It was near midnight, and he was still in the office, working on yet another issue that had cropped up while he’d been diving through the dungeon.

  Granted, it was also the last one, the power gained at the dungeon would mostly compensate for the lost sleep tonight, and going forward, he should be able to start getting the full amount he still needed, but he still felt like he’d probably not even make it to his bed. He’d either sleep in the office, or literally pass out on the way home and likely wind up in the drunk tank or something … yeah, office it was.

  As he continued to type, Frye reached out with a telekinetic spell, likewise taking advantage of his newly-gained Levels to make the process an easy one, and pulled his mattress out from behind the large filing cabinet.

  God, he couldn’t wait to have Abrams and Foster available again. Their presence and help did not prevent all-nighters, but it certainly reduced instances of it happening.

  Frye’s phone rang.

  Oh, what now?

  For a split second, he was tempted to hurl it across the room with a thought, but he managed to rein it in.

  “Frye,” he answered as he picked up, none of his tiredness or irritation audible in his voice, no matter how shattered he was feeling at the moment.

  “Uh, this is Jacobs, from the base camp, I was told to call you?”

  “You’re police?” Frye assumed. There wasn’t a ‘Jacobs’ working for the Bureau of Preternatural Affairs, their numbers were still small enough for him to know everyone by name, but someone had clearly given the man his personal phone number.

  “Yes, Director Frye, Sir.”

  Was the man nervous because of the situation, or because he was talking to a high-ranking government official whose position wasn’t yet confirmed to not be “chief of the secret police?” Which it wasn’t, mind you, but the government was currently in such a state that there were no doubt countless rumors swirling around.

  “What were you told to call me about?” Frye pressed.

  “Right, there’s a talking monkey here, he said your guys out in the jungle got ambushed and someone tried to kill someone called Daedalus?”

  Frye sighed internally.

  Note to self, make sure everyone has seen a picture of the dungeon’s communications avatar, and knows the name of the dungeon core, no matter how clearly fake said name might have been.

  “Is the attack ongoing?” he asked.

  “He says he dealt with the attackers, and he doesn’t think there’s a follow-up coming, but he’d like to hand over the bodies of the dead, and some information.”

  Frye sighed, out loud this time.

  “Hold on, I’m coming. Which base camp are you at? And can you ask him if he can wait for me to arrive?”

  After getting approval and directions, Frye stormed out of his office. Of course, he couldn’t run into the jungle on his own, or even just with whoever was in the base camp at the jungle’s edge right now, so he needed to grab some of his people. Preferably some who, unlike him, had had the good sense to take this chance to rest after the dungeon dive and were less sleep-deprived than him.

  As he marched through the maze of corridors that he’d memorized on the day of moving in, he all but ran into Granger as the young man was, for some reason, still roaming the halls of what might one day become the BPA’s London office.

  Personally, Frye felt that a purpose-built building would be better, one designed from the ground up with its eventual needs in mind, including properly reinforced and enchanted holding cells, a firing range that could withstand the powers that would likely be thrown around at that time, and, perhaps, even technology that could withstand the deleterious effect of the jungle’s magic. Assuming someone had created that by then, of course.

  But that was beside the point.

  “Granger, do you feel up to heading out again right now?” he asked. Normally, he’d have likely just ordered the young man to do so, but dragging someone tired to the point of functional uselessness along would be un- or even counterproductive.

  “I’m good,” Granger shrugged.

  Whether it was due to the fact that he was twenty years younger or two full ranks higher wasn’t obvious, but whichever it was, Frye was jealous.

  “We’ve got a situation in the jungle, come with me,” Frye immediately ordered and resumed his march. “Do you know where Henderson went after we returned?”

  “Bed, I think,” Granger replied. “Do you want me to get him?”

  “Assuming he actually slept, yes,” Frye said. The third D-Rank of the BPA had come over from the Royal Marines, knew to rest when he could, and was also used to operating on minimal or interrupted sleep.

  Granger waved his hand in the general direction of the nearest window and something like a heat haze flashed from his palm and flitted outside.

  “What was that?” Frye asked, without breaking stride.

