Despite all signs pointing otherwise, extracting everyone from the second shelter wasn’t that much worse than the first time around.

It might be a bit apathetic to think of it this way, but the hostage situation combined with being in the middle of a Breach made most of the civilians adopt a sort of resigned acceptance of whatever I asked them to do. Of course there were those who took it better, and were able to corral the group- and a few who took it very badly.

The guy who I subdued in the vents needed some help on account of some minor injuries and not having hands available. The other guy I took down was very out of it. In the end, I had to fireman carry him- a feat I didn’t think I was strong enough for, but the casual assessments of my own improved physical abilities I did while working out at SEYA probably should have told me otherwise.

Other than those two, there were three more people who required emotional support to get moving. I didn’t blame them, this was likely to be one of the worst days of their lives.

Progress did end up being slower on account of me actually needing to clear demons off sections of the route. It was tiring having to drop my person-shaped weight before I dealt with the problems, then hoist it back up when I was done, but that was the only difficult part. None of the demons really posed a threat, lacking either the ability to notice my presence without line of sight or a way to get within their effective range before entering mine.

The relative level of harmlessness from demons that I’d experienced so far prompted me to ask the fairly quiet MG chat if it was normal. The overall consensus was that while this was unusual, it wasn’t unheard of; some Breaches just never spawn anything that strictly requires an MG to deal with. Almost as an afterthought to that, Rebecca added that some Breaches look harmless until suddenly spawning an abnormal amount of much more dangerous demons.

Carlos threw around terms like ‘consumed energy to threat correlation’ and 'maximum reality warping capabilities,’ which boiled down to three possibilities: either this Breach is starved for energy and struggling to do anything meaningful, it is fine on energy but can’t using it for some reason, or eventually things will abruptly turn very, very bad.

The only other hiccup as I was guiding the civilians to safety was when we had to cross through the partially melted corpse of the slug-thing. It wasn’t an issue because of any danger, but because seventy percent of the group started retching when it came into view. I was able to get the gas masks off the people who actually threw up before they could ruin them, but it was close.

Again I didn’t blame them: it was awful to look at and probably had a smell to match. Thank goodness for however my mask worked.

When we finally made it to the forward base, I found out there wasn’t a designated place to put the definite and potential criminal, but one was unconscious and the other hadn’t caused any issues during the trip, so I dumped them next to a few armed people taking a break. The first group I extracted had already been driven out of the Breach, and it looked like the transports were almost ready to take this batch, so there probably wasn’t an issue with long-term observation- and I’m not quite sure what jurisdiction MGs have as law enforcement.

With that done, I took another short break to clear my mind before asking into the status of the third shelter. When I started checking over the catch-up briefing of the situation, I noticed it only consisted of a short transcription of the shelter’s system outputs and a log summarizing the calls that had been done between command and the shelter.

I quickly identified the most important part of the documents, a small section towards the end of interpreted the system output:

-Call ended abruptly.

-Monitoring system set off attack alarm.

-Monitoring system reported main door failure.

-Camera surveillance stops. No abnormalities seen beforehand.

-Monitoring system reported anti-magic field dropping.

-Monitoring system connection cut.

As I tried to figure out the implications of what I had just read, the document was updated with two more lines:

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-Immediate MG dispatch deemed unnecessary.

-Extraction MG(s) requested to investigate / deal with potential demons. Threat likely to have moved on.

Mouth drawing a thin line, I sent a message to the other MGs asking, “have you read the report on the third shelter?”

Fairly quickly, Rebecca replied, “I’m sooo sorry! We argued that one of us should have gone immediately when problems popped up…” Superhuman abilities clearly helped her type at unreasonable speeds since before I was even done reading the first message, she added, “handler said that it would cause too much disturbance and that telling you would cause issues with your current task.”

Slightly later, Chris also piped in, “I guess it makes sense. Most of us aren’t good at using a small amount of ULE. And while Carlos can, he doesn’t have much burst power.”

Seeing the inevitability of the chat once again devolving into stress-relieving teasing, I sent, “I’ll check it out. Need to go close to make the path to the fourth anyway.”

Seeing how everyone else was oddly positive threw me off. It made me wonder if they didn’t actually read the report or if they somehow missed the obvious conclusion- or more likely if I was being too paranoid. To me it was pretty clear what happened: something was able to break into the shelter despite the anti-magic field, disable the devices that could leak info on it, then fully disable the system.

That was clearly evidence of some sort of intelligence. While there was an argument that it was either a system failure or more ‘normal’ demon attack that happened to get lucky, I wasn’t betting on it.

Since demons were inherently magical and I was running with the assumption that the Breach had upped its game, I had to assume it was able to use some form of it like me. Some of the worst matchups I could quickly come up with would be some form of asymmetrical anti-magic, unrestricted teleportation, future-sight, or ability to create large amounts of mass.

Anti-magic would force me to rely on the physical properties of my chemicals, increasing the chance for backfire and the effectiveness of natural chemical resistances. While I was more likely to be able to fight through that than someone wielding magical or magic-requiring weapons, depending on the size and application of the anti-magic, I might be forced to rely on my drone to see again- assuming that isn’t also disabled.

Anything able to displace or swap parts of my body through teleportation would put me in a situation where my only defense would be my ability to see ULE being used. While possible that either my costume or a random perk would interfere with attempts to manifest magic within my flesh, playing it safe was still the better option. Regardless of that, attacks with any heavy or sharp objects could still happen near instantaneously in numerous other ways.

Depending on how the theoretical precognition worked and if the demon had other tools or abilities, forcing a stalemate might be a possibility. If I was surrounded by a cloud of ready to react gas, even a precognitive demon would be stopped if it had to get close to hurt me for example. If it both can see the future and has ranged capabilities, I was either already dead or would be as soon as I got close enough in time or space.

Finally and most simply, throwing an endless wave or mass at my chemicals would eventually overwhelm them either through me running out or being unable to melt it fast enough.

I realized I was super vulnerable to a large amount of reasonable and unreasonable attacks and had probably only made it this far through getting lucky that no demons were particularly tricksy. The moment of extra panic briefly loosened my control on my magic, which shocked me back into reality enough to start searching for solutions. Priority one was gathering more info to narrow down my speculations.

Still working while furiously brainstorming how I would approach killing myself, I reached the conclusion that sending my drone would either be net-positive or net-neutral under the vast majority of circumstances. There was also the unrealized benefit of the cartoon rat in the drone’s interface making me laugh with a clumsy salute as it flew off. I would have also asked my other team members about what could have possibly done this, but I couldn’t bring myself to interject into an upbeat conversation regarding if Carlos could requisition a nuke or not with scatterbrained speculations of how I might be going to my death.

I was also concerned with looking paranoid on the chance this was a fairly normal occurrence that most MGs would not be freaking out about.

Well, I would expect the news to report on entire shelters going dark, and I couldn’t remember seeing anything like that- but it was probably normal for unexpected and unexplained things to happen in a Breach.

Recognizing I probably wasn’t thinking straight due to stress, I once again leaned on my new coping mechanism. Common tropes in a situation like this would dictate Devil would either be able to solve the problem on their own or would be humbled and ultimately saved by something else’s intervention. How either played out would be dependent on the tone and direction of the story.

Through this irrational filter through which to see the world, Devil wouldn’t die here- they were the main character and resurrection wasn’t an option to deus ex machina in this setting. Of course, it would ruin the act if they acted invincible. Not only would it be an unrealistic stretch of their personality, but doing so would set up a situation where the consequences of Devil’s hubris could be used as a backstory to set up someone else as the main character of a revenge or redemption arc.

That last bit would obviously be bad for me.