a dent, and then kicked the furred thing off. The static in his head clearing away instantly as he did so.

  He looked upward to meet the terrified eyes of the driver inside the comfortable looking bus with its warm upholstery and curtains on the windows. “Drive.” Arrush reiterated.

  The man nodded, jerking back into motion and further crushing the corpse of the feline attacker as they got underway. Arrush himself climbed carefully back up onto the roof, armored form dripping with black sludge as he did so. They’d need to get clear of the rest of the pack before he could teleport these people out. Which meant he wasn’t done yet.

  He tapped his mask, inhaling a burst of exercise potion that eased the strain in his limbs and lungs as he made sure his weapons were loaded and his legs were firmly secured in a crouch on the car’s roof. There were only a few left, and then they could be out of here.

  And then, he could come back.

  _____

  Myles stood in an empty lot, digging his phone out of his pocket, and swearing.

  He’d driven like hell to get here. Even when he’d cleared the border region of the fight, and had suddenly been dumped back into normal daily life for a few thousand people who were all commuting home at the same time during 5pm rush hour. Myles had broken so many traffic laws, and the only reason he’d gotten away with it was that half the city’s police were stuck in or around the Underburbs.

  Someone had actually shot at him, in a fit of road rage. It was probably a little justified, he’d cut the guy off after all; but it was also the least important thing he’d had to contend with on the drive over. More relevant was that he’d passed by a McDonalds where he could clearly see the last rogue who had been sent to get help. Not in trouble, just eating a cheeseburger and fries, like he’d fucking forgotten what he was doing. Myles had not called, not stopped, not done anything that might get himself caught in the same web. Just hoped the rogue was alright and enjoying lunch, and then floored it as he cleared the corner and dodged a semi truck.

  Breaking out of the heavier traffic, Myles had made it to his target in record time, fully prepared to use the multiple magical tools at his disposal to rob a National Guard base. He knew they had the ordinance the Order needed to stop any large scale attacks from the dungeon, and he knew that asking wasn’t working. So it was the classic ‘steal first, ask forgiveness if they ever found out’ gambit.

  And now he was standing by his car, using overhead drones to confirm that he was the tallest thing in a ten block radius, looking at building sized cracked concrete squares on the ground with shoots of weeds growing through them and a chain link fence that had tall grass growing up to just under the barbed wire. He’d parked on what he figured was an airstrip, but without the helicopters and hangers anywhere to be seen.

  Nate answered on the first ring.

  ”It’s not here!” Myles yelled.

  ”The fuck do you mean it’s not here.”

  He spun around, one arm outstretched even though Nate probably couldn’t see him. “I mean that it isn’t fucking here! There is no National Guard base!”

  A pause, and then Myles heard Nate talking to someone else in the room. ”You sure you’re screening him? Fuckin…” Nate’s voice came back into focus. “Alright, explain.”

  ”I am standing on an empty airstrip. There are no buildings, just concrete floor where there should be, or were buildings.” Myles tried to order his report as he’d practiced as part of the rogues, but this one was too weird to keep his focus on. “There’s a fence. There’s all the space that’s supposed to be the base. But there is no base. There’s nothing! I’m not even finding loose trash or shell casings or whatever trail guardsmen leave behind!”

  Nate muttered something about policing brass before taking a deep breath and answering. “I know, know, that what I am about to say is against the rules.” The field commander said grimly. “But that isn’t possible.” Myles winced in sympathy. “It’s on satellite maps. People we have confirmed are real have left mother fucking google reviews about their time there. It’s a functioning US military base in the middle of a fucking US city. It cannot not be there.”

  “I don’t know what else to say. You’re not getting your mortar shells.” Myles looked around again. “Unless there’s something I’m missing. Want me to start digging?”

  He could practically hear the exasperated ‘I don’t have time for this’ pause in Nate’s reply. “Literally?”

  ”Yeah. Like, underground. If something scoured it, it might still have underground storage.” Myles didn’t have a shovel, but he did have a couple blue spells. Manipulate asphalt would at least let him tunnel down a bit, though… “Hey, am I in the Underburbs right now?” He asked Nate nervously.