  “You know how the E-Rank Logos Mage power Arcane Library of the Mind works, right?” Granger explained, talking rapidly and not even bothering to wait for a reply. “Basically, for any spell I know, I can create variants that are almost as easy to cast as the original. Magic missile is supposed to just impart kinetic energy, but I can make it impart vibrations too, and I made that one find Henderson’s window and make it make the sound of me telling him to meet us at the car park.”

  Full marks for enthusiasm, extra credit for thoroughness, but some lessons in properly conveying information probably wouldn’t go amiss.

  “Good,” Frye said after a couple of seconds. “Someone attacked the dungeon, we have some fires to put out and investigating to do.”

  This was likely something that should wait until he was actually capable of properly working the problem, rather than running on empty, but sadly, this was a matter of appearances and everyone from his superiors to the press would rake him over the coals if he didn’t act immediately, never mind how Daedalus might react.

  How something appeared shouldn’t be more important than how it actually was, but that was how the real world worked. Unfortunately.

  It was at that point that they passed the ready room and Frye ordered the stand-by team to follow him into the car park, where they soon hopped into the awaiting cars.

  “When’s Henderson co- …” Frye cut himself off when he saw the man himself standing on the sidewalk in front of the Holiday Inn that neighbored the headquarters and was currently housing anyone who didn’t live nearby. And, weirdly enough, there was a window open right above them … on the fifth floor, with the curtains weirdly draped across the windowsill and partially outside.

  Had he … no, he couldn’t have … the Royal Marines didn’t have the same infamy for crazy stunts their counterparts across the pond had … but still …

  Frye surreptitiously glanced at the ground underneath the man’s feet, checking it for cracks. None present, thankfully, because that would have been a rather strange work order to send out.

  Subordinate cracked pavement by jumping from the top floor, not a suicide attempt.

  No, he had absolutely no desire to wind up engaged in that kind of nonsense, even if the entanglement was on a purely bureaucratic level. A quick application of telekinesis threw open the door and Henderson entered.

  “Do you know from how high you can jump without breaking the ground, Henderson?” Frye gently chided the man, who had the good grace to look at least somewhat chastised.

  With that done, he finally picked his phone up again.

  “Jacobs, can you ask the monkey if there is anything else we should know before we’re there?”

  The answer was immediate.

  “Nothing that should be broadcast over an unsecured line,” the police officer immediately responded.

  “Thank you,” Frye said, and hung up.

  Now he was getting concerned. Morso than he had already been, anyway.

  For one, the fact that the issue at hand was a leak via an “unsecured line” massively narrowed down what this could be about. At the very least, it implied this involved state-level actors and all the headaches that came with that.

  But the fact that Daedalus was even aware of the issue was a whole other kettle of fish.

  The name alone had been a bit of a red flag, albeit a small one. Too on the nose, too “cultural” to have realistically come from someone entirely unfamiliar with Earth, its history, and its mythology.

  As for knowledge about surveillance and the like … with any luck, there’d simply been a spy novel in the museum during the merge. That would be a simple reason, one that laid this entire issue to rest. But Frye wasn’t one to come up with a reasonable, comforting explanation for a matter of concern and then dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

  Urgh.

  Why oh why could this not have happened when he was in a state where he was able to properly deal with it?

  He just knew he’d wake up tomorrow morning having come to a realization that had been blindingly obvious but he’d nevertheless managed to miss completely, only for it to have become obsolete by the time he came around to figuring it out.

  It would not have been the first time that had happened. Granted, it hadn’t been a big deal that time, but that wasn’t something he could rely on, especially since he was the one sitting in the hot seat.

  London’s streets blurred by as the driver gunned it, the jungle beginning to rapidly loom out of the darkness ahead, a black slice taken out of a surprisingly starry night.

  At that point, he finally called Jaclyn, hoping that she wasn’t in the Pacific magical zone yet, where her sat phone would fail miserably, were she stupid enough to take it inside. Which she wasn’t, but it would hardly be conducive to contacting her if she didn’t have it on her person.

  She’d spent a week at the Eternal Winter transformation zone in the mid-west of the United States, comparing containment procedures, trading tips, and tricks, with “secret” secondary orders to judge how well they’d be able to grow without a constantly-regenerating set monsters in a dungeon.

  That last one hadn’t been cooked up by him but rather originated from as far above his head as it have possibly done so, but it wasn’t the worst idea.

