“Are you—are you fucking kidding me? You’re telling me—no, no, let me get this straight—you’re telling me that you died, Lowe? Died? Like, heart-stopped, brain-shut-down, body-went-rigor-mortis, died? And now you’re sitting here, cracking wise, like that’s the part of this story I should be focusing on? Are you actually fucking insane? Because, here’s the thing, Lowe—that’s not even the worst part! Oh no, you dying? That’s just the opening fucking act. Let’s talk about the millions of gold worth of damage to the street outside the Museum! MILLIONS, Lowe! Cobblestones blasted apart, walls collapsed, storefronts levelled, businesses eradicated! Do you know how long it’s going to take to rebuild that? Neither do I, but I guarantee the Mayor’s going to be taking that out of my budget.”

Staffen slammed her hand on the desk for emphasis, making her pens rattle. “And speaking of the Museum—oh, yeah, that’s mostly just fucking gone! Poof! Vanished into the gods-damned ether! Do you know what it takes to remove a building that old from this plane of existence, Lowe? No? Well, apparently you and your little shit-show found a way. And don’t even get me started on the giant, headless, armoured corpse you’ve left sprawled out in front of the district portal. Do you have any idea the kind of traffic chaos that’s causing? No one can get in or out! Trade’s at a standstill! People are screaming bloody murder because they can’t fetch their fucking luxury cheeses or whatever the fuck rich idiots buy these days!”

Her eyes widened, little sparks of electricity spiralling out to incinerate several stacks of reports before her “And that’s still not the worst part! The worst part, Lowe, is that somehow, somehow, you’ve managed to make this entire disaster MY FUCKING PROBLEM! Because when the Mayor finally stops freaking out over this shitstorm, you know what he’s going to say? He’s going to pick up his Sending Stone and ask ‘Pernille, how did you let this happen? Pernille, why weren’t you on top of this? Pernille, didn’t I ask you to drop the case at Soar fucking Museum'!”

Staffen pointed a trembling finger at Lowe, her face flushed with rage. “Do you have any idea the paperwork this is going to cause? The explanations? The ass-kissing I’m going to have to do to keep the Mayor from nailing my fucking arse to a wall? Because I sure as shit do, Lowe, and let me tell you, it is going to be monumental. So, no, Lowe. I don’t want to hear about how you came back from the dead or how you ‘heroically’ stopped the Dungeon from fully forming. All I care about is how the fuck you’re going to clean up this absolute clusterfuck of a mess, because if you don’t, I swear to every god in the pantheon, I will personally stuff that headless Dreadnaught corpse up your arse and leave it there.”

The Commander of Soar’s Security Forces had been monologuing in this manner for the best part of a half a bell.

Whilst Lowe was the first to admit that he didn’t always pick up the nuance of interpersonal relationships, he sensed his boss was a touch narked with him.

He let her furious anger wash over him - he sensed he’d be getting plenty of repeats of this little rant from various sources in his near future - mind returning to the last moments of the Dreadnaught. activating Grid View to watch again as the Senior Preservationist of Soar Museum simply walked up to the Dreadnaught and tore its head off.

He reversed the sequence and replayed it over and over again.

Yep.

That was still all there was to it.

After all the sound and fury, all that chaos, all that heroic sacrifice and effort, the key moment in the whole caper was a short, blonde, middle-aged woman, glad in shining ancient armour, literally ripping a monster from the netherworlds in two.

Using her bare hands.

A monster that had taken everything Hel and Latham could throw at it and came out the other side grinning, was casually torn in two.

“Don’t you fucking tell me you’re fucking ignoring me, Lowe!”

Guilty, he switched off the Skill. “Sorry boss. Trauma, you know. What with dying and all.”

If Staffen felt a moment’s sympathy, it didn’t show on her face. Or in her voice. Or in the cavalcade of mental Skills she kept, impotently, throwing Lowe’s way. “Do you have any explanation for all of this?”

“Catastrophic unmined mana explosion,” Lowe said automatically, reaching for the cover story they’d all agreed to go with.