  The briefing for this whole operation had included repeated harsh reminders that there was a standing no magic used on any Underburbs stuff rule in the Order of Endless Rooms. None. Do not manipulate it’s terrain, do not use detection spells on its creatures, hell, avoid Paving anything if you could help it. External magic was probably safer, but absolutely nothing with feedback. And absolutely do not attempt to imbue or enchant anything from that place.

  That last part had been aimed at Momo pretty directly. Myles hadn’t had time to check, but he was betting she’d tried to imbue one of the skill crystals. How, he wasn’t sure, since those things were kept under lockdown just in case they were still somehow toxic, but he was pretty sure she’d tried anyway.

  “Leave it.” Nate told him. “I have a new job for you.”

  ”Oh yeah?” Myles felt a chill. Like he was about to be asked to do something really stupid.

  ”Yeah. We need firepower, and air support, and preferably from dungeon experienced combatants. And you’re the only person who’s called back from outside, so you get to be our relay.” The sound of Nate exhaling cigarette smoke was somehow discernible to Myles as he listened to his new orders. “You should have access to all the possible contact info we have. You’re authorized to negotiate a first day fee up to $320,000.”

  Myles almost asked for what, and then realized that there was only one actual answer.

  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back to catch the cold breeze flavored with gasoline fumes sweeping in with the night. “I’ll call Harlan.” He said, resigned to his fate. “Just in case, right?”

  Nate didn’t answer, and Myles worried that his boss had a gut feeling that was going to fucking ruin his weekend.

  _____

  Vex was having a weird day. Really weird. Peanut butter and horseradish sandwich weird.

  ”What the hell is happening here?” Her girlfriend asked as the two of them lingered in the harsh white light of a Wal Mart parking lot. They were supposed to be following a group of these people as part of a moving response force in case anything tried to come out of the hellgate that had sprung up here in southern Missouri, but right now they were just waiting. Things had tried to come out, but other teams had handled it. They were supposed to stay close around this building, and the little strip mall behind it, where survivors were being stockpiled like a vital resource.

  Vex didn’t know how to answer Mags’ question. “I think they’re fighting monsters.” She said, trying to quash the spiritual reflex she’d built up over the last few years to reach out and feel for her domain around them. The Order’s warning - they were called an Order, for crying out loud - about using magic on the Underburbs was still stuck in her head, and she didn’t want to risk it. “And I think they’re winning?”

  Her girlfriend motioned limply at their group. ”They’re dressed like extras from that one Christian Bale movie.”

  ”Batman?”

  ”No the one where he’s a sad fascist.”

  ”Batman.”

  ”The other one.”

  ”The Machinist.”

  ”The sci fi one.”

  ”Equilibrium?”

  Mags sighed. “Probably. I forgot you downloaded all of IMDB into your brain last semester.”

  Still smirking, Vex shook her head. ”Don’t say that around these guys, they’ll think you mean it.” She tapped the back of her neck, trying to quietly indicate the weird cybernetics the knights all had. It was weird, and maybe a little creepy. Were they even individuals at this point? There was a whole squad that looked like it was made up of girls moving in perfect unison and that was maybe more fascinating than it should be to Vex. “So… what are we doing?” She whispered to her partner.

  ”You mean, are we sneaking off?” Mags asked. “Hell, I don’t know.” Her voice was suddenly tight and leaking despair. “What are we doing…”

  ”She’s still in there.” Vex nodded toward the dark zone.

  ”Yeah. I know. I know! But what are we supposed to do?!” Mag’s voice raised, and the people they were with glanced at them. Or at least, the big snake did. “We’ve got a pistol and a baseball bat and magic that’ll kill us to use in there!”

  Vex knew that. She knew, and she hated it, and yet still.

  Their girlfriend was in there. In a place being ripped apart by a dungeon or a portal world or whatever you wanted to call it. And she was out here just waiting.

  She stared off into the horizon where the flickering orange light of structure fires mixed with pools of white mist that didn’t glow but did seem to produce an internal light. The woman sighed, shifting and tugging at her biker leathers as she did so, the makeshift armor a poor imitation of the shell plate and kevlar around her. “What if we just asked for help?” She whispered into the night.

  ”What?”