  After all, the jungle had been rapidly losing creatures as time passed and they were hunted down for being a threat or to level, until eventually, the Dungeon would be the only place to reliably grow stronger.

  Granted, London was the smallest transformation zone by several orders of magnitude, and the Dungeon was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the depletion, but the process was functionally guaranteed to be happening everywhere.

  However, she’d recently flown to the Pacific transformation zone, and the stuck Marine Expeditionary Unit that was currently negotiating with the locals in the hope of getting a new perspective on magic than that of the Worldstrider tribe.

  Thankfully, she picked up.

  “Abrams,” was all she said, clearly trusting that whoever had the number to that phone needed no extra information.

  “This is Frye, we’ve got a bit of a situation here, someone decided to try and kill Daedalus. Can you wrap things up in around six hours?” he asked, deciding to skip straight to the point.

  “I can come back right now.”

  “But are you done?” Frye asked.

  “Only landed an hour ago,” Abrams replied.

  Frye thought about it for a moment before making his choice.

  “I’d rather you wrapped things up first. Getting you back a few hours early isn’t worth losing you for two days down the line because you have to fly all the way back there.”

  Yes, in theory, he didn’t need her, specifically, to act as an ambassador, but she was good at that, and of all his people, she was the least likely to, you know, die, which was a real risk considering that she was heading into an entirely untransformed transformation zone.

  “Wilco,” she replied. “Anything else?”

  “No, good luck, Deputy Director Abrams. Knock ‘em dead.”

  With that, he hung up, and started broodingly out through the windshield until they were finally at the basecamp, which was effectively an old-school “circle of wagons,” except the wagons in question were a bunch of shipping containers that were, depending on their exact location, either storage or makeshift pillboxes.

  It wasn’t anywhere near it needed to be to keep away the nastiest of the jungle’s creatures, but it was as good as they could create it.

  They were waved in near-instantly and as soon as they were inside, suddenly, there was a familiar spider monkey with a fedora and fanny pack sitting on the hood.

  “So, are you going to let me in?” it asked, revealing needle-like teeth.

  With a sigh, Henderson reached over and started rolling down the window to let it in, though Frye could see the man’s shoulders tense. Being in an enclosed space with a D-Rank monster, even one entirely lacking a combat focus, was nerve-wracking.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Daedalus asked through his monkey as the driver turned over towards a small hut in the corner of hte camp.

  “We’re going to drop off all our advanced electronics,” Frye answered. They might have confirmed that the whole “fry anything with a microchip” field was actually just a property of a high magic area, but that didn’t put them any closer to figuring out why it was doing any of that, or putting a stop to it.

  Inevitably, there’d be a couple of things people forgot they had on them, and the complaints would be loud, but by creating a routine of dropping stuff off at a specific time and place instead of trusting that people had left everything back at the office, they cut the waste down to a bare minimum.

  And barely a minute later, they were all on their way out into the nocturnal jungle, full of strange noises and flashes in the distance where the APC’s headlight glinted off otherwise unseen predators’ eyes.

  That would have been spooky enough, but the corpses weren’t exactly making things less intimidating.

  Jungle monsters, ripped to pieces by teeth and claws, currently in the process of being dragged away by scavengers who fled as the cars approached.

  “Those things aren’t used to accounting for their target’s gear,” Daedalus commented, gesturing to his monkey’s chest. “But it seems they can learn, judging by the fact that they’re leaving you alone.”

  It had taken a while, but eventually, the lesser monsters of this jungle had stopped attacking the cars. Or inadvertently sabotaging them, for that matter.

  Sleeping in under the hood and in the engines for some reason, then ripping apart various pipes and hoses when startled by the car starting, and nonsense like that.

  But that wasn’t the salient point.

  “What are you trying to avoid saying?” Frye asked, bluntly. Daedalus wanted to talk about this, otherwise, he wouldn’t have told them about anything, but he was clearly reluctant to discuss more.

  A shudder seemed to run through the monkey before it turned to stare him in the face for a long moment.

  “Any loose lips in here?”

  Frye shook his head. “I know everyone personally and trust them.”

  Granted, he hadn’t known them long, but the background checks had been thorough and he was a good judge of character.

