“How the hell did you manage this, Joey?”

That was the summary of Claire’s reaction in between barking out orders and getting everyone moving. Every single mage with military training was being briefed on the situation while they sped through the facility, stopping to check up on Lavernius, who was on a speed-running mission to disable all the teleportals.

“Yeah Claire, I’m still figuring that part out. This has been one weird week,” Joey answers her, and Claire still looks stumped.

“Girl, I’m a little bit worried about you. You blew up Curtis. Like, wasn’t there a better choice?”

“Between him trying to give me several gaping chest wounds? No. There wasn’t,” she states with resignation. She doesn’t have any regrets about that, but that image afterward–that one might stick with her for a while.

She’s seen carnage before when monsters eat. Or on the occasion that Nick, Professor Amaranth, and herself had been on a tour and been given an attachment to their screening of wildlife, and were tasked with looking for a twelve-year-old mage.

They’d found him. Or, what was left of him. While she knew magical creatures weren’t evil, there was a certain level of awfulness, seeing the body, and Nick having to carry out the ghoulish task of gathering the remains. Very little shook Nick, from what she knew. That task had shaken him to his core, even as often as he might have had to perform it in his monster management work.

Someone would have to do that for Curtis, eventually. Even the fact that he was a kitsune, who had hidden his true form just as well as her, did nothing to detract the feeling that he didn’t deserve a burial for what he did. She violently casts the thought aside with a shake of her head.

“Joey, you okay?” Claire asks softly. Kyle is busy helping Lavernius find the sabotage work from Curtis, and is otherwise busy for a moment. Joey looks down, wringing her hands. No scrubbing could get that feeling off her soul, even in the defense of people she cared about. But she didn’t regret it.

“Ask me later, Claire. This has become a truly messed up day.”

“I know, I saw that look on Kyle,” she says it in a lower tone now, so that it’s just the two of them discussing it. “I’m glad you’re not dead Joey, either of you, and you held your own against someone who was a trained killer.”

“I’m glad to be not dead, too. But I don’t know if we’re in a better situation, Claire,” she responds after a minute. “We are currently making a deal with a lesser devil, to keep the real devil from murdering everyone in the facility, so we are hedging our bets.”

“And your role in this, Lavernius?” Claire hisses when she turns to give him a baleful stare. His noted duality has not gone over well with her, and she keeps tipping her hand to her holstered pistol. The one with the mana-coated rounds that would have a substantial impact on arcane barriers.

“Short version, world peace was the plan. Or at least world stability,” Lavernius grunts. He does not like having a gun pointed at the back of his neck, which Claire had done. Once. “Look, if you wanna throw me in prison after this, get in line. My motivations are crystal clear on where I stand, the Conclave is festering. Zacharias is the rotten core of it all, and she’s been ruling or de-facto ruling harder than President Putin in his little dystopia. Ever since Robespierre Crosomer got sent on a special trip to a hellscape of prison for seven hundred years. Let that soak in for a moment. I don’t even think she’s the worst offender, either. But bad leadership lets rot continue to spread. All kin are slowly being marginalized as a matter of historical fact.”

“Crosomer was a rebel who was willing to burn the entire establishment down, and he broke every boundary of magic before doing so!” Zameren argues. He hands Lavernius a tool when he motions for it, and Kyle and Joey are busy handing out equipment.

They’d emptied the small armory. And before doing so, they’d checked every bit of gear for sabotage. Curtis had indeed disabled a number of the weapons permanently. A few they had been able to get operating again–bolt pistols, and a few autobow rifles.

But he had forgotten Kyle’s personal armory and weapons prototyping, and the lock on the door hadn’t been tampered with. Joey’s slight paranoia of security for their lab had paid off.

“Question? Why the hell haven’t we just evacuated?” Reeves asks while looking pale, anxious, and desperately needing a valium at the moment. Lavernius grunts.

“Curtis spliced these up but good, I think he had the prep work ready, but I don’t think he was able to take care of the main teleportal upstairs. Son of a bitch was ready to kill everyone. King would have been in and out like a ghost, no one would ever have known.”

“Yeah, that makes it sound so much better,” Kyle bristles at the comment. “Where is that guy, is he not in touch with you?”

“Stalling. Val's’ soldiers aren’t going to screw around, she sees a prize and she gets what she wants. Always. No matter how many bodies it takes. Curtis wasn’t joking, she was crooning while she was eating the last person who displeased her.” Joey and Kyle look at each other, nauseous expressions crossing their faces simultaneously.

“Thanks, Lavernius, truly, for confirming that team evil is batshit insane,” Kyle states with utter contempt. “How many teleportals are left?”

“Two. The first one is on the second floor by the biolab. The last one’s on the periphery of the vault entryway. After that, you are going to give me explosives on a timer delay, and we’re going to blow up the main hub–”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Whoa, why would we do that?!” Joey interjects, and this plan is getting more dangerous.

“I’m not screwing around, Josephine, I could think of at least two other ways into Asqualia–the teleportal hub with a Valkyrie order override–unlikely, mind you, or a proxy relay. I saw what you did to Curtis, and that man had it coming. You should count your blessings that man’s overconfidence was his downfall because King said he was a real piece of work behind the scenes. His military record, while redacted, indicates he did some utterly reprehensible things in Burkina Faso about five years ago.”

“How bad?” Joey narrows her eyes at him. If he wasn’t working with Team Evil, she might even find him to be a decent human being.

“Bad enough that I’d want to kill him, for what he did to several women.” He pulls out a sintered arcanist circuit and breathes a sigh of relief. “Good, they can’t bypass this one, now. Two more, let’s go.”

