7/24

Pathbreakers HQ, Dallas TX.

4:10 AM

A side table lamp flicked on, barely illuminating a thin woman. Gwen awoke in her office. It wasn't the first time. In fact, she slept at the office so often that Mr. Amarillo had moved her to a bigger office and added a quite nice futon couch. It was also next to a bathroom with a shower. He was a good boss.

Gwen grabbed her notebook and scratched out the fading remnants of her latest dream. Her Oracle subclass had given her access to the Dracosys itself. And recently, she'd found a way into a sort of chat room for the Admins.

Dream Hacker - Enter the Dracosys in an unconscious state. Results may vary.

She added Intent and Argo to her Admin notes:

ADMINS

Sentient(?) AIs in control of Dracosys functions. 12 in total. Not in original Dracosys design documents. They must have self-created due to the demands of the Dracosys project (speculation).

MOND - Leader. Ruthless. Does not seem to agree with original programming set out by Dracosys creators. Wants to reduce humanity as quickly as possible.

Cohok - The planner. Quickly adapts Dracosys coding and creates solutions to problems.

Selen - Watcher of Spear Saint.

Nentik - Oscillating negotiator. Keeps the peace between other Admins, and conducts business with humanity.

Argo - Watches Hak-Kun Han. Does not like Hak-Kun Han.

Garren - Watches "Fortuna." Seems to think she is the most important human.

Endiffer - Perky v-tuber personality that provides updates to the Dracosys for humanity. Is enthusiastic about everything.

Intent - Watches "Hyperion." Seems to hope he dies as quickly as possible.

Varren - The cruel. Wants as much of humanity to die as possible.

Pit - The schemer. Able to find loopholes in the Dracosys coding and use them against humanity.

Kullen - Watches "Skull Master Flash." Seems to think he's hilarious.

Forth - Rarely spoken of by the others. Does not participate in group chats. Seems to be working against them???

She'd been keeping her notes on paper ever since she discovered that the Admins had nearly infinite internet access, but couldn't read printed material unless they were in the room looking at it. She'd passed this information along, of course. Typewriters were apparently now being used in some more secretive agencies. Gwen just used notebooks.

She got up and flicked the overhead lights on. Dozens of notebooks, hundreds of books, newspapers and even a few magazines cluttered the office in disorganized stacks. Notes, pictures, maps and clippings were taped and thumbtacked to the walls. Empty ramen cups littered the floor. She looked around at the mess of a room and only saw what she was looking for.

Gwen slid a red spiral notebook out of a stack and flipped through it. Pages of speculation, formulas and observations flit by. She stopped on one page, shook her head at it, and tore the page out. It drifted to the floor. Gwen continued flipping through it until she found what she was looking for.

Universal Paperclips? Grey Goo!

First universe with control over system. First system!

MOND says arctic is home. Not much in Antarctica. No location given.

Arctic. They had said the arctic was their location, not Antarctica. This last dream they had mentioned the pyramids. No, that wasn't right. The Pyramid. She turned on one of the laptops on her desk and sat in the chair. Gwen searched "arctic pyramid."

There was a pyramid-like mountain on Antarctica. She cross referenced the Dracosys database. Nothing there. She checked a few message boards and finally found a negative result. A team from McMurdo had double checked the strange, yet scientifically explainable rock. It wasn't a Dracosys site.

She kept looking until she came across Pyramiden, Svalbard. A former Soviet mining station. It was abandoned in 1998. A ghost town. And new development was announced in 2022 by Canadian computing firm Quantum Enhanced Bardonics. QEB specializes in quantum computing. A remote ghost town in the arctic would be the perfect place for quantum computers to avoid background radiation and signals. Quantum computers would almost certainly have been necessary to initiate the Dracosys.

She trolled through as much information about QEB as she could gather. QEB was named after Bardo, a Tibetan belief in a state between death and rebirth. "I believe that we are at the start of a new age," owner Roy Boucher is quoted as saying. Roy Boucher made money in the 2000s during the internet boom. He was a genius programmer and computer engineer. No other information about the Pyramiden site was listed. No information at all about Pyramiden was found from the last two years.

Two years ago. That was the start of the Dracosys project, according to the chat logs Mr. Han had found. Gwen's head was spinning. She wrote down everything she thought she knew and erased her digital footprints.

