Late night takeout in Confen was a thing, of course. This was Jeon. Workers coming home at midnight was nothing more than proof of middle management potential, assuming you weren't talking about one of the big four employers. Then it might be a sign of insufficient commitment. The real high flyers were sleeping at their desk and giving themselves towel baths in the washroom.

And the real-real high flyers would be parachuting in through family connections, generally after a good night’s sleep, an excellent breakfast and a light workout. Unhappy about that? Be born in a better family next time. In the meantime, know your place and be grateful for what you are given.

Right now, even that tradition of misery was being eroded by the war with Onis. The shops were closed. Offices were closed. The workers were told to go home- their managers were getting evaluated on compliance with wartime directives and you do not want to be the one to screw up their KPI’s.

People at work meant the lights were on. More lights on- easier targets for bombing raids. More people on the streets at night- more chances for sneaky infiltrators to sneak in and cause sabotage. It was all very practical. It just felt intensely alien. Jeon was a country that came alive at night. At least, that’s what it felt like in Harban.

Outside the slums, of course. Smart people were home, with strong bars over their windows and the doors bolted shut, come sunset in the Slums. Dad had worked afternoons sometimes, but nights a lot of the time. Looking at the cold, empty streets, Truth wondered if that had eaten at the old bastard. Having to travel from bubble of light to bubble of light, avoiding all the predators you knew were hiding in the dark.

Truth wouldn’t have been drinking under those circumstances, but then, he and his father were very different people.

He stroked his chin as he looked up and down the street. Just because the restaurants were closed, didn’t mean there was nothing to eat. At least, not for Perks. A quick trip around the back to the dumpsters should find a very filling meal.

A quick forty-kilometer-an-hour stroll up the street, and they were outside the Jade Bamboo restaurant. A quick glance at the menu revealed that, yes, they were cheap and generic. Perfect. A quick nip around the back, and the reeking dumpsters testified to both the frugality of the owners and the warming weather.

Cost money to have your trash hauled. Cost money to feed it to demons, too. So you might as well let it sit for as long as you could, just to keep the expenses down that little bit extra. Or so Truth guessed. Could just be sheer malice towards the neighbors. Either way, he was hearing plenty of furtive scritching noises and the occasional stealthy squeak.

“Welcome to the happy hunting grounds, little buddy. Time to go fulfill that primal instinct.”

Truth lowered Perks onto the concrete and waited. Perks writhed a little. Truth thought the snake looked uncomfortable. He wasn’t sympathetic. A dignified serpent had to be able to endure this little hardship. Besides, in such a target rich environment, rough concrete should be utterly meaningless.

When he had been hungry, crawling over rough concrete and under dumpsters had been nothing. Surely a snake was less particular than a human.

A few minutes passed. Perks’ forked tongue tasted the air. Flick flick. He slithered around a little bit, apparently more out of curiosity than killer instinct. Then he slithered back to Truth, and raised his body up, pressing against his leg.

Truth had been to enough pet cafes to recognize when an animal was asking for “Uppies!” He’d never seen a snake do it, though. He reached down and picked up his alleged rat snake.

“You are a rat snake.” Truth’s voice was accusing. Perks didn’t change his expression one bit in response. “A rat snake. A snake that, and I think you can follow the logic here, feeds on rats.”

Perks didn’t even blink. Was that… a sign of trustworthiness in snakes? Truth didn’t know.

“You haven’t been fed in ages. You need to hunt. To kill. Bloody those fangs of yours. Or whatever. Look, real talk? I don’t want to go diving into a dumpster every time you need to eat, and I REALLY don’t want to carry around a sack of dead mice in the storage ring. I don’t know if Sally is watching what I put in there, but since she’s the one keeping the space open, it’s a non-zero possibility.”

Perks flicked his tongue out, but had no further comment.

“Are you… sick or something? It looks like you have a bulge here, and I don’t remember you having that when I first got you. But you’ve been with me all the time, so you haven’t eaten anything. Is it… snake cancer or something?”

Truth probed with Cup and Knife, but the spell didn’t find anything it wanted to correct. It would have to have been an utterly fatal cancer to have swollen that quickly, that fast, anyway.

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“Do snakes get puffy bellies when they are hungry? Honest question, I really don’t know.” Perks declined to answer.

“C’mon, buddy. At least give me a hint.”

The tongue flicked yet again.

“Would the pet store have answers? Or… a book or something?” Truth looked around. Still dark out. He put Perks down again, just over two meters from where he was pretty sure there were rats. Perks tasted the air and seemed to agree, as he kept his eyes focused on the dark spaces behind the trashcans.

Truth waited. Was this it?

Ten minutes later, he concluded that no, it was not it. Perks just… hung out. Looked happy enough. Truth couldn't figure out why, until he reached down to pick him up again. The ground was warm-ish. Warmer than the rest of the cement, anyway.

“Huh.”

