The other building they wanted him to tackle clearing was a warehouse.

“Do I get a floorplan?”

“Does he get a floorplan, he asks.” Tanya looked over at Honeydew and rolled her eyes. “A floorplan!”

“No, Nathan,” the other woman said gently. “You don’t get a floorplan.”

“Fine. I assume it’s hell, anyway. Probably one big open space with floodlights everywhere and magical explosives in every corner, occupied entirely by meditative monks who are studying the Dao of Detecting Intruders in strict attentive silence.”

“Optimist,” snarked Tanya, grinning.

And then both women walked away, leaving Nathan standing alone just outside the fence leading to the loading dock.

He did not stay there for long. Suspecting—correctly—the existence of patrols, he approached the fence and began to study it.

It hummed audibly, and Nathan thought for a moment and then shrugged.

“Saucer,” he said to himself, fully aware that his soul-bound partnered equipment wasn’t going to benefit from the conversation, “I admit we’re in a bit of a pickle. I know you’re not exactly the type to care about whether we go stealth or not, but I have no idea what the magical defenses on this place are other than having a feeling that this is some kind of arcano-electrified fence.”

Saucer did not respond.

“Actually, I wonder. Hey Saucer, do me a solid real quick. Can you do a sort of bypass thing, where you route the enchantments on the face through yourself in an arc and back into the fence, but read the enchantments back into runes and glyphs on the way?”

Without waiting for any form of response, since he had no reason to believe one would be forthcoming, Nathan touched the tip of his artifact, which was at that moment taking the form of a standard longsword, to the fence. The result was an eerie increase in both the volume and the pitch of the hum for three seconds, after which the hum returned to normal and a semicircular section of fence crumbled into dust.

“A door. Great! And… probably alarms aplenty.”

The opening began at ground level and had a radius of just under ten feet, which was easily enough even at his shoulders to accommodate a far taller version of Nathan than was passing through it—but ah, dear Reader, this is humor; the falloff of a semicircle of nearly ten feet in height from a person’s shoulder width is deeply negligible; you can verify this using the Pythagorean Theorem, with the input variables being 16 inches, that being the recommended single-side clearance in width for a doorway, and the radius; the result of this mathematical adventure is the height at the recommended shoulder clearance, and this height is only very marginally shorter than the radius itself; and of course humans are not rectangles, and so the only plausible point of contact would be the sides of one’s head were the curve of the head flatter than the curve of the semicircle with a height rivaling the radius itself in its fullness; but, alas, we digress—and Nathan passed through them without any undue interference, magical or otherwise.

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This state of affairs would not last very long.

Being well aware of that, Nathan strode to the warehouse as quickly as he dared, keeping a careful eye on his surroundings to avoid stepping on anything unstable or loud.

Footsteps reached his ears the moment he got to the wall. He rushed to the edge of it on semi-panicked autopilot, not having put any thought into what to do in that circumstance, and struck the instant the leading edge of the patrolling figure became visible around the corner.

It was not a moment too soon. His haste had meant louder footsteps, and the guard had been in the process of processing the sound, which would have led to a vastly increased alertness. The quick strike and equally quick work pulling that guard around the corner to lay their body, rapidly decomposing into ooze, onto the ground out of line of sight of anyone else was all that prevented an alarm from being raised, and at that Nathan pressed himself up against the wall and took a moment to gibber.

It wasn’t precisely panic. He knew he should be panicking, by any standard; there he was, after all, completely out of his element, barely staying one step ahead of the guardsman, one swing ahead of the foe, one block ahead of the evisceration, one pool of shadows away from being swarmed by remarkably unsympathetic doppelgangers and winding up a corpse. Rather, his need to “take a moment” was just on the basis of the very strangeness of the situation, and on the metaphysical implications of his lack of panic.

He was gibbering, in short, largely because he did not need to gibber in terror, and that fact alone was terrifying.

“Alright,” he said out loud to himself four and three-tenths seconds later. “What now?”

The answer to that turned out to be, for a brief while, patiently assassinating sentries and patrolling targets.

Conveniently for Nathan, each of them decohered or decomposed within a matter of seconds, leaving nothing behind but a thin smear which the other guards were somehow not alerted by, despite the fact that theoretically they should have been able to smell the psychotoxic fumes coming out of the remains. This was an oversight in the simulation—Nathan’s sense of smell was the controlling, calibratory factor in the ability of the guards to detect it, and he couldn’t smell them, so they couldn’t either. And so he was able to quite trivially kill every target outside of the factory.

That having been accomplished, he maintained his proximity to the brick walls of the building, in case of sentries on the roof whose presence he had not yet detected, and slipped through the darkness of the loading dock’s partially open door.

There was nobody there. The only light in the utter silence was what leaked in through closed shutters and through the light gaps in the also-closed doors leading further into the warehouse, along with the lights from outside. And in that near-total darkness and silence, Nathan smelled something oddly familiar.

Prying open one of the boxes with Saucer, ignoring the crowbar that was quite conveniently on the ground next to the box in question, he took an involuntary deep breath and smiled in some confusion.

“Sourdough,” he said softly. “Compagne, I think? Huh.”

It was a recognizable smell. Not as sour as most sourdoughs, it was almost sweet while still keeping the same texture.

It was, he confirmed as he opened another identical crate, a warehouse full of bread.