The Pit loomed below like a scar upon Veird that someone had corralled behind battlements, fortresses, and half-made walls. It also kinda looked like a skate park, what with all the totally tubular half-pipes and gnarly grinding areas. Erick felt that the neighborhood kids back on Earth would have really loved to use it as a playground. He supposed that ‘as a playground’ was sort of what the adventurers and newly-named delvers had been doing with the place, too.

Professional play, with gold prizes and stiff competition in the form of man-eating coral eels.

So like. A professional skate park. One with prizes and tournaments.

And also a lot of yelling, apparently, now that Erick had told the very-worried people near him that he was going to solve it all, and make sure no one died in the process. They didn’t seem to believe him right now, but at least one of them was far beyond being scared of the ‘big bad Wizard’.

Aroido, one of 49, and the ‘Face’ of the Aroidos, yelled at the Archmage of the Regency, “We had it contained, Wiloza! And then you had to go get House Benevolence involved! I had it contained!”

He was probably having a mental breakdown right now. Erick glanced at Poi, and Poi gave a small nod, so Erick decided to just let the man have his breakdown. Perhaps he could get it all out of his system, for now, and Erick could get some good intel in the process.

Wiloza was not prepared for Aroido to turn his ire on her, though. Wiloza instantly declared, “I thought it would be a simple prognostication!”

That relationship there was obviously a complicated thing. Wiloza was the ‘human oversight’ for the dungeons, which was a rather normal position for a kingdom to have. But such an arrangement was usually a small group of people, with one person in charge and several underlings, and then one repro for each dungeon under the auspices of the kingdom. Storm’s Edge had it all wrong, with Wiloza being the only one in that ‘Head Dungeonmaster’ position, taking the place of the entire office of workers, and with all the Aroido, all repros, being the majority of the dungeon-oversight forces.

And that was it for their entire office staff. 50 people. One ‘in charge’, who was only there in case of emergency, and 49 others all doing whatever they wanted inside the dungeons.

Erick didn’t have the full story about all of that, but he would be getting the full story eventually, and he was getting quite a lot of sideways-information right now. It wasn’t like he needed to go anywhere at this very instant, either, for Quilatalap had closed off his dungeon, and he probably wasn’t ready for anyone to come knocking on the gate quite yet.

And so, Aroido had his mental breakdown.

Aroido raised his hands and flapped them around angrily as he yelled, “It’s never a simple prognostication! The very second you got them involved you put me and my brothers at risk!”

Wiloza scowled. “You put yourself at risk when you chose to threaten those two immortals.”

“I had it contained! I was—”

Okay. Erick had had enough of that particular lie. “You did not have it contained,” Erick said, and Aroido suddenly realized that Erick was here, and that maybe he shouldn’t be screaming like he was. As Aroido fell deeply silent and Wiloza professionally demurred, Erick continued, “And it was a simple prognostication. This prognostication of a coming storm is a big deal for you, but we have dealt with many different situations like this before now. We can solve this —all of us together— and none of us need be enemies, and no one needs to die.” He said to Aroido, “But if you think the Regency will actually harm you, then you need to relocate. If you and your brothers want [Reincarnation]s, then I can do that, but you will have to submit to the [Reincarnation] process.”

For one bright, shining moment after mentioning [Reincarnation], Aroido was thrilled. He saw a path forward for him and his brothers. And then reality crashed back into the forefront of his mind. He said, “They would never let us go. We know too much about the kingdom.”

“The option is there. Consider it.” Erick moved on, turning his sight back to the Pit. “What was the plan here? Leave the immortals’ dungeon alone? Attack it and breach the seal, and the dungeon beyond?”

Aroido said, “We have a plan for if the dungeons ever truly break. It involves contacting the Dungeoneer’s Guild down by Adventurer City. They were going to have some big elites come in and break the cores if they ever got out of control… Or if me and my brothers ever rebelled.”

Erick mentally looked to Poi, asking him to get that information.

Poi did not outwardly say or do anything, but a few more tendrils of thought flowed away from his head.

Meanwhile, Erick said, “I don’t get that. That last part.” Erick asked, “You’re the repro of the original Lord Aroido, yes? And your brothers are more copies of you. If they felt that you would ever actually rebel, then they never would have allowed that many of you to exist at once, yes? How many of there are you, anyway?” Erick pretended ignorance, “Ten? Twenty?”

“… 49,” Aroido said, after much self wrestling.

“A larger amount than expected.” Erick said, “That’s a non-insubstantial number to add to my usual monthly [Reincarnation] list. But it’s doable. I want you to really consider that option, Aroido, if they’re really going to kill you. House Benevolence doesn’t abide by the murder of uncooperative repros just because they’re uncooperative. It’s usually the grabbing of power and becoming a plague upon the land which makes us and the Core Delvers of the Dungeoneer Guild decide to end a dungeon core. Even after the debacle of the Freedom Dungeon over at the Freelands we only executed a few people, and almost none of them were dungeon-born.”

Aroido looked mollified, for now. His stance was back to normal. He had never allowed his tears to fall, but it had been a close call. His voice was even, as he said, “Thank you, Wizard Flatt. If you do not mind, I would like to speak a bit on the true situation unfolding here, pledge myself to House Benevolence, and then go get my brothers and help end this horror happening right now however we are able. And then we’ll move on, or whatever you decide needs to happen.”

Wiloza was saddened by Aroido’s change of allegiance, which surprised Erick a little bit, but not really. Erick had almost expected Wiloza to be angry at him, but the elderly archmage surprised him with her compassion.

Erick wasn’t ready to accept Aroido into his House yet, though. “It’s not quite that easy to become a member of my House these days, but your enthusiasm is noted, and marked. I suspect what’s going to happen here, at Storm’s Edge, is that I’m going to enter into a joint dungeon-creation endeavor with the Regency. That means a lot of things, but it also means that there might be places for you here at the Pit. I’ll probably ask Quilatalap to get involved here, too, in order to properly run the dungeon. That will happen either alongside Vanya and Soltic, or without them. I’ve yet to even ask Quilatalap about all this, so he might say no.”

Wiloza paled at the mention of Quilatalap, but she also saw this as a maybe-good-thing. She would withhold judgment until she needed to judge.

Through a pale expression, Aroido lied, “That would be an absolutely wonderful option, Wizard Flatt.”

“As I said, such a joint operation would mean many things, all of which will be decided later, if the Regency is even up for it.” Erick said, “Now, please give me your true order of events, starting from the first moment you heard of Vanya and Soltic. If you have the capability to do it through a memory [Telepathy] packet, then that’s good, too. You can give that to my man Poi, here.”

Aroido faltered. He wasn’t that good with [Telepathy], then? Not a whole lot of people were, but… That was surprising, too. Aroido was capable enough to have a Force Domain, but not capable enough to do well-made [Telepathy] packets?

Something was going on there.

Wiloza spoke up, “I can give that information packet for I was there for most of the interactions with Miss Silver and Mister Cross, which is obviously a call out of the Silver Cross of Koyabez, but I admit that I was unable to find them inside any Church of Peace registry.”

Erick’s eyebrows raised at that statement. Wiloza was the second person to bring that naming scheme up. He kinda wanted to kick himself for calling themselves ‘Silver Cross’, for that was obviously a code name. Sometimes, apparently, he could still be dumb.

Poi did not smile or laugh at all, for he was more controlled than that, but Erick could tell that he was laughing inside.

Aroido, fully embarrassed and hiding it, blurted out, “I prayed to Koyabez not half an hour ago, and he deigned to give me a message through the Script saying that I should have trusted Soltic and Vanya more than I did.” Aroido looked to Erick. “I fear I have messed this up, and this is all going to get dumped on me.”

Ah. Good ‘ol Koyabez.

Erick hadn’t spoken to him in a while.

Erick said, “Let’s not worry about that right now. Wiloza. The packet.”

Wiloza sent a packet of information to Poi.

Poi pulled it apart, and then handed it to Erick.

There was little there that Erick didn’t already know, though it was odd seeing Vanya and Soltic from Wiloza’s perspective, as Vanya gave her presentation. Wiloza’s information packet was colored with her utter disgust of the whole affair, for she wished that people would leave the dungeons well enough alone. So what if they were breaking all the time? Big deal. If people simply left Aroido well enough alone, then the dungeons would work well enough on their own. Who needed a Grand Dungeon, anyway? No one. Grand Dungeons were nonsense, anyway; monster lures and killing zones were good enough.

From what Erick was now seeing, Wiloza was changing her mind on that most recent opinion, due to all this ‘nonsense’ happening all around the Regency right now. Her hope at the end of all this is for a dungeon that no one needs to worry about anymore; however they get there is fine by her. She just wanted less danger in her life. That’s why she became an archmage in the first place; in order to have the power to make the world safer for everyone all around her.

After pretending to take a moment longer to understand what he was seeing, Erick said, “That was informative. Now, before I give you two some orders, and then I go down to the dungeon, is there anything else major that I need to know about? Something that you don’t tell others. Something that seems to be missing from this information packet, Wiloza.” He looked to Aroido. “Something having to do with Gold Taker, the ‘archmage octopus’ that keeps your dungeons mana-positive.”

Wiloza stilled. And then she relaxed. She was ready for anything. But she did not speak.

Aroido sighed a little, then prepared to disappoint Erick, as he said, “Gold Taker is Everbless.”

Erick nodded. “Thank you for coming clean about that, too. Now that we’re all—”

“You’re immune to the intervention, too?!” Aroido exclaimed. And then his eyes went wide. “Ah. Pardon my outburst. Uh. Wizard Flatt.”

Erick bushed over that outburst, saying, “I am immune to a great many things, as most Wizards are.”

Aroido suddenly had half of a thought.

Erick realized what that thought was right before Aroido could fully form that thought. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made a link between Wizards and immunity to magic, but he wouldn’t [Return] in a social situation like this. He had just fucked up a little bit, as yes, Aroido paled, and yes, he put a few things together that he probably shouldn’t be putting together—

“I think Soltic might be a Wizard,” Aroido said, very seriously.

“No!” Wiloza shouted, her voice full of sudden despair.

“It fits!” Aroido said, “He’s immune to the intervention, too!”

