The Daily Grind - Chapter 114 (Patreon)

Did you guys know I have other short stories aggregated here on my Patreon?  I do!  Some of them are even good!  And you don't have to pay extra to get them, either.

Anyway, enjoy this nightmare of a chapter.

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“You know,” James said with a tone of casual curiosity, “this is the second time this week I’ve ended up in the office of an authority figure?  I feel like I’m back in high school.”

“Now see, that joke would work a lot better if we didn’t have your record.”  The man on the other side of the desk said, cocking a finger and a warm smile at James.  “You’re as much of a delinquent as anyone, but hardly above average.”

When James had walked into the office, he’d done so politely.  A large part of him had wanted to slam his fist through the frosted glass window on the door, and open the doorknob from the inside, but the thing hadn’t even been locked so as to justify his fantasy.  He’d instead strolled in, quietly closed the door behind himself, and helped himself to one of the black leather chairs that he was currently residing in.  Waiting, patiently, for the man on the other side of the desk to finish whatever paperwork he was signing, and look up.

The office was about what James expected, but had a personal flair to it that he hadn’t foreseen.  The heavy polished oak desk was exactly what he assumed it would be, along with the bookshelf stocked with texts on legal codes and philosophies of authority.  But the walls also held a trio of impressionist paintings, giving a splash of orange and white color to the room.  The clock on the wall was one of those clocks where the timepiece itself was ‘held’ by the figure of a black cat wrapped around it.  And there was a potted plant, too; some big fuck-off fern against the wall by the door, opposite the little wicker trash basket.

It was a corner office, with two windows on each of the walls, overlooking the wooded area out behind the building, and also the parking lot on the side.  That was going to come in handy later.

It felt very human.  Like someone worked here, and cared about the space.

So too, did the other man in the room play into those expectations, but not quite all the way.  He was short, maybe 5’7”, though James couldn’t quite tell when he was sitting down, and he’d never been good at heights anyway.  Bald, too.  The kind of bald where he’d clearly realized he was losing his hair, then shrugged and leaned into it.  His head was smooth, as polished as the desk was.  He was also *old*.  Not ancient or decrepit, but James recognized him as someone who could be a grandfather.  Fifty, maybe fifty five? He had lines on his face from a lifetime of hard work, and his hands were dotted with scars and ridges of flesh; he’d been hurt, but he was still strong.

And when he’d spoken, his voice had been… warm.  Like he was greeting a favorite student, or a fondly thought of nephew. 

James noted a distinct lack of a nameplate anywhere in the room, or on the door.

“So.”  The man followed up his riposte of a joke.  “It’s not often that people come to *us*.  What brings you to my office today?”

“Surrender.”  James said, meeting the man’s eyes.  “Please.”  He added, wanting to be polite about it.

“I accept!”  The man broke into a grin.  “You’ve made this quite easy! Perhaps you’d like to redress your phrasing?”

James rolled his eyes.  “You know, I expected that joke from… well, myself, actually.  But I kind of thought you’d be taking this more seriously.”  He leaned forward, and tapped on the desk with one outstretched finger.  “I am here to demand the surrender of your organization, the cessation of hostile action within my sphere of influence, and the release of any prisoners kept.  Is that phrased strictly enough?”

“Hm.”  The man also leaned forward, steepled his fingers in front of his lips.  “And for this, what do you offer in exchange?”  He asked.

“Forbearance.”  James said, through his teeth.

“Ah, there it is.”  The man whispered, and the words hissed sharply around the room.  “That anger.  Such a classic.”  He said, leaning back.  “You know, I was impressed, at first.  This organization has dealt with your kind for a long, long time.  But you’re the first one I’ve ever heard of to come to us.  I was going to offer you a job, but I don’t think you’d ever take it, would you?”  He sounded sad.

“Probably not.”  James told him.  “You’ve hurt people.  Possibly my family, too.  I can’t imagine working with you.”

“Ah, that!”  He looked off to the side and gave a smooth chuckle. “You know, the ethics board ended the process of liquidating whole bloodlines decades ago.  It was always so much more trouble. Your family aren’t *dead*.  Not all of them, at any rate.  We’re not *monsters*, you know.”

“Do I?”  James muttered back.  “You seem to have the fangs for it.”

“And you don’t?”  The man retorted.  “My dear boy, our job is to *protect* humanity.  Can’t very well do that if we keep killing them, can we?”  He snorted.  “No, they’ve all just been… let’s say ‘relocated’.  Oh, they won’t remember you ever lived, obviously.  And we can’t let *everyone* live, that’s just naive.  But we prevent undue pain when possible.”

“Oh *good*.”  James sarcastically spat out.  “And here I was worried that you were all about the undue pain!”  He crossed his arms over his chest.  “You kill children.”

“Yes.”  The man said quietly, all humor gone from his voice.  “We do.  When it is needed.”

“I would argue it’s never needed.”  James said, matching the tone.

The man gave a sad nod.  “I know.  That’s why you’re part of the problem.”

“And what problem is that?”  James asked.  “The problem of too much magic in the world, perhaps?”

A laugh, in response to that.  A real, honest, surprised, condescending laugh.  “Dear boy, of *course* not!  Well, maybe!  But only as a side effect, you see!  The magic is only a problem because it puts too much power in the wrong places.  Let’s things change too quickly.  Before you know it, the outside is the inside, and chaos takes over, and then there’s nothing left.”

“You say, as you aggregate power to yourself.”  James sneered at him.  “You think we didn’t see your agents using artifacts?”

“Ah, so that was you at the high school.”  The man nodded.  “Well.  If I had any thoughts of letting you leave before, they’re surely gone now.” He shook his head, a frown on his face.  “Those men had families, you know.”

“So did those kids.”  James said, though he couldn’t deny the barb hit home.

“Well.  Our tools are our tools, of course.  A well designed organization can get far more use from them than any bog-standard trio can anyway.”  He smirked, and James’ blood started to boil at the pure smugness in the look.  “Well, duo for you, now.”

“So you did catch up to Anesh in London.”

“Stepping off the airplane.”  The agency man affirmed.  “You know, I’m always surprised when one of you chooses to die fighting.  We offered him an excellent deal, after all, all things considered.  It’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a heavily modified human body.”  He looked at James with raised eyebrows, as if waiting for the response.

