Dr. med. Ernst Seitenhuber and his great-nephew Kasimir Seitenhuber are entering a rarely used morgue the GDN has rented.

K: Great-uncle, I don’t really understand why this is so urgent that you need to call me away from doing detection rituals. Casualties are only down because there are fewer potential vulnerable sites and frankly because the idiots who refuse to evacuate are undercounted.

E: I am calling you away, precisely it is not over. We need to prepare for what may come later.

K: Such as?

E: Do you want the EOA let get away with doing this to us?

K: Why not? They have hurt themselves a lot more than us. Time is working for us.

E: Assuming that is true, don’t they know that?

K: You are saying that they’ll strike again, when the Grid goes online again.

E: Yes. And you have not been fully briefed about the „Atomic Battle“. We saw our healing potion fail.

K: Fail?

E: They technically worked but they did not fix the underlying damage.

K: Some forms of mental illness and genetic damage like trisomy-21 are beyond what potions can do, so it does not entirely surprise me.

E: I am not asking for you to be surprised. I am asking for you to be worried.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

K: We won’t let monsters surprise us again near a nuclear power plant.

E: And the EOA?

A long silence.

K: In principle one could could weaponize stuff like the mobile X-ray tubes you use for checking metal for hidden cracks. Or … uncle, are you thinking we’ll have a nuclear war?

E: No. Though you cannot uninvent the bomb and if I look at the food riots in the Middle East …

K: You think we’ll learn stuff from corpses?

E: I am not ready to rule it out. We need data.

K: You are right.

--

K: Uncle, we are missing corpses.

E: Which rank?

K: Let me check … We lost category-3 fighters? They turned into rainbow smoke?

E: Presumably. But you are right we need to correlate their mission tracks with the recordings of massive release events.

K: EOA grave robbers

E: Corpse robbers would be more accurate I think. You are good with computers?

K: Yes uncle.

--

K: Everybody accounted for. I even checked the signatures. In most cases I get matches

E: Most?

K: Yes. Major mana releases or rituals for that matter can obliterate a signature

E: Very well. It was a battle. Let’s check how many died from radiation on the site.

K: Good. I have the dosimeter readings of some of them at least. Some dosimeters were not properly recorded.

E: This is going to be a long night.