After Isolde left, Zack pulled Alex and Salazar aside to ask about what she told him. Salazar confirmed that the higher ranked adventurers were working around the clock to deal with the increased monster spawns, especially the ones appearing in the city.

"The reality is that we have no way to stem the tide of aether," Salazar explained, crossing his arms in frustration.

That didn't really surprise Zack. Like water, magic came in a variety of states that defined how it could be used. Mana was like ice, in that it was solid and easy to work when you had the right tools. Aether, on the other hand, was like steam. It hurt to touch and refused to be bent to anyone's will. Like water, though, there was a process for turning aether back into mana. It just required the intervention of a core.

Of course, Zack wasn't about to reveal this information to Salazar. The elf had a very surface level knowledge of how cores worked, and wasn't wholly privy to their function outside of serving as magical batteries. Despite the trust that was beginning to develop between—thanks in no small part to Alex's becoming an adventurer—Zack was starting to move the line that defined what he would or wouldn't reveal to Sal. Unfortuantely, this was still one element he wasn't comfortable sharing.

"It's not easy to transport aether from one location to another," Salazar continued, unaware of Zack's inner monologue. "We need something capable of moving large quantities at once, but not too much that it results in more monsters when we take it to its final destination."

Alex looked pointedly at Zack's wisp, neither of them saying outloud what they were both thinking. The adventurers needed a core of their own to handle this magical tide. Getting a core that could cooperate with them was easier said than done, though. Ideally they would want an armament core, but the only one in their posession was Enza. She was regretably less than cooperative and Zack doubted he could convince her to do anything else.

"I have an idea of how to handle this problem," Zack explained, after an awkward silence fell over them. "It's not going to be easy, but if you can bring the monsters here, we should be able to handle the excess aether they would otherwise bleed off."

Salazar frowned and tilted his head in thought. He tapped his chin, the idea racing through him. "What would you get out of helping us?" He asked.

Zack was a little taken aback that Salazar's first question was of payment rather than how Zack planned to accomplish this. "Monster patterns, mostly," he admitted. "I can always make new stuff from scratch, but I can't gain new abilities without investing mana into old ones, and even then I have to follow growth charts. It can take me a long time to learn appropriate powers. New monsters bring new spell nodes with them, which in turn gives me a new repetoire of powers to select from."

Salazar nodded in approval. "More powers means a wider variety of monsters in the dungeon."

"Exactly! Better training opportunities for you and your guild!"

Salazar went from scratching his chin to rubbing it in thought as he looked from the wisp to the kobold at his side. "What do you think? Is this a good bargain?"

"I think it has merits," Alex nodded. "Of course it won't be easy to kite wild monsters from the city all the way out here, but that surely has to be a better alternative than dragging them to a random location and hoping they won't spawn something new."

"I can assure you that monster aether will be properly processed if you bring them here," Zack concurred.

Salazar chewed his lip as he considered it, before nodding. "Alright. I'll share your proposal with the guild heads. There's no guarantee that they'll agree to it, but if Isolde is already reporting that you proved cooperative I see no reason they shouldn't want to work with you. After all, better patterns means better opportunities for training. Your reward is, essentially, a reward for us too."

"Yup! Mutually beneficial!" Zack concurred.

"I'll head back into the city and corroborate Isolde's report while delivering my own. Alex, are you coming with?"

"I think I'm going to call it a day, if you don't mind," Alex said, yawning. A quick glance at his status revealed that his stamina was low. It was an unfortunate side effect of his transformation into a kobold. His new body was simply weaker than his old one, and tasks that didn't cost stamina before cost an ample amount now.

Salazar nodded and headed out the building, leaving Zack and Alex alone for a moment before they were rejoined by Greg and Chandra.

"I'll admit, I expected things to go much worse than that," Chandra chuckled, crossing her arms as she watched Salazar's car peel out of the parking lot and head down the road. "Zack isn't exactly known for his diplomacy."

"Wow, rude. I'll have you know that I've been practicing with Iris," Zack rebutted.

"I'm surprised she has the patience for that," Greg said, elbowing Chandra lightly with a laugh.

"WOW. Okay, I see how it is," Zack said, though he was stifling a laugh all his own. He knew as well as they did that he wasn't exactly the easiest student to teach. It was true that Iris was helping Zack with his human interactions, though it was slower going than he would like. In addition to the way a person saw him, Zack couldn't help how he thought of them.

The reality was that people weren't his peers. Even if they were a higher level than him, he contained a vast magnitude more power than most of them would ever see in their lifetime. The size of his dungeon, combined with his aetheric harvesters and passive mana regeneration, meant that he always had more magic available to him than the average mage. The fact he was willing to share that power and use it to help people deepen their connection to the Akashic System was really the only saving grace.