Erick ended the conversation with a wave, saying, “Then the fact that you’re still alive is proof enough that whatever happened here was not meant to harm you, so I urge both of you to put away preconceived notions about Wizards and what might be lying in wait, and relax a fraction. Anyway! Aroido, at my side. Wiloza, here with Poi, on the battlements. You two should converse about the happenings here, and know that I’m watching.” He summoned and stepped onto a Platform, and then he looked to Aroido. “With me.”

Poi stood strongly, as ordered. Wiloza glanced to Poi, and then gave a courtly nod.

And Aroido walked forward, onto Erick’s Platform spell, softly saying, “He might be a Wizard.”

“Aye; he might be a Wizard,” Erick said, as he lifted the Platform into the air and began moving down into the Pit. He aimed for the black disk hanging in the air; the locked Dungeon #6. “Or he might just be someone Called by Sininindi in order to do a job.”

Looking a little sheepish, Aroido said, “… You are probably correct.” And then he added, “If they should open the door… I might have angered them a great deal. But I… Uh…” His voice trailed off as he tried to decide what to say, but he had nothing else.

“Don’t worry about it,” Erick said, “We don’t have nearly enough laws to protect repros yet, or at least not enough to deal with the various situations that arise from their creation. Culture is similarly backed up with problems and ways of handling the introduction of completely new people, directly into the world. I’m sure, in time, that ‘a repro’ will likely become just another thing that a person is, and not a reason to kill them, or otherwise. The shadelings are still having a lot of problems, all of them alongside the same veins as all the new repros of the world. Personally, I empathize that it must be terrifying waking up and being both yourself, and something else entirely. You probably had a lot of issues in the beginning— Probably still have a lot of issues, if you feel that the Regency will kill you for whatever failure happened today.”

Aroido breathed calmly, but Erick’s words were hitting him hard. He was not going to have an emotional response right now, though; he decided. And then he began to spill, “We’re not actually all repros of Aroido. That’s part of the problem. Aroido died— He was murdered years ago. And we’re all sort of… Copies of copies. It’s been difficult. We’ve had dungeon breaks before, all the time, for every fool and their sister thinks they know how to make it all work well, but all they do is try to kill us and then they fuck up the dungeons in the process. It’s only ever since Everbless began helping to keep the dungeons in mana that we stopped breaking all the time.”

They reached the floor of the Pit. Erick dispersed the platform underfoot, and both him and Aroido dropped a centimeter to the ground.

Aroido continued to say, “Everbless will show up when he feels like it. He’s always…” Aroido shook his head. “Aroido died, and we repros had to work overtime to keep the dungeons afloat, and after a few breaks killed the majority of our elder brothers, we had to repro ourselves, so… Thus began a chain of events that ended up with all of us being repros of repros and… Personality drift, and all that.”

Erick nodded a little, in understanding. “That’s been tough for you, because now they don’t think you’re real people anymore.”

“Yes! Exactly!” Aroido backed up. “They’re nice enough to us but… Those in the know don’t treat us well at all. It’s the little things. And… Sorry. You’re busy right now. I just needed to say this because… I mishandled the entire situation with Miss Silver and Mister Cross.”

Erick nodded. And then he walked over to the giant black disk sitting in the air, like a swirl of darkness five meters across, its bottom-most edge hovering a handspan above the flat ground. It was the entrance to dungeon 6, and it was closed, but it actually wasn’t closed at all. With a bit of mana sense, Erick watched as mana naturally flowed into the darkness. It was an anemic, slow sort of flow; the sign of an unhealthy dungeon with most of its inhabitants dead and gone.

Quilatalap was probably faking that flow somehow, though, to throw off everyone out here who might be watching.

With a quick conjuring of Force and Benevolence, Erick created a bright white staff with a knotted head. It was just a normal sort of conjuring, but one didn’t go knocking on dungeon gates with their bare hands.

Aroido had been standing four meters away from the black [Gate], but at Erick’s conjuring, he rapidly retreated, only stopping when he was a good fifteen meters away.

Erick waited for him to stop retreating, and when he did, Erick pulled back for a good strike, and then he struck the [Gate]. The staff touched darkness, and was halted. Not a single sound came from that action. Not a fraction of the black air of the [Gate] was disturbed. Erick pulled back his staff, and darkness clung to the head, like he had stuck the staff into black gum. That blackness snapped off when he pulled far enough away.

Erick used an actual [Strike] the second time, empowering his weapon to hit as hard as it possibly could, based on the angle of his attack, the object he was hitting, and a bunch of other factors governed by how the Script made that particular form of magic work.

The staff hit the dungeon [Gate] and the darkness flexed, a dull gonging sound filling the air.

Erick pulled back and hit the darkness twice more. Twice more the air sounded with a dull gong.

And then he stepped backward.

He waited.

After a moment of nothing, Aroido spoke up, “I don’t think she’s going to open the [Gate] for a polite knock.”

“I’m polite unless tested otherwise.” Erick added, “And I can wait.”

Four silent minutes later…

“I’m going to knock again,” Erick said, right before he knocked again, this time much harder. “They probably heard it that ti—”

The black disk swelled open like a bubble rapidly popping, leaving behind a hole in the world, revealing a half-decayed army on the other side.

A regimented horde of undead stood upon a vast stone plain, each of them wearing black armor and standing with a spear at their sides. All of them were in various states of decay, but most looked like they could last for at least one or two good battles. The general at the head of the army looked like he could last a whole campaign, though. He was a gargantuan man made of solid bone, twice as large as the rest, wearing black armor accented in gold. His spear was more of a halberd, and his eyes glowed with red light.

It was a thoroughly impressive and terrifying sight to Aroido, who exclaimed, “HOLY FUCK A NECROMANCER!” and then he backpedaled as fast as he could, casting some spells to [Fly] away.

To anyone not experienced with these sorts of things, and to many people who did have experience with these things, Aroido’s response was normal.

Necromancers were nothing too scary to Erick, though, and especially given how little time ‘Vanya’ had to prepare. Necromancers were rather horrific to go up against when they were truly prepared. That was one of the reasons that assaulting the Fractured Citadels of Quintlan was a near-impossible endeavor.

When a Necromancer didn’t have time to prepare, you ended up with this; a rather ragtag-looking army, propped up by quick-cast spellwork that could only really offer physical protection, and not the magical protection that an undead army truly needed.

Quilatalap could have done a lot better given how much time he had had, but ‘Vanya’ wasn’t going to go that hard, for she had to keep her head down a little bit, or else people would know who she was. There were probably some real heavy-hitters hiding in the back, waiting to respond if they needed to respond, but these guys were nothing special… Except maybe the guy in front.

There were a lot of different ways to tell that this army was nothing special. The main one was the easiest to see; Their armor. It looked real, but it wasn’t. All of that armor was conjured on all of them, instead of real, and since it was not real, it was not enchanted. And since it was not enchanted, it could not prevent the easiest way for one to win against a necromancer.

Oh, sure, there were some specialized conjured armors that would protect mindless undead from what Erick could do to them, and Quilatalap knew all of those methods, but this stuff here was not the good spellwork.

Soul Magic, that greatest of spellwork that made necromancers terrifying and horribly strong, was also their greatest weakness when employed like they usually employed that magic; outside of themselves. The base level of raising undead and making them fight for you was incredibly easy to disrupt if you knew how. [Dispel] was not the answer here, because they were souls conjured into bodies, and that natural layer of defense worked well against casual [Dispel]s.

And so, there were other magics to use. [Piercing Dispel] kinda worked, if you managed to hit the controlling spellwork in the center of the undead body, but since the army had armor and dispelling the control magics would just make the undead horde go ravenously insane, [Dispel]s of all sorts weren’t the real answer.

The real answer was [Untether], and its secondary version, [Chaining Untether].

Untether, instant, long range, 50 mana

Break the chains of the tethered soul.

Chaining Untether, instant, long range, 100 mana + Variable

Break the chains of the tethered souls.

[Untether] even worked on basic angels and demons and, to a lesser extent, [Familiar]s of all kinds. It was like a specialized [Dispel] —a Tricking Magic— for all summoned creatures.

A horde of undead? Not a problem. Just [Untether] the basic souls from the bodies and the undead would drop real-dead, their temporary souls released from their mortal shells into the afterlife. Actually fighting the horde with anything less than that would be an exercise in futility, or at least an exercise in bringing a knife to a gunfight; sure, you could still win that gun fight with your knife, or [Fireball], or [Lightning Bolt], or whatever, but it would be unnecessarily difficult.

All of those thoughts instinctively ran through Erick’s mind as he saw the undead horde.

But then came the final thought, that this was Quilatalap in front of him. All of this right now was a show to legitimize Vanya’s presence, for all those watching through [Long Range Scry]s, or otherwise, so he wasn’t really worried about going up against a necromancer like he usually would be.

He was sure to make some of his surprise at seeing a Necromancer show, though.

And then Erick called out to Aroido, “Aroido! Don’t run. We’re just talking. Come back. Now.”

Aroido warred with himself, there in the air about 50 meters away. He hadn’t gotten far.

While Aroido was dealing with his own emotions, Erick looked at the red-eyed undead captain, and said, “Hello. I’m Wizard Erick Flatt. I would like to have a conversation with the new dungeon master, alongside the old dungeon master. My hope is to resolve this without bloodshed or any terrible happenings and maybe ensure that some sort of cooperation should take hold, since you did come here Called by Sininindi, after all.” Erick made a show of turning around to look at Aroido, who was still 40 meters away, and then he turned back. The red-eyed undead had not moved at all. “Aroido will be back shortly.”

The red-eyed undead said, “Then I will level our complaints against him when he deigns to stand before me.”

Erick nodded once. And then he waited.

Eventually Aroido floated over, trying to be stoic, but he was sweating and his face was rather pale. At least he was putting on a good facade. Erick felt for the guy, and for his brothers.

Aroido did try to multi-kill Soltic and Vanya, he was doing that out of a desire not to be real-killed himself. Erick would be getting that story soon enough, though. Probably as soon as this red-eyed guy said something about it.

Aroido touched down on the stone two meters away from Erick—

Red-eyes said, “When we wouldn’t give him answers about our lives, Aroido and his brothers assaulted us, and then threatened to multi-kill us until he got the answers he wanted.”