Staffen stared at him, unblinking. “Catastrophic. Unmined. Mana explosion,” she repeated slowly, as if tasting each word and finding them each rather rancid. “That’s the best you’ve got? That’s the story you’re going with?”

Lowe shrugged. “It’s plausible. Mana’s volatile, right? Boom, bang, ancient artefacts, and—ta-da!—sudden architectural makeover. No one’s fault. No harm. No foul. All the insurance payouts in the world.”

“‘Plausible,’ he says,” Staffen said. “Lowe, the entire street looks like it’s been chewed up and spat out by an angry Elemental. There’s a headless giant monster blocking a portal. Half the museum is fucking gone. And your answer is: ‘Oops! Mana go boom’?”

“Well,” Lowe said, scratching his chin thoughtfully, “when you put that silly voice on when you say it, it does sound pretty bad. But technically, none of it’s inaccurate.”

“None of it’s—are you fucking listening to yourself?” Staffen nearly exploded herself, her hands flailing like she was trying to physically strangle his words. “‘Mana go boom’? What, did that giant fucking headless monster spontaneously generate as a side effect of the explosion? And where has that Dungeon Core gone in the middle of this . . . unexpected explosion”

“Dungeon Core? I don’t think I remember seeing any—”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“I swear to every deity ever worshipped in Soar if you finish that sentence, I will personally write the Mayor a report blaming this entire disaster on you and have them strip you of whatever sliver of dignity your Classless arse has got left!”

Lowe’s expression became steely at that. “Do you know what, ma’am? I don’t think there’s a single thing the Mayor or the fucking Council have left to do to me, is there?”

They sat in silence for a moment.

Eventually, Lowe held up his hands in mock surrender. “Alright, alright. Catastrophic unmined mana explosion might not cover all the bases. But it’s concise, right? People love concise.”

“Lowe,” Pernille said, “concise doesn’t cut it when the entire city is asking why the museum looks like a bloody war zone and half the nobility can’t get their carriages past a giant corpse. Do you think anyone’s going to buy your half-assed excuse for even a second?”

“Well, I bought it, and I was there, so everyone else can get in line. Oh, and considering I also cleared up three murders whilst I was doing it, I reckon I should earn some credit from the Council there.”

Staffen sighed and dismissed the Skills she was desperately using to try to pry open Lowe’s mind. “Why don’t we start all this again? Explain to me what went down at the Museum.”

“And you promise no shouting this time?”

“Lowe!”

“Fine. So, moments after the catastrophic unmined mana explosion . . .”

*

With a complicated gesture, Martha Culloden dismissed the armour she was encased in and stepped, carefully, away from the body of the now decapitated Dreadnaught. “You can probably put that down now,” she said to Karolen.

The Auditor was stood, slack-jawed, staring at the Senior Preservationist. “Put what down?”

“The Dungeon Core burning a hole through your hand.”

With a startled yelp, Karolen flinched and let the sphere slip from her hands. Its fall to the ground stopped just shy of impact, halting mid-air as if it had a mind of its own. Its slow descent continued before it finally settled amidst the shattered cobbles of the street, as if perfectly content to nestle there.

“Now, doesn’t that feel better?”

Lowe, after unloading all of his mana on Hel and Latham via Medic! crossed to stand in front of the Senior Preservationist. “How in Soar did you manage that? No, hang on. A more pressing question is where the fuck have you been?”

The woman gave a tired smile. “I think the answer to both of those questions are probably linked.”

Karolen, her hand now healed, joined Lowe. “You went missing the night the second Curator - Harker - was killed. Everyone thinks you did it! No one has seen anything of you since then!”

“Poor Josep,” Martha said, and to Lowe’s mind, she did really did seem sorry. “He came to see me just before I left for the evening. He was in a terrible state. His role was to catalogue the more exotic exhibits from the collapsed Dungeon on the edge of Soar and he was sure there was a discrepancy in the records of recovered Dreadnaught armour. It seemed, on the day of Isadora’s death - when we were all commanded to Cleanse the Canvas - one of the suits went missing. He’d been searching the Dungeon high and low for a month and hadn’t been able to find it, and he was sure the Director was going to blame him for its loss. He was sick with worry. Being a Curator was his whole life. I, of course, realised there was a far bigger concern.”