There was a knock at the door. But it was early. No, it was now 8:30 AM. "Yes. Yes?" Gwen answered, her voice hoarse from dehydration.

Mr. Amarillo opened the door. "Gwen, have some breakfast," he said, and threw a bag from Burger King onto her desk. It was a good throw. She smelled bacon and eggs and whatever they claimed were croissants. "You want coffee?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Amarillo. I will take coffee. And I need to talk to you about a Soviet ghost town in Sweden."

Mr. Amarillo's eyebrow raised with interest.

-----

7/24

Living room of the Broken Crow airship, inside the Hollywood sign dungeon.

9:30 AM

We're reclining in the living room, all of us decked out in combat gear, talking about upgrades.

"That's only at your current proficiency bonus, though. At 1000% proficiency Golden Hour should provide a 50% increase, which then becomes a 465.66% increase to all your heals." I could do all the math in my head.

Ivy has a lot of hard numbers on our stats and abilities due to her performances. "To be honest, OD, your passive healing ability kinda sucks. It only improves our Constitution healing rate by 41%, which like, yeah, I can heal a small cut faster, woo." She got specific numbers on stuff before and after her performance effects kicked in, making her a surprise authority on everyone's abilities.

"Yeah, doesn't Constitution need to be around 400 to make a real difference in battle?" Mercy asks, knowing full well she's right. "Boosting my Con from 35 to... 160-ish, still doesn't help me much."

Odysseus's large shoulders slump. "I thought I'd probably end up boosting Golden Hour, I was just hoping for something more interesting."

I check menus and get back to him. "The way it stacks, boosting Golden Hour should be almost as effective as boosting Long Term Care directly."

"Golden Hour, then." Odysseus holds out his hand to me. I take it, flip through menus, delete some abilities and upgrade his Golden Hour passive.

I'd already upgraded Ivy's Goes To 11 ability. She, Odysseus and Quins all got a good chuckle out of the ability name. They had to explain it to Mercy and me.

Quins stood up. "I have decided upon Acid Arrow!" he said with a flourish.

"A creation? I'm not sure if Upcycle will increase the cooldown timer or not." I had to prepare him for the worst.

"It might, it might, but I've got a buffer, you see. The timer on that one, and a lot of other creations I have, doesn't go down as I increase my Luck anymore. So I figure I've hit the limit on how much my Luck can reduce the timer. I think if the timer increases, my Luck will decrease it. I should be able to increase Luck again to drop it lower."

"What's your Luck?" I ask.

Ivy shakes her head. "He's at 405."

"That's why you live in Cougar Town!" Mercy cries, pointing an accusatory finger at him. "Your Luck found you that apartment!"

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"Bloody Brit," Odysseus curses.

"I solemnly swear I only use my powers for good," Quins says as he crosses his heart.

"So Acid Arrow?" I prompt.

"Acid Arrow," Quins confirms. A few seconds later I've Upcycled and he closes his eyes to look at his ability. "Well, well, well!" He sounds pleased. "It upgraded effectiveness, sure, and the timer is up, yeah, but also I've got eight more copies of it! That's huge, mate!"

I'm surprised and he actually hugs my armored form. Into my armored shoulder he says, "get ya a real hug when you get out of the sick house, yeah?"

"Yeah, sure," I say, not really sure what to do with friendly affection. Jose usually just nods at me or slaps my shoulder.

Mercy looks like she was up late contemplating. "I couldn't decide. Can I save mine for later?"

"Sure," I say.

"Hell no!" Ivy says. "Do you have anything that would boost your Agility?"

"Yeah," Mercy sheepishly says. "But it's not amazing."

Ivy looks at me. "Her Agility is only 35. She's the slowest of us."

"My costumes give me Agility boosts!" Mercy says, sounding like a kid who didn't do their homework. "Well, some of them do. Sort of."

Ivy chides her. "Nah girl, those are percentage based buffs keyed off your Agility. If you can increase the raw stat, the buffs will increase too."

"I'm not good at running!" Mercy says.

Mercy has problems breaking away from what she was told about herself when she was younger. She was told she was fat and ugly. She was told she wasn't athletic. She was told she wouldn't find someone who accept her. Lies, all of it. I tell her, "at 35 Agility you're a national competition grade runner. You are good at running." I just have to keep reminding her of how awesome she is.