Aroido defended himself. “We would have been killed or disappeared if Vanya and Soltic managed to make a new dungeon anyway. Our hope was to discourage them and make them go away.”

Erick nodded. “And what do you mean by ‘disappeared’?”

“When one of us goes crazy, or tells anyone about this system of having 49 of us— Anytime it even looks like we might tell people anything at all, we are led into a specific house…” An instinctual sort of fear took hold within Aroido, but he managed to beat that fear down far enough to continue, “We go into that house and then we are never seen from again. Wiloza tries to save us from that fate, but… I’m not the first ‘Face’ of the Aroidos, Wizard Flatt. Not by a [Long Bolt]...” Aroido paused for a moment, then said, “Sometimes my brothers do go crazy. It happens whenever there is a dungeon break, and then all the masters are purged from the system… But. I humbly suggest that the Regency is too liberal with this option.”

“Where is this house?” Erick asked.

“At the end of Seafoam Road, in the noble district,” Aroido said, as though he was offloading a thousand-kilo weight from his shoulders. “It’s the only house there; you cannot miss it— It’s a manor. Seafoam Manor.”

Erick said to the air, “Goldie. Check on that list of facts, please.”

A nearby shadow made a show of moving.

Aroido’s eyes went wide, and so did the red-eyed man’s, but less so, as they watched the shadow meld back into nothing, under the open sun. The shadow hadn’t even been there till it showed itself.

Erick looked to the red-eyed skeleton man. “What is your name? I haven’t gotten that yet.”

Red-eyes languidly turned his blazing sight back to Erick, and easily said, “This one is freshly born and not a real person. For now, this one is a vessel for Vanya Silver to speak through.” Vanya said, “In time, he will become real, and thus take a position as one of the bosses of this dungeon, Wizard Flatt.”

“Ah! Splendid,” Erick said, “You’re in quite a lot of trouble, young lady. Or should I say ‘apparently young lady’? Some sort of immortal, I understand?”

“Yes.”

“… A woman of few words, then.”

“I have given these people no reason to distrust me, and every reason to allow me to do my goddess-given mission of turning this set of dungeons into a real dungeon, one where people can learn real magic.” Vanya asked, “Have they told you all of what I planned to do? And my qualifications?” She held herself back from spitting her next words, but it was a bare thing, as she said, “And why are you even here?”

“I’m here because of a Benevolent prophecy about how these dungeons need to hold all the life of the Archipelago that we wish to save from a coming catastrophe which will occur anywhere from between 4 to 10 months. Maybe sooner, maybe later. But somewhere around there.” Erick spoke seriously as he asked, “Would you be able to fulfill that sort of requirement? Or is that more than what you can handle on your own?” He gestured to Aroido. “Because there’s 49 helpers right here, though he seems to be scared for his life, thinking that the Regency will murder them all if they are found wanting in their job.”

Aroido breathed out relief as yet another thousand-kilo metaphorical weight fell off his shoulders; Erick believed him. And then he realized that Erick was setting him up to work with the necromancer on the other side of the [Gate]. Somewhere in there he thought back to Erick ordering a shadow to go and investigate the house on Seafoam Road, and that piled onto the man’s mental problems.

And just like that, Aroido was now wearing multiple tons of metaphorical weight. Erick saw as the man accepted his lot in life, though; there was absolutely no way for him and his 49 brothers to live on their own, outside of the auspices of some sort of power. House Benevolence was a fine power to live under.

No emotions at all passed across the undead servant’s face upon hearing Erick’s news of a Benevolence Prophecy, for that wasn’t how this undead captain was set up. He was, in effect, the perfect way to separate oneself from a meeting, and to ensure that no microexpressions or otherwise gave away what the operator was thinking.

Of course, red-eyes could just be Quilatalap in a new form, but probably not. This one here was probably set up to die, if necessary. There had been no way for Quilatalap to see what was happening outside the dungeon once it was sealed, just like there was no way for anyone to look inside when it was sealed. (Except for Melemizargo, and other godly beings, of course.)

Vanya’s voice was steady, but subtly worried, as it came out of red-eyes’ mouth, “I would like to hear this prophecy.”

Erick told Vanya the prophecy.

And then Vanya said, “I will be able to do some sort of a… ‘Grand Shelter’, but it will require a great deal of changes to the plan… And I could use the Aroidos’ help. For starters, I need— A lot. I need a lot.” And then, perhaps a bit miffed, she said, “I wanted to make a real Grand Dungeon; not a shelter. This is not what I signed up for with Sininindi.”

“Then make your dungeon how you want,” Erick said, “But add a big red button, or something, in the center of the place that can transform the entire dungeon into a shelter when needed.”

“But that means no permanent traps and—”

“Miss Silver,” Erick said, “I appreciate your plight, but if you cannot do what is needed then perhaps you and Mister Cross should leave this dungeon to the Regency and to House Benevolence.” And then Erick added, “If, however, you are fine with this adjustment, and you are simply playing for more resources, or what-have-you, or whatever, then please state your terms now.”

“… I was going to have a False Society in here anyway.” Vanya added, “So I suppose being able to house more people is fine— No.” A moment passed in silence, and deep, deep worry. And then Vanya blurted, “There’s 25 million people in the Archipelago.”

“Yup.” Erick nodded. “The problem is a lot larger than the one you signed up to solve.”

Aroido quietly said, “22.5 million.”

Red-eyes’s eyes went wider, which was probably an affectation, like when he purposefully glanced at the shadow that was Goldie zipping away. But then Vanya spoke, and Erick thought that maybe it wasn’t an affectation at all.

Excitedly, she said, “Holy Gods. That would be the largest dungeon this world has ever seen!”

“Yes. Everyone is in a bit of a panic over here because of that and a dozen other issues,” Erick said, “So while your enthusiasm is noted, make sure you don’t get too carried away with this task laid before you.”

“Right, right,” Vanya rapidly added, acting suitably chastised.

Aroido nodded solemnly.

Erick continued, “My primary concerns are having enough space and amenities inside this dungeon, and for there to be a way for people to get into that space as fast as possible. House Benevolence will be able to provide some sort of Gate Network shenanigans to alleviate some of the stress of moving that many people, but I imagine that you would need to grow this dungeon far, far beyond your original plans. It also will only nominally be under Regency control, because when the issue is this large, involving this many different nations of the Archipelago, I am stepping in, and House Benevolence is taking a concentrated interest in this land. I plan on stopping whatever disaster is coming, but—” Erick asked, “Are you prepared to be the master for a shelter of 22.5 million people, if necessary?”

“Fuck no I am not prepared for that, but I can be.”

Erick smiled. “Good to hear that. You and I will have a discussion later about all this, in private. For now, what do you need to happen, in order to make this dungeon work how it needs to work?”

“Give me a minute to think.”

Red-eyes went silent; distant. Erick and Aroido waited.

Vanya said, “I need the Aroidos to move their dungeon entrances back to the Pit, and then I need them all to detach from those dungeons and come into this dungeon, while I send out minions to secure those other dungeons under my own power.”

Aroido frowned. “What?”

Erick asked Aroido, “What’s the problem? All that seemed reasonable to me.”

“I have no idea what she means ‘send out minions to secure’.” Aroido said, “I can do all the rest but I’m not sure what she means to do, exactly.”

“A ritual to the Dark, to bring all dungeons together into one,” Erick said, then asked, “Right, Miss Silver?”

“Correct.”

Aroido paled once again, as he muttered, “Oh great. Cultists, too.”

Erick ignored Aroido’s discomfort and asked the man, “Can you do as requested?”

“Yes, I can, and I suppose falling to the Dark is… Well it’s not execution, I suppose.”

Erick gave the man a look.

And Aroido straightened up, and realized where he was and who he was talking to. He rapidly said, “I can work with Miss Silver!”

“Good.” Erick added, “When I get a chance, and if you want, there are [Reincarnation]s waiting for you, if you are tired of your current life.”

“Right!” Aroido said, “You said that, too. I think some of my brothers will certainly take you up on that offer— Uhh. The dungeon entrances were moved into Regency control, into the bunker pit we have set up for a potential break… One time one dungeon broke, and then it rapidly broke two more before we got that back under control. I won’t be able to get to those places when they are under Regency control.”

Erick said, “I have already removed that separate area from Regency control, through a few polite conversations with the local guard.”

About a kilometer east of the Pit there was another, smaller ‘Pit’, located behind a mountain. A bunch of Regency soldiers had been there guarding the dungeons and wondering ‘where the fuck is Gold Taker; he should be here’, until Ophiel had shown up and promptly secured the area. According to Poi, who was in contact with Erick right now, the Regency was demanding Erick stand way, way down, but Erick had already told Poi to tell them that he was not standing down at all.

“You can go over there right now, actually,” Erick said, waving a hand and conjuring a [Gate] directly to that side-Pit. “The way is clear for you to go talk to your brothers.”

Aroido took all of a half-a-second to realign himself, again, to his new lot in life. And then he bowed and rushed through the [Gate]. Erick watched Aroido leap into one of the black holes in the world, under the watchful eyes of Ophiel, and then Erick closed the [Gate].

Erick turned back to Vanya, saying, “Still no sign of Gold Taker, or Everbless out here. I have half a mind to go right up to his tree and ask him what’s going on, but I have been told to stay away until recently. What has been your experience with him?”

“I have barely been able to interact with him, but he seems like a decent sort. If it weren’t for him then these dungeons would have collapsed a lot more than they have, but I don’t believe that a child should be killing people inside a dungeon, anyway.”

Erick nodded, and then he had an Ophiel flutter down from the sky, to hover in front of Erick, who already had an Ophiel on his shoulder. “I’ll be leaving Ophiel here at the entrance. Call out if you need something.”

Vanya had red-eyes go down to one knee and press one fist to the ground. “As you desire, Wizard of Benevolence.”

Erick nodded again, and then he left in a flicker of a lightstep, off to the next destination.

He felt that the act with Vanya had gone pretty well. He also felt that this whole thing was a great big mess (an understatement, considering 22.5 million people needed a shelter in the next 6 months), he was terrible about lying long term (and he was the eye of the world usually, so people were always looking at him) so he was probably going to fuck that up sooner or later (hopefully a lot later; years, perhaps), Everbless was still worryingly absent (seriously; where the fuck was he), and whatever the fuck the Regency was up to at Seafoam Manor was probably something rather immoral.

