“We hold this truths to be self-evident; that my weapons are imbued with inalienable stopping power.” -Andrew Jackson, Dr. McNinja-

  _____

  “The thing about life continuing unabated in its march toward the future,” James said to his friends, “is that it perhaps could do with some slight abating.”

  TQ hissed at him. “I understand many of those words in abstract!” The blue-grey camraconda cheerfully told James as he tried to get comfortable on the bench that the briefing warehouse had on offer. The seating in this place was not designed for people to relax here for prolonged periods, camraconda or otherwise. “But explain them for Alanna.”

  ”Dumbass.” Alanna playfully planted her knuckles on the flat surface of his camera head in a friendly tap. “I always know what James means. But explain it for Arrush.”

  ”Keeka and I were told to stop abating outside of private places.” Arrush said with a nod.

  James, who had ignored the seating in their prep area entirely and was just laying on the floor, was learning two things. One, they really needed to sweep the floor in here, and two, his friends were all perfect. And maybe a little dumb. “Anesh, Sarah, either of you wanna add to this?”

  ”Not a chance.” Anesh didn’t look away from where he was drawing a spreadsheet on the whiteboard that formed one of their walls right now.

  ”I’d love to!” Sarah declared. “But why mess with perfection?” She shrugged as she theatrically cleared her throat and flourished a small notebook in front of her. “So I have a list of people…?” She started.

  ”Hold on, hold on.” James held up a hand to her, arm extended off the floor. “I’m not done complaining about the inexorable march of time!”

  ”Yes you are.” Alanna told him with crossed arms in a voice that was almost threatening.

  James dropped his arm back down. “…Yes I am.” He conceded. “Sarah, please proceed.”

  ”I love it here.” TQ commented from the bench he had finally found a good way to settle on, flattening himself out and laying down two feet above and perpendicular to the human below him.

  Sarah couldn’t really contest that statement. “Okay! Weekly delver assignments!” She said. “Because everyone’s sick or on vacation!” A bit of hyperbole; plenty of people were active, but there were enough gaps that Sarah wanted to fill them with bespoke choices.

  Tilting his angular head up from where he’d been watching James lounging by his feet, Arrush spoke up. ”But not dead.” He added.

  ”No, it’s been a really good time for a while.” Sarah said with a sudden serious note to her words. “And I’d like to keep it that way. So, since the people who normally do this kind of scheduling left it to me this week, I’ve recruited some of you, and then everyone else who tagged along, and now we’re going to do work! Real, actual work. Because if we do this properly, then it maximizes safety for our delvers, and no one dies in a dungeon.”

  It was a strange transformation to see. Sarah certainly filled a lot of roles around the Lair; she was still a big point of information for a lot of people with her podcast, she ran emotional support groups for several different reasons, and she did the breakfast shift as a line cook sometimes just for fun. That was on top of her activities with Clutter Ascent, and being the main point of contact for Kiki. But through all of that, Sarah was… almost goofy in her behavior. A playful individual who was so happy to make friends with anyone and everyone to the point that it overwhelmed some of even the grouchiest targets.

  But then, in a moment, she turned into a person who had detailed handwritten notes about a hundred delvers, and a no-nonsense attitude toward making damn sure everyone came back alive.

  Sarah hadn’t had a good experience with her first dungeon. And while she couldn’t quite stop the itch of wanting to be a delver from creeping back in, couldn’t stop herself from really wanting to explore these places beyond reality, she didn’t want anyone else to ever go through what she did. Being the last survivor of an adventuring party was something no one really deserved.

  Fortunately, almost every dungeon the Order had faced seemed geared for defending against casual civilian snooping. The Climb was a bit of an exception with how incredibly lethal it was to anyone who was unprepared, but every other dungeon could have its initial defenses overcome by preparation, teamwork, and proper equipment.

  “So!” Sarah said. “We have a dozen dungeons now… oh, thanks Anesh!” She cheerfully noticed the spreadsheet and got a thumbs up from the most organized human in her polycule. “And we need to figure out where to slot about thirty new people in. Existing delve teams are all doing their normal operations, but we have a surplus of interest and I will not let us send people into the wrong situations!”

  Alanna leaned forward on an elbow. “God you’re hot when you’re competent.” She said with a dreamy inflection.

  ”Shut uppppp.” Sarah flushed bright red and turned away.

  Arrush used the moment as an opportunity to tug Sarah’s notebook over and start looking through the lists of names and personas she had assembled. “A… a lot of these aren’t humans.” He noticed quickly.

  ”Unsurprising!” TQ chimed in. And when Arrush gave him a long look like he was expecting an answer, the camraconda continued, “No one is surprised, correct? Your offer of adventure is enticing! I am enticed, and I have been trying to be otherwise.” He admitted.

  Sarah gave TQ a small smile that hid an understanding sadness. “Yeah, exactly!” She said as James crawled his way off the floor, dropping his arms onto the table as he leaned forward. “I think a lot of the ratroaches are motivated by you and Ishah actually, Arrush! What surprised me was the chanters!”

  ”No shit, really?” James asked. “I really haven’t made enough time to get to know them, I should do that.”

  ”Weeeeeeell… we could put some on one of your delves?” Sarah said with raised eyebrows. “I have a couple that would work well with you!”

  James blinked. “Wait, am I on your list of loose delvers?”

  ”Yup! Usually you generate your own teams when you chain delves together, but I have you down just in case.” Sarah confirmed. “Unless you wanted to just take Alanna and Arrush with you all week?”

  The crescent of Arrush’s smile, lightly glowing in the shaded light of the warehouse, dipped back and forth as he shook his head. “K-keeka and me are doing things this w-week.” He said quickly, voice slipping as he rushed to make his position known. “But… I could do one delve…”

  ”I can do, like, twelve delves.” Alanna said, tipping her head back to look at Anesh. “You in?” She asked him.

  ”I am not in.” Anesh laughed. “I am working with Research.”

  ”There’s four of you.”

  ”And also running a tutoring group or two.” He admitted with a wry grin. “And on day Arrush is delving, I will also be doing things with Keeka. Anyway, I would rather not delve this week, just discount me.”

  ”Fine.” Alanna crossed her arms. “Well, do we want to build the first set of teams for the week around James and me, then start sorting everyone else out?” It wasn’t that she was planning to poach all the best people, just that she - probably correctly - assumed that between herself and her boyfriend, they could safely escort anyone through any dungeon. They had hands-on experience together, after all. “So, Office first? What do you think, eight people?”

  ”Five.” Sarah instantly corrected like she was running a high stakes negotiation. “You two are too familiar with the Office, you’ll want to go deeper. Don’t. Take… Misha, Marcy, and Rise. None of them will slow you down, Misha needs someone that she can lean on and this is a good place to form that bond, Rise is just omni-curious, and you can take them all on a shakedown tour!”

  James watched Anesh mark in names on the big board. “Which Marcy?” He asked.

  ”Humans are confused.” TQ interjected. “You need more names.”

  ”There’s eight billion of us, in our… mild… defense. But seriously, Marcy who works with Clutter Ascent, Marcy who’s full time in the kitchens, or Marcey Bill’s wife, who is spelled differently but still counts.”

  Sarah gave TQ the most embarrassed look James had ever seen on his friend. Not the kind of embarrassed when Alanna teased her in public, but the kind where she knew she was about to say something really dumb, and didn’t want to. “…Fourth, yet further, Marcy.” She admitted, before rallying. “But she’s really good for your group there! She’s younger, and provides a window into a style of human that the other two don’t see too often! Also she’s been doing the exercise potion workout routine and I think she can throw someone through a plate glass window which I’m sure you love!”

  ”Too soon.” Alanna quipped, getting a chuckle of amusement from James.

  ”Is Misha not a human name? Did you lose that one?” TQ probed. “When I gamble things I do not wager for my species. But I understand JP might, if left unattended.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Misha is a ratroach, she’s shy about her name, so don’t pester her! Rise is a chanter. This is a good opportunity for both of them to see a dungeon that isn’t super-hostile, while having an adventure and getting used to being delvers, if they want to.”

  ”Okay, okay, I surrender.” James held his hands up. Sarah, when she did become organized, was both passionate and fierce about the reasons that she shoved people into groups. James was qualified as a leader, more than he’d ever expected to be. He was also becoming a proficient tactician too, more and more capable of making life or death decisions under pressure. But Sarah? Sarah saw the world so differently than he did. An endless networked web of lines between people and clouds of important pieces surrounding them.

  If she said he should take these three, he’d fucking do it, because the vast majority of the other teams Sarah had organized? Well they were still delving together. Ethan’s Climb team was the go-to list of experts for that dungeon, Kirk’s Horizon crew rotated people in and out but the core of it were people who trusted each other to make snap choices while going a hundred miles an hour, and everyone Sarah had stationed in Texas with Vadik was still there mastering the Ceaseless Stacks like he mastered the Office.

  So he shut up and nodded.

  ”I do kinda want to see how far we can press an Office delve with a small high level team sometime though.” Alanna said.

  ”Yes, but not this time.” Sarah shook her head. “Because after that, you’re going to need to be at your best!” Out of the corner of his eye, James saw Arrush sit up sharply, the erratic chitin lines on his boyfriend’s body poking through his fur as something set him on edge. “Planner?” Sarah continued, calling to the warehouse’s chilled air. “The bubble of silence please!”

  ”It is not called that.” Planner spoke from a half dozen endlessly long tentacles that folded themselves out of drawers and from behind desks, encircling the little meeting.