  “Eight D-Rankers tried to destroy me after attacking your men and killing all but one of them. Four of them had elementalist powers, and the other four had crystal- and fractal-based abilities that belong to a System from a land made up entirely of crystals,” the monkey replied as bluntly as Frye had asked for the information.

  Elemental powers, and a land of crystal …

  “Bloody hell.”

  It had just slipped out, but to be honest, Frye wasn’t sure he even wanted to take it back.

  Elemental powers originated in the United States, and while he was yet to have any concrete intelligence on its native system, “land of crystal” described the Russian transformation zone to a T.

  “Are you sure?” he finally asked.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The monkey gave him a “flat” look.

  “I’ve prepared the bodies and their gear for your perusal, maybe you can figure out something with them,” the monkey offered.

  “Do you know anything other than the origin of their systems?” Frye added after a long moment.

  “I was hoping you could help me with that.”

  That was a no, then.

  Frye could hear the muttering around him start to rise as more people were putting two and two together, but he was busy rolling the information he already had over in his head.

  So, Russia and the United States … that was highly unlikely to have been a government op.

  Either, he could buy. Russia was, well, Russia, and the CIA specifically had a well-deserved reputation for malfeasance.

  Smuggling drugs to earn money to fund their own operations, starting bloody civil wars, and installing dictators with the end goal of drastic market reforms in a way that was beneficial to the United States, not to mention human experimentation on both foreigners and US citizens … and that was just the shit that was public knowledge.

  Frye’s background was intelligence work and the stories he could tell …

  To be honest, they weren’t necessarily worse than what was publicly available because that stuff was horrific too, but it was the sheer volume that was shocking, the number of “unreported” shit was truly unfathomable.

  So yes, the CIA would have pulled something like this, Russian defectors or mercenaries and all, but could they have?

  D-Rankers were rare, and he was extremely surprised that they’d had four in the first place, let alone four to throw away. That would have likely required approval from the government itself, and regardless of what he thought about the current leadership, would they have gone that far?

  In addition, damaged as it was, the relationship between the US and UK still existed, and he’d have expected them to simply have asked for access before escalating to a denial of resources attack. Or was it an assassination, considering that Daedalus was, you know, a person?

  Especially considering how the government’s contract with Daedalus worked. The UK had its perks, its advantages, but they couldn’t monopolize him. Or his trade.

  It was more politely phrased in the treaty, but things basically boiled down to “either give Daedalus literally everything he wants, or let him look elsewhere.”

  There were, of course, exceptions carved out for people who the UK was actively at war with, etc., but the United States would still have had relatively easy access to the dungeon, supply lines permitting.

  And considering Frye’s position in the government, while he might not be a part of the regular diplomatic channels, he’d have definitely heard about it, had any request been made. Trying to destroy the dungeon before even asking was just. Plain. Idiotic.

  Of course, just because something was “stupid” it didn’t mean that no one would do it. And with the current administration … let’s just say that one could apply the principle of Hanlon’s razor “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” to the majority of its actions and leave it at that.

  As for Russia … the biggest sticking point with that idea was that they’d somehow gotten their hands on D-Rankers with the American system, and only the American system, with no indication of the Pacific system being used whatsoever.

  Although that could also come down to the fact that the Pacific system specialized entirely in aquatic and amphibious combat, which wouldn’t exactly help here.

  But, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that this was an action not ordered or condoned by either government.

  Who else could have been responsible for this?

  Well, in terms of global influence, there only other candidates were China and the European Union except, well, the EU had even less of a reason than the US to pull something like this, and China … the diplomatic relationships between China and the UK weren’t exactly good, but he’d have thought they’d have at least tried the diplomatic route before risking pissing off both the dungeon and everyone who was either currently using it, or likely going to use it in the future.

  Too likely to backfire exceedingly badly, and the Chinese government did not suffer fools in its own ranks.

  In addition, the Chinese had a patch of transformed ocean right off their coast that was giving them problems, without them having been able to access the native system.

  And, unlike Frye and his people, there was a complete lack of any helpful orc tribes which could grant access to their home world’s system via the village nexus.

  Given they had a huuuuge problem in their own backyard without an easy solution, jumping straight to irrevocably alienating potential allies … it was too soon for that kind of move to be made.

  Hm, North Korea, then?