… Hopefully not too bad, though. Hopefully it was just routine immoral executions. Those were easy enough to solve. Erick could arrive, say ‘no’, strip the bad guys from power and forcibly repent them, if necessary, and then that would be the end of that horror show. House Benevolence would come in next and deal with greater fallout, like putting survivors back into homes, getting them work, and then doing whatever else needed to be done.

With any luck, whatever was happening down at Seafoam Manor was not too deep of an institutional problem.

Toppling a government was never Erick’s preferred option.

- - - -

At first glance, the house at the end of Seafoam Road was an unassuming place, all shuttered and locked down with spellwork to make sure no one broke in and stole anything. Sure, some of those spells looked impressively dangerous, but that was rather normal for a lot of these houses out in the middle of nowhere.

The road probably got its name from the house, since before the Teleport Exodus, Erick suspected that this place didn’t even have a road.

Seafoam Road split away from the main road back closer to town, in the real noble district, to then wind its way into the mountains, curling around the southern side of the island. In another life, Erick could easily imagine driving a car down a road like that, taking in the wonderful view of the sea, south of the Archipelago. Far beyond that watery southern horizon lay the northern coast of Nergal, where everything was made of poison and death, and everything tried to kill everyone else all the time. But here, on Storm’s Edge, the land was tame, Seafoam Road likely hadn’t had traffic in months, overgrown as it was, and though the beaches down below were rather filled with salt spray air, the wind up by the manor smelled of the forest.

Here, at this end of the road, a large iron gate had laid directly across the road, serving as a final dividing line between the road and private property. A shadow had ‘opened’ the gate prior to Erick’s arrival, though, which was more like breaking several enchantments laid upon that gate and dealing with the explosion afterward, but that was fine with Erick. He was pretty sure whoever opened it was fine, though the gate was very much not. Blackened iron lay in a small heap to the side, where someone had gathered it up just because they could.

Normally, a place like this, disused as it looked, wouldn’t have had such robust defenses, for all magic used to degrade rather fast once it wasn’t actively tended to.

Erick had changed that, though.

Or more specifically, the Lighter’s Guild had brought the node network all the way out here, which meant that this place was still inhabited all the time, even though it was a good 220-ish kilometers outside of town. That sort of distance in a node network wasn’t all that abnormal, but most people who lived out in the sticks had decided eleven years ago to abandon their houses and move into town.

It looked like no one lived here, either, which was part of the obfuscation of the whole place.

Other than that, this place looked like a rather normal noble’s house. Several stories. Stone. Large windows everywhere, offering great views of the southern sea. Balconies and whatnot. Of course it was all boarded up with solid wood, and all the stone was solidly enchanted to prevent [Stoneshape].

Erick muttered, “Kinda weird for him to say it was ‘inside the noble district’, but I suppose ‘the noble district’ could also be a state of mind—” He asked, “What have you found?”

Shade Goldie stepped out of the shadows. She was decked out in her normal solid-black armor which showed almost no golden scales at all, while her black sword hung at her back like a plank of wood. She was looking particularly excited today, beyond that solid black mask, which was a little odd, but it was also ‘whatever’. The Shade still had her bouts of absolute-devotion to Erick’s authority, especially when he hadn’t called upon her for any specific task in a while, but she usually grew out of that rather fast these days. Maybe she had picked up on Melemizargo’s excitement? Whatever the case, Erick would find out later, no doubt.

For now, Goldie happily said, “The place is shut tighter than most banks. An over-eager shadow tried the gate but she more managed to break it, rather than unlock it, and that put her in a temporary coma. She’s fine now, but she’s taking it easy for a while.”

Erick was glad the shadow was okay. For security purposes, they never spoke names out in the field, but Erick was pretty sure that Goldie was talking about Durri. ‘Durri’ was just a code name, anyway, for ‘durable’; it was the name she picked for herself because of her usual temperament when it came to how she survived solving the problems of House Benevolence. It made sense that Durri would be the one to try the gate.

Goldie continued, “One side effect of that breaking was that the manasphere cleared beyond the gate. We’re not sure if it cleared all the way into the house, but it’s very possible. The place is also on a 24-hour cleaning cycle as well, which they seem to have cribbed from bank protocol, which is basically what they copied here but with a few variations.”

“A governmental building, then.”

“Highly likely.”

“I probably won’t find anything at all.”

“All the defenses seem automated, yes, but we haven’t gotten any Regency people snooping around yet, so perhaps there might actually be someone inside there, and they don’t need the Regency people to come to the rescue.”

Erick considered his next moves.

Warning plaques held to the gate’s adjoining stone walls. They read out warnings of [Force Trap]s and [Alarm] spells upon the property, and said that Seafoam Manor was not responsible for death incurred by those foolish enough to test its defenses.

Erick tuned his mana senses forward, delving into the property.

There was about 230 meters of space between the gate and the manor itself, with a somewhat-wild forest growing up from the land to the left and right of the roads. That road itself was overgrown, but some sort of semi-autonomous spellwork kept the house looking halfway-decent; The weeds only got so high, and the road wasn’t too overgrown.

He picked up on a good dozen types of spells holding in the air, and in the ground, within the node network that was the surrounding walls, and inside the various dry fountains, and ivy-covered statues here and there. [Force Trap] seemed to be the usual spell of choice; perhaps a few nonviolent variants to dissuade people from trying shit in the first place, before the really lethal traps started closer to the house. That spell was illegal in most of the world, except for governmental use in protecting property. In a few places nobles were allowed to use that spell, too. Whichever this particular case was, Erick would find out after he cracked the place open like a bag of potato chips…

Hmm. Potato chips.

Maybe he should have eaten something as a dragon before he came here. It had been about a week since he last ate and was getting damned hungry… And he wanted some potato chips from Earth, now that he was thinking about all that. Oh well. Maybe Ezekiel could invent those; Erick had tried a few times in the last decade, but he couldn’t get those thin, crispy ones that he truly loved, nor the ruffled ones—

Enough about food.

Erick’s mana senses stopped at the door to the manor. His range was around 500 meters on a good, clear day, and this was a good, clear day, so he got a great deal of the front of the house in his sense, but he couldn’t peer inside.

“Good [Ward]s,” Erick said, “High class.”

“Hence the bank-connection.”

“Highly likely. I assume you haven’t been able to get inside yet?”

“Nope. I can already foresee that the place will violently reject me.” Goldie said, “It’s easy to make a place impregnable, but people can’t usually exist inside those, and that is what they’ve done here. They might have someone inside, but such a life would be a sad sort of existence.”

Erick nodded, then he regarded the manor once again.

He had seen a few places like this before. A dozen places existed like this in Oceanside, each of them hiding works of disassembled magic too great to be let out into the open, or too ancient to be used here on Veird, in this New Cosmology. The manor was kind of like the noble district of Enduring Forge, actually, where they used their old noble houses to store stuff securely, like with the Tear of Aloeth. House Benevolence even had a few caches like this, and Quilatalap had a great many caches like this.

Erick had a little bit of skill breaking into places like this, but he was no expert, by far.

He could just ask the Regency to be let inside, but that would be asking for permission, and they’d scuttle the place if there was anything truly reprehensible here. It was better to do the deed and then ask for forgiveness later, if forgiveness was necessary.

Erick could just use his Class Ability, Mana Siphon. That Ability, which Erick had created based off of [Renew] and the Undertow Effect, was a way for him to touch a spellwork and Drain it of all power. It was a bit more nuanced of a Drain than just putting an [Undertow Star] into the sky, and wiping the magic away from a building, but in the end, the effect was the same; all the mana powering a working was forcibly removed.

Of course, if he did that, Erick was almost 100% positive that he would break whatever incriminating spellwork existed inside the place, and there were likely failsafes to prevent investigation of an unprotected manor, if the node network should fail. That could be either good, or bad, depending on the nature of those failsafes.

Over the years, with Erick’s invention of permanent spellwork for the masses, he had seen many different places use a node network to set up spellwork that would trigger under certain conditions, and then go away if the spellwork itself was disturbed in a way it wasn’t meant to be disturbed. One particular terrible instance of that was a Trap Master who had installed a [Force Shear Trap] into the node network of Killtree, over in the Sovereign Cities. That particular trap was primed to be hidden in almost all cases, but then to activate if a certain demographic of people should come near; shadelings, primarily, but also orcols, strangely enough. That spell would remain dormant until properly triggered, and if it was disturbed, it would violently lash out at everyone, causing a great deal more destruction than the usual triggering, regardless of who triggered it.

Over a decade ago, there were those words painted onto the side of Odaali, back when it was occupied by the Halls of the Dead, and the Daydropper Queen. Those words were actually [Force Trap]s, and they would have remained for a very long time, decades really, if Odaali would have left them alone, but the second Erick tried to [Dispel] them, they triggered violently.

Another instance of needing to leave traps intact, was once again in the Sovereign Cities. A cult of blood had tried to undermine Erick’s authority, and in order to have meetings, they had enchanted a specialized [Force Trap] into a part of the node network, that if you approached it in a certain way then you would be directed to the meeting location, and if you approached it any other way, it would break. Those types of ‘traps’ weren’t very useful for permanently securing a location, though, for a box that could be opened was always more vulnerable than a box that was welded shut.

There was really no way to know what he was dealing with here, at Seafoam Manor, until he poked at it.

Erick decided to secure himself with his [Perfected Benevolence] Elemental Body and his [Lodestar] Domain. With his sunform active, Erick would avoid all the largest of the traps, and all the various Ethereal ones that were strung across the property like a web of power, cast by a terrible spider of some sort.

He stepped onto the property, his skin flickering with pale white light, and then distorting as he moved through the space like an ooze; his body coming apart before it met any lines in the air, and then flowing back together on the other side. It was movement born of a great deal of personal skill, but to anyone looking they would have assumed that it was easy to do what Erick was doing now.

Ophiel twittered from the air behind him, back beyond the gate, saying, “I look out here!”

Erick spoke through the air, without using his actual body at all. “Thank you, Ophiel. Be careful not to trigger anything.”

Undoubtedly, small animals triggered these things all the time, but whatever sort of spellwork this was seemed to be either immune to the vagaries of small animals, or it was controlled by some force inside the house.