James didn’t move.  He took a second, took a deep breath.  Anesh was dead.  But Anesh wasn’t dead, was he?  There were two or three more of him; this was a minor setback, not an existential crisis.

But it hurt.  So much.  He’d promised.  He’d promised his partner, when this had started, that every single one of him mattered.  And now one of them was gone, because of this smiling bastard.

James put it aside.  He had questions.

“How are you so sure there’s only two of us left?” He asked, trying to be just the right amount of puzzled.  “You don’t know us.”

“I think you’ll find we know quite a lot about you, James.  Even your military service record, classified as that seems to be.”  James stoically gave no reaction to that while with a thin smile, the kind you gave to someone you knew was lying, the man continued, “Regardless, we know because that’s how it always is, of course.  That’s how we know there’s two of the school children left in the wind, too.  Though I suppose you’re responsible for that, too.  It’s always the same pattern, every time.”

“For the dungeons?”  James asked.  He didn’t want to overcommit to knowing anything, or share any info that this jackass didn’t already have, but he had to know.  So he prompted.

“For any phenomena.”  The man affirmed.  “What you call ‘dungeons’ are quite rare.  We’ve only ever found them in this part of the world.  Other mysterious happenings, though? It’s always one person first.  Then, they infect their two closest relationships.  Then the spread of information stops, for various reasons.  Usually personal ones.”  He shrugged.  “Trios.  Always.  Human greed never allows for more than that.”

“You’re telling me no one’s ever tried to set up a company on one of these things, and harness it for profit?”

A *peal* of laughter at that statement.  “Of *course* they have, boy!”  The man slapped his desk in amusement as he caught his breath.  “Where do you think Nike get’s half its product from!”

“Child labor.”  James deadpanned.

“Child exploitation, certainly.”  The man agreed with a nod.  “Of one of these special spaces you call dungeons, though.”  He winced a bit.  “Ah, the modern world with it’s video game terminology.  It’s not inaccurate, I admit, but it does make me feel the age.”

“Hang on!”  James held up a hand.  “How come *they* get away with it, but you’re offing any trios that you set your sights on?!”  He demanded.

A blink.  “I thought we covered this.  Because it puts power in the wrong places.”

“And the wrong places are, what, anyone who disagrees with you?”  James noticed his voice raising in anger.

“Not ‘disagrees’, no.”  The man said, staying calm.  “But there is a limit to the chaos we will allow in the world.  The system *works*.  We cannot allow all of humanity to be upset every time three young idiots get their hands on a dragon egg, or a magical gun, or, God forbid, some supposedly friendly spirit approaching a false apotheosis.”

James bit his tongue and pointedly did not say anything at all.  He tried to look as innocent as possible.  It might have worked.

The man continued, unabated.  “Peace is allowed, in small doses, because power can be focused on those who can be trusted, or controlled.  That’s all.  You, your surviving friend, those like you, you are all of you neither of those things.  You spread chaos, and whether you mean well or not, you undermine a world that is functioning.”

“Change is what it takes to make things better.  You’re just… letting it all stagnate.  That’s not even real control.”  James held his hands spread in front of him, trying to drive home the point.

The man shrugged.  “Perhaps not from your perspective.  But it keeps the majority safe.  And it works.”

James snarled.  “People suffer.  Wars, famine, internet trolls.  The world isn’t getting better, and you’re sitting on the keys.  You’re not even *trying*.”  He blinked, and felt a wave of calm understanding in his heart.  “Oh.”  He said, leaning back.  “Yeah, of course.  This is why.”  He sighed off the questioning look.  “This is why she said we’d come to call you Status Quo.”

The man laughed lightly.  “I suppose that name is as good as any other, for those of us that build a secure world.”  Then he switched to a slight frown.  “She?”  He prompted.

“Your world isn’t good enough.”  James said quietly, ignoring the question.  Sadly.  He was starting to understand, though.  This anonymous man wasn’t interested in changing his mind.  He *believed* what he was saying.  He really thought that the world was better off with him in it, doing what they did.

“I know you think so.”  The other man said, and James could see that he was just as sad on his end.  What a tragedy, it must be!  To meet someone you could really *talk to* about everything, and feel like you had to kill them!

James understood intimately, in that moment.

“So, what now? Your global organization tries to sweep me under the rug, pick off my surviving partner, and pretend this never happened?”  James counter-probed.  As long as this conversation was happening, he may as well aim to extract what intel he could.

“Global is a strong word.”  The man laughed.  “Oh, agents everywhere, yes, but they’re mostly contractors.  This is our home office, after all.  You’d be surprised how few people it takes to deal with external threats.”  He didn’t even bother to hide it; after all, James wasn’t expected to survive the night.

“I really wouldn’t.”  James said with a shake of his head and a grin.

“I suppose not.”  The man sighed, and leaned back in his own chair.  “But yes.  While I understand you were here to try to do what you thought was right… well, it doesn’t matter.  We cannot let you leave the building alive, one way or another.  Either you die loudly, or quietly go into the basement for processing.  I suppose I leave it up to you, whether you wish to remain an asset to humanity.”

“Oh *that’s* not an ominous phrase at all.”  James snarked, and was both a little surprised and amused to get a chuckle out of the man.

“I’m sorry, my boy, but you were just too much of a problem to let you be.”  The man spread his hands apologetically.  “You won’t be the first good soldier lost to this war.”

James gave him a comical frown.  “You’re the ones that came into my house and poured coffee grounds in my Keurig.  Don’t act all high and mighty.”  He thought for a second.  “Also my military history is a fiction.  I feel it’s only fair to let you know.”

“Fair!”  The suit admitted with a boisterous laugh.

Conversation lapsed then, and the two of them sat there, reclining in their chairs.  Just enjoying the quiet for a few seconds.  Neither of them were going to surrender, or change their minds.  They’d said what they needed to say.  Now there was only one thing left.  

“Well.”  The man said, leaning forward.  “I suppose it’s time.”

“I suppose it is.”  James said, setting an elbow on the edge of the desk.  “Hey, before we do this, who are you?”

“No one of consequence.”  The man said, wildly grinning.  “That’s the point.”

No more chances. For either of them.

James’s hand dipped into his coat, and  the man flew into motion himself.  While James wrapped his hand around the butt of the flare gun and drew it in one smooth motion, the suit was discovering that James had already hit his desk drawers with Attach at the start of the chat.  He wouldn’t be drawing whatever he had hidden in there, while meanwhile, James had already leveled the flare gun at one of the windows and pulled the trigger.