  And all of a sudden James remembered something. “Oh. Right.” He said, as if it had been there the whole time. “Our last window for a Sewer delve if we still want to test out leaving it untouched for a couple months. And that means…”

  Arrush spoke quietly, a nervous clicking in his throat. ”A ch-chance to… to help the Beautiful One.” He said. “Before we forget ag-again.” James reached over and set a hand on his boyfriend’s thigh in concern. “F-fine. I’m fine.” Arrush said quietly, but he still dropped one of his smaller paws to clutch at James’ fingers.

  ”Okay. Okay, yeah.” James took a deep breath. “Okay.” He repeated himself before pulling his thoughts together, now more properly screened from whatever insidious infovore effect kept them from acknowledging the Beautiful One properly. “So for that we want the best we’ve got. Are we sure we want to do an Office run just before it at all?”

  ”Like Sarah said, I think we can handle it.” Alanna shrugged, faking a casual mood. “So… you, me, Simon maybe?”

  ”Myself.” TQ hissed as he spoke, drawing their attention. “I am not here for decoration.” The camraconda said with a tense anger in the way his body moved while he spoke. “The Sewer annoys me. I wish to annoy it back.”

  ”And me.” Arrush almost whispered. “W-we… we left her there. Alone in the dark. And it wasn’t her fault.” He stopped and then chittered out a wet burst of laughter. “It was some of her fault. She is awful, and I hate her, and I never want to be near her again, but she deserves what you gave the rest of us.”

  ”If you’re bringing in Simon, you could get your other paladins too.” Anesh suggested lightly. “Some kind of terrible team building exercise?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Alex is still hunting sea monsters! And Simon is doing outreach work with… uh… just all of Saskatoon? That seems wrong. There’s too many people there and I know he hates crowds. And I thought he was busy hunting… hm…” She flipped one of her own notebook pages. “Oh! He took Magneto with him! Okay, if he has his emotional support EM field, he’ll be great at that!” She looked up to see everyone eying her with raised eyebrows or a widened lens. “Sorry, sorry! Back on track! Take Prince.”

  ”…the shapeshifter? The one who’s really bad at pretending to be a dog?” James raised his eyebrows again, but this time in confusion. “Why?”

  Sarah puffed up her chest. ”Do you want the answer that’s going to make you think I’m scary, or do you want to trust me?” She asked. The scary answer was that Prince was someone who had a self destructive savior complex, but had run out of people to be a savior for ever since the Order had placed the two kids that Status Quo had kidnapped into one of the mixed foster families in Townton. Those two were, eventually, painfully, going to recover from the death of their friend, and some day they might trust the Order enough to show what kind of magic they had. But even if they never did, they were safe, and comfortable, and Prince and Ruby… didn’t have a place with them anymore. They were guardians with nothing to guard, and Prince himself saw the fact that Status Quo had nabbed the kids in the first place as an ultimate personal failing that made him angry and bitter. He needed to be put somewhere with an outlet, and he needed someone like James to bluntly slap down his attempts at being an asshole. He also needed to see that there were other people suffering that he could channel his anger into helping, and the Sewer was the silver bullet for that.

  But James didn’t ask her for that. Instead, he saw the dancing light in her eyes, and just nodded. “Prince it is.” He said. “And we can fucking ruin the Sewer’s shitty vibe again. Good.” And then looked back at the whiteboard. And all the empty spaces on it, Anesh easily twirling the dry erase marker in his fingers.

  They still needed to map out the who and when for the Stacks, the Climb, the twin dungeons of Verdgris Venture and Pylon Motoric, and at least one exploration of Clutter Ascent’s growing rainbow swamp.

  James slumped against Arrush’s legs. This was going to be a long meeting, and his Endurance wasn’t interested in helping him out this time.

  _____

  At a certain point in his life James had stopped being stunned by Officium Mundi’s entrance architecture.

  It was still beautiful and wonderous, a promise of a strange horizon and deadly trials, the curtain call for an evening that would bring him more magic, more wealth, more levers to move the world with. But it was also a part of his life now. It wasn’t strange, it was a familiar place that he knew better and better with every delve.

  To the point that he felt like the maps weren’t something he even needed for the first half hour of the delve. But James wasn’t here by himself, and so whatever he needed, it didn’t really matter. Because the point was to give the new people what they needed. He and Alanna were, essentially, actually here to work. Marcy, Rise, and Misha were here to learn how to get their feet as delvers, and see if this was a path they wanted to pursue, and that made the two experienced lovers less an adventuring team and more teachers today.

  So James made them read the map.

  He actually ended up feeling like he was running a field trip of sorts. He and Alanna going through cubicles in their smoothly practiced breaching patterns before taking the time to closely show the three new people how certain things worked. Close observation of how to disable the flashbulb traps, or what to look for when trying to break a password on one of the working PCs, or the proper way to make an approach to a potentially friendly or nonhostile shellaxy or strider. The little things, that James felt like he had a kind of quiet mastery over that came from repetition after repetition, but that were foundational starting places for anyone who wanted to get into delving.

  The newcomers were a strange mix. Stranger than the outer regions of Officium Mundi, as far as James was concerned at this point. And not just because they came from three different species either.

  Misha’s body had been rebuilt by shaper substance surgery and the ratroach had leaned heavily into the insect side of her form, with heavier layered chitin across much of her body in a black spotted brown. She talked a lot for someone only a few months out of the Sewer, with excited whispers asking questions about anything and everything. And not just of James either, she was perfectly happy to start hushed conversations with whoever was close by whenever there was a lapse in the flow of the delve, inquiring after dungeon lore and personal details alike.

  Marcy, in contrast, never really asked anything, though she did seem to absorb every word spoken. The young woman had more tattoos than James had collected scars, which made her skin an impressively colorful canvas, and out of all of them, she was the one that was the most impressed by the dungeon. Officium Mundi probably looked like just another place to the others; Misha had ‘grown up’ in a dungeon, so of course places sometimes looked like this to her, and Rise had grown up in a basement prison, so of course every other place was equally surprising. Marcy though, she seemed like she was enthralled by just how carefully curated the weird bullshit of the Office was.

  And then Rise. A chanter, the first chanter to dare to try exploring a dungeon. And actually the only one that they had to rework the delve around, because Rise was nervous, and when a chanter was nervous, it became everyone’s business. The bouquet of emotions, curiosity tinged with thrill, determination undercut by fear, was a thing shared with the whole party. In a way, it made Rise’s lower profile shelled form irrelevant in seeing him as a person; everyone knew, instantly, that he was a person, because they could feel as he did. It was just that basically every stapler within twenty feet knew too, and the ones that weren’t happy about it made that clear very quickly. At least with only a single chanter, the actual chant itself wasn't too powerful.

  To James and Alanna, it felt like there was some kind of invisible social wall between themselves and the trio. They weren’t even an established group; all of them were meeting for the first time now. It was just that there was a line in the carpet between the masters and the students, and it was clear what side everyone was on.

  They still had, in James’ opinion, a lot of fun with the delve. It was fun to decipher what the hell was going on with the picture frame that constantly repositioned itself to be right where you were about to turn, and to get a blue orb from it. It was fun to have Alanna casually pin a vicious plastic plant against a cubical wall and explain the proper procedure for approaching and engaging one of them. It was fun to get temporarially separated and semi-lost in an area where a support column hid an orange totem that split the world around it and hid a whole extra thousand square feet of cubicles in its shadow.

  It was fun in a different way to pass through a break room and have to answer Misha's question about the refrigerator. Which led to James realizing that no one had ever opened one, because they'd all been following his directive passed down from the exodus of dungeon survivors from literal years ago. A command he'd given because if they did explode, he didn't want to find out while they were escorting terrified and battered civilians, that had been echoed through delve groups and new recruits with the confidence that he had known something they didn't.

  So he was learning too. And when they did open the fridge he also learned that this one, at least, was just a fridge. It had some pretty good dungeon pesto penne in it though, in a tupperware container that was itself some kind of dungeontech. So even though he felt a good amount of awkward embarrassment at dropping the ball for so long, James at least got the satisfaction of sharing lunch and finding what he hoped was some kind of device that converted material into pasta.

  It was also deeply satisfying to be there for each of them getting their first skill ranks that didn’t come from an armory package. Alanna and James spent way too long bantering about if they should be called ‘organic’ or ‘natural’, long enough that it was Rise of all people who told them with mixed language and the sensation of distracted annoyance that they should probably make a new word.

  Misha got a skill rank in wingsuit maneuvers, and for the first time, went completely quiet as she paralyzed herself with fear of flying. Rise’s first reward was actually a red orb with an emotional resonance rank for protectiveness, but his first skill rank was in repairing speedboat electrical systems, which seemed… difficult for someone who was not shaped to fit into the spaces he now knew he’d need to access. Marcy got a rank in bees.

  They took an easy circuit of the early parts of the Officium Mundi, moving through the mapped regions and updating those maps in spots the dungeon had changed. It didn’t change often, as unlike other dungeons, Officium Mundi seemed uniquely forced to work through its puppet life. But when it did rearrange things out of sight of the Order, it often led to the easily accessible wide corridors being altered, and orange totems being placed in annoying spots.

  The group learned that Marcy had a lot of opinions on the kind of clothing the dungeon spawned in its cubicles, even if she mostly shared them through grunts and glares. They also learned she was apparently a fan of the Bachelor, when they found a series of files on one of the computers of an Office-created alternate season of it. James was pretty sure the media was missing episodes, which was sure to disappoint the new delver, but they grabbed it anyway.