Ophiel flitted away to go check out all of that, but really he just wanted to look at the mice and the big bugs that roamed the land.

Erick continued onward, stepping around and through a good hundred layers of spellwork. Finally he came to some [Alarm Ward] effects. Those ones were easy to spot as a bunch of anti-animal magics. They seemed much more nuanced and were more of a ‘do not approach’ sort of effect, as opposed to a [Solid Ward] effect, though.

Animals on Veird had somewhat different hearing ranges than people, but not really. Everything on Veird was invented by other people, after all, and generally, people heard, saw, tasted, felt, and experienced the world in a certain, shared sort of way.

Eventually Erick came to a Wall-like effect, about 50 meters away from the actual house, with no way around. The important thing here was that the Wall hadn’t appeared to his senses until he was five meters away from it, which meant that Erick might be triggering something unknowingly, or maybe someone was watching, but he didn’t think anyone was watching… So how was this Wall spell appearing before him, like some sort of ethereal surface? There was also some other sort of spell underground that was much more solid than whatever this Ethereal-thing was, and that certainly hadn’t been there before now, either. How was it appearing…

Erick considered what he was seeing.

Other people were better at certain magics than him; this was no surprise. Still, though, it always surprised him a little bit when he came upon such a thing. Finding new magic usually made him smile, followed by him trying to figure it all out, for magic was fascinating. But in this place, in this situation, Erick did not smile.

As a test, Erick floated left, and the Wall-spell, whatever it was, only appeared to his senses when he was within a good ten meters of it. Had the perception-range of it changed? Perhaps. It was 5 meters before, and now it was 10.

… All the rest of the Wall simply did not exist until he was there, observing it.

It was as though Erick was a lightbulb, shining on a wall that was not there, until he shone upon the—

Oh. It was responding to the presence of a soul.

Duh.

This was Soul Magic.

… Could also be something like a [Magic Sensing Wall], for Erick was layered with active magic at the moment.

… This was taking too long.

He could always [Return] if he fucked up, so Erick stuck his Domain-protected hand into the static spell effect.

This would have been a phenomenally stupid thing to do for most people, but Erick was able to weather any casual trap these days, and most anything that anyone could throw at him.

With his hand in the Wall, Erick felt a ‘testing’ sort of magic try to read his soul, and then it returned a ‘negative’ result, or something like that. That was only an educated guess, but it was probably the correct one.

Magical turrets opened up on the roof of the house and began blasting Erick with [Force Beams]. The beams struck his Domain and splashed away like curving laminar flows. Some Beams hit the ground, hitting [Force Trap]s in the ground that promptly exploded underfoot. Others hit the [Alarm Ward] spells in the air, triggering them, causing a large wailing sound to pulse away from the house like a shrieking demon. It was probably a Thunder-based damage effect, but Erick couldn’t feel anything under his protections.

“Ahh… Fuck it.”

Erick dove into the house, shaping his Benevolence into a great dragon-clawed hand to rip the wooden shutters away from the door—

The interior of the house detonated.

It was not a large explosion, all things considered. The house remained, but the carpets, the drapes, the chairs, the windows, all turned to shrapnel, all throughout the house. Bare stone remained, heavily scorched. And then a massive [Cleanse] spilled throughout the entire manor, wiping away everything that had been destroyed. Anything that Erick might have wanted to find was gone, and what’s worse, is that the final burst of cleaning spellwork had erased the manasphere; there were no bits of shrapnel to [Mending Aura] back into furniture, and whatnot. The house was now empty of all normal clues.

Erick sighed a little.

And then he [Return]ed.

Once again, the house was as it had been, and Erick stood before the Wall of soul-checking magic.

He opened a [Gate] just past the wall, and stepped through onto a land that was devoid of any spellwork at all. Glancing backward, Erick saw that he had successfully circumvented the Wall spell. That magic hung in the air behind him like an ethereal curtain—

A wave of another ethereal Wall expanded from the interior of the house, touching upon Erick, and then the Thunder-based alarms and Beam turrets began again.

Erick [Return]ed to several seconds ago, back beyond the ethereal Wall spell.

These simple 10 second jaunts at the base cost of [Return] of 10,000 mana only cost Erick 500 mana each time. He could do this as much as he needed to do this. But...

Well…

Erick opened a [Gate] back to the front of the house, beyond all the defensive Alarm spellwork, and then he sent a telepathic question to Poi, who was still beside Archmage Wiloza, discussing the events happening right now.

‘I need to know about Seafoam Manor. How do you get in?’

Poi asked Wiloza the question, and after Wiloza furrowed her brow, and then answered, Poi responded, ‘She says Aroido just walks in, without anything special happening at all. The place is layered with defensive spellwork, but none of it activates on him. Blood Magic or Soul Magic keys, she suspects.’

As Erick watched Wiloza and Poi through Ophiel, as all that information came through, and it all looked truthful according to what he was seeing of Wiloza, he was still watching his own area, where he actually was. 

More specifically, he watched the Manor explode.

[Return].

Once again standing beside Goldie at the gate, Erick said, “This place is tied up tighter than a high-class bank.”

Goldie smiled a little. “Yes it is.”

Erick had learned a few things.

Firstly, that the house was actively being monitored. This would explain why it activated when it did, and why no Regency people had come out here to stop Erick. That raised another question, though, of why hadn’t the Regency asked him to stop this, if they knew he was here?

Also why had the monitoring person inside allowed Erick to even get this close without exploding the place already? Erick wasn’t sure. But since it was being actively monitored, that meant that the monitoring force wanted to see how far Erick could get… Maybe.

Erick was almost 100% sure that if an Aroido walked down this road, that they would be allowed inside, but Erick was not going to do that to any Aroido. The ‘Face’ that Erick had spoken to had seemed rather honestly horrified by this place...

Erick almost decided that he didn’t need to know what was in Seafoam Manor, but he knew this place was at the center of a lot of the horribleness of the dungeons, and whatever else might be going on around here. So he did need to figure this out.

So Erick opened a [Gate] to the secondary Pit, where the Aroidos had moved the dungeon entrances while dungeon 6 was compromised, and then he stepped through. Six black holes in the world held in the air, above a solid stone foundation, here on the other side of the mountain of the Pit.

Erick had kicked out the Regency overseers with Ophiel not ten minutes ago, and now Ophiel stood where those Regency overseers had been. A few Aroido had come out of the dungeons to all talk with each other, too, there in that not-private-at-all space. The Aroidos looked rather like triplets that each decided to style themselves differently, in order to be picked out from their clothes. One wore roughspun clothes, the other wore a thick leather belt, and the last one wore noble hand-me-downs. The three of them easily conversed with each other under the watchful eyes of Ophiel, but they all turned Erick’s way when he showed up.

Erick changed his mind about asking them to visit Seafoam Manor with him; he would ask, and see how they responded. “Any of you want to visit a foamy manor by the ocean with me?”

All three Aroidos went pale and started to protest—

“That’s fine,” Erick said, cutting them off. “I just need some blood, then.”

The three of them looked to each other.

Belt-wearing Aroido stepped up, asking, “How do you want to do this?”

Erick plucked the air, painlessly drawing out a baby-fist-sized ball of blood from Aroido’s exposed skin. It was just some Blood Magic he had made a while ago to collect samples for various reasons, and it worked well for stuff like this, too. As he floated that blood upon his hand, Erick watched as Belt-Aroido’s eyes went wide, and then fluttered. This was not enough blood to make anyone lightheaded, but Erick hit him with some [Greater Treat Wounds] anyway. It wasn’t a perfect blood-restoration magic, but he didn’t actually need a blood restoration spell.

As Belt-Aroido stood stronger and gathered his wits, Erick gave his thanks as he stepped back through a [Gate], his prize hovering to his left side.

He closed the [Gate] behind him and used a bunch of rapidly-cast illusion magic to do a few quick things. First, he used the blood to adopt Aroido’s Familiar Form, with his own [Perfected Polymorph]. Second, he made sure no one saw that, and what they saw, instead, was Erick stepping through another [Gate], going off to elsewhere, and leaving Aroido behind with instructions to walk forward, while he watched from afar so he didn’t disturb what might happen. A silent instruction from Erick had Goldie vanishing herself from sight.

Erick was rather sure that whoever was inside that Manor, watching, probably had [True Sight], but Erick’s illusions were good enough to fool that sort of spell about half the time, and he wasn’t faking his ‘new’ body at all; that was all real.

And so, Erick, as Aroido in body, but not in soul, walked forward, into the Alarm Wards of Seafoam Manor. Erick wasn’t willing to make an illusion of his soul, for that was practically impossible, anyway, and he probably didn’t need to.

The alarms did not trigger.

Erick smiled inwardly, but outwardly, he pretended to be Aroido; a worried mess, walking forward, stepping through [Force Trap]s and otherwise that did not trigger, even though they looked like they should. Erick knew at that moment that a very skilled Blood Mage had to be involved here, in some capacity.

Probably not a Blood Mage that Erick needed to worry about, though. Years ago, the knowledge of DNA had slipped to a few higher-ups in the world. The public knowledge of DNA hadn’t gotten out into the greater world at all, but some people were making big strides in figuring out how he could [Cascade Imaging] for [Cleanse]d blood. Both Kirginatharp and Quilatalap knew what DNA was, thanks to Erick. But then again, so did Kiri and some other high-ranking members of the Office of Enforcement, and…

Eh.

The knowledge of DNA was out there, but it wasn’t a problem yet.

The Blood Magic / DNA problem wasn’t even visible upon the Benevolent Sky, so Erick wasn’t too worried about DNA Magic. This wasn’t the first time he had encountered a set of spells coded to DNA permissions, either; that sort of magic was old hat, actually. Blood Magic was being used to do this exact sort of thing a thousand years ago.

And yet, the fact that he had gotten to the ethereal Wall again, without trouble at all, meant a few different things.

One, was that this place had blown up when Erick had involved Wiloza, but not when he had involved the Aroidos. Someone was looking at Wiloza, but not at the Aroidos. Or perhaps the magic here was actively checking up on Wiloza, and the Aroidos didn’t matter. Or maybe Wiloza was involved in this place more than Erick had suspected, and she had purposefully blown the location. But then again, no one had done anything between the time that Erick had first learned about this place, back there in the Pit when he was talking to Vanya and Aroido at the same time, and other people were undoubtedly [Long Range Scry]ing him then…

Eh.