The muffled *whump* was undercut somewhat by the flare just bouncing off the reinforced glass.

For a brief heartbeat, the two men just looked at the flare sputtering to life on the floor, casting a sharp red glow on everything.  And then they moved again.

“Vested Authority!  Detain him!”  The suit shouted, and James’ hand locked in place where it was halfway through getting his real gun out.  The man wasn’t hesitating, either; he slid over his desk with more dexterity than someone in their fifties should have, grabbing the keyboard off the oak surface and swinging it like a club toward James’ head.

James blocked with his off arm, wincing as the keyboard cracked in half down the midsection on impact.  That was a guaranteed bruise.  He shoved the pain down and moved to pivot to snap off a kick at the old man, but his right leg wasnt moving either.  So instead he used that as his brace point, and turned the incoming tackle from his opponent into a throw, tripping and flinging the man trying to football tackle him into the opposite wall with a heavy thud.

James saw a flickering of light on the man’s ear, and just barely caught the apperance of a glistening earring, before the man himself disappeared.  Wasting no time, James dipped his free hand into one of the many pockets of his coat, and flicked out the infrared glasses.

His vision lit up, and his headache expanded to epic proportions, but he got his arm up in time to deflect the incoming punch, slapping the now cloaked man to the side before the roundhouse could connect with his jaw.

But his adversary didn’t relent, instead sliding into a boxing stance and unleashing a small barrage of jabs at James.  It was hard enough to judge depth in infrared already, and the flare’s red bath of light wasn’t making it easier, so James just had to try to shrug off the hits that came through.  They mostly landed on the coat, but they stung, and the pain was starting to add up.  In retaliation, when he got lucky and caught the latest punch, he flared his absorbed blue and Attached the man’s suit to his skin.

The punches slowed down, and so did his target.  He didn’t drop his guard against James, and James returned the favor, but they were eyeing each other carefully now.

“I believe I have it.”  Secret whispered in his ear.  “Not an Idea, but something else.  I need one measure of power to kill it.”

James opened his mouth to taunt the man, which is when his enemy threw the paperweight at James throat.  He only barely dodged, his enhanced reflexes letting him feel the air moving just in time and causing the heavy wad of metal to impact his shoulder instead.  James retaliated by snarling and hooking his mobile leg on the chair to his side, sending it flying a few inches off the ground toward his foe with the help of leverage from his ‘restrained’ limbs.  It sent the man down in a tumble of legs, which he rolled out of to his feet near one of the windows a few seconds later.

“You know!”  He said, and was surprised by how shaken and loud his voice was.  “The best part about this is that I get to see all your cool secrets.”  James panted for breath.

“Vested Authority.”  The man spoke, and his voice was no longer friendly.  “Silence him.”

James felt his throat constrict, as if grabbed by an ethereal hand.  But there was one, singular, ultimate constant in his life.  One thing that had persisted, through school, through careers, through the loss of friends and the existence of magic.  One thing that *never* went away, one light that never *ever* went out.

James was going, *going*, to mouth off to authority figures.

“I’ve…” he croaked out around the force, and realized that speaking cause the pressure on his voice to turn into very real physical pressure on his body, “I’ve got a Secret too.”

Secret was not a shield.  Secret wasn’t really a weapon, either, but he was actually by his own admission very bad at blocking anything that wasn’t memory based.  But what he was, was very, very good at finding the small vulnerable points in external effects, and biting into them.

And when James spoke aloud, one open secret, and pulled Secret’s invisible form into the real world, he acquired a certain level of weight from the execution of the hidden plan.  From the shattering of expectations.

A blue leviathan was suddenly *there*, and James could see in the false light that Secret threw off that there were ghostly shackles locked around his right limbs.  Probably also one around his neck, too.  Or at least, there were.  Until Secret brought his jaws down and demolished  the things like they were so much paper mache.

Secret faded back to a more pale blue, less substantial, but still powerful, and coiling eternally around James’ arms and shoulders.  James faced where his enemy was still lurking, invisible to the normal spectrum of light, and smiled a vicious predatory smile.

“Hm.”  Came the grunt of acknowledgement from across the room.  “Didn’t see that coming.”

But he wasn’t done.  James could see the man shifting back into a boxer’s stance, ready to fight to the last.  So, he did what a smart combatant did.  He ignored what his foe wanted, drew his gun, and unloaded the magazine directly at the director’s head.

The first bullet hit him in the eye.  James *knew* it did.  But while the man’s head jerked back, he didn’t fall or scream out.  The next fourteen rounds slammed off a web of golden light that bloomed to life in both visible and IR, bouncing helplessly to the ground.

James calmly started to reload, speaking softly.  “Secret.”  He said.  “When I start firing, tear his legs off.”

“Yessssss.”  Secret hissed joyfully, overplaying his ferality for the audience.

“No.”  The man spoke, and made a striking motion with the arm that had the shield bracer on it.  Suddenly, the gun in James hands was *gone*.  Just a pile of component dust; even the bullets were nothing but tiny pieces of metal and gunpowder.  While James was still processing the loss of his trusted tool, the suit had closed the gap between them, slamming a fist through Secret’s ethereal head with just enough force to shove him out of the way, and then swinging another at James.

James blocked, slid back a half step.  Adopted a judo stance, got ready to throw his enemy into the wall again. Felt the desk against his back leg, made a slight adjustment, and in that moment, the man was moving again.

If James was *half* as athletic as this guy when he was fifty, he’d be estatic.  As it was, he was kinda wishing Status Quo had less of a good exercise regimen.  Because right now, the director was weaving between Secret’s coils and fangs like a pro; avoiding semi-real bites, and exploiting openings to aim punches at James’ head.

James swatted aside the first punch that came in, but the man flowed with it, bringing an uppercut toward James chin. James would have grinned if he’d had time, as the move overextended *exactly* too far.  With a yank, Secret jerked an ankle forward, and James brought his hands together for the perfect grapple that he could turn into an arm-shattering flip.

Something on the man’s person sparked, and *the punch landed*.

Nothing had changed; James was still landing his grapple, but he’d been hit.  It had been the perfect strike, in almost every way; his teeth slammed together so hard he tasted blood, and he reeled back.  His throw messed up at the last second; James’ back hit the wall instead of the other man’s head.  And James felt it all at double speed, his purple sensory orbs working against him.  If he hadn’t practiced this over and over, he’d be dead just from the pain right now..