  ”I said what if we ask them.” She turned to Mags, the other woman’s tattooed hand wrapped up in her hair as she nervously tugged at the braid. Vex looked over at where the group they were attached to was talking to a couple men who looked like they were really excited to play soldier. “The Order weirdos seem… uh… they seem…”

  ”One of them mouthed off to the Line.” Mags said as she stared blankly in the same direction as her girlfriend. “We can’t. We can’t trust that kind of… of…”

  Vex shook her head in disagreement, anger flaring. “Of what, being a badass? I bet if we tell them, they’ll…” she trailed off. What would they? Send a rescue party? Send them?

  She and Mags stood there, leaning into each other and then jumping in shock as automatic weapons fire sounded maybe half a mile away. Vex gave a worried look at the Order group they were with, and the snake bobbed back at them in some kind of gesture. “A shield team covering a vehicle fleeing the zone. Everything is fine.” The digital voice informed her.

  Vex took a long breath, wishing she was following through on her original plan for the night of getting high and doing party tricks with her latest domain upgrade. Then she made a decision and hoped Mags wouldn’t hate her later. “Hey!” She called to the snake, and got the attention of a couple other armored humans too. “Our… our friend is in there.” She jerked her head toward the zone, and felt Mags pull away from her shoulder to glare at her. “Any chance we can get a ride to her place?”

  ”Shit, you know the address?” One of the armored goons asked rapidly. Vex nodded. “Alright.” He turned and tilted his head up, staring at the sky.

  As Mags tried punching her shoulder, Vex worried she’d broken their new buddy’s brain, or her girlfriend’s trust, or both. ”What…”

  ”Oh, he is speaking to someone. Please wait.” The snake told them.

  Such a fucking weird night.

  ”Right. Does your friend have magic?” The armored human asked. “Also what’s the address?”

  “V, come on, don’t-“

  She cut her girlfriend off, deciding to pay the price for it later. “Yeah, the kind we got warned away from, but she doesn’t know. We’ve never seen this place before.” She relayed the address for Astra’s apartment, hoping she wasn’t fucking everything up.

  ”Oh, that’s close to someone already there.” The guy said. “Aaaaaand got it. Arrush is heading that way. If your friend’s still… I mean, if she’s… if…”

  A short woman who had just walked up rapped the man on the shoulder to shut him up, grimacing as she turned to Vex, giving a more blunt explanation that was still appreciated. “If she’s alive, he’ll get her out.” The girl said, at the same time that Vex and Mags noticed the halo of what looked like pencils orbiting her head. “Hope she isn’t afraid of bugs.”

  ”…is he a bug?” Mags asked. “Actually nah, fuck it, I don’t need to know.” Her voice trembled as her shoulders sagged. “Thanks.” She muttered.

  ”Yeah, thank you.” Vex added, shocked that just asking had actually worked. “Hey, can I ask… who the fuck are you guys? I didn’t really get an explanation before I got dragged into this.”

  The girl that would introduce herself in a second as Momo grinned. “I’ll give you a crash course.” She said. “If you tell me what the shit you meant when you told James you can control oil cause that sounds like my kind of bullshit and I’m here for it.” She froze for a second along with everyone else in the group, half of them doing the little head tilt thing. “Hey, later though, yeah? We gotta get moving. Nate’s decided the front line is two miles that-away, and we need to stop a bus full of old folks from driving back into possibly figurative hell. Easy!” She raised a hand for a high five, which Vex gave her after sharing a baffled look with her girlfriend. “Great! You’re driving! Follow that fire truck!”

  Vex was having a weird day. Catching the keys Momo threw her and sharing a look with her girlfriend who was gnawing on her lower lip in consideration, they clambered into the probably not stolen van along with six people in body armor. Half of them were glowing. It was amazing and hilarious and exciting, but also, she felt like the world was falling apart a lot faster than she had when all she knew about was one single place that gave out arcane secrets.

  But at least someone seemed to be on top of things.

  _____

  James, Cam, shield team number three (they really needed to let the teams name themselves stupid things, in James’ opinion) and two squad cars worth of police officers who were way out of their depth, all stood in the ruins of a public library.

