"Well, unlike cylons, our terminator units have shown a complete indifference to the human concept of divinity!" -Alex Stacey, Crapshot 423 (The Weapon 4)-

  _____

  “You have a lotta friends, kid.” Kiki commented as James watched another group teleport into the parking lot that had once been used to drop kids off for their daily classes.

  The woman was standing like she’d never missed a day of finishing school, a living expression of an etiquette lesson. And somehow, impossibly unfairly, she made it seem casual and relaxed as she sipped from a ceramic mug of hot chocolate that declared her the world’s most grandma.

  James let his eyes focus on the cup as Kiki smacked her lips and gave a content sigh. “Most what.” He asked, trying to deflect.

  ”Grandma.” Kiki said with the kind of ancient and tarnished smugness that could only come from someone that was either carrying around some kind of phenomenal cosmic power, or was very old. “So where are you gonna fit all these people?” She asked as she stood next to James in the door of the clubhouse she’d finally actually come home to.

  “…I really should have asked if we could use this place as a temporary base.” James said. “Sorry, that’s my bad. Do you mind if we borrow one or two of the empty rooms?”

  ”Oh, I’m not being snippy with you, I’m really asking how big you think this place is. It was an elementary school, you know. There was a good reason for setting up in the library.”

  James’ teeth bit into his upper lip as he considered that. “Ah.” He said slowly. “So not that much room. Well it’s fine, we’ll have most of them out there today. Myself included. Still need to figure out if we’re dealing with a few thousand ravenous creatures from beyond the veil, or a few million.”

  ”One of those seems easier for you.” Kiki opined as she took another sip of her drink.

  It was, James decided, absolutely criminal that he could smell how delicious that was from here. The perfect morning beverage on a cold December morning. “Is there more of that somewhere?” He asked.

  After a moment of quiet, save for the wind and the voices of those approaching, the woman shaped natural force shrugged. ”Sure.” Kiki handed him a mug.

  James took it, and frowned at the fact that he knew that it hadn’t been there a moment ago. Kiki’s own mug was still in her hands, this one was something new, and yet, it was both his and also filled with hot cocoa. He looked down at the mug, holding it up slightly to read the words on the side. World’s most pain in my backside, it read. He turned to try to make direct eye contact with Kiki, but she just kept her gaze fixed on the pale grey fire of the morning sky, a tiny smile on her lips as James took a loud sip. “Thanks.” He said, humor and earnestness intermixing in his voice.

  The drink was delicious, too. Chocolatey and rich but with none of the cloying sticky sensation of something overburdened with sugar. It made James feel like the day was starting. Not in a way that promised more work, or that brought dread, but just the warm content sensation that today had begun and he was a part of it.

  ”This is really good.” Zhu commented, having appeared in glowing feathered form wreathing James when James was distracted by his own calm gazing up into the sky. The navigator had taken a sip of the mug that he was now holding himself in a taloned grip, the liquid going… somewhere. Not to James, at least, they knew that much.

  Navigators were weird.

  ”Morning.” James said. “How’s the magic?” He asked, breaking the spell slightly to ask something practical while trying to read Zhu's mug.

  Zhu focused for a second, and then made a surprised revving sound. “Huh! Still there! Did you get yours back?”

  ”Sure did.” James said with a smile that had enough smug satisfaction that it might one day rival Kiki’s.

  Once per day, from his advancement due to the whole umbral thing, James could cast Patch Garment. A useful little cantrip, even if it was kind of minor. Alternately, once per day, James could pass off his ability to cast the spell to someone else.

  And now, after having giving it to Zhu yesterday, and waiting long enough that the spell came back to James, they found that Zhu still had it. The biggest weakness of the magic, the inability to stockpile it? That was only true if you were alone. A collective could store as many uses as they wanted, apparently.

  Well, not literally as many as they wanted. A quick second test showed that Zhu couldn’t take on another charge. They needed to check with Tylor and Jubilance to see if that rule held true higher level spells; both of them were already here today, with varying levels of grumpiness, and it felt like it was high time to actually drag them into the Order proper by throwing them into Research like steak into a pack of wolves.

  Maybe he should have done that sooner. Maybe James had made a mistake with them, not finding hooks to use to integrate them more directly and firmly. He’d need to revise his cultural strategy for the future.

  ”You awake?” Zhu poked him out of his thoughts. “You wanna trade shadow spells, since that works?”

  “I don’t actually know if I need a single cast of Check Container.” James said, but then shrugged, the feathers covering his right side fluttering a little with the motion. “But then again, it’s kind of free real estate, isn’t it? So yeah, hit me.” He settled on, and a moment later, felt… well, nothing really. That was one of the issues with being handed the spells; you did actually need to keep track manually. There was no sensation or anything. “Thanks!” James said anyway, assuming Zhu had done the thing.

  “No problem. Now tell our army of minions where to go.” Zhu pointed at the group of knights that was upon them.

  Right now, James was the first point of contact for everyone as they arrived, and got directed toward where the Order was going to be holding briefings and mustering for operations. The building was actually almost entirely empty except for them; no one from the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society actually lived on site, unless you counted the cat. And James wasn’t sure about the cat yet. So it was just him his friends and Kiki here to greet everyone as they filtered in.

  They came through, some of them sharing short words before being directed where they were going. It wasn’t like the building was complicated, but this was someone else’s borrowed Lair. James felt it was critical to be polite.

  ”Good morning, Miss Kindness.” Ink-And-Key said as he slithered past, the long white camraconda addressing Kiki as he carried several hundred pounds in packed gear bags into the building.

  ”Hey Kiki! Yoon and Mishka and Din all say hi and want to know when you’ll come back to hang out with Clutter again!” Sarah drifted past like some kind of ethereal fairy, a gentle touch on Kiki’s shoulder getting a tentative smile and a mild promise out of the old woman.

  ”Oh, Kiki, good. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the progress on studying your anti-death charms. If you have a moment later, maybe we can talk?” The most human ratroach commented as Reed walked into the building with a couple more people from Research trailing behind him. Or her. James still didn’t have an answer for that from his head Researcher.

  “H-hello again.” Arrush paused just long enough to meet Kiki’s eyes. Then he smiled at her. “You look happier.” He said, before realizing how openly he’d spoken and having to force himself not to flinch away, quietly moving through the doors. After James stole a kiss from him, eliciting an amused chuckle from Kiki at the color Arrush turned.

  ”Ma’am.” Evans said as he gave Kiki a polite bow of his head. “Si… James.” He caught himself this time, and James smirked.

  ”Kiki. Paladin.” Was the formal term that Cam used, Kiki giving her an amused look as the young human-looking girl appraised the width of the doors and then folded her wings a little tighter to fit through. And though he wasn’t her only companion, Morgan was one of those trailing in her wake, doing his best to not make eye contact with James, who was doing his own best to scour Morgan’s thought processes from the outside.

