Zack showed Iris the fairy corpse that Alex had brought back to him in one of his many lab rooms. He didn't bother creating a living mob replicant of it, out of concern of what these fairies might be capable of. Instead, he conjured the corpse as it had been brought to him: its head severed and sitting on a table next to the decapitated body.

Iris gave up pretenses about her wisp and instead seemed to focus her magic on the fairy. Zack could practically see the lines of mana dancing across the creature as she scanned it, studying its each and every facet with the utmost attention.

"This is indeed a fairy," Iris finally said, once again gaining control of her wisp. "Though I don't quite understand how you came to be in posession of one."

"Like I said, this fairy was controlling a core that I wanted to recruit. It had to be eliminated in order for us to make our pitch," Zack explained.

At the mention of Matt, Archie stiffened. He was standing near a corner of the room, leaning against a wall and watching the two cores interact with the carcass. If Zack had to guess, Archie was still irked that he hadn't been able to enlist Matt to their cause.

"And you mentioned that you think these creatures are based in the math element? Or otherwise control some aspect of it?" Iris pondered.

"It was a function of one of their abilities, called Unseelie." Zack quickly spun up the ability node above the fairy's corpse so that Iris could scan it. "The function of the ability, and other powers stemming from it, is for affected beings to be subject to bad luck. That description felt off to me. After all, how can you control luck? Luck manipulation as a concept makes very little sense."

"Yes, I agree. But that does seem to be what this ability describes," Iris concurred, as her mana danced across the node.

"Well, it got me thinking: what if, instead of affecting luck, this ability affected probability. For example, in a situation where a good thing and a bad thing both had a fifty percent chance of occuring, Unseelie would instead cause the bad thing to happen more frequently."

As Zack walked her through his understanding, Iris' wisp pulsed with yellow light. She quickly absorbed a small portion of the ability node before spitting it back out again. "I think you might be on to something. I can't say for certain if your explanation is absolutely correct, but I can see the correlation betweeen math manipulation and bad luck."

Zack's wisp bobbed about excitedly. "If what I think about this is true, that means there's an element we can trace back to the source."

"Yes, I do believe that would be possible," Iris concurred. "Though I can't imagine why you would want to go searching for more of these fairies. They're our natural predators. They devour cores like us for breakfast."

"Edward Fenton," Archie said, pushing himself off the wall. He strode over to the table and plucked the fairy's head off its surface. He palmed it like a ball before tossing it up and down. "You think we can use this math element to track him down?"

"It's just a hunch, not even a really good one, but it's the best idea I've had in its regard." Zack's wisp dimmed for a second before glowing again.

"I think I might have missed something critical." Iris bobbed her wisp to draw the attention of the dungeon and his mob. "Who is Edward Fenton?"

Zack quickly walked Iris through the night that the forge core Ember was used to infiltrate his dungeon and set him ablaze. His voice actually got a bit choked up as he remembered having to force his way through her burning influence and shatter her himself. It was an act he desperately wishes he could undo, but that was simply not an option. She was long gone, and if there was any hope of bringing her back it was well beyond his means.

"You think Edward might have been a puppet for a fairy?" Iris finally asked.

"It's the only thing that makes sense. Fairies feed off our mana capacity, and Ember had a flat zero in hers. Any magic she absorbed was immediately dumped right back out again. How else could a human get ahold of such a core if they weren't in cahoots with a fairy?"

Iris didn't argue the point, but her wisp hovered about the room as though she were pacing. When she finally stopped again, she hovered over the fairy's body. "I think you might be giving the fairies too much credit. Your suspicions are justifiable, however I don't see why a human having a fairy-fed core and using it to attack you necessarily means they're working with our natural predators."

"It's not just a matter of acquisition, it's how she was used," Zack said, a sense of urgency to his words. "Edward was dumping aether into Ember so fast that she could do little more than let it explode out of her as fire aspected mana. Edward understood how to weaponize her and then proceeded to leave her behind when it was clear his plan wasn't working."

"It's almost like they were testing you," Archie said, turning the fairy's head over in his hands so that it was looking him in the eyes. "Like they were seeing how vulnerable you were to their attacks. If I had to hazard a guess, they were testing whether or not they could easily feed off you, or otherwise infiltrate your dungeon."

Both cores stared at the rabbit in silence for a brief moment, before Iris spoke again. "Like a predator scouting out a potential prey animal. They want to make sure they don't overhunt the area, but also that they don't waste their limited energy on prey they can't catch."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Or on prey that will generate more prey," Archie suggested. He set the fairy's head back down on the table and crossed his arms once more. "I think we need to operate under the assumption that every core we know of is a potential target for fairy incursion. We don't know how many of these things there are, but we do know that even a powerful core like Zack is just another snack to them."

"Let's say that all your assumptions are correct—a stretch by itself. How do you plan on tracking down sources of the math element when we barely understand how it operates?" Iris asked, incredulous. "You forget, math is a fundament element—a law of the universe itself. Even if it's not being wielded by someone, math exists as part of the background of reality. It's not something so easily isolated from the rest of the fabric of creation." Iris took a deep breath of mana before continuing. "This isn't even taking into account the fact that you don't create sources of fundament elements the way you can the primary or secondary elements. Fundament elements are fundamental to the universe, and therefore can only be manipulated."