“How long have you worked with King?” He grunts at Kyle’s blunt question as they walk swiftly to the next teleportal, Claire always keeping her hand on her firearm in her holster. Joey had also swapped out her clothes and gotten her old MBPS jacket–which also doubled as a light armor set for field incursions with mithril mesh inserted, and she’d belted on her new alchemical hopper system and loaded it with everything she thought they’d need. She has a solution for a variety of problems, at least.

It felt good to have this jacket back on. Back when her forays into the field gave her purpose beyond just her work in academia, and showed her the wonders of the magical world. Even if MBPS had started deteriorating…it was a nice bit of nostalgia, and a really nice piece of equipment.

“I worked with King for…fifteen years. I got into a bit of trouble as a teen. I took something that didn't belong to me, for money. I should have stolen from someone less vindictive,” he adds with a sarcastic drawl. They proceed through the hallway to the next teleportal cargo point just a ways down, past a stairwell of gleaming chrome and glass, and little safety signs plastered on the siding. At least slips aren’t an issue with the grip pads on each landing. “King…got me out of a bind. Later, we…sort of became friends. Even though his profession is as an enabler of criminal activities, he does have loftier goals. More noble ones.”

“You know he’s done nasty things,” Joey interjects.

“Only to people the world is better off without. I won’t mince words, King hasn’t always been on the right side of the law. Neither have I. But when the law itself is broken, what are people supposed to do?”

Lavernius has his thoughts interrupted when Kyle’s phone pings. He pulls it out, and gasps. “Joey, the motion sensor went off by the waterfall.”

He turns on the feed from the observer golem, and Terra is now clinging to a wall just by the waterfall. "Hmm. Ah hell, it's that stupid overgrown feathered bull again," he utters but sounds slightly relieved.

"You mean the Feralaz Draconis?" She refers to it by its formal name. Most people called it one of two things, either a European avian charger, or a feathered battering ram. It was a cousin to the Murmions that lived in the area, but bigger, and built like a giant raptor with a smooth, broad skull, and it would have been over three meters at the shoulders. It was a fruit and small prey eater and couldn't fly, but it was aggressive, and its head was built to withstand immense shock. It used that broad head to smash away competing males, or threats to its existence and could run very quickly on its powerful two legs, and it was covered in iridescent blue feathers, with green ones on its face and wings. Odd. Where's the rest of that herd? Must have wandered off.

But then something gets its attention. The Feralaz pops its head up to full height and lets out a warbling shout. And she hears something else. People talking. Kyle pans the camera around, and he almost drops the phone. There's a group of people that were near the waterfall that had come out of the stone door, which is now open. And she recognizes them!

“Holy hell, they made it,” Joey says almost excitedly when she sees them, Drenar taking the lead. It’s brought to a terse standstill when the Feralaz rounds the corner and sees them. They follow Nick’s advice and become relaxed. Julia is cooing about a new monster pet–does she have any idea how dangerous they could be?

Nah. Julia would have this creature eating out of her hand by the end of the week, given her personality. At least, that’s what she concludes.

"Hey, who's the hottie by the Feralaz?" Claire whispers. Joey completely forgot that she was there next to her and that she's been holding her breath for too long.

"That's Nick DeShandrea. He's an old friend of Amaranth Vertimer, my academy professor." Claire frowns.

"No, the hottie with the sword and messy hair. He's ruggedly handsome, isn't he?"

"He's…decent," Joey finally says. She spent a long time coming up with an answer that sounded noncommitted, and Claire claps her shoulder.

"Uh-huh. Just decent?"

"Eh, he's a five out of ten. He’s nothing special, and he needs a haircut," Kyle mutters. Joey needles his comment with an icy glare. "Hey Zameren, we need to cut this short, we have guests of the non-murderous sort over by the waterfall."

Lavernius is busy with the next console, tearing through the innards and pulling out the spliced-in circuitry–it had been well hidden, and when he turns to see the video, he gasps. “Dear Gaia, Julia, Drenar, Angela, and James?!”

“You’re acquainted?” Claire asks.

“Julia is best friends with my daughter, and also friends with Drenar.” Claire taps that gun in her holster again, Joey notes. He is going to get shot by the end of this, and not even by her.

“You’re pretty messed up Lavernius, you know that?” Claire says with a deadly tone to her voice. “Focus on stopping bloodthirsty killers from raiding the place, I’ve got a security team eyeballing the main portal, so far, nada. After we’re done with this one, I need Joey to brew up more explosives to destroy it. I am not about to have our back lines overridden.”

“Can’t we just cut the power?” Reeves asks.

“We can’t. There’s so much power running through it at all times to maintain a load in the capacitors, that it’s too dangerous to just ‘cut’ an arcane power node. You’ll kill everyone nearby unless you let the capacitors drain. That's several hours in a by-the-book procedure,” Lavernius snaps, even as he peers in closer. “So, go do something dumb. Just know that it’s an instant ticket to a Darwin Award if you’re curious.” Joey gets worried when the Feralaz draws closer to who she presumes is James, and after a calm statement from Nick, opens his bag.

Things go wrong as the Feralaz grabs the bag upwards in its beak–and James and it warbles cheerily. James panics and screams, and the bag is now tangled around him, and the antlers. The bird spins around, nearly impaling Julia with its talons, and tries to dash off at this slight complication.

"Ahhh! I'm gonna get eaten like bad comic relief!" James screams out and tries to get loose, but can't. Joey grabs her alchemical kit and darts out the door. The last thing she saw was Drenar sprinting at top speed, trying to help James. She hopes she can get to them before he gets torn apart!