Instead, he grabbed the cat clock off the wall over his head and flung it forward like a discus, pushing himself off the wall shortly after, and using his increased acceleration along with his bizarre ability to move faster in midair to slam a knee into the suit’s chest.

The man toppled backward, before rising to his feet again with a wet tearing sound.  It took James a second to realize to was his suit and skin pulling each other apart, and the realization almost made him gag.

Almost.  No time for distractions now.

“Vested Authority!”  The man yelled.  “Detain the monster!”  And there was a flash of shackles as Secret himself started to become pinned down; mouths sealed, eyes shut.  The infomorph thrashed and keened in a high tone, twisting away from James as he suddenly found himself on the defensive, trying to take the fight out of the way of the two mortal combatants.

“Last chance.”  James gasped out, while reaching into yet another pocket and snapping the two blues contained there.  “Come on, dude.  Give up.  Let Secret go.  You can just give up.”

[Problem Solved : Dishes cleaned]

[+1 Skill Rank : Electrical Systems - Lighting]

[Problem Solved : Painkiller administered]

[+1 Skill Rank : Recipe - Muffin - Blueberry]

“Or what?”  Came the distorted voice from the wobbly distorted vision of the man on the other side of the room.  It was strange, being able to only see him in the extra sense provided by the glasses; kind of like if you could see a single object but not in the color blue.  “You think you and your pet can just walk out of here?”  The man laughed, turning it into a cough that ended with him spitting blood into his trash can.  “This office may be soundproofed, but you aren’t leaving this building alive, one way or another.”

“Not alone, no.”  James agreed.  “I may have some help, though.”  He was going to keep bantering, but the old man stopped circling and lunged into motion again, closing the gap and executing another impossibly perfect punch that struck James in the chest and cracked a rib, sending him flying back into the windowsill of the glass that opened on the parking lot.

James thanked his reinforced skeleton as he pulled his head out of the spiderweb of cracks in the window, the cuts on the back of his scalp from breaking the glass already starting to scab over.  His right hand fumbled for *anything* he could use as a weapon, but he didn’t have much time.

“Your one ally won’t help you here.  One girl just as stupid as you, against the building?”  The man sounded like he wanted to laugh at James, if he weren’t so busy trying to kill him.  James blocked another incoming punch from the aggressive man who had *leapt* across the room to follow up on his first strike; knocking the fist aside and into the window, and then smoothly he pulled the pen that wrote in French out of a coat pocket and slammed it through the old man’s elbow joint.

“Se rendre et mourir!” The still invisible but now heavily bleeding man yelled at him, shrugging off the pain of the injury to pummel James in the stomach with a flurry of rabbit punches.  

James recovered in just enough time to trigger the bracer on his arm, hidden under the coat, wishing he’d thought to do so earlier.  A quick switch to tune it to these strikes, and then the automatic shield flared to life and started eating the impacts like they were peanuts.  The man kept up the assault, though, and James became acutely aware of the fact that the last number in his mental interface might just be ‘charged remaining’ as it plummeted toward zero.  So, he caught the next punch and turned it into a looping pivot, slamming the enemy’s face into the glass.

“Do you see?”  He hissed, barely trusting his own voice not to break as he mashed the man’s cheek into the broken windowpane and the golden glimmer faded back to red flarelight.  “You and your fucking arrogant murder agency.  You think I brought my *girlfriend* to this party alone?”  James reared back, and with as much force as he could, *slammed* the man’s face into the window, eliciting a shield glow from it as the adversary adapted.

The tinted glass broke on the third hit, and all of a sudden, everyone outside could see the red glow of the flare from inside the building; a beacon in the darkness outside.

The man jerked back, out of James grip, stumbling to lean against his desk, ripping the pen out of his arm with a spray of blood.  “No!”  He yelled.  In the moment, he noticed that his skin and suit had unwoven from each other at some point, and he took the risk on his desk drawer.  It slid open neatly, and he grabbed the revolver there and leveled it at James.  “No!  It’s never more than three!”

James preemptively tuned his bracer to ‘.45 bullet’, and tried his best not to flinch as the first one lit up the space in front of him on the shield.  Five charges left.  Four, three, two.  He stepped forward, and the man stopped firing, saving his shots in what he knew was a futile fight.

“Here’s another secret.”  He said, half to the man, half for the benefit of the damaged leviathan that was still fighting his own battle.  “It’s been more than three for a long time.”  James lashed out with more speed than he knew he had left, and snatched the revolver away from the old man.  “Let me introduce you,” James said, “to the Order of Endless Rooms.”

He fired, the last couple bullets ripping through the tinted glass of the window, as sure a signal as anyone was going to get.

Overhead, Secret rippled as he fed off the breaking of ignorance.  The authority holding him sloughed off like dead skin.

“Secret.”  James said, almost sadly, exhaustively.  “Tear his legs off.”

The man didn’t go down without a fight.  His hand grabbed the silvered letter opener on his desk and he brought the small knife up in an overhand plunging stab to drive it into James’ throat, but it was too late.  James caught the underpowered swing, not backed up by whatever magic let him throw the occasional perfect punch, and *twisted*.  The knife went into his adversary’s stomach, and then, pinned by James’ grip and the desk behind him and unable to retreat, Secret’s overreal teeth tore into soft flesh.  With a brutal scream, the man fell, slamming into the floor with a wet, violent splattering noise.  The fragments of his Authority fading out, alongside the old unnamed man’s final breath.

The office was soundproofed.  But in the sudden quiet, as the blood stopped pounding in his ears, and only the sputtering end of the flare echoed in the room, James heard muffled cracks of gunfire from the other floors, and a rumbling thud coming from the roof.

“No time to rest.”  He whispered, pulling himself up to stand tall in the wreckage of the corner office.  Binding the bracelet on his right wrist to the heavy revolver in his hand, he triggered a reload, and stepped up to the door, stepping over where the bookshelf had disgorged a pile of legal texts into the blood pool on the floor and lightly resting a hand on the handle as he waited for Secret to pull himself together around his shoulders.  The infomorph showed holes in his scales from where the shackles had punched holes in him, and James could feel in his subconscious that Secret was hurting; and truth be told, so was he.  But his friends were here, and there was work to do.