As the others continued to poke fun at Zack's expense, the portal arch opened with a ripple of purple energy. The creature that stepped through it was an anthropomorphic rabbit with blue fur. It had human proportions, which only made its lapine features all the more extreme. Its ears were perked and alert, its brown eyes scanning the room curiously. The strangest feature of all, though, was the horn jutting from its forehead like a unicorn.

Archibald Thumperson Esquire, better known to his friends as Archie, was covered in dirt from head to toe. His normally immaculate clothing was covered in dirt, from his deep maroon silk shirt and black waistcoat, to the perfectly creased pants adoring his legs. Zack could hardly ever remember seeing the dire rogue so filthy in all their time together.

"Archie!" Chandra exclaimed and ran to his side. The werewolf and rabbit man wrapped each other in a quick hug, followed by a peck on the cheek from Archie. The insides of Chandra's ears turned red with blush as she nuzzled into Archie's neck.

"Jeeze, you two, get a room," Zack admonished half sarcastically.

The fur on Chandra's neck raised in frustration, but she didn't say anything. Instead, she took Archie by the hand. The two had only grown closer in the week following Snow's demise, their budding relationship continuing to blossom.

"I think the burrow is finally done," Archie said, kissing Chandra's hand to calm her down. "I've finally got the layout the way I want it. All that's left is to properly populate it."

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Zack conjured a wisp at eye level with the rabbit and bobbed it excitedly. He technically didn't need such a thing to communicate with Archie, given the rabbit was a part of his dungeon and therefore a part of him. Still, it was polite for Zack to include the others present, and the wisp helped him with that.

"Do you have an idea of what mobs you want down there?" he asked.

Archie nodded. "I do. I've already started placing those badger soldiers you made, as well as the toad workers. I'll admit they're not perfect for my intentions, but I do enjoy their design enough to add them. I was hoping I could talk you into making a few more humanoid rabbits? Without my obvious features, of course," Archie asked, flicking the horn jutting up from his face.

This was one of the harder concessions that Zack had made in recent times. Archie was part of him, but was equally his own individual person. Zack had struggled in the past to give Archie a space all his own, and was now making a concentrated effort to rectify this mistake. The one exception, of course, was Zack's core room.

Archie wasn't the most powerful mob in the dungeon, but as the only one with true individuality and sapience he was the ideal guardian for Zack's core room. It helped that he was also technically Zack's first mob, the creature he created upon first waking up as a core. This had led to their current compromise: Zack would give Archie full creative control of the burrow, provided Zack could place and control his core room within its boundaries.

"I think I can whip up some bunny ladies for you," Zack teased, noting the immediate tensing of both Archie and Chandra's shoulders. "I kid, of course. I'll make them genderless. The last thing we need is bunny babies running around."

Zack's assurance was enough to ease Archie's tension, though Chandra seemed a little put off. "Why do you want rabbit people, anyway? Isn't the whole point for you to appear special within the burrow?"

"I'll appear special regardless," Archie assure her, once again flicking his horn. "The idea is for the burrow to make sense ecologically. To that end, there are a few more monsters I would like added to it. I'm thinking some large ants—roughly the size of hound dogs—would be a good place to start. They could serve as labour animals, as well as pets."

Again, Chandra's fur bristled. It was well known that she didn't like spiders, but it was news to Zack to learn she didn't like ants either. Although it might have more to do with the proposed size than the ants themselves.

"I'll see what I can do about that. I don't have any ant patterns, so I might have to craft those from scratch," Zack explained. "Anything else you want down there?"

Archie listed off a few more monsters he would like to add to the zone, and Zack had to stop himself from refusing. It wasn't that he couldn't fulfill the requests, even if he had to craft most of the creatures in question. The burrow would be the most expensive zone to maintain to date solely because of how many mobs it was going to be populated with.

Granted, Zack wasn't starving for mana, but it would take a really big bite out of his regeneration. He made a mental note to figure out a way to set up some underground harvesters so he could start absorbing ambient aether from the earth. His current harvesters just didn't work underground.

"Is it too much?" Archie asked.

"No, I can do it. It just might end up being a bit of a lower priority while we deal with something else." Zack got Archie up to speed on what he'd learned from Isolde and Salazar, including the plan to invite the adventurers to bring monsters into his influence and kill them where he could absorb them.

Archie agreed that it was a good idea, and even had merits that would help both sides. To Zack's delight, Archie even agreed to help oversee the actual process. Jean-Claude was good and all, but he was little more than a puppet that Zack had to manipulate. The real benefit of Archie was his ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Sure, Zack could give him orders, but the rabbit was more than capable of using his own judgement to react as events changed.