  They learned that Misha already had a skulljack, when a tumblefeed ambushed and tried to grapple the ratroach with its cords, clearly aiming to connect with the port at the top of her neck. They also learned her chitin was almost as good as the hard shell armor that was tailored to her body, and that the tiny fangs at the ends of each of the cords in angry ball of cabling was unable to do anything to her before the party hacked the tumblefeed apart.

  They learned that when Rise was the one to actually kill something directly, in this case a purple and yellow sticky note mask, that the orb that dropped from it was weaker than it should have been. Weaker in the sense that it only gave point-seven-four skill ranks, instead of the full one. They didn’t go out of their way to kill that many things on delves in the Office, but the group did test it out, Rise sharing a conflicted anxiety at the violence but soldiering through anyway, and found that he seemed to sap or destroy or something about twenty percent of any loot drop before they manifested.

  At one point, James and Alanna stepped back and sent the three newbies - all of them working a little better together now after a few hours of tempering - into one of the cubicle towers together. Keeping back and letting them handle things themselves in an environment where the life was more deliberately aggressive and hostile. It was meant to be part test, part just… useful delving. Collecting ritual coffee and orbs and any dungeontech they found. That last part was especially useful because the Office had not been creating that many blue items in the outer regions for a while now, so if they wanted home grown magic items, they’d have to go deeper.

  What they had expected, at worst, was for the team to maybe take some minor injuries as an unfortunately important experience, and need to step in to save them. What they couldn’t have possibly expected was for three delvers to go into the tower, and six delvers to come out; the Order team having run into a three-arachnid squad of the boxy vent spider creatures from the ceiling tiles, who were running their own operation.

  James had, in the abstract, understood that the Order was actually training people before sending them into dungeons. He hadn’t really assumed the training included ‘negotiate a peaceful resolution to a startled initial fight, gain the trust of a group of armed dungeon life, make a mutually profitable trade, and only then decide to inform the more experienced delvers’.

  He and Alanna had just figured out that a wheeled office chair in a nearby cubicle was magic, and were trying to figure out what it did and how to activate it, when the larger-than-expected team had come out of the tower. And James had been excited to actually get to talk to the HVACnids, that he’d forgotten they didn’t actually have natural voices, much like camracondas. He’d been surprised then, when one of them had retrieved a dungeontech notepad from its awkwardly homemade satchel and ‘written’ onto it in legible French.

  They’d had a conversation that was nowhere near as long as James would have liked, sharing information about the Office, learning that this delve team was from one of three political factions among the small kingdom in the ceiling tiles, and extending an invitation to visit the Order if they wanted.

  The newbies had traded them a lot of orbs, the most valuable resources for a people who didn’t have any other source of food, for ritual coffee and dungeontech. And now, James traded promises for one of them tagging along to stay the week at the Lair. A creature that looked like like a low-poly metal mimic of Rise if you squinted enough, splitting from her companions to join them on the way out.

  As they reached the exit, and the tension of being somewhere that was wild and often dangerous drained, the group actually made more casual conversation, the gap between James and Alanna, and the others, broken down by the shared experience of having become adventurers in a way. James made his traditional invitation to them, to all of them, to join him at the all-night diner that he continued to haul people to after Officium Mundi delves as a kind of personal tradition. Even the vent spider.

  After all, it wasn’t like the staff hadn’t gotten used to camracondas and ratroaches. And now, they’d have to adapt to chanters anyway, so what was one extra species on top of that?

  Which was how his delve actually ended. Not with unloading their gear into the ‘safe’ tower near the door, or the cataloging of their loot, or the door itself that led to mundane Earth. But with a conversation about what the coolest thing they’d brought back was, over greasy breakfast food and milkshakes, while a scattered collection of late night patrons did a poor job of not staring.

  James thought the coolest thing was the totem design for the ‘split hallway’, which he looked forward to seeing put into civil action. Misha and Marcy both voted for the green orb from the tumblefeed; no one knew what it did yet, but it would be copied, and put to use too, and both of them had participated in the Order’s small ritual to have new people test green orbs at the Lair, and appreciated that.

  The newest person with them, the vent spider, voted for herself. Which got Alanna to change her vote from the headphones with something like aggressively adaptable Bluetooth capability.

  Rise abstained. He spoke-and-emoted of a lack of understanding for where to start thinking about many of the things they’d found. It opened up an honest and strangely pleasant conversation, all of them thinking about what it meant to be a good delver for the Order, and how Rise’s physical and emotional capabilities were perhaps overshadowed by the fact that he didn’t know enough about things like social structures and even just daily life in a civilization to know what magic items were worth picking up.

  Afterward, after tipping with too much money and a few select copied blue orbs for fun, James and Alanna made it back home having done very little of what they thought of as delving themselves. But it had been a good night anyway.

  _____

  Seven people entered the Akashic Sewer, stepping over the threshold of the painted blue security door that flaked with rust, all of them alert for the tug of pressure that would indicate if the dungeon was going to force some of their equipment out.

  But nothing, this time. “I hate that we’re getting good at acquiescing to this shithole.” Alanna said as the team cleared the first room. A coarse cement floor and walls, with pitch black holes near the ceiling where pipes ran through but weren’t quite flush with the structure. There was dripping graffiti sprayed or scratched across a lot of the wall’s surface, some of reminders of when this dungeon had made up its diet with murdered teenagers, other parts new. And hopefully new and not from students of the school ‘above’ them. “Clear?” Alanna asked as she cracked a handful of glowsticks and scattered them to her side of the room.

  ”Clear here.” TQ replied quickly.

  Prince was already looking like he was unhappy with this dungeon, brushing at the edges of his armored coat. “Something touched me.” He complained, but without any real alarm to it.

  ”Clear, except for the bug James smashed.” Zhu reported.

  ”No! Skulls!” Arrush’s shout called instant attention to the pipe-ringed tunnel he had ended up near. His ears had picked up the beginning of something moving just after they’d come in, but the scraping of the mobile bone creature against the pipes and jagged walls of the Sewer had very quickly gone from ‘something shifting around’ to ‘something coming this way fast’. “It’s here!” The ratroach yelled back at his companions.

  He had to force his voice to do it. Arrush had been on one Sewer delve, and he had not retrained a lifetime of instincts to stay silent and stay hidden. But this was not survival, this was not a fearful existence under the cruel eyes of this place; this was an invasion. And when he shouted, his allies moved with him.

  The thing that tumbled out of the pitch black of the arched tunnel was a ball of snapping violence. Skulls, shaped like those of a common rat but sized up to be as big as an adult human, lunged forward in a clump of massed bone. They had necks of far too flexible vertebrae with glistening flesh and tendons clinging to them, each of them connecting back to the same tangled cluster of bone and exposed organs. It was, really, less of a ball and more of a hydra. A hydra with no limbs except for skulls, and no instincts except for rending and crushing with those skulls.

  Arrush was stepping back, his padded ‘armor’ nowhere near the same quality as the kevlar and form-fitting hard plastic shell the Order tended to wear on other delves. As James and Alanna rushed to cover his flanks, the scraping collection of skulls, mouths locked open like they were trying to scream, tugged itself through the arch leaving behind chips of its own body, and zeroed in on Arrush with such a flagrant target selection that there was very little way to mistake what was going on here.

  The Sewer had noticed him come back in. Personally. And it was pissed.

  This was a stupid mistake for the Sewer to make, and Arrush didn’t need an update from Zhu, the navigator’s form spearing across the room to splash into his shoulders as new orange feathers, to know what he needed to do.

  This wasn’t his fight. This was his turn to be bait. And Arrush did that job very well. His time learning how to swordfight and jog and even just move without hurting himself all coming together into a confident flow to his steps, his armored paws touching off the floor as he sprang backward. Tails giving him feedback on how close he was to the cracks in the floor that might trip him, or the far walls. It was almost possible to forget that if the skulls caught him, he’d be dead very quickly if he didn’t do something.

  It didn’t matter though. The Sewer monster was so focused on him, so blind to anything that wasn’t its blitz target, that Alanna and James reached it from opposite sides at the same time that TQ began sapping momentum from it. Which was to say, freezing it.

  The camraconda himself was shocked his gaze worked. “It weighs almost nothing!” He announced as the skull ball didn’t just slow down, but came to a near total stop. “Good! Perish!” His digital voice bounced off the unpolished walls.

  He said it just as Alanna hit the skull she was aiming for. She didn’t even use one of the makeshift weapons the Order had brought, forgoing trying to break a large object with a broom handle and just punching the largest part of the bone she could. TQ’s effect didn’t stop outside influence from moving his target, so her first hit just slammed the skull into the one next to it, but after that, Alanna braced it with one hand and used her other to pry back part of the jaw until it splintered and burst apart. On the other side, James crushed one of the skulls on the floor underfoot while rushing past, and then kept going until he was behind the monster. He did use the staff he had finished screwing together, taking advantage of the immobile target to thrust through gaps in bone and pulverize or puncture every one of the weird organs this thing hand behind in between the two main masses of heads.

  At a certain point, he and Alanna backed off, the damage they had done extensive. “Okay. Let it go.” James said sharply, holding out a hand as the group made a loose crescent around the skull hydra.

  TQ blinked. And for a moment everyone held their breath. Right up until every remaining bone in the monster’s body collapsed with a skittering impact on the cement floor, a small wave of blood-red sparks pouring into James, the light a washed out contrast to the blue green glowsticks scattered everywhere.

  “Don’t worry everyone, I’ll help too.” Prince spoke up, as if he was compelled to say something while James checked on Arrush. “That thing is huge. Is everything in here like that? You know it didn’t let me bring bullets, right?”