He tried the handle.  Locked.  Locked, from the inside?  This guy was as paranoid as he was foolish.  Though to be fair, he had just gone down fighting in his own office.  James counted himself lucky that he had Secret to help cloak his approach; if he’d come in here in handcuffs with another goon behind his chair, this would have gone a lot differently.

With an unamused snarl, James pulled a paperclip out of his pocket.  Wedged it into the door’s lock, and then, bent it in a direction that didn’t exist.  He exerted as much pressure as he could, occasionally resetting his grip so his wrist didn’t pop off.  Then he yanked it as hard as possible outward, and the paperclip tore through metal and wood from a direction that it had no physical presence in.

James pocketed the blue that that paperclip dissolved into as it broke off in the external bit of the lock, then kicked the door open, and moved out in a low crouch, gun up in front of him.  Time to rejoin the others, and burn this place to the ground.

_____

The front doors cracked their glass as they were thrown open, and masked figures in body armor rushed into the lobby of the building.

The woman behind the desk, a one Marion Driver, had been a loyal operative of the agency for forty six years.  She had fought for them, she had seen secrets that were beyond most men, and she had killed.  Before women were able to even hold some jobs in America, she had led an operations team.  He work here, now, was a retirement of sorts.  She didn’t want to stop, but old injuries both physical and spiritual kept piling up, and desk work was really all she was up to these days.

She’d known, sort of, what it might mean to let James meet the director.  The old man was like her, in a way.  He wouldn’t let the boy leave, but maybe, just maybe, there’d be someone knew for Marion to report to tomorrow.

Still, her instincts were razor sharp.  And so, when those first two people had come in, guns up, she’d hit one with one of the shotguns under her desk, and the other with one of the unique tricks she’d picked up over the years, sending a small wave of reversed time to throw them back out and buy her time to line up a second shot.

The first figure had shrugged off the buckshot, even as it punched holes in her armor; kinetic force bled off just enough that her skin didn’t break around it.  The second assailant was rewound, yes, but all that did was reveal some kind of black shelled snake-thing that had been coming in behind them.

And when that monster looked at Marion, she froze.  Both out of fear, and because she could feel her personal momentum being sapped away to nothing, leaving her locked in place.

Her hands were ziptied, and she was thrown face down in front of her own desk, without stopping a single one of the invaders.  She ranked it as the third greatest failing in her career; accounting for the ravages of old age of course.

When the sounds of gunfire from deeper into the office intensified, she realized she was one of the lucky ones.

_____

Dave/Pendragon hit the roof with the grace of a tank and the force of about the same.  The building didn’t crack under them or anything, but it felt like it maybe should have.  Sticking to the plan, and seeing no one up here that could pose a threat to them, Dave/Pendragon opened their mouth, and vomited a wave of twisting gravity that tore away the doorway, and surrounding building, that led to the roof access.  Sending building debris raining down to the ground in bobbing motions as the fragment’s personal interactions with gravity continued to fluctuate.

They raised their wings into the air in a triumphant, birdlike gesture.  And from Dave/Pendragon’s sides, six figures both human and camraconda dropped to the rooftop, and started moving with something close to military precision toward the now open stairwell.

Then, as Dave/Pendragon lifted off from the roof in an explosive gale of paper wings, figures begin to pour up from the stairs.

Men and women; unmasked, wearing suits and not armor.  But they held guns, and they didn’t bother asking for surrender.  They just started shooting at the invaders on their roof.

One locked up to a camraconda, before their shield flared to life, golden light flashing bright in the darkness on top of the building.  Then another shield flare as return gunfire started, and another, and another.  One of the invaders reshaped the concrete of the building into low cover, one of the defenders blinked across twenty feet of distance in a diving kick aimed at one of the attackers, and quickly devolved into a rotating shield war between a camraconda lock and shielding from gunfire.

Then Momo, somewhere on the roof, started lobbing offensive totems, and things quickly spiraled out of control.

Dave/Pendragon started taking gunfire; the enhanced plated paper on their hide ripping and cracking under the impacts, but not letting anything do more than a little damage.  They leapt, soaring overhead and dragging one agent in a chair-claw, throwing them aggressively toward the asphalt of the parking lot below as they cleared the lip of the building.  Dave/Pendragon left the fight upstairs to the attackers; they’d be fine, and the two of them had a second job.

Cause some chaos.

Ignoring the brief glimpse of the full engine schematics of every vehicle within twenty miles as they passed too close to one of Momo’s intel grenades, Dave/Pendragon did a low looping glide that brought them out over the street, and then back toward the building that housed their enemy’s organization.  They didn’t slow down as they approached this time, though.

Dave/Pendragon put their head down, wings tilted just slightly forward, gaining momentum with every passing second.  Until, suddenly, they threw their wings out, their talons forward, and slammed with the force of a furious truck through the windows of the second floor.

No one was still at their desks.  The agents inside were aware something was wrong now, there was fighting on the roof, and ground floor, and it seemed like some of the people were were trying to shoot a blue-light-wreathed figure that was dashing hunched over from desk to desk.  There were maybe twenty people here; alert, armed, *angry*, and ready for anything.

They were absolutely not ready for Dave/Pendragon.

The unified life form snapped their jaws forward, grabbed the nearest agent from behind, and with a twist of the long, sinuous cardstock neck, flung the woman into the night at high velocity, her pistol dropping from her fingers in shock as her scream faded into the night.

The agents had noticed.  Gunfire started turning their way.  Taking a few bullets, Pendragon/Dave dug claws into the ledges and shattered glass, and scampered sideways along the exterior of the building, the windows exploding outward around them as the agents inside shot through to try to knock them down.  They rounded the first corner, slammed a talon through to sweep a pair of desks and a pair of unfortunate agents into a crumpled pile, and then, cutting their losses before their armor started to ablate too much, shoved off with a push of heavy paper wings.

Dave/Pendragon circled the building, a hundred feet in the air.  Thirty seconds, they thought together.  Thirty seconds and they’d strike again.

_____

James gasped in pain, and considered whether it was appropriate to vomit a little bit.  He was huddled in pain behind an overturned desk, just on the other side of a thin cubicle wall from a trio of agents who had all been shooting at him.  One of them had been shooting at him *successfully*, and he felt the bullet still wedged in his palm where he’d tried to swat it out of the air.  It hadn’t worked; he wasn’t Alanna after all, but it had kept it from hitting him directly in the face.