  They weren’t the only ones. People kept arriving for a while. A technical fortune in telepads being used to bring almost a hundred knights in various shapes and sizes to this strange new battlefield. James and Kiki saw them all into the Society’s schoolhouse, including in the mix a half dozen of the older delvers who showed up while the whole process was going on. That wasn’t an accident or coincidence either; they knew damn well what they were doing, all of them old hands at being in dangerous fights, even if the specifics of some of the dungeon memories were blurred and fuzzy.

  ”You know,” James said after the twentieth person had something to say to Kiki, “I’m starting to think you’re more popular than I am.”

  ”You’re intimidating!” Zhu lied.

  “He’s not intimidating, he just talks enough that everyone’s already said their piece to him.” Kiki took another sip of her seemingly endless hot cocoa. James’ cup had run out, so apparently her magic didn’t give him free refills. He’d be keeping the mug though. “I’m not planning on stealing your order out from under you, keep your panic quiet.” She told him.

  ”I am, I’m only screaming internally.” James joked.

  ”I know, maybe turn the volume down.” Kiki joked back. “I can hear you from across the country.”

  James raised an eyebrow. “Are you, perhaps, currently both here and also across the country?”

  ”Haven’t figured that out, if I can even manage a trick like that. Maybe I can finally get my Vegas act going.” Kiki sounded so weird when she wasn’t having an existential crisis, James wasn’t sure how to feel about it. “You’re supposed to feel good when you help people.” She told him. “Moron. Stop being so American.”

  ”You’re American too!” James protested with a laugh.

  “And look where that almost got me.” Kiki patted him on the shoulder, the bony fingers of her hand biting in with a shockingly crushing force. Then, her expression changed, as did her voice. Not in tone, but in actual composition, like a very slightly different person was speaking. “I need to go take care of something. Don’t burn the place down.” She told James.

  He and Zhu gave her a startled look, eyes both human and navigator widening in alarm. “Are you okay? If you need-“

  Kiki’s smile, several smiles shifting and overlapping, was like a forced wave of reassurance. “This one I don’t think I’ll mind so much.” She said as she stepped out, past the awning, and gave James and Zhu a grin. “Don’t wreck the clubhouse, or my state! I know how you can be!” She called, before suddenly there was just a blur of motion and Kiki was gone; launched or maybe pulled into the air at speeds that would make a fighter jet blush.

  James basically blinked and she was gone. “I’m worried about her.” He told Zhu.

  ”I’m worried about whoever she’s gonna land on!” Zhu retorted.

  ”Oh I hadn’t considered that. Yeah, maybe shoulda tried to stop her a little more.” James hummed. “Course, last time we saw her basically land on someone, it was an Alchemist. But then again, at least one third of Alchemists have mostly completed their personal redemption arcs, so…”

  Zhu counted on his talons. ”How are you counting Columbia?” He asked. “Is he, like, only half a person because he’s an inhabitor?”

  ”I… was going to forget he counted.” James admitted as he nodded to a group that he was pretty sure were rogue knights coming in. “We can examine my biases and poor memory later. I think we’re mostly done with people arriving, let’s go get the briefing and assignments going.”

  ”And then a road trip into-!”

  ”Absolutely not! Not until we get some better scouting information beyond you going ‘yeah probably murder over there’!”

  ”Well obviously,” Zhu rolled his central eye, the pupil sliding all the way around the smooth domed projection, “I’m not hungry for doom, I just wanna drive into an ambush we know about on purpose. I wanna see you do the street harpoon thing! I’ve heard about it but never seen it!”

  James shook his head and tried to not get flustered by the laughter that Zhu’s words brought out of at least a half dozen people around him while he followed the tail end of the knight pack into the building. “We need to get you a hobby.” He said as he headed off to plan.

  _____

  How do you deal with an invasive species? Because while the increased force they had to bring to bear now was definitely going to let them cut through to where the dungeon had been, it was a long shot that this would actually let them drag all the dungeon life back. So the Order needed to be prepared to manage what was looking like a local ecological disaster, which was perversely low pressure compared to what half the knights were used to.

  To get the answer to that question, James turned to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. Kind of the people who you’d want to go to in the event that you had this exact issue, and people he was annoyed they hadn’t thought of earlier.

  To expedite getting an answer, he kind of kidnapped four of them, and stuck them in the briefing with everyone else, which was why they’d had to go through the process of answering a few basic questions. But it did legitimately speed things up. It also probably saved at least two of their lives, because they were supposed to be going into the danger zone today to check up on a few people from their department that had stopped answering their phones.

  As it turned out, there were a lot of ways to handle invasive species. And also, it turned out, the word ‘invasive’ was kind of arbitrary. There were a lot of species that weren’t native to Oklahoma that didn’t count; the defining factor was if something was the species in question was fucking things up. Mostly fucking things up for humans. So that was jarring to learn.

  Also jarring to learn was that the main way they tended to manage these things, when or if they ever came up, was to find the most efficient way to kill as many of the species as possible. And when the state officials who weren’t busy being confused by the presence of ratroaches got a look at some of the captured specimens, they all very quickly agreed that either wide deployment of traps, or just shooting them, was the way to go.

  They also had a lot of questions about life cycles and breeding patterns, to which the Order didn’t have any good answers. All they really knew was that the things were aggressive and hungry.

  This particular maneuver James had pulled did lead to one of the higher ups from Wildlife Conservation admitting that he’d gotten ‘a few’ emails and ‘maybe a phone call’ about these things. When his own employees threatened to cut his dick off if he didn’t elaborate, he then admitted that it was more like a couple hundred emails and calls. Including a blurry photo of something that looked like Bigfoot, which was why he thought he was being pranked, and had ignored it.

  At least he offered to work as a field guide for one of their teams. He wasn’t evil or malicious. Just kind of dumb.

  _____

  The first objective was the town of Goodwell itself. While no one knew the exact nature of the dungeon that had, or possibly still was, there, they did know a very focused location of where its entrance had been. The antimeme that had carved out memories of it was both thorough and brutal, but it wasn’t any match for Kiki pointing and saying right about there.

  They’d refrained from teleporting anyone straight to the source of the issue yesterday because there was a pretty high chance of something going wrong on landing. And the fact that Zhu, and later Harriet and Amelia and a half dozen other younger navigators besides, all had trouble finding a route that didn’t involve something trying to eat them meant that they weren’t super interested in just trying to make use of the highways.

  Certain people changed that equation.

  Dave and Pendragon, showing up for the first time James had seen his friend in a while, were no longer the only dragons that the Order had. Though Pendragon was still the largest, she wasn’t the only one capable of a pretty sizable flight range. And so between them, and some passengers running a pretty wide net of camera drones, there wasn’t much trouble locating a spot to deploy the vanguard to.