  ”This is new.” Zhu said as he crossed back to James from the contact that his host made with Arrush’s neck.

  ”It was after Arrush.” Planner finally spoke for the first time since entering the dungeon, the informorph sounding a little more distant than normal. “I do not believe it is going to be alone. We should move. Now.” Their job on this delve was largely just to keep everyone on track against the Sewer’s main antimeme, and also glowing a little. And that suited Planner just fine; they were probably the best person for this delve, and that meant they’d do it, but being ‘away’ from the Lair was uncomfortable.

  James gave a sharp nod as he kept looking at Arrush, his hand lingering on the ratroach’s neck. “Okay. Form up.” He said, stepping back. “Alanna take point, TQ and Prince on fire support, Arrush…”

  ”I know.” The big ratroach nodded, not offended that he was somewhat a liability. “Behind them. I’m a trap.”

  ”That means something different than what you think it means!” Alanna called from the front as Zhu targeted a tunnel for them to take. The navigator wasn’t mapping them to a destination exactly; nothing that would cost them anything down here where even a casual misadventure might have long term health consequences. Instead he was just letting his own nudging instincts guide him without pressing too hard, a skill he’d been working hard on lately. Alanna strode through confidently, adding a quiet “Hup!” as she pitched another glowstick ahead of them.

  They had a lot of glowsticks.

  The Akashic sewer was, generally, just a fucking shit place to be. When the Order sent delve teams in here, they did so with targeted objectives in mind, usually to gather lessons, shaper substance, refugees, or all three at once. And an important part of how they did so without any fatalities was that they moved with steady and well paced practice. They didn’t rush, they didn’t charge in, they took it slow and made gradual progress in the tunnels and caverns of the growing dungeon. It didn’t mean no one ever got hurt, and in fact the Sewer was high on the list for dungeon that injured the most delvers. But no one died.

  They also sent them in with filter masks that only barely helped with the litany of smells.

  But that plan, that tactical doctrine of careful progress and methodical combat, went out the window real fast when the dungeon stopped its own normal operation of ambushes and jump scares, and turned a lot of the creatures it seemed to have direct control over into meat seeking missiles with a grudge against Arrush in particular.

  They were no more than three hundred feet down the tunnel, lit by their armor flashlights and infomorph glow enough that they felt comfortable moving faster than a crawl, when the attacks started. Or maybe continued, if you counted the skullball. Creatures of the Sewer, the mindless kind that were just unthinking balls of violence, began to assail them from every available angle. Slamming open doors that should have been locked, dropping down from the shadows over the pipes on the ceiling, crawling out of dens in the dirt on the other side of cracked cement walls, and charging openly down every single tunnel intersection they passed.

  Husks of ratroach bodies, all sharp edges and rage and makeshift knives. Skinless rats and raccoons, their exposed flesh dripping and their bodies detonating in sprays of explosive blood when they died. Hands attached to arms that were fifty feet long and as thick as some of the pipes, growing from pulsing sacs that looked like wasps nests and that tried their best to pin and claw at the delvers. Another skullball, its hydra styled jaws accomplishing more than the first one only because it blocked the tunnel they were in.

  The attacks started, and they did not stop.

  The group sped up.

  “Ah. I see.” Planner spoke up with a calm scribble of a voice. They were currently an octet of tentacles drifting in meaningless patterns around TQ while the camraconda coordinated the fight happening in the larger dirt floored room that the team had to pass through. “There is information moving both ways.”

  ”Oh, that makes sense.” TQ told the assignment as he froze a crow wasp before it could dive bomb James. He wasn’t Alanna, he couldn’t sense emotions, but he did live in Townton and had a lot of empath experience with the chanters; and TQ had an inner impulse that the creature he’d frozen wasn’t as heartless as the others. “Except I am lying. Explain quickly please things are messy.”

  Planner sounded almost angry as they replied, which was uncommon for them. “I have failed to mask our presence. Preventing you from being altered has been noticed.”

  ”Ah.” TQ repressed a hiss; hissing in this dungeon was a good way to be disgusted. “It isn’t Arrush, it is that the Sewer knows we are here for its toy.” He dropped his gaze for a second, letting the crow wasp resume moving, before catching it again. Two flickers like that and it had lost the pattern of its own wingbeats; the last release saw it crash into the dirt behind a chittering ratroach that James was in the impressive process of subduing without breaking any of its legs.

  Prince glanced at them, the shapeshifter crouched in the dirt with one hand clutching an experimental tennis ball Climb wand and the other extended out to point any Paves he might want to throw out. ”So why don’t you just turn it off until we’re close?” He said.

  ”It does not work that way.” Planner replied like they’d prepared the response for use after the first million times someone had asked that.

  ”Well what if-“

  ”Why do you not simply turn into a rhinoceros and conclude this encounter?” Planner snipped at Prince.

  ”I don’t… alright fine, asshole, I get it.” Prince was currently in the form of some random guy he’d stolen the face of, since a human body was convenient sometimes. If he’d been thinking, he would have let himself get ready to turn into an organic tank, but he didn’t do that, he just picked ‘some dude’ because he figured thumbs were an asset.

  The team - feeling more like a strike force than a delver group - cleared the rest of the room quickly. There were dens carved into the dirt walls here between creeping lines of tile, and to the subdued individual ratroach and crow wasp figures, Alanna gently added two more ratroaches that had been wrapped in some kind of spongy fungus she’d needed to cut away. The team didn’t send anyone back with them, just showed them what to do with one of the many spare telepads, and sent them off to the waiting medical team.

  And then they kept going.

  Through rooms flooded with ponds of liquid body spray, down canyons of concrete that dripped with spores and glowing liquids, across the narrow grate of a catwalk that led over a gaping hole in the ground. They fought everything that came their way, and did it with the kind of unified teamwork that even Prince fell into the flow of. As long as they stayed calm, and stayed in control of a situation, they got through without even small injuries. Even as reserves of Breath and Velocity dipped, even as they used their various potions and one-shot items, they weren’t having trouble and they weren’t feeling seriously threatened.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Most of the Sewer was mapped. It changed a lot faster than most dungeons, adding a ‘room’ worth of accessible space about once a week, but a lot of its changes came in the form of branching paths and interruptions to the otherwise massive straight line tunnels that it had laid out in a grid funneling people toward its only valid exits. There were only a few points where you were offered a ‘choice’ of tunnel from a room that mattered, where some of the tunnels would just warp and twist and put you back where you started eventually. Having dodged that with Zhu’s help, the strike team knew where they were going and what to expect. They ignored branches, secondary objectives, and anything that took time away from making it to where their target most likely was.

  James did his best to keep an eye on everyone the whole time. Constant checks for parasites were part of the pattern of delving here, but more than that, he was just making sure everyone had the stomach to keep going. Even when it was dungeon life that was just an empty receiver and not a person, combat and bloodshed were still hard on people. But while Prince seemed oddly subdued for the whole delve, James didn’t think that was because of the fighting at all. He really needed to add the mimic to the list of people to have a deep conversation with later. But for now, they had monsters to cut through.

  They encountered only one new thing, which was still a surprise. The Sewer didn’t come up with new mobile guardians that often, and even more shocking was that it wasn’t some kind of weird amalgamate of infected flesh. Instead, the thing that was waiting to intercept them in the twisted mirror of a classroom as they passed through was just a simple column of slate-black stone.

  It looked like a chalkboard, James thought, just before it started moving and made an ear-grating screech like someone was dragging a fork over exactly the thing he had compared it to. From its sides, lines emerged where long bar-like limbs split off, the ten foot tall beam of slate unfolding like a stickbug as it began skittering their way, naturally producing the singular most horrible noise James had ever heard in his life.

  It didn’t get far. TQ froze that one too. If it had been like some of the other fights, where multiple groups had stacked on top of each other, or where waves of the red-shelled bugs had poured across the floor underfoot while larger creatures tried to kill them, it might have been a problem. But it was alone, and that was a fucking stupid thing to be when fighting a camraconda.

  It had writing on its body, James saw as he got closer to figure out what part of it he needed to break. Actually, the writing was the same kind of stuff as was often scrawled on the walls of side rooms here; questions that rewarded the green sparks needed to open ‘chests’. Tentatively, he tried answering one, and was rewarded exactly as he’d hoped.

  And then, despite TQ’s lockdown, the slate slab had shifted slightly. Not much in physical space, but its body had rippled as a new question had formed in place of the first. And another after that, and another, and another.

  Even Arrush had been willing to pause to think that through. “Is… did it… does it not know?” He asked. “Was this a mistake? It’s just feeding us more of the glow.”

  ”It is very heavy.” TQ stated. “I will become tired eventually.”

  ”And something’s gonna show up and try to puke on us. Again.” Zhu griped as he shivered his feathers across James’ body, the tail he formed when he manifested fully held as far off the ground as possible. “Which sucks! I bet it’ll fuck it up before we’re back.”

  ”Alright, lightning round.” Alanna said, trying to burn through questions as quickly as she could while James, Arrush, and Prince set about snapping bits of slate off with rocky cracks, occasionally chiming in with their own answers.

  They ended up with a collective two hundred green sparks split between their group before TQ declared that he was running out of stamina, and they finished shattering the chalkbug. And then they just had a small gap left to close to get to the exit, and hopefully find the Beautiful One there as the dungeon’s priestess-and-exit-exam.