Now, he was running out a lot of stuff.  He checked in with the bracelet on his arm, asking it politely how much he had left in terms of ammunition.

[Bind Firearm - 3 - 90 / 300 - 126:14:3:18 (0)

Cluster Shot - 54 - 16,894 / 100,000 - 3:12 (0)

Munitions Dump - 23 - 1,106 / 2,000 - 31:55 (3)]

Three uses left.  He’d burned through a lot of it with this stupid six-shooter the director had provided him.  The one upside was he was stress testing the limits of the bracelet, and finding them surprisingly not very human.  In comparison to the blue orbs, that caused internal bleeding and migraines if you overused them - and he had already exhausted his Attach charges - this just cared about the cooldowns and the stored uses.  Of course, the cooldowns were kinda long, and he didn’t have half an hour to wait for the next reload after he used the last three charges.

In retrospect, James mused, he probably should have just walked out of the director’s office, and shot everyone in the head while they were still at their desks.  Instead, he’d politely asked for them to lay down their weapons, which had of course made them *pick up* their weapons, and now he was in the alarmingly familiar scenario of taking cover against a cubicle while violence was directed at him.

Bullets whipped by him, and he tried not to hold his breath as he prayed that their suppressive fire didn’t accidentally clip off a chunk of his brain.  The cubicle wall was nothing to the assault, though the desk was doing a good job of keeping him safe.  He waited for a lull in the firing, then waited another second for one of them to start shooting to try to keep him pinned before he popped out from around the edge, and put two heavy bullets into the kneecap of one of the unshielded agents.  When he dropped to the ground, James felt a moment of heart-twisting pain mirrored in the man’s face before he fired again, and a splatter of blood and brain matter painted the carpet.

One more down, he thought with as cold and mercenary a mindset as he could keep, while the more physical parts of Secret’s form dragged him back behind cover before the return fire could find him.

Two agents left.  He sent a silent thanks to Dave and Pendragon for wrecking chaos among their ranks, even if his friend hadn’t stuck around to let him get on the dragon’s back and *leave*.

James huddled behind the degrading wood of the desk as gunfire filled the air with deafening cracks and the buzzing of bullets.  Two more, or until the assault team got here.  It wasn’t a race.

_____

When Alanna shouldered through the door at the top of the stairwell, rifle up to an armored shoulder, she was met with the smell of blood and gunpowder in an overwhelming wall of sensation.

The dead littered the floor.  There were only two living things left here; James and Secret, standing in the middle of the room, breathing heavily.  Her assault team had moved as fast as they could, but the first floor had been overwhelming with enemy operatives.  They either knew something was coming, or suspected it, because there was no reason for there to be more bodies than desks waiting for the Order.

The only saving grace was that they hadn’t been on high alert, and with the camraconda’s help, they’d been able to disable and restrain a couple dozen.  They’d also kept wounds on the delver’s side non-lethal; for now, anyway.  There were a couple people who might not make it, even with the functionally instant medical intervention that the camracondas enabled.

*James*, on the other hand, hadn’t disabled anyone, and Alanna had a brief moment looking at her boyfriend and the infomorph orbiting him when she saw something dark and horrifying instead of the person she loved.  There were over ten dead here, human corpses full of bullet holes and fang marks.  The floor was a mess of blood and 

James saw her, recognized her through the obscuring fox mask she had on, and offered her a weary smile as he let the gun slip out of his fingers.  He opened his mouth to say something, but only got out a tired “Ow.” before he just kind of limply stopped trying to speak.

Alanna lowered her gun as everyone fanned out around her.  Shouts and digital hisses of “Clear!”  Sounded around them.  Through the skulljack’s wireless braid and the hardware Virgil had wired up, she tracked images out of the corner of her mind of other Order members securing the prisoners downstairs, collecting computer towers and documents, stripping xenotech off of enemy agents.  But through her own eyes, she just saw James as she stepped up to him.

“Hey.”  She said softly, reaching out before freezing, unsure if she should touch him right now.

“They didn’t surrender.”  He said, looking at her with sad eyes.  There was blood dripping from a cut on his forehead, blood on his hands, blood staining his coat.  He’d been shot, Alanna realized.

“We have prisoners downstairs.”  She said, trying to make him feel better as best she could.  A quick check of her skulljack inputs showed that on the roof, Sarah had disabled prisoners as well.  “And upstairs.”  Alanna relayed.  “Some of them surrendered.  Not everyone went down fighting.”

“Who did we lose?”  James whispered it like a plea.

“No one, so far.”  Alanna winced as she half-lied.  “Ethan and Neil need medical attention. Camracondas are watching them until we move the wounded to the hospital.  Anesh… made a mistake.  One of him…”

“I don’t understand how he can’t care.”  James softly said.  “Well, I guess I can.  It’s just hard to live the idea.  So I’ll respect how he wants to do it; one body isn’t one Anesh.  He’ll live.”  James shook his head, trying to think.  Trying to remember what he had to do.  But he’d been hit in the skull repeatedly today, and it felt like there was a wad of cellophane between him and reality.  Reaching up to massage his forehead, he realized his glasses were gone, and vaguely remembered them breaking at some point.  He left a smear of blood from his wounds across the bridge of his nose, as he remembered something else.  “The basement.”  James said.  “There’s a code to the elevator, and a hidden door to a staircase.  There might be captives down there.”

“Okay.”  Alanna acknowledged.  She turned, and raised her voice.  “Secure the floor!  Check the bodies, make sure no one’s getting back up!  Then two people on alert while the rest of you collect anything that isn’t nailed down!”  She turned back to James.  “Let’s get you downstairs, then Sarah and I can check out the basement.”

“We’re coming too.”  Secret whispered.  “It is important.”  James didn’t say anything, just jerked a thumb at Secret as if to say ‘yeah, what he said’.

Alanna didn’t argue; that would be pointless.  She just worried as James limped like a wounded lion toward the elevator to the ground floor.

“Come on.”  He said.  “We’re wasting time here.”

_____

“Two guards, both on alert.”  Secret said as the elevator descended into the depths of the building.  “They are… distant.”  He mused.