  Frye actually facepalmed at that thought. Nope. The ironically named and highly totalitarian Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had a well-deserved terrible reputation, and made for a fantastic cartoonishly evil villain for any creative type in need of one, but in terms of Realpolitik, they were a minor player cut off from the rest of the world. The “Dear Leader” would likely have done this if he could, but it was the “if” that was the sticking point here.

  Assuming this really was a matter of official assets being bribed or seduced away from their government, both the Yanks and the Russkis could have shielded the defectors from their former masters. North Korea decidedly could not have. And assuming the now-dead attackers had had even a lick of sense, they’d have been aware of that.

  Yet that was the obvious suspects out of the way, all of them eliminated for one reason or other.

  Which meant that either it was one of them and it just wasn’t obvious, or it was someone not usually in contention.

  Still, neither transformation zone was even remotely small enough for its access to be controlled, and the tech-disrupting properties of the transformed areas made adequate surveillance of the interior downright impossible.

  Even so, people getting inside and hitting D-Rank and leaving without noticing … still somewhat unlikely.

  Which ultimately brought him back to his original issue.

  Who had sent those people to kill Daedalus?

  The United States and Russia together, one of the two acting on their own while sending enough people with the other system to confuse matters, or an entirely different party who had simply used the most accessible systems?

  Ultimately, there was nothing he could do about it right this minute, perhaps the bodies of the attackers and their gear would reveal some more information.

  The Dungeon that used to be the Natural History Museum of London peeled out of the darkness of the jungle shining like a beacon, the natural light that illuminated its halls bright only in the context of its utterly black surroundings.

  As they drove closer, the roots covering the ground or pushing up the pavement made the car and thus the headlights bounce up and down despite the quality of the car’s suspension, illuminating the devastation outside in brief flashes.

  “My God …” someone breathed.

  The reaction was more than warranted. Blood spatters that cut off at the edge of the Dungeon’s influence, crystal planted in the ground like stakes impaling now-vanished corpses, scorch marks, half-melted patches of ice, massive scars cut through the environment by blades that were nowhere to be seen.

  “Do you need protection in case this happens again?” Frye asked.

  The monkey shook its head. “If someone can top what they already threw at me, then your help won’t matter either.”

  Ouch.

  Frye didn’t let it show, however, instead focussing on something else.

  “Would you be willing to expand the contract for ‘safe’ leveling to a few more of my people?” he asked.

  The deal had been highly limited earlier, Daedalus’ fundamental nature as a dungeon not being conducive to creating a situation where people were rescued the moment they were in danger. But at the same time, he had done so in the past to ensure that he had powerful allies available outside his sphere of influence.

  “Assuming they sign the contract, yes,” the dungeon core immediately replied. The contract in question boiled down to the signatory not being able to directly or indirectly act to kill the dungeon using anything gained as a result of the safe delving, whether that was power or information. A magical contract.

  “You do know that will mark the United Kingdom as a threat in most people’s minds?” he added after a long pause.

  “They already think that, that’s why this whole thing happened,” Frye replied darkly, then turned to the people he’d brought and started barking orders, specifically ordering them to secure the scene, both guarding against further attacks and collecting evidence as best they could, considering only a third of them had a police background and that they were limited to low-tech techniques that were often decades out of date.

  And once that was done, he turned back to the monkey avatar.

  “You said there was a survivor? If you will, lead me to him, and then show me the invaders.”

  “This one will show you the way,” a voice rang out. It was clearly Daedalus’, but it had come from a particularly fluffy and adorable velociraptor standing in the doorway.

  Frye raised an eyebrow.

  “I need Jan to scout the jungle, you’ll have to deal with one of my in-house avatars,” the raptor said by way of explanation, then turned around and headed inside.

  Frye followed, soon reaching what used to be the cafe, a room separated from the rest of the museum by a truly ludicrous number of doors, there to “create a metaphysical separation from the dungeon proper.”

  Apparently, there were more rules Daedalus had to follow than those he imposed upon himself.

  Once he’d managed to finally open the last door, he saw the blood-spattered form of Lieutenant Alexander, one of the many soldiers of the British Army the BPA was borrowing while its native manpower was being built up.

  “Lieutenant,” Frye began, but Alexander cut him off.