  Having a vanguard that included people like Cam also helped. Actually Cam kind of just was the vanguard. Appearing out of nowhere outside a mechanic shop that was still open, and quickly calling the all clear when no one tried to murder her.

  Knights followed. Teleporting in as squads that rapidly began to draw attention. There were still people here, civilians, and they maybe just a little bit weren’t that comfortable with random armed and armored adventuring parties appearing on their street.

  And a lot of them had guns.

  Before a mob could form, James had gone into action. Approaching the nearest people and asking questions about the situation with the kind of open energy that he’d learned really effectively disarmed suspicion. Having actual state officials on hand helped too. Quickly building rapport based on the fact that James was willing to make fun of the federal government for not being involved, and framing the Order as a ‘citizen’s militia’ also helped more than he was comfortable with, but whatever, it got them answers, and fast.

  The towns in this part of Oklahoma just weren’t that big. It wasn’t like they were tiny blips you could drive through without noticing, but often times they were maybe a five-street grid of houses, a few restaurants, a half dozen other businesses that were there to cater to the farmer population, and in this case, a university. But even the presence of student housing didn’t make Goodwell that big. And that factor didn’t exist for the three nearest towns either.

  So while they set about making sure the locals knew they were here to help, and learning about how basically everyone knew about the wild animal attacks, they also set about establishing a perimeter.

  That perimeter started about two blocks down Church street, just before the university parking lot and almost exactly where Kiki had told them the dungeon entrance had been. It started there and not somewhere sensible like ‘the outer buildings of the city’ because that was where the dungeon wildlife had gotten to before being deterred by the locals.

  The buildings past there were, in short, infested.

  Team objectives were quickly revised. The locals, who had been living under this condition of pressing hostility for what seemed like months, were looped in. Lists of farms that weren’t affected were drawn up, little squares on the map that denoted places where the creatures hadn’t spread to. There was no clear evenly distributed pattern; it seemed almost random in some cases, until two things were considered. The local terrain in the places that weren’t farmland or road, and the roads themselves. Natural barriers and inorganic throughways funneling the dungeon life to erratic destinations.

  The biggest problem was the local memeplex. It was a strange one, even to Planner, who was self-admittedly pretty strange themself. It didn’t stop people from acknowledging or thinking about or even communicating the danger of the creatures. It just stopped them from reacting in the most obvious way that a person should react; not a single one of them seemed able to accept that leaving was a good idea.

  If it had just been some of them, it would be one thing. People got attached to where they lived, that was natural. And a lot of the homes here were owned by the people who lived in them. James knew he’d have a hard fucking time abandoning a whole house, even if it was a ‘good idea’. But it wasn’t some of them, it was everyone, and out of the six hundred people that two of the knight squads checked up on over the day, not a single one of them brought up escape, evacuation, or even just the idea of moving to a neighboring town.

  So with a hundred people deployed, and their immediate goals set, they got started.

  _____

  Actually the memeplex was the second biggest problem. The biggest problem was that there were a lot more types of dungeon life in this area.

  Ink-And-Key’s team, which included one of their recruited wildlife agents but thankfully - to the camraconda at least - did not have any other local humans as reinforcing militia, encountered the first new one.

  It was ophidian, like himself, which was worth absolutely nothing because it seemed to have no interest in commiseration or communication at all. The fact that it was three times his length and six inches in diameter also meant it was more like an Earth boa and not a real camraconda, but still. The subtle signs that it was from a dungeon included things like the hundreds of quills carpeting its back in layers, and the way the sounds of the natural world twisted around it.

  When it lunged from out of a covering of dry grass, Ink-And-Key had entirely missed it; so it was a good thing that there was a far more alert and skittish ratroach in his team that had blocked the strike. The snake wasn’t their first contact, so it was mostly alone as the other life in the immediate area had been cleared out, but no one wanted to risk shooting it and drawing more attention if they didn’t have to. Also the Order was trying to make sure they had live captures for study, so they worked to get it into the animal control crate they had on their little ATV.

  This was where Ink-And-Key had discovered the other quirk of the snake. When he had tried to voice a complaint, in the aftermath of the scuffle, his voice had come out wrong. John’s voice had not, however. Which was to say, when Ink-And-Key spoke, it came out in John’s voice, from John. It wasn’t just twisting sound, it was mixing it up like a live DJ.

  Further experimentation found that all sound that someone made was being transferred and transmuted to someone, or something, nearby. All their voices bounced to each other, but the reason that sound itself seemed twisted around in the area was because each plant rustling in the wind was giving off the actual sound of a different plant somewhere close by. Even walking sounded slightly different, though it seemed to obey physics in some abstract way, as when someone else’s steps were ‘sent’ to Ink-And-Key, the resulting noise was actually the rasp of his plated belly sliding across the ground.

  ”This is very confusing.” Ink-And-Key said, and not just as an excuse to hear himself with a real actual organic warmth in his words. “I should have stayed in Saskatoon with Alex. Thermoclese, please call this in, assuming that is possible.”

  It was possible. It was just a little weird.

  The next one was less weird and more horrifying. Probably the source of the not-bigfoot photos that had been sent into the Wildlife department, the creature had been spotted moving from room to room inside one of the university buildings that was being cleared out, and had at first been thought to be a giant furry spider.

  Just a flash of brown fur and four legs with no look at a central body, rushing through a doorway. It was big, bigger than a human for sure, though definitely no more than a couple thousand pounds. Dangerous wildlife big, not dungeon going all out big.

  The team had followed, moving deliberately and carefully, both because the creature was large and also because there were spiderweb patterns of cracks in the walls and floors here. Like someone had fired a makeshift cannon into them and then mostly cleaned up the debris. And no one was in a hurry to get caught by that.

  Their target had been located in the cramped confines of what had once been the college’s IT office. Tight quarters of narrow halls and furniture toppled or damaged by the other dungeon life that had swarmed through here made the place a nightmare to navigate; even more so than most dungeon environments. This place wasn’t clean, and while a dungeon might have a lot of deliberate traps, it was smaller details like the shredded papers scattered from the broken copier creating a slipping hazard that threatened to trip up knights who only had combat expedite as delvers.

  Inside the IT office though, most of the debris had been shoved out to form a kind of circular nest of cables and crushed electronics. Inside it, piles of stripped bones - many of them human - sat underneath the brown furred set of legs.

  When it ‘saw’ them, the rest of the animal had revealed itself; a torso extending from its center that looked very much like a bear, complete with paws and lifelike head. But the eyes of the head didn’t have any spark in them, and the arms didn’t really move; the whole thing was like a terrible angler fish lure, because who would just walk up to a bear anyway?

  The false-body had then split along the center, opening up a mouth filled with a lot of small teeth, and had screamed. The sound had struck the front member of the party that had encountered the creature hard enough to shatter stone, a physical shockwave directed into the lifeform’s prey.