  Avoiding a ‘trap’ that was less dangerous than the exploding pipes they’d been running into a lot, but was far more disgusting because it was a rain of undulating white larva from the ceiling trying to crawl into the gaps of their armor and into their flesh, the party continued.

  And ran into their target ahead of schedule.

  What they had planned for today was less a confrontation and more of a kidnapping. The dungeon being aware of, if not their intentions, then at least their broad potential actions, had complicated things but not stopped them. Ultimately, their goal wasn’t harvesting or suppressing the Sewer, it was getting in and removing the Beautiful One specifically.

  A long, long time ago, possibly before the antimeme had been in place, Alanna had said something important. You don’t ask an abused child if they want to stop being abused. You remove them from the situation, fix what you can, and hope they forgive you later. But understand that even if they never do, your actions are critically required.

  They weren’t here to convince the Beautiful One to leave. They were here to take her away. So her resistance was expected. What was less expected was the dungeon’s own resistance. And now, it wasn’t just to the delvers, it was turned on the Beautiful One herself.

  The room the tunnel cut through was cracked and stained stone, with a ‘path’ across its floor made of the uneven pipes they’d been walking on the whole time. The pipes also formed the only bridge across the river of warm flowing meat sauce that cut a gash across the more open dungeon space, filling the air with an almost sweet enticing aroma. It was also a room crawling with ratroaches; dozens of the misshapen forms laying broken against the far wall and scattered across the floor, with dozens more still standing and using wave tactics with their makeshift spears and knives against their larger foe.

  That foe was the Beautiful One herself. Modified with the shaper substance to hell and back, James had the bad habit of describing her to others as ‘the size of a bus’, but the reality was that she was closer to a minivan that looked bigger in profile because it had limbs. Whorls of polished chitin that fused with her flesh in hidden lines, shimmering white fur that glowed enough to make her clear to see in the gloom of the Akashic Sewer, the Beautiful One was not an especially symmetrical life form, but she was an impressive one all the same, towering over anything else in this place, even if she could no longer balance upright on her digitigrade hind legs.

  And right now, she was being ripped into by the rest of the Sewer’s puppet creations. Glowing blue blood splattered across her fur as ratroach after ratroach charged the position she’d taken with her back to the meat river. James came into sight first and just barely realized what he was looking at as the Beautiful One picked up a screaming ratroach in her doubled right hands and snapped it in half, throwing the body at the others charging her but getting a gash across one of her paws for the trouble.

  Their blood hissed and burned where it splattered. Her blood didn’t. Instead, it writhed in rhythmic patterns where it pooled, the army of puppets avoiding it as they kept trying to kill their own priestess. The massive bloodied ratroach lashed out, claws flattening another attacker, and as she did so, she screamed. A primal expression of rage and fear, that it was almost shocking to have followed up with actual words, even garbled ones. “Ahhy waaas pherrfect!” She yelled as she pulped another ratroach’s skull. “Ahhhyyyy am ghood! Sssthrong! I shhharvived!” Her yelling did nothing to the ratroaches that swarmed toward her with dead eyes and nothing in them but dungeon-installed violent anger. And as she howled, a spear found a gap in the chitin around her shoulder, more blood spilling as she jerked back and took the piece of sharpened rebar with her, screaming in pain and fear.

  ”Oh fuck me.” Alanna said. “If the dungeon can’t have her…”

  ”Fuck this place.” Prince spat. “What do we-“

  James took charge of the situation with cold words covering up his own anger. Alanna tensed up next to him as she felt the disgusted fury rolling off him. “Cutter wands. Now.” He ordered Prince and Arrush. “Alanna, save Breath. Everyone else, fire support. Stop saving Velocity. Approach from the right side, don’t cross the meat; she isn’t going to be nice to us for helping. Alanna, with me. Melee. Planner, I’m gonna need you to baffle her once we’re clear. Once we’re out, everyone else follow. Got it?”

  ”Be careful.” TQ said quietly. “I need more time with you.” The camraconda said as he and Prince began creeping around the outside edge of the room. Arrush went the other direction, a moment later both the ratroach and the shifter flinging the Climb wands they were live-testing out.

  They landed in the middle of the pressing crowd of ratroaches, the bounce triggering the stored Breath to cast a weaker but area version of Winter Wroth, cuts and gashes appearing across a score of ratroaches. It didn’t kill most of them, but the damage was more to get their attention. As the others started firing Paves across the gap, James and Alanna charged in a straight line toward the point where the Beautiful One was holding off a crescent of attackers.

  It felt good to run like this, James thought almost distractedly, a distant observer to his own actions as he and his girlfriend made a ten foot leap over a river of flowing chunky sauce to land in sliding impacts directly into a horde of actual monsters. Zhu’s feathers splayed behind him, the navigator’s tail whipping around as they hit the ground, and then, as a group, started carving a bloody path through their shocked enemies.

  Alanna didn’t need any special tricks, just used basic but devastating punches and kicks to take her targets out of the fight. James was still using what remained of his partly broken ‘staff’, but more than that he was using multiple frozen talons to go with Zhu’s more avian form. They made targeted punctures in the ratroaches that lined up in front of them, slipping past blades and clubs to land fatal strikes.

  They were twenty ratroaches in when the Beautiful One screamed again, a choked sob following as her oversized form toppled sideways with another spear stuck in her side and a trio of ratroaches crawling up the fur of her flank. She hit the river of meat with a thick splash, her blood flowing out into it in a bright blue stain. “Whhhhy?” She cried out. “Ahhhhy whas ghhaaaoood! Ahy deh…desh… desherve…!” A ratroach cut her off, stabbing down with a knife made out of someone’s femur right toward one of her widened eyes.

  TQ froze the attacker before the point connected. Then Prince hit it with two tactical Pave casts, flinging the blade away and then injuring the ratroach enough that the thrashing of the Beautiful One was enough to dislodge it.

  ”We’ve got enough space.” Alanna said, voice steady despite the acrid smoke drifting off her gloves and sleeves from the ratroach blood. “Take her.”

  James nodded. “Planner, now.” His own voice was still sharp. He had no more patience for this, and the Order’s largest infomorph agreed with him. Planner’s tentacles folded in on themselves and away from TQ, before they simply latched onto the Beautiful One’s mind and, applying a tremendous amount of raw force in the infomorph sense of things, turned off her consciousness. For perhaps ten minutes.

  That was plenty of time. James cut through the rest of the ratroach swarm trying to kill her, grabbing one and applying a Frost Vector cast to its body so he could swing himself in an arc and slide the frictionless ratroach at high speed into several more before they got close. Zhu ripped into another that got too close, and both of them Paved the last one without moving to indicate they were casting at all.

  Then he slapped a hand on the Beautiful One’s hide, feeling a deeply unsettling and familiar minty tingle where her blood touched his fingers, and before he could worry about that Zhu pulled their telepad and they were gone.

  The others followed shortly after.

  James did his best to not slump against the heaving and heavily damaged body of the Beautiful One, both because he didn’t want to hurt her, and because he desperately needed to not touch more of her blood. “It’s shaper substance.” He warned the medical team that was rapidly expanding as they called for assistance when they saw how badly damaged she was. The temporary structure they’d built to hold her out on their isolated property suddenly didn’t feel like it was enough at all, especially not with how they were going to need to solve a very unique problem of keeping her alive without fucking up their own bodies.

  But the hard part was done.

  It was a delve without a specific ‘reward’. And yet, it felt like the most important thing James was going to do this week. Even if every one of them needed a bath. And maybe to be exfoliated with a pressure washer.

  _____

  Compared to that, the next few delves were practically mundane.

  James and Alanna, along with a scattering of various other members of the Order that they were assigned to teams with, made effective use of their time searching for more tools for the Order. For James, this meant his days were split between keeping up on everything going on as part of his role as paladin, and throwing himself into dungeons. Especially since he saw a lot of his partners every time he staggered home to recharge.

  Which was kind of perfect; for this brief window, there was no known crisis that needed him.

  Simon was dealing with Saskatoon, and apparently had just decided to bulldoze through the veil of mundanity by running a public campaign to introduce the umbral to the city. A big chunk of Research and the rogues were doing very close monitoring, and had determined that the information about their presence wasn’t spreading past the greater metro area, which meant about ten to twenty miles past the official border of the city. But inside that zone, Simon was repeatedly ripping the bandaid off and by all accounts doing a pretty good job of changing daily life so fast that no one really had time to complain. A lot of umbral wanted to move to Townton, but there were more that felt like they belonged around their home dungeon, and suddenly making up almost a whole percent of the city’s population made them, while still a minority, very noticeable. It felt like a huge problem waiting to happen, but shoving them back in the dungeon was worse, and James trusted Simon.

  Alex, meanwhile, was hunting down a sea monster, and struggling with it more than she had anything else as a paladin. They knew the big crystal thing was out there, but most of what Alex was accomplishing was making friends on various cargo ships, because there had been no sign of it. She had messaged James several times about being reassigned, and he’d had to remind her that she assigned herself, and if she seriously wanted to go track down that dungeon in northern Uruguay she could just do that. But the girl was determined, even if she was taking breaks to help out around Townton and do a few delves of her own.

  Spire-Cast-Behind was actually on duty as part of the rotation to make sure the Beautiful One could be treated without her murdering anyone. But aside from that, she’d focused her paladin time inward. Specifically inward on Officium Mundi, working with both of the vent spiders to acquaint herself with the political landscape of the expansive empty zone over the dungeon’s ceilings. Spire sent James regular reports over the week, including one that he found initially weird that had her coterie’s roster on it. James had been… unaware… of the fact that at least one of his paladins had a coterie. But it wasn’t like he had room to judge, he was spending his whole week delving with his girlfriend.