  Around them, real honest Earth darkness appeared. In the wake of the glowing mist billowing away from the position of the destroyed anchor, the night as it was meant to be came back. No induced gloom, no artificial breeze pushing light-filled fog, just the surviving streetlights and the clouds overhead shrouding the crescent moon.

  James dropped his hand from where he’d raised it, the incantation that was becoming too familiar finished.

  ”Well that was easy.” He lied.

  Covering miles of ground when you had vehicles wasn’t that hard, though the streets were getting worse. There were fewer people, and more places where people had either tried to flee or just been caught in transit. One road they crossed had what looked like a twenty car pile-up, the street that cut through neighborhoods and clusters of businesses a complete blockade created by people either running or being dragged from their cars.

  Getting past the monsters wasn’t hard. For all that the anchor itself had a couple of those massive bundles of power lines floating around, they were easy to dodge when you knew they were there. Dangerous, very dangerous, but slow. And the rest of the horde was… well, James was starting to suspect that this dungeon invasion wasn’t really bringing the dungeon’s A-game. The dogs it was sending were the kind with skin like upholstery and bulging protrusions filled with rusted teeth, but those were… almost easy. They seemed like they were more distracted clumping around empty buildings than fighting or hunting.

  He hated thinking it, but James would admit that a lot of the Underburbs was easier when you were approaching it with a full sorcerer-rifleman squad and a loadout that included thermite. Also Cam.

  The rest of the creatures - the twisted children, the slimy panther forms that messed with electronics, and a brand new problem that was a slowly plodding grey flesh body that only served as the vehicle for a TV screen that tried to kill you if you looked at it - they were all dangerous, but they were all manageable. Easily so. There was no sign at all of some of the more threatening stuff, like the hoods or the stronger ambush predators.

  The other threats, the diseases and the watcher-class threats, those were harder. Fewer authorities meant less protection from infection, so they were banking on safety precautions and moving faster than the dungeon to get through. And that… mostly worked. The watcher problems were harder, and the party had taken damage from them, though again, it felt like the Underburbs had finite time to set stuff up here, so it wasn’t too bad.

  All five officers with them had some skill points by this time from all three sources. The shield team had fared better on the watcher front, but someone had still been inflicted with a dangerous self-harm compulsion from a mobile wall mural, and there were at least three real broken bones scattered across the group.

  But they’d done it. Anchor down, city reclaimed, dungeon banished. And there hadn’t been a human delver guarding this one either, which made it almost suspiciously simple to walk in.

  James kinda wanted to know how many skill points he’d racked up. Because if they’d done it, if they’d repelled the enemy and saved as many people as could be saved, and the Order had won? Well, then he was starting to let himself relax, and when he was relaxed, he wanted to be snarky, and if he was going to be snarky, then he wanted to enter into an unasked for competition with the mortar team to see who had gotten the bigger supply of skill points from the night’s attack.

  It was actually close to horrifying that they’d gotten kill credit for their bombing earlier. But it was a better way to make use of the Order’s very limited skill crystal stash than getting sick over and over.

  ”Is that it?” One of the cops asked, kneeling by a hole in the wall with his service pistol pointed out into the night while his partner stood behind him with a shotgun leveled the same direction. “Did we do it?”

  “Can’t see shit.” The other one muttered, running a blood stained hand through his short cropped hair.

  James glanced at Evans, the shield team leader reporting their success back to the Order’s operational base. “Planner’s confirming most of the watcher hazards are cleared out. Fog is receding. Looks like we got it.”

  ”The others?” James asked, holding his breath as Zhu let his feathers relax and stretched out his manifested talon, the navigator mimicking the motion even though he had no muscles to get sore. “Did they get theirs?”

  He supposed he could just check on his own, but Cam answered him a second later so everyone could hear. “Team two was successful. Minimal casualties.” Her voice was cold and professional, but still James found his heart pounding at the mention of casualties. That didn’t specifically mean deaths; their own team had casualties after all, with no fatalities, but even so. Cam cut the thought off by continuing. “We need to return. Now. There is a problem.”