  Unfortunately for it, that prey happened to be Cam, who had taken the hit and not even flinched as the rest of her team unloaded enough automatic fire into the monster to kill something far more dangerous than it. The loot drop from it had been about ten of the things they’d been finding from all the others, as well as one larger piece in a different and more cubic shape. Cam had ordered them to be especially careful with that one, especially after they measured it and found it could probably fit in the copier ritual. Though they’d had to check that after dealing with the flood of scythe rabbits that came to investigate the gunfire.

  Meanwhile, while the university was being cleared out, and the outer edges of Goodwell were being patrolled, there was a new problem for everyone to deal with.

  Traffic.

  As in, the normal interstate traffic moving along highways 54, which had not stopped. Civilian and commercial traffic, mostly people cutting through the relatively thin spur of Oklahoma as they went from Kansas to Texas, but plenty of people who were just going to the larger nearby city for groceries, or hitting up a bar, or road tripping, or something.

  This traffic was, for the most part, making it through just fine. Semi trucks, it turned out, were largely immune to dungeon life that was the size of a large hare, even if it was an impressively large and also armed hare. The problem that the knight team encountered, as they got used to the passing cars while they scoured the uncultivated fields and rough hills to the south of Goodwell, was that some of those cars were state police.

  And the state police of Oklahoma, it turned out, didn’t like it when you had squads of mixed species knights running around with automatic rifles and dungeontech.

  Now, one of the reasons James had sought approval from the Wildlife Conservation department was so that the Order was technically operating in the legal realm of being semi-deputized. It was fuzzy, but they weren’t really breaking any laws. So the state troopers that showed up to attempt to arrest the first squad they encountered weren’t actually puppeted by the Long Arm Of The Law, they were just normal police who were doing what they thought was their job. And under normal circumstances, James would have agreed that maybe yeah it would at least be smart to check on what the fuck was going on.

  Less so when they didn’t know about the dungeon life.

  To the state troopers’ collective credit, they caught on real fast, and none of them actually shot at the nonhuman element of the patrolling squad. But there were multiple close calls with the sheer quantity of things trying to eat them.

  One of which was best described as just a little guy. Like a mushroom cap of a body, covered in striped fur, with thin little paws underneath that it used to scuttle around. Despite the shape, it was entirely mammal, or at least mammal-impersonating, even if its mouth was kind of wide where it sat on the underside of its body.

  It was probably the least physically imposing thing they’d found so far. It was also a genuine magical terror and the closest they’d gotten to casualties so far, counting the grizzly cannon.

  Like the hares, it dampened sound around it. Unlike the hares, it didn’t just muffle; it stole. Noise was taken and, the early reports of encounters guessed, compressed into a kind of domed shell that mimicked the shape of the creature’s body. It could only it while stationary, letting everything go with a cacophony of noise when it moved on, but while it was sitting still, if it was fed enough volume, it could create essentially a stationary shockwave.

  And if one of them was half-buried in a pile of farm compost, and it had collected a few dozen gunshots? Well, that shell was thin enough that the total force could rip someone’s fingers off.

  Which was why Evans’ team had to send a couple people to evac two of the police that had gotten too close to the dungeon-made beast. At least the Order had a stockpile of purple orbs for regrowing fingers.

  The last one was also in the occupied part of the town of Goodwell. Which was itself a bizarre boundary line, because there wasn’t a boundary line. There were houses with people living in them directly adjacent to houses that were empty due to the deaths of every resident. There were buildings where the windows were broken in and there was dungeon life nesting inside next to businesses in operation. And while people acknowledge that was true, and even took steps to protect themselves and were suitably on edge, again, none of them considered maybe leaving.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  In one of those emptied buildings, they found the first scavenger variety of the dungeon’s creation. Four slender legs that were way too uniform to be an evolved Earth mammal, and a coat of either pale white or dusty black fur, the sharply pointed muzzles that the fist sized creations had for faces all had bulbous furry sacs coming out underneath. Inflating like they were croaking toads, but making no noise.

  Well, no noise that was actively audible to a human.

  Infrasound was the term for it; something that was just barely below what the unmodified human ear could hear, but that had half the team clearing the building feeling a sense of unknown dread, and in some cases active nausea. Ishah had to stay outside when it turned out that the effect on ratroaches, even ones that had undergone shaper surgery, involved rapidly skipping nausea and going straight to vomiting, and also bleeding from the eyes. But at least Myri could report that camracondas could handle it just fine.

  There were bodies, humans and dogs both, in the building being fed on by the dungeon scavengers. But it didn’t look like they’d done the killing; the marks were from the scythe rabbits, even though there was no sign of those, so it was looking likely that these particular beasts were part of the dungeon’s own ecology. Using infrasound to drive away successful predators and get a meal of their own in, while pulling double duty in creating a hostile environment for delvers.

  The thing about scavengers was, while they didn’t attack on sight, they were still vicious bastards when they wanted to be. And when the knights surprised a room full of them, half of them had scattered out the window while the other half had gone berserk and started screaming in the infrasound noise they made, while also physically trying to rip people’s eyes out.

  It hadn’t worked out well for them, and the Order had another thirty loot drops to add to their growing stockpile. But it was worth keeping in mind that just because something filled an ecological niche, didn’t mean it was going to behave like its Earth counterpart.

  There were probably more variants and styles of dungeon life spread out there, but at least for now, the Order was getting a clearer picture of what they were up against.

  And, maybe for the first time, they were finding that they were ready for it.

  _____

  “Okay, so, let’s recap.” El said, using her best customer service voice while she tried to ignore Momo grinning like a gargoyle behind her. “The city is full of monsters.”

  ”Wouldn’t call Goodwell a city, but with you so far.” The man who had answered the knock at the house shrugged behind the screen door.

  ”You know there are monsters. And in fact, have been attacked by at least one.”

  The man nodded solemnly. ”Big ol bitch too!” He said, fingers tapping the bandaid stuck to the side of his cheek. “Almost got me good! Nearly broke my shovel on its damn skull.”

  El went through the impossible effort of keeping her face from twitching in whatever direction her emotions were demanding. “Your neighbors have been killed and eaten by monsters.” She added. And even Momo stopped smirking for that.

  Her conversation partner frowned and shook his head solemnly. “Fucking shame, is what it is. Oh, I hated Mark, but I just wanted him to stop doing laundry at 4 am. No one deserved that.”

  It annoyed El when people humanized themselves in front of her. She didn’t let that show either. “Well, good news, the Order is prepping an evacuation. Are you ready to get out of here?”

  The look she got in return was so puzzled that the guy skipped the part where he got angry that someone had confused him, which was at least novel for today. ”Why?”

  El took a deep breath. “Monsters.”

  ”Yeah?”

  ”Injury.” She pointed at his face.

  ”Not that bad, but yeah.”

  ”Dead neighbors.”

  ”Still a tragedy.”