  “Sir, I’m … I’m fine enough, considering the circumstances,” he said, then immediately launched into a report. Frye let him, ignoring the rudeness, considering the situation.

  “They ambushed us. We stood in front of our trucks, the way we always are, and suddenly, half of us were dead. There was no sign of them coming, no threats, no warning, just … if this was another state, it was an act of war.”

  Frye sighed. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter if this was a state, a corporation, or some random person with a grudge against the dungeon. Once I know who it was, I’ll bring down the hammer. The only thing that’ll change is the hammer’s size.”

  Or, more likely, his superiors would do that, but it was all the same in the end.

  There were missteps, there were immoral actions that, while taken on foreign soil did not affect the foreign nation directly and were therefore “overlooked,” there was the usual leeway a sufficiently powerful international player was given even when they were being absolute bastards.

  A direct attack upon what was rapidly shaping up to be the strategic resource in this new world that included the slaughter of soldiers … no, if that was overlooked, he’d quit on the spot.

  Alexander gestured towards the far wall, and Frye followed with his gaze, seeing the seven sheet-covered objects lying there. He didn’t need to look to know that those were the bodies of the fallen.

  “The Dungeon fixed them up,” the soldier explained. “I don’t know why or how, because Corporal Shaw was ash last I saw him.”

  Probably just recreations by the dungeon, one and all, but Frye held his tongue. Saying that out loud … unnecessary and cruel.

  Instead, he said, “When you’re ready, they’re waiting for you outside.”

  Alexander nodded, and slowly rose to his feet, revealing a massive cut across the stomach portion of his uniform, the cloth around his torso soaked in blood, yet the skin visible underneath was looking hale and hearty. Clear signs of healing potion use. But the man ignored Frye’s probing gaze and simply marched out through the doors.

  But the BPA director’s gaze lingered on those seven sheets.

  “Just so you know, when people die in the normal course of a delve, I shall give them the same courtesy.”

  “When?” Frye asked tiredly.

  The raptor made a weird arm movement that likely represented a shrug on the dinosaur.

  “A dungeon is a dangerous place, and the ‘safe leveling’ deals will always be a limited commodity. You’re good, but you’re not that good.”

  The delivery wasn’t exactly threatening, however, it still sent a chill down Frye’s spine. But Daedalus wasn’t done.

  “I know what I’m going to say next is going to make it sound like the exact opposite is going on, but I feel it needs to be said anyway.

  “I will not change my dungeon specifically to mess people over. It will not stay static forever, however, any changes I make will be readily apparent and easy to see. You will never approach an area with a specific tactic in mind only to find out that it won’t work at the worst possible time.

  “Anytime I change something, even to close off a loophole or cancel an exploit, there’ll be a clear visual change to accompany the alteration.”

  Frye just looked at the raptor for a long moment. It was, well, a “historically accurate” velociraptor in that it was barely larger than a chicken and covered in feathers, but that was where the similarities stopped.

  Because this thing was, well, it was adorable, looking more like a stuffed animal come to life than something that could have naturally evolved. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the blunted claws were clearly made up of whatever normally constructed claws, rather than whatever soft material normally attached to toys.

  It was obvious why Daedalus usually sent a spider monkey in a fedora to negotiate, rather than one of these things, although the fact that his usual avatar, who was apparently called “Jan,” was needed to explore the outside implied that there were other factors in play.

  He almost asked, only to shove down the impulse in favor of actually responding to what the Dungeon Core had said.

  “You’re right, that did sound like a threat. So why speak up at all?”

  Another shrug.

  “I felt it needed clarifying. But do you know how I could have said that in a way that couldn’t be misinterpreted?”

  “I guess a sign on the notice board outside might have done the trick,” Frye answered after thinking about it for a couple of seconds. “But no, I don’t think that could have been said differently.”

  And mentioning it later would likely not have had the same impact, the silently added.

  “Follow me,” Daedalus finally told him and after a circuitous route through the Dungeon, Frye found himself standing in front of eight body bags, or at least black bundles that looked like body bags but clearly weren’t. Not only was the care shown to his men entirely absent, but significant disdain was also present.

  He grimaced internally. The kind of things a Dungeon core could pull off if it felt the same about all of humanity, not just those who pissed it off … he didn’t want to think about it, but sadly, it was his job to do so.

  Later.