Too many variables to suss out anything truly worthwhile right now, and it had only been maybe 15 minutes since he left the meeting with Vanya at the entrance to Dungeon 6. When you moved fast enough, a lot of the time other people just couldn’t keep up.

Anyway. Erick was at the ethereal Wall, and this time he pulled his Domain to just around his core and his head, leaving all the rest of his body completely unprotected.

He stuck his hand into the ethereal Wall—

“Tut tut, fake-Aroido,” came an indistinct voice from the air, “No Domains here, or else you’ll never know the truth about yourself.”

… Okay.

Lotta implications there.

Someone was watching.

That someone was able to pluck at many different separate threads of information out in the rest of the world, but did not know that the Aroido in front of him was Erick, or could not intuit that much. Erick had done that illusionary display back there to nominally fake out whoever might be watching, but he hadn’t given it his absolute best shot. Someone currently watching Wiloza at the Pit (and thus ready to explode this place) should have seen what Erick did with the Aroidos at the smaller Pit.

Though there were lots of smaller implications, too, but Erick considered the main series of ones, now raised by the words that had come from the air.

Every Aroido knew of this place, but didn’t want to come here, for to come here was to know the truth about themselves. Which usually ended up with them never being seen again.

Also, the system was loose enough to check on every ‘fake-Aroido’ coming through, and then accept them.

A purely soul-based checking system could do that, but Aroido had spoken of soul-drift, which was a common fault in repros when they got copied from each other, instead of from the original. Soul-drifting would have invalidated any sort of ‘Aroido-specific’ soul check in this case where there were many copies of copies.

Now, if there were only Aroido and the first generation of repros, then a soul check would have worked.

Blood Magic was easier to work with when it came to repros, though, for repros acted like a family line, and Blood Magic did family lineage checking very well. So it was possible this was all Blood Magic, and there was no controlling mind behind this spellwork at all, or at least a Blood Mage had left enchantments here, and those enchantments were supposed to take hold of Aroido when he crossed a threshold.

Erick hadn’t allowed that control magic to happen to him, but then again, whoever had placed this stuff was obviously familiar with Aroido’s spellwork, and he knew Aroido had a Domain, and so this Blood Magic enchantment was able to talk about what Aroido should not be doing in order to get his answers—

Ahh… Paranoia was causing Erick to think everything through, perhaps too much. This prognostication of a ‘storm not of Sininindi’s make’ and this [Onward]-fiasco were certainly freaking him out.

… So should he let the Blood Magic take hold?

Not a second had passed since the voice had spoken.

Erick answered, “I’m not like the rest of my brothers. I’m not insane yet and you’re not touching me.”

“A wily one, then! Well come on in anyway. Once you see the truth of yourself you’ll want me to take control of you anyway. All of you disappointments always do.”

Another eye-opening statement.

Erick didn’t go down the rabbit hole with that one, though. For now, he would play this event out until he reached the end.

The ethereal Wall opened up, pulling back like a curtain, and Erick stepped through.

The manor was exactly as it had been, but now there were no spells standing between him and the house. Erick had half expected to shift into a [Fairy House], or something, after walking past that Wall spell; to see everything from another perspective. But no. Seafoam Manor remained an enigma, all boarded up and growing weeds here and there.

“What’s supposed to happen now?” Erick asked, sneering in the way that Aroido had sneered at Soltic and Vanya, down there in the dungeon.

“Oh my,” said the voice. “You must be far gone if you don’t remember anything at all. Or maybe the one before you plucked those memories out, unknowingly.”

The wooden covering across the door began to shift, as under the spell [Woodshape], pulling aside, revealing a much nicer set of wooden double doors beyond. They were gilt with gold and silver, and those doors opened inward, revealing a hallway filled with opulence. Blue carpets, blue drapes, paintings on every wall. Seascapes with ships plying waves and storms, and coral vistas under sunny waves.

But as Erick walked forward, it was the portraiture that got his attention the most.

Pretending to be in a slight daze, Erick walked into the house, onto the blue carpet, to stare at the largest of the paintings, set above a grand staircase. It was a family portrait, with everyone wearing expensive clothes. Aroido was left-of-center while a woman sat in a chair beside him, two of their hands clasped together, while five kids from age 15 to 1 stood and sat around their parents. Three boys, two girls, with the youngest girl sitting on the woman’s lap, in her arms.

“If you accept my power, then you will know who they are,” said the voice.

“Tell me, instead,” Erick replied, making sure his voice was a bit shaky.

With too much hateful mirth, the voice said, “They’re you!”

“All of them?”

“Not the children, of course; those were just your first victims.” The voice took on a subtle, terrible wrath. “From eldest to youngest: Seyto, Matt, Aryi, Maya, and the baby, Silkie. You took [Force Beam]s to all except for baby Silkie. For the littlest one you just grabbed her and threw her down the stairs, thinking she was a demon. The only demon in the house was you.”

Erick breathed out, “I’m not responsible for who came before me.”

“… Huh.” A sudden [Scry] eye appeared before ‘Aroido’, glaring at him. “You’re not my creation at all, are—”

[Return].

“No,” Erick gasped, instead of saying what he really thought. He needed to drag out this interrogation a bit more, to get some actionable intelligence. “But I don’t remember…”

“A part of you remembers! A part of you knows your broken Truth.” The voice demanded, “Tell me your guilt, ‘Aroido’. Tell me, and I will wash it all away.”

Erick said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“You don’t even know her name, do you? You poor, broken thing. You come here out of some unknown duty, engraved within your soul as a final act to keep you from harming others, and you don’t know anything at all!” The voice taunted Erick the entire time it spoke. “Born of the union of Aroido and Frydrika and myself, you are our greatest achievement, and greatest failure. Your entire line was conceived in a confluence of Blood Magic and the idea of utter subservience to the Regency. Fake. Unreal. Liar and death-to-all. You were to be the greatest dungeon master the world had ever seen, and yet all you can do is live for a while and break horribly after five years, growing more and more erratic the whole time, until finally, you come here. TO ME.” With a condescending whisper, the voice said, “Ready to break yet again, and yet still following those final instructions anyway, trying not to break where anyone else can see.” With imperiousness, “Let me in and I will make it painless. It’s more than you deserve for what you did to our creators.”

“I— I could go to the Wizard, and he can [Reincarnation] me!”

Quiet laughter began to seep into the grand entrance, spilling out of every hallway and out of every air vent, before erupting from the very air in front of ‘Aroido’.

“HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!”

The level of sound would have qualified as an attack if Erick had been less secured in his own protective magics. He still pretended to hold his ears in pain, though. He pretended to struggle to turn away from the painting, to look toward the open doors behind him—

The laughter cut. The doors slammed shut.

The voice declared, “Die now, parent-killer, child-slayer, abomination-of-the-dark.”

The attack came from all sides. Blood spikes, mainly.

But Erick simply cast a [Time Stop], for he had done enough direct investigation with the construct, or whatever it was that inhabited the place. A [Familiar]-esque magic, perhaps? Maybe even an actual intelligence, locked away downstairs, or something.

Erick would have cast some of the various spells he had in order to find out better answers, since he was here, at the center of it all, but there was only one thing Erick couldn’t really do inside a [Time Stop], and that was to use any Script-granted magic at all. That magic was locked behind the Script Second and he was currently experiencing exactly zero of those.

Time Stop, instant, self, 1000 mana

Become the moment.

Lasts for 1 subjective hour.

He didn’t really need those Script-granted spells, though, and he didn’t really need to manually cast them, either.

His version of [Timestop] was really quite good, for it was fitted with such niceties as a [Cleanse] to keep his blood oxygenated and an [Alter Friction] to not burn himself (or the world) up as he walked through the air in the room. It also wasn’t a perfect [Time Stop], for he could still see. If time was perfectly stopped then no light could have reached his eyes at all. Erick’s version of [Time Stop] was more, as the text described, a ‘moment’.

And all he really needed was an undisturbed moment to suss out whatever was going on in this manor.

Quilatalap’s version of the spell cost a lot more and did almost exactly the same things, but Quilatalap’s version eventually turned the world dark all around him and anyone else he dragged into his [Time Stop] with him. He attributed Erick’s flavor of [Time Stop] to him being a Paradox Wizard.

Erick almost let his mind wander back to those moments when he was talking Time Magic with Quilatalap, and the few times he had done so with Phagar. But, no. He would do all that later; they’d have lots to talk about. Maybe not so much with Quilatalap, for he would be busy, but Phagar was literally always right there in the mana, waiting for his time to guide all people to their final destinations. Or to talk magic, in Erick’s case.

Later.

Erick walked into the house, following the frozen magic here and there, the layered Privacy spellworks inside the few mana-sense-opaque walls (mostly the outer walls), until he got to the kitchen. To his mana senses, the room looked normal; no large holes in the ground anywhere. But the large kitchen table was set oddly in the middle of the room, and that small bit of weirdness caused Erick to look closer at the table, and then, eventually, at the floor underneath the table.

The stonework under the table was composed of bricks and some Privacy spellwork layered through those bricks, just like it was all through the rest of this place. But there were scratches in the stone where the large table had been moved back and forth, and a conspicuous hole, about 1 centimeter across, lay in the very center of the stone. That hole was filled with some sort of Force Magic.

Erick shoved his sunform down the hole, breaking the Force spell, and then into several holes around the main hole. And then he lifted. Three bricks, all joined to each other, lifted out of the hole, revealing a depth beyond that was layered with even more Privacy spellwork.

For that, though, Erick just poked his sunform through, extending his soul past the well-made Privacy.

There was a cavern about the size of a bedroom down there. Mostly plain, open stone.

And it was occupied.

Force Magic hung all around the entire room. Most of the spells were [Scry] spells, looking out into the rest of the world; mostly to different parts of the property itself. A few [Scry]s looked over at Archmage Wiloza and also at Regency Castle, along with a few other high-profile places. Everbless. The Blue Temple. The harbor. And then there were the Alarm spells of the property, each lined up to a switchboard made of lights. Those spells filled up a quarter of the space. And then there were the killing spells, set to triggers here and there, alongside [Scry] spells on those triggering locations.