  ”So maybe you should leave before you get injured or dead to the monsters?” El asked exceptionally patently.

  ”Why though?”

  She took a breath and changed tracks. “So, do you own this house?”

  ”Wife and I do, yeah. Mortgage free, too! Came in from her uncle, so it’s just property tax, and around here you’re looking at next to nothing there.” He gave a small shake of his head, shifting to lean against the doorframe and showing more of the hall behind him that looked like it still had cardboard boxes in it.

  ”Is that why you want to stay?” El pressed. “The house?”

  ”Honestly I kinda hate the place. It’s free, and there’s fresh air and some good hunting, but it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere and there isn’t even a church here unless you want to drive half an hour up the road.”

  ”…so if a disaster happened and you had to evacuate, that’d be pretty good, right?” El promoted. "As an excuse to bail?"

  The man gave a little bobbing nod, lips pursed. “Sure, sure, so long as no one’s hurt. Why?”

  ”Because there’s monsters in Goodwell and they’re killing and eating people and you should maybe use this as impetus to get out of here?”

  ”Oh yeah? Wait, why?”

  Damn, she’d almost had him. Or at least, El was prepared to believe that; at least she’d gotten a momentary blip of raised eyebrows and possible consideration. “Well this has been fascinating. Speaky?”

  From inside the collar of the bomber jacket she was wearing, a reedy voice emerged. “I’m tirrrrred. This is the thousandth one! Make Sar do it!”

  ”He and JP’re busy with…” El didn’t even fucking know. She just stopped that sentence, and pivoted. “Come on, this is the last one on our list.”

  ”…Why am I on a list?” The man asked.

  El rolled her eyes. The reason she and Momers had been given this shitty job was that they had infomorph support, but also because half the people in this city were primed by their existing biases to open the door and have a conversation with random young women. But honestly, it was a little weird how people wouldn’t just slam the door when she questioned them on leaving. El, Momo, and Speaker’s mapping of the local memeplex - done through the low tech method of tugging at the edges of memories and documents - was showing a construct that seemed to frequently recreate the Wile E. Coyote trick of someone’s thoughts running off a cliff and not noticing that there was gravity for a while.

  Or at least that’s how Momo had phrased it. El, recent new owner of three different skill ranks in sociology topics, found herself looking at it as a kind of operant conditioning. When someone thought about leaving, their mind just blanked and left them with an obviously unpleasant sensation of confusion. Not just about escape, but about everything they were doing. Do that to someone enough times, and you’d end up with a human that would find themselves repulsed by the idea of running away.

  Though of course, they didn’t know how long this had been going on for. The city was infested with dungeon life, and El had her pockets crammed full of orbs from murderous rabbits and ferrets and whatever other fucking weird semi-normal wildlife was crawling through the otherwise abandoned structures around here. She wasn’t really a fighter, despite her status as a delver, but she’d been conscripted into some basic marksmanship classes and had a new shotgun that had gotten a ton of use today. Enough use that it was clear that this was something that really could be described as an ‘eruption’, or that there had been at least a few weeks, or maybe months, for the dungeon to sprawl its spawn outward.

  It took Speaker about three minutes to build a kind of shell for the guy’s brain, a process that El also found exhausting because she was participating in it in a way that was more than just subconscious. Keeping a dozen different pieces of proof rotating in the fore of her thoughts so that Speaky could use them as a foundation of evidence to create the thought-shield out of. El had asked her about it earlier, and gotten an explanation from her companion assignment that included the phrase “but it’s not really like that” so often that she’d just kind of decided on not thinking too hard about the metaphors.

  El and Momo left the guy with instructions on where the evac point on Church street was, and then had a pleasant twenty minutes of nothing until they got assigned to something new.

  Sitting on a the hood of a derelict car whose owner was never going to come back to their driveway again, they took a moment just to themselves. “You holding up?” El asked.

  ”I’m not a fucking baby, I can do this all day.” Momo lied. She would do it all day, but she hurt like hell and wanted to die. Just a little.

  ”Yeah, whatever.” El had once punctuated this argument by poking at Momo’s hip. But only once. Sometimes she had to learn her lessons by doing really stupid shit, but she did learn them. “We should get you a cane.” She said that part out loud while in her head she was making plans to make something that looked like a wizard staff, so Momo would actually use it.

  ”We should get me shaper surgery.” Momo said.

  Speaker, fish body fluttering in an infinity sigil of looping rings around her two humans, dipped in surprise at Momo’s words. “Is it happening? Are you taking care of yourself?” She asked.

  ”Wait don’t make any sudden moves.” El said, causing the other two to tense up like they were about to be attacked. Then she continued, a mischievous smirk slipping through. “If we startle her, then Momes might bolt, and this’ll never happen again.”

  ”Oh fuck you.”

  ”Later, we have shit to do today.”

  ”Yeah, yeah.” Momo leaned back, her body causing a light pop from the ancient windshield of the car they were using as a chair in the absence of anywhere else to sit in this miniature town. It was weird to be in a place where people lived, where she could walk from one end to the other without getting tired, even in her current state. “But yeah, I dunno. Maybe it’s a good idea. We don’t look like we’re finding purples to heal this kind of shit, so eh. But then I’ll miss my chance to do something weird. Also there’s a hundred ratroaches that need it more than me.”

  El plopped a hand onto Momo’s head, playing with her hair and folding the long side over the shaved side in a way that she knew annoyed the hell out of her girlfriend. It was like petting a cat the wrong way. “I bet we can find other stuff to make you weird.” She said. “Like you need the help.”

  ”Yeah I’m dating you, that’s weird enough.” Momo shot back.

  Speaker, still swirling in the air around them, turned different sets of eyes on each of the girls. “Is this flirting? I live in your brains and it’s still so hard to tell with you two. Should I give you space? I could go explore! It’s probably safe for me, right?”

  ”Oh hell no.” El caught the little glowing teal fish-thing before she could bolt herself. “Don’t think I don’t know that your manifestation can take damage! Also, what if there is something here that eats your sort of magic? I don’t wanna find out a day later that I let you wander off and you got vored.”

  ”Please don’t say it that way.” Momo pled. “But yeah, um… hey, what would you… I dunno, would you be okay if I tried to…”

  El’s expression, her normal disaffected mask of playful sarcasm, froze for a second. Then she blinked, and a completely different version of her was leaning into Momo. “I’m not gonna be mad if you tell me you’re trans or something.” She said.

  Momo’s own expression went from vulnerable to the look she got when she was thinking about a new magical curiosity in her own eyeblink. “Now see that’s kind of a fun thought. Because I was gonna ask if you’d be cool if I tried to keep my wings forever, and now it’s actually really easy to say that because I’m trying to do the math on if that’s more or less of a change than making myself into a guy.”

  ”Oh that’s my fault, sorry.” Speaker didn’t sound that sorry about prompting the outpouring of words. It solved problems pretty much every time, and she liked solving problems.