  All that was to say, there were no emergencies. Just the normal set of horrible conditions that had become a background for a lot of Earth, and the looming threat things like the pillars or the Underburbs, and the anxiety of rushing toward going truly public with multiple world-changing dungeon-technologies.

  Which was the perfect time for James to go delving more, to cull that stress. And to find more weird magic to share. Or, he admitted to himself with regret, magic that would make him more dangerous and harder to kill. For the future that was coming where those things would be more needed in a paladin.

  The Climb delve went well. Really well, actually. They still didn’t understand the exact reason or trigger conditions for when it dropped delvers into totally different regions of its domain, but they did have maps for several of those regions now. Ethan’s team consistently hitting the same map over and over sort of made it clear there was definitely something going on, and if James didn’t know better he’d think he was being made fun of by the dungeon. And Ethan agreed, saying that it did tend to give them weird layouts when James specifically was with them. Which was a bit jarring.

  But despite that, the large delve team he went in with managed to not only quickly get to the two thousand foot ascension mark that would get a half dozen people their first two spell slots from this place, they also found a new spellbook. Not a blank one, but still. They found it tucked away in a little cave that had two stone puzzle doors and twenty cramped tunnels between the snow outside and its deepest parts, in the bottom of a backpack that contained a couple stained shirts, a road flare, and a dented metal water bottle.

  The cave, which sadly didn’t have any wall decorations like others they’d found, and the pack were weird, but not weirder than anything else this dungeon did. Also they didn’t have to fight a dragon for this one. The spell it granted, taken by one of the newer delvers, was called Updraft Gradient, and it was a medium Breath cost effect that just levitated a person about a foot off the ground.

  The cost would be lower if the book weren’t so beat up, James figured. But they had a couple workarounds for that now; maybe upgrading it a few times would bring it in line with something useful. The other downside was it wouldn’t work to aid flight; it really did only push from about a foot away. And you still had to figure out how to move yourself when you couldn’t touch the ground.

  The delver who got it proclaimed it the coolest fucking thing ever, though, so that was good. Personally James was looking forward to loading that into a wand that turned it into a projectile, because it’d probably be better offensively than as a utility spell, which was a weird change.

  Overall, he liked his time in the frozen dungeon. The Climb always felt honest in its ire, and while it was dangerous, it was a kind of wild violence that was easy to understand. Also, and it was weird for James to think this, but it felt normal to him. Of course it was huge, because mountains are big. It might be bigger than the Office, but the Office felt far more daunting, because something as enormous as a snowy peak that ascended through multiple cloud layers was supposed to be big, and offices were not. You weren’t supposed to be able to go on a ten mile hike while you were inside.

  James didn’t gain any new Breath or spell slots - available learnings as the dungeon called them - himself. But a stronger cadre of Order delvers was a kind of power increase all its own, and every time they accidentally found a new wand they learned a little more about what that could do for them. So he called it a win.

  The next delve was the Garden, and it went about as smoothly as the Climb. They didn’t go far in, instead dedicating time to learning the limits of the segmented chunks of vegetation.

  Where the Climb had stickbugs and snow beasts, both of which were more dangerous for the secondary effects of their venom and just freezing cold respectively, the Garden liked to deploy life that was a little more earnestly aggressive. The only thing James was comfortable calling a demon were the hooved and vaguely caprine winged creatures with their drill beaks and endless font of flustered anger. Running into shaggy pillbug beasts the size of cows or spotting the drifting form of a bloated creature overhead that bore the coloration of a massive bee was less of a fight, because those things could just be avoided if you were passive enough to them.

  What was really interesting about the Garden was that it seemed to have an ecosystem. Not just like the Office did with its basic interactions that had developed over time between wild life there, but more like there were creations in the Verdigris Venture that looked designed to fill ecological niches. Bugs, especially. Pollen flies and worms with wedged metal digger heads and a few others besides. There was apparently a waiting list for biologists to get escorted safely through the Garden and set up long term observation of some of these things, looking to see what they were doing, or if they were just decoration. But so far, at least for the worms, it seemed like they dug channels that plant roots poured themselves into at an accelerated rate, which explained at least one way that destroyed vegetation was always replaced in rapid order here.

  They didn’t find a whole lot on the delve, except for two interesting pieces of information that came in the form of loot statistics. Because what they did find, as they tried to determine how much peaceful interaction was required to prompt a potential coin drop from some of the local wildlife, was the gathered data to say that the Order’s way of doing things was really messing with this dungeon.

  Coins, the source of spell slots for the Garden, were actually comparatively rare, all things considered. They didn’t know what the hypothetical highest spell level was, but each level seemed ten times less common than the one below it, which rapidly added up to the reason they weren’t seeing level three coins at all. The dungeon seemed to use scarcity as a limiter, but unfortunately for it, the coins were perfectly sized for the Order to just ignore scarcity forever with their replication ritual.

  The other thing they found was that the dungeon kept dropping spellbooks. As in, the loot they acquired included two copies of spellbooks they already had. In theory that was nice, since the books were sometimes bigger than the replication envelope and couldn’t be copied anyway, but getting another Mindful Reverberation text when they already had seventy of the things was kind of annoying. It did explain at least in part how the Mormon church had stockpiled so many of them, though James still suspected they had their own form of copying magic somewhere.

  That delve was nice, but much like the Climb, it was more of a way to expand the Order’s distributable power. Even the single level two coin they got had a modifier attached that locked it to a single spell forever, which seemed annoyingly like the dungeon thought it was a perk and not a complication.

  That was a concept key to their success so far, and James planned to push it as far as he could. Magic was for everyone. Yes, he needed more personal upgrades if he wanted to do his job of being generically heroic, but everyone needed magic if they wanted to do the collective task of progressing toward a perfect tomorrow. And the Garden was great for that.

  Spell coins were harvestable without violence, technically, and they were copiable in batches besides. Spellbooks were reusable forever, or at least until they decayed to dust in a couple hundred years. The only cost was time, and even this early, the civilian applications were amazing. A couple hours with Altercation Imp Ward for high risk jobs could save thousands of lives and tens of thousands of injuries a year, and James had done the math; the loss of economic productivity was easily offset by keeping skilled workers alive and healthy. And that was just one spell. There had to be more, waiting.

  In contrast, the paired delve into Pylon Motoric was very much just to make James tougher.

  He had hoped to find a breach between the dungeons, because those were cool and unexplored. But instead, he just went in the normal way, and picked up a couple milestones over the course of maybe an hour that had been discovered.

  Crafted Visionary Apprentice was worth two more AP and came from actually drawing a recreation of a piece of graffiti. James kind of wondered if it would work for other forms of art, or if they had their own, but either way, they’d figured out through testing with over fifty delvers that Low Visionary Apprentice came from using any automated method to record a graffiti tag from inside the colossal and endless parking structures. That included using the Office notepad that drew its own version of things, or the Climb spell that created a detailed map out of snow and often could include the graffiti if you narrowed it enough. Which was neat, in James’ opinion.

  Sustained Skirmish was kind of a boring one, and seemed to be for getting in a certain quantity of fights. Only one point, but it was early in the branching tree of requirements that milestones had here, and it also didn’t seem to count any fights if you got another milestone while in the dungeon, so actually getting it was surprisingly tricky.

  James and Alanna did their best to put all of their newly acquired points - three for James, two for Alanna because the dungeon didn’t think her drawing was good enough apparently and she ended up with a different milestone that time - into running. It almost worked. It did work for Alanna, and James only lost one point to increasing his breathing. So at the end of the day, he was left with a slight increase in two things.

  (Breathing : +1 level, 8 levels total, [Charm River Transformation])

  (Running : +2 levels, 2 levels total)

  For a lot of James’ ‘skills’ from the Pylons, he didn’t really know what they were doing. Not really. It was just hard to quantify the small improvements that they seemed to make. Though there was one very interesting factor; the ratroaches who got breathing levels seemed to notice the changes very quickly. And not just them either; human delver with a pretty bad stutter gained a noticeable amount of control when he picked up levels in talking, and another with dyslexia talked about being able to instantly tell what had changed when they got levels in reading.

  It seemed like a strange parallel to the Office’s skill ranks. When you had something dragging you down, the offset was clear to the person who got the levels. If you were already at your best, then it did definitely improve performance, but in a way that was just more marginal.

  So it said a lot when James, newly gifted with two levels in running - not jogging, he’d been careful there - found that he could move so, so much easier.

  It was like he’d been spending the last couple years playing a video game with a broken controller, and had only just been handed one where the analog stick worked. The extra acceleration taped onto his movements that he’d spent so long getting used to and compensating for, finally ceased to shackle James with unwanted momentum. It wasn’t that it was gone, it was that, when he started to move his feet to begin running, all that force worked with him. He didn’t need to frantically compensate to keep from tripping, he didn’t need to hold back, he just needed to move like it was normal. A sliver he’d long forgotten finally removed, the pain he’d grown used to vanished.

  And that was two levels.

  It was, then, a supreme irony that his next planned delve was in Route Horizon, where it didn’t matter how many running levels he got.

  But the next morning, James made an effort and woke up alongside Alanna and Arrush, and followed his two larger partners on their morning run.

  And it shook loose something painfully relieved in his chest, as he realized that here, on a little black asphalt path winding through some uncut grass behind a bunch of mundane apartments, he felt more free than he had in any dungeon so far this week.