Truth felt around a bit. It was a small patch, maybe a half meter in diameter. His first thought was that something hot vented onto the ground there, but there was nothing but a dim light over the back door. His next thought was that something hot was aimed at it, or rested there, during the day. But there was no sign of that either. No scorch marks on the pavement, no signs of something heavy being dragged around, nothing. And who puts something super hot next to their dumpster?

He felt around the pavement, but didn’t find anything. There wasn’t that much to search. It was an alley behind a restaurant, just big enough for a garbage wagon to fit down. So just why was this half meter patch of nothing in particular noticeably, though not very, warmer than the rest of the pavement?

He tapped at the ground, not expecting anything in particular, and getting exactly that. Sounded like pavement. There couldn’t be piping under there- water came from talismans, sewage would be destroyed at the toilet- Confen was far too small to rate an actual sewage system. So just what was it?

“Hey Thrush, can you check what’s below this bit of pavement? Non-destructively?

“Things buried in the ground aren’t really my specialty, Dread Magus, but your dutiful slave-”

“We talked about “slave,” Thrush. Especially given all you have told me about Hell. Also, you are on salary. You even quit once.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. My labor is performed under threat of pain.”

“I apologize. Let me just activate the banishment and you are free to go.”

“Your contractually bound and highly enthusiastic employee is delighted to undertake this opportunity to improve a key skill to better meet current and future business development milestones, Unholy Supervisor.”

“Simultaneously better and worse. Impressive.”

“One might argue it’s a distinction without a difference.”

“One might. Not me though. Hop to, birdie.”

Thrush chuckled like a newly crowned king watching his freshly orphaned nephews fall off a high tower. The imp’s form burst apart into black smoke and slowly, painfully slowly, sank into the concrete. Then came boiling up again, and reformed into the small black bird it usually pretended to be.

“I regret to inform the Dread Team Lead that I cannot fulfill his orders and even attempting to do so will result in destroying this body and being forcibly returned to Hell. Whatever it is that is down there is warded against demons.

Truth’s curiosity flared up. This was nowhere, in a nowhere town. Logically, he should be the most interesting thing in it. And yet, there was something carefully hidden here. He had to know what it was.

“Can you roughly mark out the dimensions of the area warded against you?”

Thrush bobbed its head and a black square appeared on the ground. Neatly boxing in the circle of heat, Truth noticed. The circle touched the four sides of the square.

He called out the Tongue of One Who Speaks For God and got it hacking through the concrete. If volcanic basalt was no match for it, lowest-bidder concrete wasn’t even the invitation to a match.

“How deep is whatever it is?”

“Perhaps the distance from fingertip to elbow? I regret that my results do not qualify as “Exceeding Expectations,” and understand this must be reflected in my quarterly performance review.”

“Hoho.” So he wouldn’t have to dig even the length of his sword. He cut around the black square, and then paused. Then smiled. He made two smaller cuts on either side of the square. He squatted down and stuck his hands in the smaller holes. Got a grip of concrete and-

“Back straight, lift with the legs-” Pulled several hundred kilos of cement straight out of the ground.

Level Five body cultivator. “I love the Meditations!”

“Well done, your Vice-Eminence for Administrative Affairs!”

“Look, can we compromise here? You don’t call yourself a slave, and I won’t pretend you’re a wage slave. Fair enough?”

“Fair, Great One, has nothing to do with it.”

“Got a better grip on what this thing might be, now?”

“Regrettably, I do not. It is still powerfully warded against my kind.”

Truth had a sudden sneaking thought. “Thrush, have a scout around. See if you can’t find more of these.”

“An earth demon would do the job far faster and better, Magus. If you hadn’t told me precisely where to look, I would have spent hours searching this alley.”

Truth grunted. “Alright, hold off for a moment. I want to see what’s going on here.”

He started carefully chipping away at the cement, then realized he was being silly. He started casting Cup and Knife, using the cement in the block to fill the hole. Leaving out what shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.

What was left was a small black metal box, carefully covered in anti surveillance wards, banishments, divination diverters, and a reasonably comprehensive collection of other ‘mind your own business’ enchantments. Not cheap, by any stretch, but all the enchantments stamped on it were mass-producible by properly tooled up talisman factories.

Truth recognized all of them. They were Starbrite talismans, afterall. Averaging about Level Two power, but their combined effect would make them even harder to detect than their level would suggest. That power was also why he was able to find it in the first place.

“Classic. Just classic. You got a bit of stamped metal that didn’t feed right, got stamped just off the correct angle, somehow passed QC, assuming there was anybody checking, then assembled.” Truth was tracing the lines of two talismans that just barely touched each other. The metal near the touch point was glowing cherry red, though the rest of the talismans in the case were impressively unaffected.

“Must have been busted for a while now, with the heat very slowly building up in that one spot.”

He very gently prised the two sheets of metal apart, barely cracking open the interior. Nothing went off, but Incisive was whispering an unsubtle warning.

“You know what the most interesting thing is about this, Thrush? Even without opening the box?”

“Pray tell.”

“It’s mass produced. Which means there are a lot of them around. Now… just why is that, and what is it?”