  ”The big griffon wings?” El was familiar with how the Climb spell hit Momo specifically. “The ones that take up three times the space of the bed?”

  Momo flushed. ”I mean we could get a bigger bed?”

  ”I was just thinking tha-“ El’s words came to a sharp stop as something crunched behind them, the sound of crunching and clinking broken glass coming from just inside the house they were outside of. “-at sounds dangerous.” She breathed out. Technically it was suspicious that it sounded at all, given what the caerbannogs did. So if the falling glass sound was coming from around the back of the old house, then the actual problem was either something different than the little rabbits, or a lot closer.

  Speaker stopped moving, swirling up around and into Momo’s sleeve as the witch rolled off the side of the car’s hood and ducked into a crouch. “How’s your velocity?” She whispered to El as she unclipped a pouch at her side and set her fingers on one of the Stacks statuettes that she’d been having fun with today.

  ”Not that bad. Checking.” El needlessly raised her fingers up around her right eye, letting the liquid motion in her body rush into the form of An Eye Of Glass And Steel, and giving her an inventory of the building she was looking at. The searching spell was a little hard to modulate, but there were some cases where El could just scan the list it gave her for outliers in a few seconds, and this was one of them. “Oh fuck me. You have your gun?” She asked Momo.

  Momo nodded. ”I have several wands! And I already called for backup, because you don’t sound happy!”

  ”Break time’s over.” El said as her count of the dungeon life inside the mildly dilapidated two story home started dropping. Going from about fifty to a steadily decreasing number as the fur and bone dungeon bioweapons started swarming out of the windows and garage. “Stay with me, and don’t you fucking dare die before you get to turn into a bird, okay?!”

  ”Yes boss!” Momo answered cheerfully, already aiming the stockpiled Climb spells she had packed into the hand blender she’d stolen from the Lair’s kitchen and really needed to remember to apologize to Nate for.

  In her defense, she had been testing. And also Nate would probably forgive her if it saved her life now.

  _____

  The problem with dungeon life was, when you poured it into normal Earth, it had to contend with Earth life.

  It was hard to tell, but it was a safe assumption that the swarms of bone sword wielding rabbits weren’t ripping through ranches entirely without casualties. Not just from the humans, either; cows were dangerous if you didn’t take them seriously. Any heavy animal could be. But the reason they didn’t have a clear read on that situation yet was because, if the swarm that descended on a farm was a few thousand ravenous beasts, there often wasn’t any evidence left of how the fight had gone.

  Animals and humans alike got stripped to the bone, and then those bones got gnawed down and scattered, and often times the only thing left of a farm that had a horde come through was the buildings themselves. The rabbits especially would eat fields down to nothing, then race away to the next target, or set up nests if they’d finally eaten enough. And the fallen dungeon life weren’t spared the fate of being turned into food; knights had witnessed more than a few acts of cannibalism when someone had picked off a member of a swarm from far enough away that it hadn’t provoked retaliation.

  So it was kind of a surprise when one of the teams combing the area around a relatively nearby river came across a scene of pretty brutal violence, that had left a dozen scythe rabbit corpses in a state of bloody disarray.

  The question of ‘what the fuck happened here’ got answered pretty rapidly. The squad had enough locals in it with outdoorsman experience to recognize the signs of something being trampled or gored to give a confident answer. These dungeon creatures had picked a fight with between three to ten feral hogs.

  Following the blood trails eventually uncovered where some of their targets had died. But not all of them. Which was when Kirk had made the observation that no one was happy with.

  ”Guys, there’s no orbs here.” He’d told them. The older folks took a second to catch on, while the guy from the Wildlife department just gave a blank look. Kirk decided to not waste time. “That means there’s at least one boar out there with…” he counted corpses, “twenty or so focus ranks.”

  Now. The odds that any of those orbs were going to turn an already problematic piece of angry local fauna into a bigger problem weren’t high. The most likely outcome was that there was now a boar that was better at learning how to fly a helicopter or something.

  But weirder things had happened. And no one wanted to find out what a boar that was capable of unerring cartography and was currently training in the way of the blade looked like. Or, well, no. James probably wanted that. But James wanted a lot of insane things.

  The boar looked like it had crossed the river though, and none of the people with them were exactly expert trackers. Finding it by drone wasn’t working out either, with how far those things could apparently wander. So, without a trail to follow through on, there wasn’t much to be done, and they called in the potential problem, and moved on.

  At least they didn’t have to spend the ammo on the suicidally aggressive rabbits that thought they’d win that fight.

  _____

  The Order’s first paladin stood at the point where Church street ended in the university parking lot. It was a street that did not have a church on it, and apparently never had, despite this town of nine hundred people containing three churches - four if you believed Google Maps and didn’t look too closely - though two of the buildings were just houses that James wasn’t sure actually served as active places of worship. The incongruity bothered him. He didn’t need every Main Street to be, literally, the main street. And if James were being honest with himself, he didn’t really want to encourage the existence of churches anyway. But unless the street was named after a George Church or something, then if you were going to call it church street, you could maybe put a church on it.

  James looked down at the dungeon detector in his hand, trying not to think about how he’d made ‘church’ sound like a gibberish sound by thinking it over and over again. Instead, he thought about something else that sucked.

  ”Welp.” He said

  “Nice little doohicky.” Chuck said, looking over James’ shoulder. The old man was taking a break from sorting danger rabbit corpses, looking for ones that were clean kills that he planned to apparently process into meat and fur. On some level, James found that a little weird, but honestly, if they were going to be getting into fights with an entire dungeon worth of loose wildlife, then it felt strangely respectful to use every part of it. He also realized, suddenly, the the plush grey fur pillows in the Grandparents Society clubhouse were probably this exact same rabbit fur. Chuck probably had experience with this method, even if he didn’t realize it. “Does that do anything or is it just for looking mysterious?”

  James’ mouth curled upward at the corner in something that wasn’t quite a smile. Chuck was, as had been pointed out by many of the other members of the Grandparents Society, kind of a dick. Not a lot, but there was a layer of smarmy sarcasm in his words that came across as just a little abrasive. “It detects dungeons.” James answered. “It’s a dungeon detector.”

  ”…You had that the whole damned time and had us running around like chickens looking for a door we can’t remember?” Chuck glared at James. “I missed rugby for nothing?”

  James pocketed the little piece of overlapped metal that was his dungeon detector. “You did not. It detects if you’re in a dungeon.”

  ”Well that’s useless.”