  _____

  Getting into the Horizon was amusing to James because, while it had a ‘threshold’ as every dungeon seemed to in some way, the key to it was a state of mind. If you knew about the dungeon and wanted in, you had more time to figure it out, but if you didn’t, then you might never notice as you passed under the arch of highway signs and scaffolding.

  You had to be running away from something to get into the Horizon.

  Well, no, you had to think you were. It was actually a pretty shitty lock, because if you did have more than a few moments to work, the average human could elicit the feeling needed in order to punch through the fog and into the endless roadways and seemingly barren arid desert. Humans were good at lying to themselves when they needed to, though that might not be a totally fair assessment. Everyone else had found that not wanting to go back to where their trauma came from was enough to get the dungeon to let them in, and if it worked for ratroaches and camracondas, it worked for humans too. The dungeon species didn’t have a monopoly on trauma after all.

  Route Horizon itself was oddly pleasant when James entered it at the wheel of a modified jeep that was built sometime in the early 90s and restored to working condition by magic sometime this year, over three decades later. Pressed back into service as one of the few cars that were the right mix of fast enough and durable enough for this delve.

  The dungeon, like the standard design for cars, had changed since James checked last. Overhead, there were neither of the blaring suns. One of them was a crescent over the far horizon, leaving a liquid blood-red afterimage to anyone who looked at it for too long and casting the whole dusty highway in long shadows and baleful reds and oranges. In the dungeon’s sky, which they still didn’t know the true ‘shape’ of, there was just ripples of color from the setting suns, splashes of light that caught on drifting clouds of smoke.

  The clouds were just smoke, an escorted Research team had confirmed that a couple months ago. The dungeon did something to moisture in its domain. Something that was probably illegal according to physics. But that wasn’t the part that bothered James. “Fuck I wish we knew where that smoke comes from.” He said as he watched a coil of the drifting ashy substance catch the light for a moment before dipping back into twilight’s shadow and vanishing from even his enhanced sight.

  ”At least it stays away.” Alanna said as the road rumbled to a consistent beat beneath them. She was having a bad case of copilot syndrome for this stretch; they were between the single roadside buildings that the Horizon team had been stopping at to explore and loot, they weren’t in a fight, and she wasn’t even the person who was supposed to be keeping watch. Actually, Alanna was supposed to be taking a nap and letting the exercise potion return her augmented body to about thirty percent above peak human performance. But that was boring, so she was queuing up a playlist instead. “Hey, you kids good back there?” She called into the back seat.

  Distance-From-Fear and Ishah didn’t look at her, but both of them nodded. The camraconda was watching the terrain pass by as the colored flat dirt outside was occasionally broken up by a mound of rock poking up like a tooth of a giant creature or maybe just a ten foot tall anthill. The ratroach, in contrast, was actually napping. Or trying to. Ishah had become a familiar presence to James on delves, and it surprised him how calm the ratroach could be even in this hostile place.

  Outside the car, Zhu and Leif danced as lances of orange light, flowing on invisible currents as they kept pace with the jeep and the rest of the delver vehicles around them. They weren’t the only navigators; the infomorphs both favored and were favored by long term Horizon delvers, so they were part of a display of ten or so of their kind that drew glowing lines next to the convoy.

  The convoy was one other jeep like the one James was driving, a pair of Crown Vics that had been police interceptor vehicles before they turned into Order interceptor vehicles, and an armored cargo truck in the middle of the formation. They were just here for a general run of exploration and looting, so they hadn’t come in with the full road-fleet that was being assembled in Townton for the next long delve, but they were still prepared to fight off anything short of a whole swarm of dune bugs that came after them.

  The cars were modified too, though how differed for each of them. The jeep James was in had a rearview mirror that let him ‘see’ through the back window of the vehicle like it was an extra eye, which was cool. But that was the only outright magic in it; the rest of its modifications were mechanical. A more powerful engine, better tires, armored windows and panels for when they did get shot at by dungeon life, that kind of thing. Oh, and the gas. Which was magic, but James felt like that didn’t count as a modification.

  They were using the second kind of magical fuel that they’d found in here. While the repair gas was nice, it didn’t hold a candle to the delver value of the gas that mitigated damage to people in the car. They’d discovered that property entirely by accident, when someone had walked off having their delve vehicle flipped over and then partially exploded by a spider tank. And ever since then, the repair gas was something they brought along in the cargo truck to use when needed, not what they put in their cars as a shield against death.

  That was actually a lot of what they were here for today. Oh, they’d stopped at other places, yes, but the shield gas didn’t come from the station pumps, so the team was hunting. Preparing a stockpile for the next long delve that was scheduled for next month, assuming the Horizon didn’t plunge itself into total darkness by then.

  The parking structures had been interesting enough, though James had only gone into one of them. The mazes of rusted and broken cars, the nests of camcondors, the patrolling creatures made of rebar and anger that wore shredded human-sized security guard uniforms, that was all fine. He was really interested when they found a new dungeon creature, and not just because it reminded him of a tumblefeed. It was a neatly rolled ball of copper wire, maybe two inches across, with five foot-long arms extended from it at equal points where it clung to the concrete. A starfish of dull metal, which everyone had thought was just a wall decoration until it had moved and tried to wrap around Ishah’s face. When it failed, it just skittered away under a semi truck that was impossibly parked across half the structure’s third floor, and no one saw it again, which was nerve wracking. They’d looted the place quickly, finding a pair of Velocity gears, a fairly large folding map in the security office, and tucked in an inoperable elevator, half out of line with the floor, one of those car part altars that held a small motor assembly.

  And yet, to James, these things weren’t that interesting anymore. They were just buildings. Cluttered and populated with dungeon life, sure, but they weren’t a parking structure dungeon, and compared to that they just felt a little lacking. Especially since the team had ignored half the maze by using grapples and ropes to climb up and down the outside.

  The rest stop had been a lot more fascinating. There was a hole in the floor of the men’s room, a spiral ramp of broken structure around the outside of the crumbling tile and concrete, the jagged gap in what should have been a totally ordinary place leading down and down and down into a dark void. Though it wasn’t dark enough to deter the delvers from checking it out, and discovering nothing sinister, just another part altar with a radio antenna sitting on it. They’d photographed the diagrams and writings for the records, and made an exit before anything tried to keep them down there.

  On the way out was where the problem had been. One of the cars in the rest stop’s parking lot was a lot less derelict than it had seemed. The dune bug maybe just taking a nap in the shade of the gnarled and unhealthy looking trees that sat in the rough parking lot, but certainly woken up by the time the delvers got to searching it as if it were just another rusting hulk.

  It had highlighted something to James that was critical about this place. The Horizon’s most dangerous life forms had two things going for them; speed, and mass. If you were behind in either count, you were in trouble. Camracondas were great for slowing down the larger cars, but outright stopping them was hard, and fighting even one of the car-shaped insects on foot was a nightmare.

  You needed to meet them on their own battlefield if you wanted things to go well. Which meant being in a car, since no one in the Order that wasn’t named Alex was fast enough on foot to match something like that.

  The fight on foot had nearly killed three people, before the dune bug had made the mistake of circling away from them, revving its organic engine as it lined up for a charge from farther away, and had opened itself up to sustained gunfire without the risk of friendly fire.

  The whole ‘nearly dying’ thing was why Alanna was supposed to be napping. But instead she was just waiting and fidgeting as they neared the target the delve convoy had located.

  Speaking of meeting their targets at high speed, the convoy was just about to make contact. Well, in the next few minutes anyway. Which meant, since they were moving at high speeds, somewhere within three to eight miles from here.

  The radio in the car clicked and Sunrise-In-Cloud’s voice came through clearly, the lack of interference in the Horizon doing their group a favor. “Pack sighted ahead. Thirty miles an hour, vector… away-left.” The camraconda sounded tightly angry as they said that, but kept going. “Cars one and three, split hard left now. Coordinate on final attack.”

  The pack of spider tanks they were after had tried to attack their parked vehicles early in the delve before being driven off. While it was considered bad manners to hold a vendetta, James had read the Horizon reports that talked about these things; packs of them operated like they had a collective record of their own activities, getting better and better at attacking over time if left unchecked. It sucked, but they didn’t learn to interact peacefully. Also, the bulbous metal tanks of their bodies contained magic gas that the Order wanted anyway.

  Still felt awkward to James though. Hunting was never his thing. Though as he steered over the edge of the road and into the cracked dirt through a patch where the spiked metal trench was barely passable to their reinforced tires, he was more thinking about how hard it was to coordinate large fights in here.

  Sunrise-In-Clouds wasn’t annoyed for no reason. When cars moved fast, they often lost their unified frame of reference. Telling someone to ‘go left’ was just really imprecise, and when you were trying to line up two groups to hit from different angles, what you really wanted was precise degrees for your vectors. But, as it turned out, those usually relied on a compass.

  There was no prize for guessing why a compass wasn’t an option in Route Horizon.

  James had about thirty seconds to wonder at getting some kind of synced gyroscope thing that could mimic the function, before he started seeing the wavering black dots that were the silhouettes of the spider tanks ahead. They weren’t really spiders, that was just an easy shorthand; more like bulbs of metal with flexible metal legs ending in spinning wheels. They weren’t very fast, but they moved in packs, used their limbs and they usually had one or two extra arms that ended in some kind of scrapyard delight of machinery; a buzzsaw or cutting torch or something.