He was perched on James back now; smaller than before, but more solid.  He’d condensed himself as much as possible for what was to come, but he was still injured from fighting whatever the Vested Authority had been.  He’d told James it wasn’t another infomorph, and while that was true, that hadn’t stopped him from kicking the shit out of it.  Or, in turn, stopped it from getting some good licks in on him.

The elevator contained James, Alanna, Anesh, and Secret.  Another team was taking the stairs, but these four were going down together in advance.  James was in armor now; when they’d made it to the first floor, a pair of delvers had helped him out of his coat, and clipped the shell into place like squires, their moods almost reverent as they helped the bloodied fighter into his gear.

As they descended, James clipped the braid into the back of his skull, shoved the hardware into the security of the back of the armor on his neck, and opened up the wireless access to his brain.  Suddenly, he had two more fields of vision, both of them of the door of the elevator; Alanna and Anesh.  He knew how they felt about the building, how they’d navigated some of its halls and rooms.  He knew how many bullets were in their guns.

The three of them had rifles now.  James had left the .45 revolver with someone on the first floor, abandoning his bound gun on the grounds that he didn’t have any charges left to do anything with the magic anyway.  He’d burned a lot of his tricks, and it sounded like the rest of the Order had too.  They weren’t *soldiers*, but they had a collection of bullshit they could bring to bear that tilted the tables against the people who actually were trained killers.

The elevator ride went on for a long time.

“I think the people taking the stairs may not have known what they were signing up for.”  James mused.

It was a joke.  Not a great one, but it was a joke.  And suddenly, he could *feel* again.  The tension in the air, the fear and pain.  He could feel Anesh’s anger, and Alanna’s fury.

“Anesh.”  James said softly, reaching out.  Then he stopped, and realized there was a better way to do this.  He pulled back his hand, and reached out his mind.  The connection was filtered, but it didn’t *have* to be.  He pinged Alanna first, and she widened her eyes as she answered.  Their minds slipped together like kindred flames rejoining.  Lovers and partners and allies and *so much more*.  And then, together, the two of them queried Anesh.

He didn’t answer at first, and they didn’t push.  They just sat there, waiting.  Physically standing in an elevator; their crew going from four to three people in an eyeblink as two of them became one.  They offered, held out a hand, and held back.

Anesh sighed, his shoulders slumped.  And he reached out to take it.

They didn’t need Virgil’s filters, they all suddenly understood.  They should have been fighting this way the whole time; like Simon and the other James did.  They were *together*.  They could feel each other’s lonely pain, and they could feel each other’s steel bound support, their shared bonfire that was a *relentless* love and trust.

Three minds danced together on an elevator ride into the bowels of the Earth.  Healing each other, supporting each other, sharing their emotions and information and experiences.  At a certain point, they drew each other so close that their orbs snapped into focus on each body, and a torrent of power flooded each of them.  Reaction time snapped up, the smell of the elevator was suddenly sharper, bones and fingernails and hair hardened, muscles redefined themselves.  Skills poured in like a river.  The weirdest part was knowing that *every one of them* was a Canadian citizen now.

Then Secret was with them; their singular mind thinking him into being with more focus and definition than ever before.  He spun around them, broken scales healing, fangs and curves streamlining.

The elevator doors opened.  The person inside had stacked up two bodies on one side, and one on the other with Secret.  There were guards outside, guns ready.  Unlike the agents upstairs, these men were in body armor and held automatic shotguns.  They were prepared for a real fight, but they were unsure what would be coming down the elevator since the camera feed had been cut.  One of them yelled a challenge, but there was no response from inside.

They made no move to get closer; keeping their distance and their weapons up.  The person inside nodded once at Secret, and he flowed to the floor, moving like a perfectly normal glowing blue snake with too many eyes that was longer than he appeared.  He shot forward out the open elevator doors.

The guards outside shouted, and then started shooting, as he approached them.  The booms of shotgun triggers being pulled echoing through three sets of ears and generating a collective wince.  Then they had a moment of knowledge from Secret that he was past them, and the guards had turned away.

The bodies that used to independently belong to James, Anesh, and Alanna, stepped out and started pouring .308 rounds into the backs of the two men who had made the mistake of turning their backs on the elevator.

Two corpses hit the floor in pools of their own blood.  The collective that killed them, and spared one of its minds to realize that it needed to name itself, was thankful that all of its parts had remembered ear protection this time.  They stepped off the elevator, and over the bodies, and moved forward, guns up.  Secret hadn’t detected anyone else hiding down here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t people who were just around and armed and *not* waiting in ambush.

The floor was one large room, and the three shells slowed as they moved toward its center.  They walked in perfect sync, only making slight mistakes as they adapted to being one together.  A ring of limbs with guns pointed outward; three hundred and sixty degrees of vision.  They took in the sights around them as they realized what was going on.

Blue lights overhead, cool air all around.  Smooth white sheet vinyl underfoot.  Metal racks filled with what looked like medical supplies.  Secured metal lockers against all the walls.  A couple of carts in places around the room.

Beds.

So many beds.  All of them with a cyberpunk swarm of monitoring equipment and needles and tubes and IV drip bags.  Thin hospital sheets, covering bodies that almost looked like corpses.  People with skin like old leather pulled tight against bone; barely any muscle mass left, veins jutting out in profane lines across their bodies.  There were heavy straps pinning their arms to their sides, their legs held together, and their full forms locked to the beds.

Underneath each bed, raised just slightly from the floor that they were clearly mounted in, there were stone rings.  Toroidal shapes, perhaps three feet thick.  Some kind of sandstone, one of the component minds thought.  There were markings on them, some of them dark shadows, others a glowing red.  As they watched one of the beds, there was a whirring noise - one of a dozen such noises - and a small drop of blood so dark it was almost brown dripped down from a tube.  Pulled out of a person, and onto the stone slab.

A marked character lit up with a red glow.  Only about three hundred more and that one would be complete.

Not every bed was occupied.  But all of them had the rings underneath.  Waiting for new sources of… blood?  Life energy?  Suffering?  It didn’t matter.  This was going to stop now.

“Hey!”  A voice challenged the entity, and all six of its eyes collectively snapped up to a man in a lab coat walking toward them.  He had glossy hair and a trimmed goatee, and was sipping from a mug of something.  “You the new guys?  You’re supposed to check in before you…!”

