At the urging of Rebecca, I wrote an email to various important people after the party. She wasn’t concerned about anything happening to me legally, but wanted to smooth over my relationship with our hosts and supporters before anyone decided to get petty.

In summary of that email, I explained the vulnerabilities I found with their security and how I would go about addressing them. It was mostly just human error: not following what was likely protocol, not preparing for someone to actually be malicious, and being too relaxed. To be honest, I couldn’t blame anyone for acting like they did. I highly doubted that any spies or saboteurs would be able to get here- if they even existed in the first place. Sure, there were always people throwing phishing links around to see if anyone would bite, but I trusted that they were prepared for that at least. Also, I’m sure the proximity to a bunch of MGs didn’t help with the problem of being too lax; very few people would want to try anything that would upset near unstoppable superhumans.

Of course, I neglected to mention how my ability to ignore digital security had or could have helped, but I still would like to think my suggestions were reasonable. Even better, I wrote it to look official and hinted at ‘previous correspondences’- which would give the recipients an easy way out if they picked up on it. And from what Rebecca had told me, they were the type of people to notice the wink wink, nudge nudge nature of my writing. By the time anyone looked into what I’d been doing it’ll probably be ‘officially requested’ to let them save face.

With that out of the way, I got a full ten hours of blissful sleep. I guess I had been ignoring my exhaustion because as soon as my head hit the pillow, I woke up feeling great. Even better, while I was asleep I got an email containing nothing except a few forms for me to sign- dated as if they had been filled out on the day of my arrival.

I used [Magical Hacking] to sanitize things on my end and trusted my co-conspirators to clean up their end. Of course, by that I mean I trusted that someone would open the documents which had a packet of the aforementioned skill loaded with significantly more ULE than I had used in the past.

Much to my annoyance, I discovered that my previous backdoors had run out of juice when I tried to access that agent’s tablet again. Sure, it made sense that any spell would eventually run out of ULE and stop functioning, but I expected to get some sort of feedback when that happened- so for this one I loaded it up with just enough to hopefully not be easily detectable by any MGs in the area the email will be opened.

On the much more benign side of my morning communication management, Kay had invited me to brunch at that cafe we went to last time. There wasn’t much more in the message beyond that, but she did say she would be helping me figure out a training regime. Not exactly exciting, but I understood it was necessary.

Despite arriving ten minutes early, Kay had beat me there, offering a polite “hello” as I sat down. We made some small talk while waiting a few minutes for a waitress to come take my order- some jam and powdered sugar crepes- before Kay took out a notepad.

“I hope you don’t mind me stepping in to help organize this.” Kay started, “I’m getting help from Rebecca. She very much enjoys magic in every form, which has led her to making friends with everyone who tends to use it- in turn making her a good resource for finding people who are willing to teach.”

Quickly waving away her concerns I replied, “I actually really appreciate it; I would have no idea where to start beyond asking someone from SEYA for some tips.”

“That is a relief. If it is not too much of an annoyance, can I ask about your prior experience with weapons or self defense techniques?”

I drew in a sharp breath before admitting, “I haven’t really done anything like that… Unless you count theoretically being able to combine basic knife skills from learning to cook with knowledge of human anatomy?”

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In a very out of character move for her, Kay muttered “how the hell did you survive running around in a Breach,” before catching herself and saying, “oh, I’m sorry. However, I do wonder about that.”

“To be honest, I was stupidly lucky with how everything went and mostly relied on being sneaky. The only group I ‘fought’ was exploded. Individual demons either too slow to kill me if I just ran or not dangerous if you have literally anything sharp- and even then I got beat up.”

After a moment of consideration while my crepes arrived, Kay sighed, “from what I know of your perks, you should be able to fill a few important and somewhat overlooked roles: civilian extraction and maybe final cleaning- in addition to normal Breach clearing. Ah, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me give a little context on what those would entail.

“Step one of clearing a Breach is to get everyone who is not an MG out of the area- preferably alive. The best ways to do this is either sprinting in with your most powerful magic and weapons, cutting as straight a line to surviving groups as possible. From there you throw up some protections and run them back out. The other way is to avoid being detected as you sneak them out if the group is small enough, or if prepared ahead of time- evacuate to somewhere a magically shielded vehicle can get to them.

“Step two happens at the same time as step one and involves setting up a perimeter to contain the Breach. While not ideal, various forms of anti tank or fortification munitions can deal with most demons that can not use magic themselves.

“Step three is equally simple: having every on-site MG push out as much ULE as possible.”

I interrupted, expecting something like systematically sweeping the area and killing everything that moved, and asked, “what? Why? Isn’t it better to get a Breach closed as soon as possible?”

“Well, yes. But only when there's a problematic cluster that needs to be dealt with. If you have enough teams to cover all the Breaches, or when you are down to that many, it is pretty standard to farm Breaches until a few waves before the demons get too strong. Pushing out as much ULE as you can will bait the Breach into committing more demons to capturing it- either altering the wave timings or strengths. From there everyone takes a pre-planned section and kills demons until they reach their limit. Most teams of four or more also have a floater that makes rounds helping out as needed.

“Finally, before anyone runs out of energy, you use everything at your disposal to purge the area. If your support team is good, you should have had a fairly accurate heatmap of where the demons are coming through and confided them to a small area around that- making the final bit a lot easier. You still have to thoroughly check the entire area of the breach for stragglers as even a single demon can eventually summon another wave.”

I munched on a crepe while processing this, then nodded and posited, “so taking my current perks as a guideline for what I’ll likely be doing in the future, I should be able to covertly extract civilians which would cut down on initial energy and resource investment, letting the group farm for longer- and blanket the Breach’s area in nasty chemicals to make sure everything dies?”

“If that sounds like an acceptable role, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, Carlos and Chris are the ones in charge of extraction and we often have to resort to very destructive measures to ensure everything is cleared.” Kay wrote a few things on her notepad, crossed off some others and continued, “chemical weapons would still require a lot of cleanup- but depending on your proficiency with them, it would be likely you could do the majority of that. Regardless, I would guess that infrastructure would be more intact than after our normal methods.

“Of course for that, you need a lot of practice, guidance, and equipment. The equipment is the easiest: you can request pretty much anything available to the public, get most things the military has, or use the facilities to manufacture whatever you might need beyond that.”

Speaking into my mind, Cleo interrupted, {On that note, the additional things I was making alongside your mask are ready to be picked up. Also, make sure to ask about if they have a gym you can use. You need it.}

Oblivious to my Semilseeile speaking into my head, Kay had continued, “As for learning how to use your magic better, Rebecca has enlisted the help of one of the more proficient wind-magic users. Her name is Elly, and ended up with… Potatocannon as her cover name. Sorry for not informing you earlier, but Rebecca organized some time later today for Elly to start teaching you.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s not like I would have no clue what to do around here besides getting into more trouble.” As we had both finished our meals and paid, I stood up and asked, “I have some stuff to pick up at the manufactory, want to continue as we head over there?”