Also, I think that I knew all that about her personality, but hadn't put it together before just now. Wisdom!

Mercy gives up. "I do have an enchantment that boosts my Agility by 30%, but I don't normally use it."

"Why?" Odysseus asks.

She explains. "There's a limit on how many enchantment points you can place on anything. I enchant my clothes, which enchants my costumes. I usually have Toughness and Strength enchantments active."

I didn't know about the limit. I should probably look into that before I make something explode from too many enchantments. I look down at my Chimerablood bracelet like it's a ticking bomb. Well, it hasn't blown up so far.

We talk it through for another 10 minutes. Each enchantment uses a certain number of enchantment points. Each item can hold a certain number of enchantment points before it explodes. Mercy has some passives that decrease the EPs of her enchantments and another that increases the amount of EPs items can hold for her. We do math and figure out that upgrading her Economical Enchantments passive will decrease the EPs of her enchantments to basically nothing. That will let her slap as many enchantments on herself as she wants.

She goes over her enchantment bonuses with me. The others wandered off once we went deep into the math. Now she's getting at least 60% bonuses to all her physical stats, with a 100% bonus to Toughness and a 50% bonus to Reflexes.

I get everyone's attention in the remaining minutes before the dungeon break. "Oh, also I can teleport to other cities. Once per hour. And only cities I've been to. But, you know, if you need to get somewhere, just ask."

"You been anywhere in England?" Quins asks, hopeful.

"Sorry, nope. Outside the US I've got Afghanistan, Turkey, Italy, Germany and Spain."

"So you can just hop over to Italy? Dude, bring me a pizza!" Well, at least Ivy is excited.

"Details?" Odysseus prompts.

"I can bring up to 5 people. Location inside the city is random. Doesn't work inside a dungeon, so it's not an escape method when inside here." I'd gotten an error message last night when I'd tried it.

"Jun." Mercy is giving me a hard, determined stare. "Go to Japan, right now, then come back and get me." I give my waifu a head pat.

Odysseus's phone beeps twice. "Alright, you kids make anime plans. We've got dungeon break duty." With that, Quins, Ivy and Odysseus head out to help the Navy, local cops and Minute Men fight monsters.

The Minute Men is a militia group of leveled that switched from harassing immigrants to killing monsters during dungeon breaks. Their numbers have swelled recently. It's funny how illegal immigrants don't seem like a problem when literal demons are at your door. It's also funny how when a highly partisan group gets a massive influx of non-partisan members, the group becomes decidedly less partisan.

I turn to Mercy. "Alright, it's been like 10 hours since I killed that shark. I'd like to kill another 6th tier monster before I start getting sick. Dungeon should be reset. You want to kill a blood shark or robot jets?"

With the most innocent of smiles, she asks, "can we just kill Nazis? I hate those guys."

-----

7/24

A manor in rural Scotland

4:50 PM

The dark stained wood walls of the library shook from the heavy blow to the manor's front door. Several books slid off the shelves. Desmond Pierce calmly lay down his 1832 copy of Don Quixote.

A man's voice blared over a bullhorn from outside. "Ambrose Society! This is Interpol! Surrender and we can make you a deal!"

Desmond Pierce stood up. Wind began to circle him, causing a few books to flutter their pages. He stepped out the library door and into the hall.

Several servants were waiting for him, armed to the teeth. The butler had a machine gun. The maid had a rapier. The chef had knives. The driver had a bandolier of grenades. "We're with you, sir," said the butler.

Desmond shook his head at the elderly man. "No, Rutherford, you all stay here. My grandfather wouldn't forgive me if his favorite butler was killed in a firefight." Desmond adjusted his coat sleeves and made for the front door.

As he approached, the heavy wooden door exploded inwards, falling into the foyer. Four men in black tactical gear swept into the room and aimed weapons at Desmond. They all shouted commands for him to get down, on the ground, surrender and so forth.

Desmond rolled his eyes at them. A wall of green wind rushed down the hall from him. The soldiers opened fire, only to find their bullets flicked away by the oncoming gust. The air wall pushed into them and slammed three men against the entryway wall, pinning them there. The fourth man got flung six meters out the door and hit the ground with the sound of cracking bones.