There was a wave of absolute revulsion from within three minds and one person.  These people were being tortured to death, and he was just standing there, talking about *policy?!*

They shot him.  The vile mirror of a doctor vanished in a spray of blood, dead before he could even be surprised.  Three bullets punching through the heart, brain stem, and skull.  All of them had perfect aim, and the shots hit so close together they may as well have just been one single hammer blow.  Bullets they’d bought to kill giants made of metal putting grapefruit sized holes in the unarmored human body.

This time, someone heard the gunshots.  There was a weak moan from nearby, and James’ body rushed over, dropping his gun to its sling as the body grabbed the metal bar on the side of the hospital bed.  The gaunt figure groaned again, eyes locking onto the horrified face looking down at it.  At him.  The eyes; the Empathy that Alanna had learned echoed through the mind.  Look at the eyes.  He hurt so *much*.  He’d been here longer than he could remember.  It felt like it had been his whole life.  He just wanted it to *end*.

“I don’t want to kill you.”  They whispered with three bodies.  “Please, what can I do?”  Working together, James and Anesh’s hands started to unhook bonds and remove tubes and hooks from the near-corpse’s mouth, doing what they could to free this ruined person’s voice.

A wrinkled, scarred hand feebly grasped at James’ wrist, trying to pull him in.  The body leaned forward, and the victim whispered.

It was a series of numbers.  Eyes flicked over to the lockers along the wall as the weak man flopped back to the bed, his limited strength exhausted.

Alanna’s body strode over, punched the numbers into the keypad, and opened one of the lockers.

Shelves.  Lots of them.  Each one containing, neatly packaged in a bed of custom cut foam, and helpfully tagged, an artifact like they’d seen the agents wearing.  A copper and ivory bracer here, a silver greave there, a polished earring in this one.  Thirty, maybe forty objects, some of them they’d seen so far, some they hadn’t.  Just in one locker, enough to equip ten people for war.

There were a lot of lockers.

A memory pulled out of James’ memory, from the conversation with the director.  ‘To the basement, for *processing*.’  Processing.  This was where their equipment came from.  They’d found a dungeon at some point with these… sacrifice rituals.  Put blood in, get an item out.  And just like the Order had begun exploiting the duplication ritual, they’d done the logical thing.  Pull them out, and industrialize it.

Why the prisoners, though?  Why not just…

It didn’t matter.  They banished the thought across three minds.  It didn’t matter *why*.  This structure wasn’t surviving intact.

_____

By the time the second squad made it down the staircase, James, Anesh, Alanna, and Secret had quietly disconnected the life support of the last captive.  They sent them on their way with held hands, tears, and a promise.  That this wasn’t going to happen again.  And that the Order would use the product of their blood for something worth dying for.

When they reached the surface, having packed up a lifetime’s worth of impossible magic from the basement, James had to be held back from just executing every prisoner they had.  Though he didn’t *really* want to murder them in cold blood.  Which was good, because some people didn’t really put a lot of effort into stopping him.

Instead, they settled on dragging them outside, stripping them of everything but their underwear, and leaving them in the parking lot as a pair of *very* nervous members of the Order carefully wheeled a water tank out of the back of one of the vans.

It was not filled with water.  It contained, in its core, a tank of liquid ether.  Around that was packed far too much aluminum phosphate, and filling the rest of the sealed space was as much pure oxygen as could be safely added under high pressure.  It was a bomb.  It was actually kind of an absurd bomb.  The kind that could, if detonated in an underground environment, could collapse, say, a building.  The number of things that you could learn from college chemistry students just by suggesting that you were interested *continued* to be one of the top things that worried James.  Outside circumstances were pushing it down the list, but the fact that they’d been able to assemble a fuel-air explosive in one of their own basements, with minimal problems, was honestly kind of horrifying.

By this point, the streams of people going in and out of the building were dwindling.  Nearby, Neil kept watch in the surrounding area with the limits of his drone swarm, a half dozen mechanical eyes watching for incoming police or agency vehicles.  A handful of delvers, camracondas, and one angry magnetic dog-shaped distortion kept watch on the prisoners.  Boxes of paper documents, stacks of acquired equipment, computer towers, and anything they thought might give them more information or potential operational strength.  All of it was loaded into the backs of the unmarked vans they’d circled up in the parking lot.

And then, they were ready.  James leaned into the elevator, punched in the code for the basement, nervously twisted the timer on the bomb to just enough to get it down the shaft before it went off, and then ducked back out, letting the doors close.

“Time to get out of here.”  He announced as he stalked out of the building.  “Everyone pull out!  Leave the prisoners!”  James yelled, and a swarm of Order members started piling into vans, or back into the landed form of Pendragon.  James turned to give the prisoners one last look.  The surviving members of their agency, the last remnants of what had just yesterday been the gatekeepers of magic for a quarter of the US.  One of them, the woman he’d passed at the front desk, gave him a death glare from the cold ground.  “If we ever see you again,”  James told them, “we’re going with kill on sight.”  He informed them coldly.  “Whatever gods are out there sure as hell know you deserve it.”

He turned, stalked away, and climbed into the passenger seat of a van without further comment, leaning back into the seat, and trying to ignore the screaming pain in his wounds.  A glance down at his hand showed that it had already started to scab over, and he winced; he’d have to get someone to dig that out for him later.

Behind the convoy of vehicles and Lifeform aircraft, a detonation occurred somewhere below ground.

The air in a three hundred meter radius was instantly turned to fire, and then vacuum.  Directed by the sealed elevator shaft, the explosion rushed into the underground medical torture facility, vaporized most of what was left there, and left the room empty of air.  Then, the pressure began to pull on the structure’s foundations.  Flooring ripped downward, support struts cracked, the building bowed inward.  Above ground, it wasn’t very impressive; a two story office building sort of pushed down in the middle, like a squashed cake.  But underneath?  The things hidden below it were crushed under hundreds of tons of metal superstructure and rock debris.  The elevator shaft crumpled in on itself, leaving nothing but what looked like a quarter mile long sinkhole beneath the structure.  It was possible that some debris shaking loose from the building might have fallen on the bound prisoners around it.  No one who understood what had happened here cared.

The sound was phenomenal.  Nearby windows shattered; in the distance, after a moment, sirens sounded.

Devastation.

And if anyone who knew what was down there ever tried to dig it out, James would just do it again.  And this time, he would wait for them to leave first.

_____

The Order of Endless Rooms won.

Status Quo lost.

But somehow, it didn’t really feel that way.