Erick wasn’t quite sure at the intricacy of what he was seeing here, or what all of it was for, but a lot of it seemed rather self-evident. If someone tried something untoward here at Seafoam Manor they would meet a grisly fate at the hand of the controller, down here in this room.

The controller, though, was a blood ooze.

Erick wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

There, in the center of the room, inside a bowl of Force that hovered above the stone, sat a bathtub-sized puddle of blood, viscera, eyes, and a few teeth. It was a very old blood ooze, for those didn’t usually develop those gory-bits until after several decades of life, at least. Since the thing had a myriad of tentacles extending from its mass, out into the room to control the switches on the Force Magic, it had intelligence, so it was very old. Dozens of decades, maybe. Over a hundred? Yes, over a hundred.

Maybe even 200? Who knew with these things—

Kirginatharp would know. Quilatalap, too. Several others, for sure. Oozes very rarely turned sapient, but of those that could, blood oozes were high on the list. Usually oozes were killed long, long before they got anywhere near to that point, for the life of an ooze was generally extremely violent.

But this ooze seemed rather well put-together. And it looked to be ‘at home’. That was the one main thing that showed Erick that this blood ooze was not a recently-transformed person. It was not like those blood oozes he had encountered over at the Sovereign Cities, back when they went to war with him and Charme had turned all those people into blood oozes. All those people were practically monsters after their transformation. Of those who had any wherewithal at all, they were desperately crazy, trying to get anyone at all to understand them as they fell to the madness of the ooze; rhythmic tapping to get attention, making sounds with their oozy body, or even casting some of the spells they knew in life, like using [Prestidigitation] to speak. [Telepathy] didn’t work on oozes, though, so that main method of communication never happened.

Those which failed to learn how to communicate fast enough, and get help fast enough, generally fell to their monstrous nature within a day. That didn’t happen to the Sovereign Cities, though; Erick and his coalition had been solidly on that job to ensure that no one got left behind.

Blood oozes in the wild could come back to some sort of sanity, though, if they were alive for long enough.

So this one was probably very, very old, but maybe only recently cognizant? That was Erick’s educated guess, for aside from the spellwork and the ooze, the room had one painting on one wall; one hint at how long it had been since the ooze remembered itself.

It was a different sort of painting; kinda weird, if taken on its own, but also kinda heartwarming, with everything else Erick had seen.

The ooze’s portrait was the same as the large one in the grand entrance way of the house; the one with Aroido and his wife and their five kids. But this painting also had the blood ooze in the painting, standing in its floating Force bowl, hovering behind and between Aroido and Frydrika like a protective force. A myriad of blood tendrils came out of that bowl and wrapped around both the humans’ shoulders in a protective sort of embrace.

The blood ooze was a member of the family.

Kinda odd? Kinda odd.

Erick had seen odder, though. All he had to do was look down, below that ‘family portrait’ in order to see ‘odder’, and to know that the blood ooze, while sapient, still had very non-human sensibilities.

A small collection of well-tended gilded glass boxes sat in front of the family portrait. Seven of them; not a single one of them looking old or dusty at all, unlike the rest of the stone hole-in-the-ground, where dust held in some of the other corners of the pit. Each of those well-maintained glass boxes held bones; carefully stacked and organized inside, with the skull sitting on top, looking outward. Each box of bones was arranged sort of how the people in the portrait stood.

Two boxes of bones were larger than the other five, and those went in the back of the arrangement, while the five smaller boxes held around those main two. The smallest box of bones had a faded blue ribbon sitting on the skull that mirrored the little blue ribbon on the little girl in the portrait; on Silkie. It was not the exact same ribbon in the painting, but it was close enough.

It was easy to tell what was going on there.

“… So this all seems like a horrible mess,” Erick muttered to himself. And then he had a thought. As he looked down at the ooze, he said to himself, “I never would have seen you had I not decided to dig as deep into this problem as I have. Perhaps it was the prophecy that made me go this far, but… Maybe I really have been ‘gone’ for the last eleven years.”

Erick pulled his hand back, and the cavern vanished from his Sight.

He went over to a chair and sat down for a think.

Two timeless minutes later, Erick went back to the hidden hole in the manor, stuck his hand through the Privacy, and did a whole lot of spellwork rather rapidly. First, he ended the [Time Stop]. As a flash of warmth from heated air passed across him, trailing all through the path he had walked throughout the house, Erick cast a [Slowing Enclosure] around the blood ooze.

That provided him with some more time.

He used that time to begin dismantling the spellwork all around the ooze, as the ooze slowly, ever so slowly, began to realize that something was happening. Erick made sure to disable all of the killing [Force Trap]s in the room, too. He was pretty sure that those had not exploded back when he had assaulted the place, and the place had exploded, before he [Return]ed to try something else. The ooze did have a final sort of contingency plan, though, in case it was discovered down there in his hole.

Erick excavated the kitchen, fully opening the pit below, while transforming back into his Apparent King, normal black-horn-crowned form, along the way. And then he went through the house, disabling every other explosive [Force Trap] he could find, which was a lot of them. More than a few of them were primed to explode the second they were disturbed, and Erick had more than a few accidents, but [Return] fixed those accidents, and since he was only going back the normal amount of seconds, his mana regen and his Intelligence could keep up with that mana expenditure.

A [Return] might move Erick back into the past, but it didn’t restore the mana he used to cast [Return]. It did, however, return all the mana he did not use to cast that [Return]. So it was easy to disable stuff when he was actually trying, since there was no need to keep anything intact anymore.

He had figured out the secret of this place.

Once Erick was through with the worst of the house cleaning, he invited Goldie inside, to help clean up the rest of the mess. But mostly she was to just stand there with him as he stood over the ooze’s pit. He was going to talk to the ‘monster’ now. Oozes didn’t have cores so they weren’t really ‘monsters’ in the classical sense of the word, but this one certainly looked the part of a monster.

Some would consider Erick a monster simply because of his core.

Erick dismissed the [Slowing Enclosure].

The ooze froze, suddenly shrinking down into its Force bowl spellwork, its many eyes turning upward to take in Erick. Watching the movement of its eyes was like watching vein-covered golf balls turning around of their own accord, inside a bowl filled with dark red gelatin. Those eyeballs were certainly attached to a living creature, though, for variously-colored irises went wide. Disbelief, anger. Sadness, hope; a lot of emotions passed across those eyes rather rapidly.

But no words came out of the blood ooze.

So Erick spoke first, “I am sorry that you think I do not care about Aroido, or, ostensibly, about you. I care about as many people as I can see, but my Sight is limited, for I am still just a person, like you. Do you want a [Reincarnation]?”

The ooze said nothing.

It was in complete, sudden denial.

It simply lay there in its floating Force bowl spell, five of its eyes trained on Erick, three of its eyes trained on Goldie. One of its eyes looked to Ophiel, on Erick’s shoulder.

Ophiel fluffed up a little bit, expanding to show more eyes on his wings. He exclaimed, “I have eyes, too!”

The ooze mumbled, “Why yes you do, little one—” And then he went silent again.

Erick recalled Ophiel back to his shoulder, and then he hopped down into the hole. The ooze recoiled a fraction as Erick landed without a sound. Now at eye-level, Erick stated, “I have a lot of things to clean up around here at Storm’s Edge. I feel like I don’t want you to be one of those things. So here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to ask you a few questions, and then Goldie up there is going to give you a full interview, while I move on. I’ll be back, though, and we can talk then. Okay?”

“… Okay,” said the bathtub of red gelatin, eyes, teeth, and various bits of living gore.

Erick nodded. “Okay. So, first question: The Aroidos go insane? Not hyperbole?”

“… They do. They were… They had too much of me in them. They… We tried to make…”

The ooze’s voice faded away. It was too scared to talk.

Erick nodded, though, for that was enough information anyway. This part of the Tidewalker family tried to make the dungeons work through a perfect dungeon master, created through blood magic and various donations from Aroido, Aroido’s wife, and this guy here. Quilatalap would probably have more to say about that.

“Final question for now: Do you have a name?”

“… Oozy.”

Erick raised an eyebrow, and then he went with it. “Nice to meet you, Oozy. I’m Erick, the Wizard, and by the time all we’re done here, we’ll make sure you’re assisted out of this hole you’ve gotten yourself into, both literally and metaphorically. Goldie will explain more. Also: Are you going to be a threat to anyone who doesn’t deserve it? Or do you only kill the Aroidos, as they are your failed experiment?”

“… I only kill the Experiments who go crazy. We tried fixing them but they… They always go crazy. It’s a soul problem, I think, and I can’t fix that, and... Frydrika was the only one who knew how to do that sort of magic, and the Experiment killed… All of them, except me.”

“But the ‘Experiment’ still works as the Regency wants it to work?”

“… The Experiment works well except when it doesn’t, near the end. At least that’s… what they tell me. I would have rather we never used them.”

“With any luck, I’m pretty sure that the dungeon master in there now will be able to solve the problem of the breaks, and I can take your ‘Experiment’ and give all of them new, real lives, so they won’t ever degrade again.” Erick added, “Just like I will do for you, if you want.”

“… I… I do want that.”

“Good! I want to help you, too.” Erick stepped into the air a half-step. “Goldie will take your interview from here. It was nice to meet you, Oozy.”

“… nice to… meet you, too...”

Oozy’s voice fell away, and never came back.

Erick flickered away in a flash of Benevolent light.

As he moved to his next location, he considered, for not the first time, what it meant to have non-human sensibilities. Yggdrasil was non-human, and he never had been, though he had been born of Erick and had grown up with Erick tethering him to reality. Yggdrasil had it easy, didn’t he. Sure, he had troubles in the beginning with being aware of what it meant to hurt people and animals and what not, but he had grown up fine, and soon, he would be out on his own, and making an avatar of his own, to experience the world through human-adjacent senses… Would he even pick a human form? Maybe not. He lived with the orcols and the arbors most of the time. He might choose to be an orcol.

Ophiel was another conundrum. How would he turn out?

Erick sort of smiled as he thought of Jane, how she had started off as human, but now she was a whole bunch of other stuff, too.

And he was a dragon, so that was freaking weird.