  ”Not if you don’t know if you’re in a dungeon.” James pointed out patiently. “Also they work if you stand on a closed threshold. Though I don’t… see anything around here that would be even close to that…”

  He looked around as he spoke, taking in the area. James was hesitant to call it grim, because it really wasn’t; this was a nice enough place, even though this fresh December day was freezing between the cold and the wind. But the area was certainly sparse. There were a few single story homes with white panel siding and a dozen cars parked on unpaved lots. One of them actually had a small backhoe parked out front, the tiny piece of construction equipment looking like it had survived worse than this event, and would tank this one too. The larger buildings were from the university, and the clear open field of a baseball diamond that kind of marked the end of the town was only slightly torn up from the operation to sweep this place of hostile life forms.

  There were trees, James noted. Bare of leaves and reaching claws of branches up to dull winter sky, but none of them forming an arch of any kind. A series of untreated wooden posts holding up a length of chain to keep a dirt lot sectioned off from the road could count, but he’d already checked that and it wasn’t it. And James wasn’t quite desperate enough to look into the bulky green box of an electrical station; not yet at least. There were also doors to the buildings, obviously, but Kiki had been pretty clear that the entrance was on the pavement somewhere.

  As he looked around, he also realized there were no streetlights here. A check of some online maps and photos, made slower by the signal here that was thinner than air on a mountain peak, showed that this wasn’t an outside effect. There just weren’t streetlights here.

  This place probably had a hell of a night sky, James realized. But also he would not want to live somewhere that he couldn’t go on a walk at 2 AM without worrying about being eaten by a grue.

  Folding his arms and feeling himself nearly flatten Zhu where the navigator was hiding inside James’ coat for warmth, he kept frowning at the local landscape as if annoyance would pry the secrets out of it. “It could be like the Climb. Making its own threshold with a projected door.” He mused, turning to look at Chuck who was loading mostly intact rabbit corpses into the box on the back of an ATV with more strength than his wiry old frame would have indicated. “Hey, do you remember if you ever had to run away from the dungeon entrance?”

  ”If one more of you twits asks me if I remember something I’m gonna feed you to a bear.” Chuck answered as he tipped a corpse into his neatly arranged stack.

  ”So no then.” James walked over to the side of the road, the hard packed cracked dirt just waiting for the next rain to turn into what was probably an unholy amount of mud. He toed a discarded soda can as he looked around, chewing on his lip.

  Down past the university’s main building, he could see a larger knight team that he was pretty sure Alanna and Arrush were on, sweeping for any signs of infestation. Overhead, dragons and drones circled, providing perfect battlefield awareness since their enemy was just animals with no anti-air support. The pop of gunfire and the faint whiff of blood wasn’t steady, but it was constant; no break longer than a few minutes from either source.

  James felt the toe of his boot impact something metallic as he paced down the side of the cracked street, taking careful steps as he checked the dead grass and small weeds that coated the space past the dirt sidewalks and any of the buildings. Pausing, he looked down and shoved aside some of that grass with his foot, revealing the dull grey metal of a buried cylinder. It looked like it might have been a pole at some point, spiked deep enough into the ground to still be here even after it had been broken off by something; maybe being run over, though there was no sign of bending from a vehicle impact.

  That was actually odd. James crouched down and ran his fingers along the object with a frown before he stood up and looked across the street. They were just before the university and the baseball diamond, and while this was a small town, it wasn’t like the people here were somehow inhumanly devoid of whimsy, right? So, looking slightly upward, hand overhead and tracing an invisible line, James crossed the road, stepped over a pool of dungeon-made otter blood, and brought his hand down to a point he was making an educated guess about.

  He had to shove aside more dead grass than he’d care to admit, but he did find the other piton.

  ”This was some kind of flag setup.” He said. “Maybe a wire between two poles, for hanging banners or a ‘welcome to the fair’ sign.” James looked over his shoulder as he talked to himself, still alert to the fact that there were hundreds of hostile critters around, even if most of the town was swept by now. He’d helped with that personally a lot, and this time, he’d even managed to do it without accidentally cracking an orb. “So an arch. That’s gone now. But still.” He walked back to the middle of the street, standing in what he figured was the exact center of the thing.

  Out of curiosity, he pulled out his dungeon detector and held it up.

  Nothing. James frowned at it. “Well that-“ he started to say, before shutting up, as the device made a single clack. He wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t actually heard these things for an extended period of time, but his first thought was no that doesn’t sound right. The noise was like a weird distorted echo, and not just a normal mechanical impact of metal on metal that it was supposed to use as an indicator. He kept holding it up, waiting to see if it would do it again, and it was almost five minutes of steadily feeling his arm get tired before it made another one of the unpleasant clacks.

  James had a sudden unpleasant thought, and he made a call to one of the rogues that wasn’t actually here today. “Ben.” James said as the other guy answered with a tired exhalation. “Are you busy?”

  ”No matter what I say you’re going to give me a job. What, did you get eaten already?”

  ”Not yet, I’ll keep you appraised. No, I need you to do me a favor. Go down to Research and grab one of the dungeon detectors. Or maybe a few of them.”

  Ben’s voice firmed up as he woke up, though James wasn’t sure why he was sleeping in the middle of the day; not that he had room to judge, but Ben always seemed more normal than him. ”Okay, why?” He asked.

  ”i need you to take them to any of the sites where one of the Statuses Quos say they killed dungeons.” James said. “And tell me what they sound like.”

  He took a little while to relay specifics, and then a little while longer to wait for the results. In the meantime, he got lunch, got in three more fights, learned that there was a freight train stop in the city and that the train crew also didn’t understand that the monsters were maybe an issue, and let Zhu lead him to ‘buried treasure’ that was an old lockbox with slightly decayed adventure comics that had definitely been published and put there before the Comics Code Authority had existed. They were a cool little artifact of a long ago time when this place was just a train station, but also, a grim reminder of what had happened now since they were found in the backyard of a home where the residents had all been stripped to the bone before the Order had arrived.

  And when Ben called him back and reported what James had suspected, he felt like he was suddenly back to being a very small speck looking at a very large problem.

  The dungeon here was dead. Or at least, it read to the detector the same was as known dead dungeons did.

  Which meant, James realized as he and Zhu were busy reequipping themselves and preparing for taking out yet another cluster of dungeon life that was currently a half mile away and steadily stripping a small hill of vegetation, that he was going to be doing this for a while.

  Oklahoma didn’t have an easy solution. It had a land war, that had already started, and that the Order was preposterously understaffed to handle.

  _____

  Planner was in their element.

  In a way, they wished this would never end. There was an objective, and clear tactical goals to accomplish it. Almost two hundred individuals were completely committed to it at the moment, and so, they were capable of directing them to optimal efficiency. Information was reported promptly and accurately through the channels the Order had chosen to utilize, and action was rapid and trusted their decisions.

  When the Underburbs breach had happened, Planner had told everyone that they weren’t a military commander. That they couldn’t act as a general for the Order’s troops. And that was still largely true.

  But not entirely true. And it would not be true forever.

  ”Alright tentacles. Drone feeds show movement here and here.” Nate said with his familiar gruff voice that was somehow comforting in this situation. “Work it out.” He ordered Planner.