  ”What now?” Evans asked, the knight checking his rifle’s ammo supply. One of the other shield team members swore, shifting away from the officer they were paired with when the man started coughing wetly. Outside, metal and glass protested loudly as something heavy crashed down from the sky into a number of parked cars, the blinking lights from their alarms lighting up parts of the street where a dying powerball had dropped from the sky. Everyone else jumped. Evans just made sure his weapon was ready before resuming his lookout on the perimeter of the library’s destroyed atrium. “Was that the problem?” He asked.

  ”No.” Cam said. “The fog has only receded two miles.”

  James did some quick mental math. “Wait. So this anchor was… weaker?”

  ”No, it had pushed the dungeon’s perimeter forward exactly as much as the others.” Cam reminded him.

  Shaking his head, James tried to push through the mental strain of two prolonged fights and more planning and coordination than he usually did while under pressure like this. “I don’t… wait, no, hang on. That means there’s something behind it?”

  ”Another anchor.” Evans supplied.

  Cam nodded. ”Likely.”

  ”You mean we’ve gotta do this again?” The officer at the back door asked, turning his head incredulously. James found himself agreeing, pointing at the man and nodding at Cam as if to echo what was said. The cops weren’t trained for dungeon bullshit like he was, but this had still been a lot, and it wasn’t over? That wasn’t fucking fair. “Fuck this!” The cop said. “I’m getting the fuck out of this city.”

  ”Don’t antagonize the goddamn dragon lady.” His partner hissed at him, having recently watched Cam rip a car door off with her bare hands and use it as a frisbee.

  Cam shook her head slowly as the other powerball made its death known by landing on a more mundane power pylon and ripping the whole thing down to Earth, lights in the buildings that still had power flickering before going dark and leaving the area even less lit than before. “Ariel analysis is showing curves in the boundary. They were there before for these anchors as well, we just didn’t notice.”

  James tried to imagine what would cause that, and, to his annoyance, felt like he had an answer. ”Curves, like… oh shit, Cam, no. Don’t tell me there’s more more.”

  ”I won’t tell you, but Nate will when we decide how to deploy for the next push.” Cam told him.

  Zhu groaned like an engine stalling. “Who taught her how to be sassy? It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “It was me.” James admitted, trying to hold onto a spark of optimism in the rapidly encroaching sea of worry. “So… what now?”

  ”Now we head back.” Evans informed them as his team closed in around the group at the base of the metal spire that Cam had brought down by hitting it repeatedly, bringing the police with them to exfiltrate. “Telepad groups, split like this;” he made hand gestures, motioning them into three pockets of people. Standard procedure for shield teams now, apparently, was to never teleport as a single group if they could help it. James liked it, and wished he’d thought of it sooner.

  ”Why didn’t we teleport here?!” One of the cops said. “Why can you fucking teleport?!”

  ”The dungeon destroys addresses.” Zhu sighed, getting a stare from the man in response as the officer tried and commendably mostly succeeded in processing that explanation. “And we can teleport because… actually I haven’t been here long enough to actually know this one. James why can we teleport?” It was meant as a joke, but Zhu sounded halfway to crying.

  James didn’t answer. He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to cry, and he wanted to scream.

  But more importantly, he wanted to know why his day, that had started out so well, was looking to cross the line into tomorrow feeling less like a victory or even a defensive action, and more like he was getting into an active war.

  And then, the part of him that refused to give in to despair took over. And he started thinking. Not just reacting, but planning. Because if they were going to be at war with someone, the Underburbs was probably the thing that deserved it most, and the people behind the Order were going to need him at his very best if they were going to be protected.

  As the telepad took them back to a Wal Mart with management that was getting increasingly uncomfortable with how much their office was getting used by random paramilitary strangers, James was thinking of one other thing. A little black book, within which were written the oaths of his paladins. A little piece of ceremony and theater that had nonetheless become something that was important to them all. Himself included.

  Because his promise was in there too. And when he thought about the fact that the Right Person At The Right Moment had given him a timeline for the collapse of civilization, James thought about the promise he’d made in response.

  And he started thinking not about how hard this was going to be, or how many people had already been hurt or killed, or how much it would cost the Order.

  And started thinking about how to win the war.

  There is a discord! Come hang out with us.

  There is a wiki! It's starting to be come helpful.