"Let's wait to see what the guild says before we actually start planning how we do things," Zack suggested.

"That might not be an option," Archie pointed out. "They might accept your offer and start dragging monsters your way, whether or not you're ready. You made the offer, so you better be ready to uphold your end of the bargain."

Zack mentally frowned but didn't refute the point. Instead, he looped Alex in on the conversation, asking if this sounded accurate to how the guild would do things.

"I've only been with them a short while, but that sounds accurate to me," Alex explained, nodding eagerly. "Adventurer guilds have to focus on rapid response, otherwise monsters in populated areas can cause a lot of damage. If you've made an offer to help them deal with the problem, they will assume you're already prepared to do so."

Zack's wisp bobbed in place—his equivalent of a nod. "Okay. How should we go about this? It's one thing to say we'll help, but it's another thing to actually help. Once monsters are in my influence, it won't be hard for me to absorb their aether when they die, but what's the best way to kill them?"

Alex tapped his chin. "Honestly? The best way to kill monsters is to burn them down. Not fire burn, but magical burn. You know how everything has a health value?"

Zack's wisp bobbed, while Archie and Chandra nodded in turn. Greg lumbered over, curious to hear Alex's explanation in depth.

"One thing I learned from the guild is that, while the health value isn't as concrete as mana, it's not as abstract as stamina," Alex explained. "Essentially, you can think of health as less a measure of a person's overall vitality and more how much damage they can take before things really start to affect them."

Zack had a momentary flashback to seeing Alex's health in the negatives the day he died.

"It's like a magical defensive barrier, then?" Archie proposed.

"More like the level of defensive mana in the body," Alex corrected. "Once that defensive energy is depleted, you're just a normal person again, with all the weaknesses that entails."

"That doesn't make sense. What about when Thumper gored me in the side?" Chandra asked.

"Sorry about that," Archie whispered, quietly reminding Chandra that he'd been Thumper at the time it had happened.

"Well, that's the exception. The health attribute isn't an absolute defense, it's just a measure of magical protection," Alex reminded her. "Damage can absolutely bypass your health and affect you directly, it's why guns are still viable weapons. Most people don't use guns only because it's incredibly hard to channel mana into bullets—the small surface area and intense speed is too much for most spells to work with."

Zack bobbed in place. "I was wondering about that. This is good to know. I'm assuming that's also why stuff like health potions work at all."

"That's my understanding of it," Alex nodded. "Basically health potions replenish the defensive mana, which in turn allows the body to rapidly heal injuries. Normally this mana would take a long time to replenish."

"This is really interesting, but what does this have to do with killing monsters?" Greg asked, crossing his arms.

"Sorry, got distracted. So, unlike people, where health is a measure of defensive mana, in aetheric manifestations it's an absolute value. If a monster hits zero health, the magic holding it together breaks apart and they fade. In corrupted creatures—animals with too much aether in them—burning their health to zero essentially allows us to reset them instead of killing them. We purge the monster out of them. In stuff like elementals, though, it kills them outright."

This was news to Zack. He had previously been under the impression that health was absolute value for everyone, but the more thought he gave it the less sense that made. Alex was right, and Zack could easily corroborate that information with the Akashic system if he so desired.

"So all we have to do is burn the health aether down to zero and that's it, monsters are done?"

"Yup. It's why adventurers usually work in teams rather than alone," Alex continued. "A group will always burn a monster down faster than individuals.

Zack took mental notes and considered a way to incorporate this information into his dungeon. There would be time to play with it later, but for now he needed to use this revelation to help kill some problematic monsters.

"Okay. I can have some caster mobs on standby to help burn down whatever they bring our way," Zack explained. "Archie, I want you out there, too. You've got really high burst damage in the right situations."

Archie nodded his agreement. "I could use the exercise, and God knows I need to see the sun again."

"I'll prepare an arena beside the dungeon rather than directly in front or inside it," Zack continued, already selecting a large plot of earth within his influence. "This should give the adventurers plenty of room to work while also giving them a place to kite the monsters to. Once they're inside, I should be able to trap them with pressure from my influence."

"Should?" Alex asked.

"In theory, it's identical to how cores work. We can't absorb each other's mana directly, and our influences basically serve to block one another. Not to mention mana has physical weight behind it when applied in enough quantity—it's how barriers work. I'll just erect a barrier of my influence around the arena," Zack explained. "Alex, do you want to let Salazar know that we're ready for their monsters as soon as the adventurers agree to my proposal?"

"On it," Alex yipped, pulling his phone out of his pocket.