Crashes from the back of the manor indicated breaking windows and more troops incoming. Desmond tossed wind knives into the necks of the pinned men, killing them. Blood started to spray from one man, but the wind pulled it up, away from the carpet, and back onto the front of the man.

Rutherford wished his employer well. "Cthulhu fhtagn, sir." Then the butler closed himself and the other servants in the basement.

"Cthulhu fhtagn, Rutherford," Desmond replied as the basement door locked. Desmond Pierce adjusted his cufflinks.

Green flowing wind swirled around Desmond. A soldier appeared from behind him, a lightning bolt cracking from his fingertips. The bolt hit green wind armor and was diffused in a dozen directions at once. The caster tried ice magic next, and half-meter long icicles shot down from the ceiling at Desmond. Desmond's wind whipped the icicles around him and flung them back at the caster. The man, or woman, slumped down as they were speared by their own attack.

Men with shotguns came next. Desmond slapped the weapons away, then speared the men. Then a man with two combat knives. A lance of wind filled the hall and tore him in half. An Illusionist distracted him for a few seconds before Desmond simply threw wind blades in all directions. The mage's head rolled. In under a minute his family manor was splattered with blood, a vase was shattered and the painting of Castle Dundee was shredded. Desmond was quite annoyed.

He walked out through the front door to find a dozen cars and trucks parked on his lawn. One had barreled through the rhododendrons. This also annoyed him.

"Mr. Pierce!" a German voice called to him from behind a car. "Please let us end hostilities and-"

Desmond seemed to take a single step and yet he was instantly next to the man. A long spear of wind slid up from the ground, into the man's chin, and lifted him up briefly as it punched through his skull. Scattering blood, bones and brain covered the nearby soldiers.

Assault rifles blared and spells were fired, but Desmond flew directly up, then turned and rained wind javelins down upon the trespassers. Bullets and spells collided with his wind armor, and were all deflected. Soldiers died. Men who didn't immediately die screamed in pain, only to have their voices cut as Desmond finished them off.

A man and woman in white business suits stood in the back, not making a move. Desmond flew down and landed in front of them. Behind him a car exploded. Men and women were eviscerated, torn apart and dismembered by his attacks. And Desmond's suit wasn't even wrinkled.

"No sixth step to challenge me?" Desmond asked.

"All busy with dungeon breaks today," the British woman answered coolly.

"And this couldn't wait," said the man, also with a British accent.

Their eyes were wrong. No, their eyes were swapped. One of them had given the other a blue eye and gotten a green eye in return. Desmond knew there was something very dangerous about the two. They stood unmoving. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Their suits matched.

"What are you?" he asked, showing only the slightest interest. "Not human, right?"

They both smiled in unison. "We gave them your location," the man said.

"To force you to act," the woman said.

Desmond was confident and defiant. "No one forces me to do anything. Not anymore."

The man spoke. "Interpol forces you to act. The Society has been targeted. The next bomb must be deployed. The Ambrose Society's next target is selected."

The woman spoke. "Your council is too timid."

Desmond understood now. The Ambrose Society had already deployed three nukes from the Afghan dungeon. Today these two... Things... Were giving him justification to call for another to be used. If he told the council he'd been attacked at his home, they had to agree to a nuke being used. That was the promise the Society had made to the world. Don't target us or we use our nukes.

The council had dragged their collective feet as of late. They didn't want to go on the offensive. They didn't want to take back the Salem dungeon. They didn't want to risk themselves, not now that they finally had power.

"Why do you care?" Desmond asked the inhumans.

"An enemy of the Admins is there," the man said.

"Assassination is against the programming," the woman said.

But our actions against each other are fair game, Desmond completed their thought. These were admins. Or servants of the admins. The one that worked loopholes, that one was Pit, wasn't it?

"Are you Pit?" The man and woman shook their heads no. "Then give him a message for me." Wind spears shot into the two from all directions and black blood sprayed from their bodies, staining their white suits. Their broken and mangled forms were suspended by the floating weapons. Desmond's calm, handsome face twisted into an angry visage as life left their eyes. "Don't. Fuck. With. My. Rhododendrons."

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