  Right now, he had investigating to do.

  “I’d have brought you pictures, but the only working cameras in the building are the kind of thing your great-grandfather would have considered outdated hunks of junk,” Daedalus offered.

  Frye pulled a simple polaroid from his jacket pocket, a model specifically chosen for its complete lack of complex electronics and purchased en masse, to the point where it had likely revitalized that entire branch of industry.

  “If I give this to you, you can make as many as you want, we don’t need to keep you supplied?”

  The raptor nodded, and in the distance, Frye noticed a spider monkey, different from the ambassador, peeking around the doorway.

  “How do I …” he started to ask, loosely holding out the camera towards the little dinosaur that was clearly incapable of handling, let alone using the device, when the camera simply vanished, disappearing so suddenly that his hand twitched closed before he realized it was gone and stopped.

  “You’ll get it back in a minute or so,” Daedalus explained, began stalking over to the bags, and opening them just enough that Frye could see the men’s faces.

  They were all white, of military age, and with varying hair and eye colors. No tattoos, no obvious scars that might have wound up in the “identifying characteristics” category of someone’s file, no nothing.

  Frye walked up and down the line, even as a few people with cameras, including Granger, filtered into the room from behind him.

  Until eventually, he stopped, standing before one body in particular.

  “He was the fire elementalist, wasn’t he?” he asked after taking a few more seconds to make sure he knew what he thought he knew.

  “What makes you say that?” Daedalus asked, sounding slightly suspicious.

  “The scorch marks outside tell me there was almost certainly at least one fire elementalist, and I think I know this guy,” Frye said, glancing up at Granger. “This is the guy from the file Deputy Director Abrams sent over, isn’t he?”

  The young man took a second to look it over, then nodded. Being a mental-focussed D-Rank had given him a memory someone like Frye could only dream off … or, at the very least, wouldn’t get for a while yet.

  “John Soders, explosives expert, dishonorably discharged from the United States Army for a reason of general malfeasance, worked as a hellfighter, that’s someone who puts out oil well fires, by the way, and then vanished into the transformation zone early in the disaster. He was in a file we were sent with problematic individuals known to have attempted to gain powers,” Frye rattled off what he remembered.

  “So putting out fires demonstrates enough knowledge of flames to get pyrokinesis? Or did he get his powers before the system realized using a lighter didn’t mean you’d mastered fire?” Daedalus asked, sounding confused.

  “Putting them out with explosives does,” Frye replied. “When oil wells burn, water alone usually isn’t enough to put it out, but if you can blast away or use up the oxygen completely enough to smother the flames, they stay out.”

  “And that works?”

  “As long as you can smother the fire completely and there aren’t any embers left, you can extinguish it. Heck, if you can extinguish it completely before it catches, you can even use gasoline to put out a fire, though I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Now that I don’t believe,” Daedalus replied.

  “My chemistry teacher once demonstrated it in class,” Frye said. “But that’s beside the point.”

  The actual point was that this was a weird connection to the United States. Giving the information to the British government could then have either been a ploy to preemptively disavow Soders … or it could have been a genuine effort at information sharing that just so happened to have been helpful.

  Shit.

  He doubted anyone would try anything right now, but assuming that Jaclyn was completely safe in a United States military installation under the current circumstances … he was about as close to certain as he could be that there was nothing going to happen in such a traceable way, but at the same time, “almost certain” wasn’t the same as “actually certain.”

  Frye grabbed one of the men gathering evidence and sent him out.

  “Take a car and an escort, head back to base, and contact Deputy Director Abrams, tell her to watch her back as there are concerns about hostile actors,” he ordered.

  It was fine. Probably. All the intel had been passed along to MI6, who’d double-checked things and confirmed everything in that file, this guy might have been ex-Army but shouldn’t have been in the employ of the government, and if he had been, why call attention to it?

  Frye continued to pace, until he finally turned to Granger once again.

  “What about this guy?”

  The young man shook his head.

  So, that one wasn’t in the file, but there was something about this particular invader that was still familiar. Which meant Frye knew him from the intelligence circuit, maybe? Or somewhere else a junior police officer wouldn’t have been?

  After a minute of wracking his brain, the penny finally dropped.