  ”Eyes up, buckeroos!” Alanna barked out in excitement as she shifted in her seat. There was one modification to their car that made it even possible to use in a dungeon fight, and that was the way the doors could be swung open and had spots to stand on them. For Distance-From-Fear, this fight would involve bracing himself in the center of the seat and snapping off gazes and spells at things out the front windshield. But for Alanna and Ishah, they were going to be hanging out the side of a moving vehicle and trying to hit their targets in a way that wouldn’t puncture their main bodies. “Time to earn our guzzoline!”

  “What?” Ishah looked outright puzzled as he shuffled into position, his tails slapping against Distance-From-Fear’s armor as they both stared at the back of Alanna’s head.

  ”She’s referencing Mad Max, we’ll watch it later, I am shocked it isn’t the national anthem for the usual Horizon delvers, and get ready!” James called back, not turning his head.

  His hands were held firmly but not painfully on the wheel. He could feel the vibration of the tires on the dirt, the steady sound of a heavy machine moving across the dungeon’s terrain mixing with the engine’s growl, a kind of multisensory white noise that blurred the details of what he could feel and hear and even smell over the endless baking dirt.

  James knew how to drive. James was actually shockingly good at driving in combat situations, despite his training being more civilian oriented in a lifetime of commutes and a few Office skill ranks. He was pretty sure that his potency was just because he was so determined to not panic at dungeon nonsense, and so nothing interrupted his basic skills. But here, right now, he felt something uniquely powerful about this specific dungeon.

  He was flying. The car felt, for just a moment, like part of him. Like he was out here, in the open, able to move so fast that nothing could catch him, free from any tether. Running, hunting, delving, none of those words meant anything as he pushed the devoted jeep up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The other vehicle at his side, behind on the left making the beginning of a wedge formation with just the two of them, became more than just another delver; along with the navigators flowing around them and making tiny corrections, they were a single high speed organism. All that mattered was the momentum. And also not hitting any rocks. That would interrupt the sensation a lot.

  “R-ready!” Ishah yelled from the back seat as the black dots got closer and closer against the liquid red crescent on the horizon.

  Alanna grabbed the radio mic and thumbed the button. “In position!” She announced. “You guys ready?”

  ”Prepared to strike.” Sunrise-In-Clouds replied. “Careful for collisions, and do not blow them up. Ten seconds!” They added.

  James pulled the wheel to the right, nudging them back toward the tanker spider pack. They had probably seen the dust cloud from the incoming cars by now, but the point was less to be unnoticed, and more to distract them from the other half of the delvers coming from a different direction. He flicked his turn signal on, almost giggling at the mundane gesture that served the real purpose of silently telling the other car his intent, and began the final approach to the pack that had noticed but failed to get up to speed in time.

  The moment Sunrise-In-Clouds had given them a time, Alanna had hit another button. Replacing the radio on its clip, and hitting play, causing the already noisy car interior to fill with the sounds of Rob Zombie’s Dragula.

  James barely had time to appreciate it before they crossed paths with the pack. He brought them past the edge of the cluster of nine dusty silver creatures, clipping one with the edge of his vehicle and feeling a harsh jerk on the wheel as he kept his cool and kept control and then suddenly they were past. The flashing shapes behind them in seconds as the guitar of the song thrummed.

  James braked, shedding speed just enough that they didn’t skid out or flip. Alanna and Ishaha, as he brought them back down to a speed where they were still well ahead of their targets but not flying away from them, threw their doors open and stepped out. Braving the open air over the ground screaming past, both of them raised rifles and started lining up shots at the spiders that were now flowing after the two cars.

  ”This is really fucking hard!” Alanna’s yell was barely audible to James as she took what she thought were careful shots, but that didn’t appear to be hitting anything. “How the fuck do you do this all the time?” He thought he heard her say.

  To be fair, James cheated with magic. But Alanna could do the same if she wanted to, though he would never say that during a gunfight. Zhu and Leif were already helping the duo aim, when they weren’t telling James where holes in the dirt were that he needed to watch out for.

  As the two cars harassed the spiders, occasionally plinking a high caliber armor piercing bullet into one of them, the camraconda delvers waited for their moment. It came when the rest of the convoy came in from the side, flanking the pack and making for an effective ambush. They timed it with a rocky slope that the spiders seemed unwilling to flee up, so that they effectively pinned the group down unless they wanted to stop. And Route Horizon life never wanted to stop.

  Now it wasn’t just guns. Camraconda gazes, casts of Pave and wand-modified Reaching Frost, dropped spike strips and launched nets, the delvers unleashed a hail of disabling and crippling effects on the rolling metal constructs, most of them going down in the span of seconds. Tangled in ropes, wheels ripped apart, icy arms growing from the ground to grab and cling even if they were ripped apart quickly, it all added up fast.

  None of them exploded. Though by the time the fight was done - timed badly, because Alanna’s playlist hadn’t even gotten halfway through the first song - two of them were leaking husks. The rest, though, took up most of the remainder of the time the Order spent in the dungeon. Dispatching the trapped or wounded ones, and circling back with their own set of power tools to dismantle, tap, and siphon the liquid out of their tanks. Storing it in barrels in the big cargo truck, while the smaller cars circled their position like patrolling sharks, leaving the others to do the hard work.

  James felt a little bit irate that the main injury he got on this delve was nearly cutting a finger off by accident here, and not from an actual fight. At least he got to actually make use of his umbral Patch Garment spell to put his glove back together.

  But by the end of it, the Order had secured a wealth of new resources, including a dozen small Velocity gears for copying and feeding to everyone, and enough maps to put together a new spell.

  Exhaust Torch was the first variable cost Horizon spell James had ever seen. One to three Velocity got you, with a pretty intuitive physical sensation, a single breath of fire. As in, like a mythological dragon of legend, spraying fire out of your mouth.

  It couldn’t burn the caster, it was weirdly safe actually, and a single Velocity was more just the world’s coolest party trick for lighting candles. The spell came out of a tourist map of Seattle intersecting with a fragment of road map of I-5, the two technically lining up. The spell was one of those ones where the decision was made to not give it to literally everybody, unless they had a good reason.

  And in an unexpected twist, it was also the first one where they had another intersecting map chunk. Just a tiny little blot of a few streets that happened to also intersect the I-5 somewhere. And what they found when they tested that was wild.

  If you used the first two, you got Exhaust Torch. If you used the other map piece with the central highway, you instead got A Hood And Cowl, which was a personal enhancement that let a caster either ignore or compensate for the downsides of trying to do something while at high speeds. Or in a vehicle. It wasn’t clear, and required more testing.

  Now James poked at Alanna that she could cheat with magic while in a car chase and gunfight.

  The thing was, you couldn’t get both spells. They were mutually exclusive. And while that sucked, what was cool was that Sunrise-In-Clouds only took about ten minutes to figure out that you could intentionally absorb the connected map chunk, empowering the spell that it added to. For Exhaust Torch, it meant the ability to add another point of Velocity to the spell for a similar effect. For A Hood And Cowl, it meant that the nine Velocity cost just went a little farther, lasted a little longer.

  James was going to do his normal thing and refuse to make a decision until he was certain about something, burned too many times by jumping into something. Then Alanna and Zhu had both teamed up to pin him in a headlock and force him to make a decision, his girlfriend and navigator mutually agreeing that leaving the option unfilled was definitely worse than making a long term mild mistake. After escaping from being gagged with feathers that were literally attached to him, James had relented, and accepted copies of the map fragments in the right order to get Exhaust Torch.

  He didn’t really need to compensate while driving. He was much more likely to need to spit a fireball at something. Not even for combat, just the basic survival utility of always having a lighter on him was kind of cool.

  Combined with enough copied gears to get his Velocity up to a maximum of twenty five, and James felt like he had come out of this delve with wild success. The thrumming in his chest as his Velocity slowly filled up over the next week a constant reminder of his efforts.

  Leaving the Route was so wildly different from the rest of James’ delves. There was no building to sneak out of like the Pylon or the Stacks. It wasn’t as personal as the Office either. Instead, their convoy rolled carefully back through destroyed streets long since swept of debris, avoiding packs of necroads that were still a toss-up in terms of hostility. Like the delve had followed them back into Earth. And then, when they cleared the outer perimeter of Townton, the mood changed so quickly that it was like he’d gotten whiplash from hitting the brakes too hard.

  People on the streets saw their convoy and waved, excitement and amusement at the delvers return clear on a variety of faces. Not everyone; some of the umbral they passed didn’t seem to really know what the armored vehicles indicated, and some of the humans looked more nervous than comfortable. But that was to be expected from people who were new, and some of whom had come from places where armed figures in armored vehicles meant that there was violence about to happen, often to them.

  But overall, it was a strangely public welcome back to the broader world. A civilian public that knew about the dungeons, knew about the delves, and waved to them happily as they came back. Something that, as far as James knew, didn’t exist anywhere else.

  He loved Townton so much. Even if it was becoming a logistical challenge, it was a place that was something new. And having the rest of the night free after the delve meant he and Alanna and Zhu had time to explore it.

  Maybe go get dinner with TQ. Maybe visit the park and get to know more chanters. Maybe see if Arrush and Keeka were down here hanging out with their own friend. Maybe just go hang out and vibe with the terminally chill pillboar that lived on the outskirts of the perimeter in a backyard swimming pool.

  Maybe anything. Just as soon as he and his girlfriend took a shower powerful enough to get rid of the grit that had formed a crust on their skin somehow from the hours on the road. And maybe after a nap.

  Certainly before the next delve tomorrow.

  James was so fucking glad he had multiple stat upgrades that kept him from feeling exhausted.

  _____

  And so life continued. Weird and bountiful and maybe just a little bit dangerous.

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