Iris' questioning tirade left Zack stunned into silence for a few seconds before he finally mustered up a satisfying answer. "It's the only good idea I've got."

All at once, Iris' incredulity melted away. She radiated an aura of calm and understanding, her wisp floating over to Zack. "I know you want to find other cores and help push knowledge of us to the forefront of peoples' minds. I also know that the existence of these fairies is deeply concerning to you, given the threat they pose to weaker cores like myself. The reality is that what you are proposing just doesn't work the way you think it does." She let out a long sigh and pulled away again. "I think this might be why Akasha blocked me from full knowledge of all the fundament elements. There would be too much risk in knowing how to interact the fabric of reality but lacking the skill to do so safely."

Zack was silent for several moments, as he considered Iris' words carefully. She was right. He didn't fully understand how fundament elements were supposed to work, let alone what he could do to track down a magically manipulated source of it. He had been operating under the assumption that he could just create an elemental tracker of some kind and seek Edward Fenton out by the trace levels of math magic that surely existed within him.

Only that wasn't an option. That wasn't how fundament elements worked. And he was quite certain that Iris wasn't lying to him, either. He saw the way that Cornelius Snow manipulated the magic element, and he even remembered his own forays into spacetime manipulation to create rooms that were bigger on the inside. Unlike the primary or high elements, interactions with fundament powers were always far more complex and difficult to understand.

"What do you propose I do instead?" he finally asked. "Every time I think I have enough of an understanding to start formulating a real plan, something gets ripped out from under me. First it was these fairies feeding off the cores that I need to save. Now it's not having a way to track the fairies down. I'm running out of options, here!"

He didn't mean to get angry, but as he ranted he could feel the frustration bubbling up inside. He didn't have a stomach anymore, but if he did it would certainly be clenching. He took several deep mana breaths in an effort to calm down. Somewhere in the dungeon, he could feel Jean-Claude performing breathing exercises in a mirror of his own. When he felt he was calm enough, he spoke again, this time in a more controlled tone.

"We can't keep hiding from fairies. Not from a lack of want, but because our very nature keeps that from being an option. We've seen what these things can do to cores, both from Ember and from Matt. I don't want to wait around for one to decide it's time to eat me."

There was silence in the room as Zack's words hung in the air. The only noise was a slight tapping of Archie's foot against the ground. It was Iris who spoke first, and her own solution sent a shiver rippling through Zack's entire dungeon.

"What if we set a core out as bait for them?"

Zack hated how he didn't immediately refute the suggestion, but he couldn't deny it had merit. All they had to go on was the dead fairy's corpse, and it wasn't providing much in terms of answers. Everything they knew was based on deductions and reasoning. Lucky guesses, if Zack could put it other terms. But was this something they even wanted to risk?

"I'm not sure that's worth the cost," Archie said, interrupting the dungeon's racing thoughts. "While it's true we've no shortage of cores to serve as bait, what would this accomplish? They already know where we are, and they already know what Zack is capable of. Who's to say they're not watching us right now? No. We need to take the fight to them."

"But that's not an option, either! Fairies are as much a part of the magical ecosystem as we are. There has to be a reason cores have a natural predator," Iris insisted. "Eliminating them from the natural order can only be a net negative."

"Not to mention we shouldn't assume that they're a single organized unit. It's possible there are multiple hives working independent of each other," Zack added. He shook his wisp from side to side in exasperation. "I miss when things were simpler, when all I had to worry about was making a cool dungeon for people to run through."

"And yet every project that steers us away from that goal has been your brainchild," Archie reminded him.

"Bite me."

Archie smirked but didn't point out Zack's lack of denial.

"It might be time to take a break and recovene at a later date," Iris admitted, resuming control of her own wisp. "We don't have a plan of action. Assuming we had one, we lack enough knowledge to actually put it into motion. I can scour my archives for any information that might prove useful. Now that I know what we're up against, I can narrow the search and widen my range."

Zack wanted to ask what she meant by that, but he honestly wasn't sure he cared. If Iris got him the intelligence he needed to execute his plans, he wasn't particularly bothered about how she got it. What did bother him, though, was the fact that they were currently blind to a potential enemy's movements. He needed to change that, and he needed to do it fast.

As Archie left the library, Zack mentally prodded him for some telepathic communication.

"We need to find Matt," he said. "I know you said he flew off, but that's all the more reason we need to find him. Not only is he more vulnerable to fairy incursions than the rest of us, but he's likely got valuable knowledge about how they work."

"So you wish to attempt recruiting him again?" Archie asked.

"Not necessarily recruit, but at the very least we need to open a line of communication with him. Is that something you think you can arrange?"

Archie shook his head as he stepped through one of Glitch's portals and back into his warren. "Not as easily as I would like. I haven't a clue where he is, but I think I might know somebody who does."