  Planner looked across the screens with semi-physical eyes, and looked across the reports themselves with non-physical non-eyes. They checked the roster, then double checked statuses against the most recent check-in from each team and on a more granular level from each knight. Maps of the region were consulted, navigators that were hosted by people in Planner’s close-host web were spoken to, and supplies were weighed.

  Initially, this role was something that the new digital intelligence, Second, had expressed the most interest in learning. And Planner fully understood why, too. Consuming information like candy, and synthesizing truth out of disparate sources; there was something exhilarating about the experience. But Second, still not allowed to use the internet out of entirely reasonable concerns that it was dangerous for them, was limited in their presence here. And so it was Planner, nervous at the outset, uncertain about their capability to be something different, and secretly terrified of making a poor choice, who had ended up under Nate's watchful gaze. Directing an entire Order operation, albeit with an escape hatch if they were overwhelmed.

  ”Squads Strider and Necroad are presently the closest to the location. The number of dungeon animals is within their combined combat capability should unforeseen problems arise. Strider will need a full resupply afterward, but given the current projected movement of the animals, the majority of them will be point two miles closer in an estimated twenty minutes, allowing both squads to briefly rest and collaborate on a hunt.” Planner turned a full tentacle of eyes onto Nate. “Issue deployment orders and arrange ground transport immediately?"

  Nate gave a single jerk of his head in denial. “Missing two things.” He said, pointing at the map. “No roads there. You’re looking at the kind of hills they couldn’t flatten for farms, and there’s nothing there except a hiking trail.”

  ”…Transport can be arranged to nearby,” Planner thought out loud, “or aerial or teleport deployment. Team size would require Pendragon, who is off duty for two hours. Teleporting then. Drone coverage shows no movement. Hm. No. We have no infrared of the area. That is an unacceptable risk. Revising the plan. Contact the drone control team, redirect additional cameras to the area, including infrared. This will miss snakes, but reports have them operating independently and they lack ambush potential.” Planner paused as they realized something. “This will also be useful for negating the second thing I missed, which is that the area between here and there is not cleared.”

  ”There ya go.” Nate nodded. “So what’re we here for?”

  ”Reducing the number of aggressive dungeon life from the likely dead dungeon that occurred in this city.” Planner stated the mission statement easily.

  Nate’s eyes flicked upward momentarily in an unseen motion of exasperation. “Yeah, come on, think it through. You know all the details already.”

  ”…there is no operational timeline.” Planner said slowly. That wasn’t quite painful to admit, but it was something uncomfortable. A strategic objective with an open ended ellipsis instead of a hard stop was something Planner found… irksome. “The strategic objective needs to change.” They said suddenly.

  ”Oh yeah?”

  If Planner noticed Nate was prompting them, they didn’t show it. ”Correct.” A tentacle twisted at a right angle, a small page of script unfurling from it as Planner drew in information in comparative notes. “No, not change. Be appended. My estimation with our current kills-per-hour and the known limits of our knights is that it would require a minimum of three months to eradicate enough dungeon life to comfortably close our operation. That does not account for unknown heavier pockets that have migrated farther from this area, however. Three months is an unacceptable time for civilian losses to mount. So, a change. Prioritization of population centers, followed by transit routes, followed by concentrations of dungeon life in the wild. Does this… sound correct?”

  Nate gave a huff of air so long that it ended up as more of a hiss. “Planner, you want to know a secret to this job?” The assignment focused more and more of their eyes on Nate until giving a slow go on motion with a pair of tentacles that curled around the old building they’d temporarially occupied as a command station. “There’s no right answer.”

  Now that was something Planner didn’t like. “Incorrect.” They said. “There is a correct answer, I simply do not know it. Inaccuracy is due to lack of information.”

  ”Yeah. But we do lack that intel.” Nate pointed out. “We’re flying blind on half this shit. And you’re going to have to get used to that.”

  ”…I do not like that.”

  ”No one has ever liked that.” Nate told them. “Sometimes you’re going to be making choices you don’t even know are choices. And sometimes you’re going to send people into bad situations.”

  Planner considered that new piece of information, and added it to their growing list of important facts about overseeing an Order deployment. “The more information that I can collect, the more likely I can avoid that.” They said. “Correct?”

  With a loud smack, Nate brought his palms together in a clap that made half the other people in the tent jerk in surprise. “Fuck no.” He told Planner bluntly. “Because getting the information has a cost! Risk, resources, time, doesn’t matter; you’ll never know everything.”

  ”Then how do I make the correct tactical decisions?”

  ”Sometimes you don’t.” Nate said, looking away from most of Planner. “But here’s the shitty secret. It doesn’t matter; you’ve got to make a choice. Doing nothing is still fucking up. Better to be proactive about your mistakes, because at least then you’ll know what they are.”

  Planner took that advice onboard, and decided that they would work their hardest to never actually understand it personally. But the core of it was sound, and matched with their known ideal from the Order of Endless Rooms. Do good recklessly; that meant something, those words meant something. They meant everything to Planner. And it meant that passivity was not a good choice.

  ”I see.” They said, looking over the available information again. “I am tasking the current squads to continue securing the city itself, working northeast toward the next human settlement. However, the large concentration of dungeon life cannot be left alone long enough to scatter. I am tasking James, Alanna, Cam, and Kirk to eliminate it. Topographical maps and drone spotting show a bare hilltop that will serve as a sniper perch to eliminate heavier targets from while the pack can be surrounded by other combatants and engaged in close quarters. All of them are mustering here in two minutes. Please record these coordinates on a telepad.”

  Nate looked at the glowing sigils of numbers that Planner had formed in their ethereal rubbery tentacle flesh, and rolled his eyes again. “I know you can write.” He grumbled as he did it anyway. “Any other jobs for me, commander?” He asked with only a little bit of sarcasm.

  ”Yes. Please act as a driver for the six individuals that will be waiting for pickup at the southwest continuation of highway 54. They require rest and downtime, but also a Velocity refill, and half an hour at unsafe highway speeds will accomplish part of both goals.” Planner said. “And we require a resupply of 5.7 ammunition. Use of minor memory bullets is keeping our 9mm supplies high, however. I will inform our logistics chain myself of that.”

  Nate looked at the ghostly octopus, and then gave a nod, a small ghost of his own living as a smile pulling at the corner of his lips. “You’re gonna be one hell of a hardass captain some day.” He muttered just loudly enough that Planner wasn’t sure if they were supposed to hear that.

  It might be true. But Planner wasn’t offended.

  There was no easy solution in sight. Only a series of increasingly complex decisions based off ever more detailed information and gathered intelligence. It might be a disaster that this would be going on for months at least. But for now, at least one person found the situation to be deeply satisfying. So really, it didn’t matter how long it was going to take, because that just meant more time here, learning a brand new way of processing information.

  Planner was in their element.

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