  Frye hadn’t seen the man’s picture, he’d seen a sketch. A South African mercenary known by a list of aliases as long as his arm, specializing in firearms …

  “What was his power?”

  “Kinetic energy manipulation,” Daedalus replied.

  Yep, that tracked, and somewhat confirmed that Frye had correctly identified the man in question.

  That done, he moved over to the pile of equipment that had already been picked over by his men.

  “Those necklaces make it impossible to understand them or identify the language used,” Daedalus said, the raptor gesturing to a set of weird jewelry. “They’re ubiquitous enough that neither I nor my fairy were able to identify their origin, let alone narrow them down to a specific transformation zone.”

  “Can we have them once they’ve been processed for evidence?” Frye asked.

  “To be honest, I straight up wasn’t expecting to get those back once you left with them,” Daedalus admitted.

  Frye chuckled despite himself and the situation, then re-focussed on the pile of nondescript uniforms and simple military gear. Well, mil-spec, because nothing here was military specific, merely up to the standards of military gear. Save for the guns, which had had their serial numbers filed off.

  The sort of things people would carry if they didn’t want it to be traced, regardless of whether or not these were disavowed, or soon to be disavowed, state actors, or actual mercenaries.

  Now, if those necklaces were revealed to have been found by another nation, that would be their smoking gun, but otherwise, he’d have to hope that the boffins down at the lab found something hidden from his bare eyes.

  Frye was about to say as much but when he opened his mouth, he yawned despite himself, feeling like he’d almost dislocated his jaw when he finally managed to shut it again.

  “Right, it’s late, isn’t it?” Daedalus asked lamely.

  Frye swallowed a sarcastic “Really?” and simply nodded, mutely.

  “I have some stamina potions, they should work like coffee, on the house,” Daedalus announced … and stayed put. It took Frye an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that the dungeon core did not, in fact, have to go fetch the potions with this particular creature, he could just as easily create them elsewhere and march them over with a different monster.

  That turned out to have been true as, after a couple of minutes, an unnaturally fluffy jaguar marched in, dragging what looked like a cooler bag across the floor by its strap.

  Opening the cooler revealed a series of small glass vials, neatly stacked inside, glowing with yellow light.

  “Elias says that the reiki potions actually work better at staving off sleep.”

  “Elias?” Frye frowned, already picking up one of the potions and examining it.

  “My fairy,” Daedalus shrugged.

  That … that wasn’t information that Frye could do much with, or wanted to, for that matter, but it was interesting, if secondary to the potion.

  He focussed on it, drawing on his Inspect skill. Everyone had it, becoming “proficient in inspecting things” happened over the normal course of one’s life, but using the system to bring it into the realm of the supernatural was an arduous process and he wasn’t very good at it yet, but between how far he’d gotten it thus far and the information provided, a system screen popped up nevertheless.

  Of course, it could have still been poisoned, Frye wasn’t anywhere near good enough to detect that, but this was a clear-cut case of “there are easier ways to kill.”

  So he threw it back and, but the instant he swallowed, he felt like he’d tried to deep-throat a chili pepper.

  “Fuck!” he swore, breaking off and coughing, pounding on his chest a couple of times as though this was merely a case of something going down the wrong pipe.

  Yet after a couple of seconds, he managed to straighten again, glaring at the nearly-full box.

  “Was that supposed to happen?” he asked.

  “I’ve never tried one,” Daedalus deadpanned, then, after a second, added, “Elias says it’s normal to feel a little rough for a couple of seconds.”

  Frye was tempted to say something harsh, but stopped for two reasons.

  One, it hadn’t seemed malicious.

  And two, he was actually feeling pretty great.

  So instead, he said “I suppose now we have no choice but to catch these bastards, seeing as you’re being so generous.”

  ***

  Ten hours later, only two of which he’d spent asleep, Frye was reading over the report.

  All four users of the American system had been some variety of mercenary, which didn’t really point towards the US government, but it hardly ruled it out either.

  At the same time, the other four were ghosts. Not in any database any UK government agency had access to, including those they really weren’t supposed to be able to search.

  Bollocks.

  This would be a true slog, and them finding the truth was growing less and less likely with every test and investigation that failed to return any actionable intel.

  At least Jaclyn’s expedition to the Pacific had been successful, even if things hadn’t exactly gone as expected.