“That the missing Dreadnaught had found a home.”

“Well, quite. I’d told the Director over and over again that it was ridiculously dangerous for us to keep untethered Dreadnaughts on site - especially once we started bringing in all sorts of new Dungeon artefacts. But, well, as I imagine you have noticed, you cannot tell Nuroon anything. Even presented with evidence that one of them escaped its binding, he remained blithely unconcerned. After all, a Dreadnaught without its armour is little more than a shadow.”

“But then,” Karolen said, “the museum began bringing new Dungeon artefacts on site - including Dreadnaught armour. Didn’t anyone think that might be a massively dangerous thing!”

“I’m sure we did, my dear,” Martha’s voice was cool. “But then, unfortunately, we all wiped our memories after Curator Isadora’s accident.”

“Allowing the Dreadnaught complete freedom to act.”

“Indeed. It was only when Harker came to me that I started to piece together what was likely to have happened. The Dreadnaught was able to access The Great Hall when the Director was showing Ms Mehin around, and took advantage of the . . . escalated tension to enter the open Sarcophagus and claim its armour. It would have consumed Isadora to complete the binding process.”

Karolen thought back to that morning. Had she noticed any unusual . . . shadows around her? And, if she did, would she have thought anything much of them?

“With our memories wiped,” Culloden continued, “the Dreadnaught had all the time in the world to secure itself to this realm. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Harker, I would have been none the wiser anything was going on before that Dungeon reformed itself.”

“And you think that was the Dreadnaughts plan?” Lowe asked, “to claim the Dungeon Core?” They all dropped their eyes to look at the glowing sphere still nestling happily on the ground.

“Of course. A Dreadnaught is powerful, but this was a newly formed one. If it had the opportunity to drain a Dungeon Core? Well, that would have been a whole different kettle of fish. Its immaturity was the only reason I was able to escape when it attacked Harker and I in my office that night. That poor young man took the brunt of its necrotic slime attack, and I had just enough time to escape through a passageway to the Chapel of Rest and used a Skill to lock the door behind me.”

“But where did you then go? You activated the portal and didn’t go through it?” Lowe said.

“I didn’t know what was best. After the kerfuffle over the audit,” Martha grimaced at Karolen, “Nuroon was pretty much invincible. I couldn’t go to him and say I thought, because of his insistence on secrecy, he’d allowed an ancient horror lose on Soar. He’d scared off the Security Service from investigating Isadora’s death, so there was no point going to Cuckoo House. And the Trustees had made it clear they had no appetite for hearing any more bad news.”

“So, what. You just hid out in the museum?” Lowe said.

“Yes,” Culloden replied with a shrug.“We’d uncovered a second set of Dreadnaught armour in another sarcophagus the day before Isadora’s death, and - after Harker’s research had brought that to my attention - I assimilated my core with it. A rather delicate undertaking, I might add. And it’s not like I didn’t try to warn you about what was going on,” she added, casting an accusatory glance at Lowe.

“It was you, then?” Lowe said. “You were the one following me in the corridors beneath the museum?”

“Well, yes. Of course, it was me,” Culloden said, as though the answer were obvious. “Unfortunately, at that stage, I was in the early phases of integrating with the armour, and controlling the necrotic slime was... challenging. I assume that’s why you ran off like a scared little girl?”

Lowe offered no response to that jab.

Karolen stepped in. “So what made you show yourself now? Not that we’re not grateful, of course,” she added hastily, glancing at the headless Dreadnaught lying amidst the rubble.

“Once the armor fully accepted me, I had nothing left to fear,” Culloden said. “That’s the thing about the bindings we had in place on those monsters—they were calibrated for extremely powerful beings. The Dreadnaught that escaped was far from whole and its connection to its core was tenuous at best, which is why it was able to break free. But if it had managed to consume that Dungeon Core?” She paused, letting the gravity of the statement hang in the air. “That would have been an entirely different story.”

“So what now,” Lowe asked. “This is going to be a hell of a thing to explain.”

“Well,” Culloden said, leaning forward, “how much do you know about catastrophic unmined mana explosions . . .”