Non-humans all around… Not to mention, incani, dragonkin, harpies, shifters and all the rest.

Well anyway.

Everbless, the other most non-human entity in this land (that Erick knew of), still hadn’t shown. That was weird, too. Erick decided that he would go visit Everbless personally, if he didn’t show after this next major stop. Eventually, anyway.

There was a lot more work to do before he went looking for Everbless, though.

Erick’s next stop was at the Pit.

Poi and Archmage Wiloza floated along in the sky, upon the archmage’s Platform spell, overlooking the Pit as they spoke of current events and what would happen next. Erick was very glad that Wiloza was being as cooperative as she was, and he decided to say as much after landing on the archmage’s platform.

Wiloza did a professional, tiny bow with her head and upper body, saying, “I have a great deal of loyalty to the Regency, Wizard Flatt, but I know that we are not prepared to weather the storm that is coming; Sininindi helps, but she won’t help a sailor who won’t read the wind or know the tides themselves, and I see this wind and these tides very clearly.”

An unexpected sentiment, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been unexpected at all.

Erick said, “You seem more centered, too; I’m glad to see that, Wiloza.”

“I’m past the initial anxiety of knowing the storm is coming. I’m sure many people back in the Castle will take several more days to reach this point.” Wiloza gestured to the Pit, to the spaces where all the other dungeons except for 6 had been located until the Aroidos had moved them. Two of those black holes in the world were back in position, but the rest were still missing. “Aroido is past his terrible worry, as well. Nothing quite like a super power coming in and setting things to rights.”

Erick asked, “Do you know about Aroido’s true history?”

He tried not to make his words too accusatory, for he wasn’t quite sure what he was accusing, anyway.

Wiloza was already past being overly-worried about anything, though. “I know the larger sweeps of the story, but not the nuances. As I was telling your man: Years ago, in a bid to make proper dungeons, Aroido and Frydrika worked together to produce a repro that was perfect; him with his Force Magic, and then a bit of Soul Magic snipping from Frydrika. I don’t know the whole story, but it was a major horror show back when it first happened.

“The first repro or the second, we’re not sure, turned on them and their five children, killing them all.

“But by then we had ten Aroidos in a dungeon, and the one that had committed the deed was executed for his crimes. Augustive then handed off the Aroidos to me, for he couldn’t bear to work with them directly anymore.

“And so, for the last several years, the Aroidos have copied themselves into every dungeon they can get into, and they control the dungeons well enough for our purposes, which have always primarily been the disposal of monsters. But of course, they still sometimes go crazy.

“Augustive told me what to watch out for years ago, and I have seen what happens when an Aroido ages past his prime, and so, I guide them to Seafoam Manor. I’m not sure exactly what takes them over when they see that place, for Frydrika built something into their soul, or something like that. Whatever the case, they all always go inside, and they’re never seen again.

“That’s only for the ones who go crazy, or who are about to go crazy, and who don’t know where to vent their insanity. Sometimes the Aroidos simply get erratic out here and they have no respect for their lives, or something to that effect. They end up drinking themselves to death or going swimming with sharks to try and feel something, or… They’re sort of broken. But they work well enough, and we’re not going to execute them for being melancholic people.” Wiloza added, “But now that the secret is fully out, I believe that Augustive might pop that [Force Trap] and deal with the aftermath of executing them all as soul-abominations. A few people in-the-know have been calling for that ever since the Aroidos started replicating themselves inside their dungeons… You know we never asked them to do that. They do that on their own. They will actually be exceedingly difficult to remove from our dungeons.”

Erick listened intently, corroborating what he had seen back in Seafoam Manor with what Wiloza was telling him. “Thank you for telling me that. I only have one more question. Do you know about the blood ooze family member, living inside Seafoam Manor?”

Wiloza had been prepared for a great many proclamations from Erick, but she was not prepared for that. Her eyes went wide first, and then she narrowed her vision at Erick. “… There’s an ooze inside the Manor?”

“An ancient ooze, too. Centuries, maybe. With developed eyeballs and teeth and brain matter. Skilled in Blood Magic and able to use Force Magic, too.”

“No. I. Ah. I did not know that.” Perhaps sheepishly, she added, “I never went looking into that manor… for a vast number of reasons.”

“The ooze’s name is Oozy, and he has some odd sensibilities. He talks well enough, too.” Since that was enough investigation into the Aroido-situation for now, Erick changed the subject, “I’m taking Poi into the Castle. Do you wish to come along and answer questions, or will you be staying here?”

Wiloza banished her worried facade and looked back to the Pit. “… I’m going to stay here and have some talks with Aroido.”

“Ah. One last question about him.” Erick asked, “Do they have individual names? I am assuming not, but I can’t quite figure out why not— Aside from security issues with keeping the secret, but that secret is out of the bag now.”

Wiloza said, “They might have private names for use amongst themselves, but I don’t think they do. They like to trade on the expectation of Aroido being aloof and curmudgeonly, so they can be all of that without reprisal, and to be interchangeable with each other… They are their own little society, Wizard Flatt, and I could spend hours talking about what I know of them.”

Erick got the hint. “I would listen to those words, but I must move on as well.”

Wiloza nodded.

As Erick flickered away with Poi in tow, the Slime Mage resumed her work on the Pit. To be sure of what she was doing, though, Erick rapidly consulted with Poi, through [Telepathy].

‘What is she doing with the Pit?’

‘She was going for a trap to defend against Vanya’s workings, and she’s still doing that because she doesn’t trust any known necromancers, but she’s going to be adding in some intake areas and stuff like that if we get to that point. She does civic engineering on the side, and she’s made storm shelters before, so she knows most of what she’s doing.’

Erick extrapolated, and then asked, ‘Do you think she would like some help from House Benevolence in making the exterior of the shelter? Or would Stratagold or Oceanside be better contacts?’

‘She’s iffy with any foreign powers, so the answer to that really depends on how big you want to go with all of this.’

‘As big as necessary. 22.5-million-people big.’

‘I’m sure Archmage Wiloza will adapt.’

- - - -

The lower levels of Regency Castle were bustling with people preparing for a dungeon break or a necromancer attack, fitting themselves with armor or spellwork as they lined up in squads on small fields and on balconies here and there, all in order to hurry up and wait. Higher in the castle, in grand meeting rooms and otherwise, nobles and the servants of nobles argued over what would come next. The news of Vanya’s necromantic powers was spreading rapidly, though it had yet to reach any of the public.

A lot more people were stuck outside the Castle gates, simply trying to find out what was happening and why. Rumors abounded, and the Regent or Regency had yet to make a statement, and that seemed only to inflame the crowd. Some of those people were delvers who had Platformed themselves over from the Pit to try and find out what was happening. A few of the more violence-inclined people had fucked around with the guards, and then found out what happened; those worst offenders had been hauled away, off to some holding cells for the duration of this temporary crisis.

The guards also let in those who were of high standing, who appeared out of the crowd.

Erick did not go in that way, though. That would cause a scene.

Erick expected to make a few scenes, of course. The Storm Prophecy, as some people were calling it, was making the rounds rather fast. Because of that Prophecy, much of this riotous gathering was expected.

But for the Regency to take hours to make a proclamation one way or another spoke of… Problems.

Lots of problems, really.

Erick was rather sure that the Tidewalker clan, the people in charge of the Regency, and who were indeed ‘The Regency’ itself, were rather politically weak. Maybe magically weak, too. Sure, they had Archmage Wiloza, who was moving literal mountains back there at the Pit, but aside from nominal control of their guard and their army, they had nothing.

On the other side of the equation of the power of Storm’s Edge, lay the Storm Priestess, Tiza Nindi, and all the other people of Sininindi’s Church. Then there were the merchants and their various trade guilds, as well as the nobility. The Dungeon Guild also had a prominent place of power in the Regency, according to what Erick had seen over the last hour, through the Ophiel he had left scattered around the Regency Castle, spying on everyone.

And so, because of that spying, Erick knew where to enter the Castle.

Not through the front gate like any proper person, but through a swirl of white lightning, opened up directly into the most important meeting he could see happening at the moment. One where Tiza Nindi and a bunch of nobles all stood or sat around a large table, yelling at each other and at the Regent Augustive Glorious Tidewalker, who sat quietly at the end of the table, flanked by guards.

The room did not go silent as Erick entered. Instead—

“What the FUCK are you doing here!” yelled Storm Priest Tiza Nindi, her feathered hair puffing up behind her owl mask as she glared at Erick. “You’re the reason we’re having this crisis at all! You and your House stepping in where you don’t belong! What do you have to say for yourself!”

Erick wanted to ask why Tiza was coming at him with that rude tone, and all those disrespectful words, but he only got so far as, “The first time we saw each other you called me an—”

“You shouldn’t be here!” Tiza said, interrupting him, because he wasn’t answering her question, or prostrating himself before her, or, even better, simply leaving. So she yelled, “Leave, and respect the sanctity of The Goddess’s decree against your incursion into this land! We don’t want you here, and you shall not have contact with Everbless while we stand!”

“… The first time we saw each other you called me an—”

“Stop talking and leave Storm’s Edge to us! Go away, Wizard!”

Erick had had quite enough of that, thank you very much.

Now, he was very sorry for what he was about to do, for it was not right to shut people down as he was about to, but as he looked around the room he saw a few Storm Priests silently backing up Tiza’s words, and a few nobles who were waiting for weakness of any sort, in order to pounce and demand that the Regency capitulate to their personal desires for the future. There were a few people openly gawping that Tiza would speak that way to the Wizard, but those people were trying not to have that expression on their face, for no one here really liked the Wizard at all.

And then there was Regent Augustive Glorious Tidewalker, sitting on his chair, and probably a little bit drunk, all in order to deal with the people all around the room. He was probably drinking due to Erick’s presence, too, which was a slight problem.

So Erick was going to make all his problems go away.

First, Erick filled the room with his [Physical Domain], and then he turned off all other magics in the room at once, popping a good thirty [Scry] eyes in the process. The room went utterly silent, as the only power and sound in that place was now Erick’s.

Tiza Nindi briefly grabbed her throat as her words failed to come out, and then she advanced on Erick, prepared to slap him. She fell through a [Gate] instead, helped along by a little push of power. She ended up in the hallway, beyond the locked door, not five meters away.

She could come back in when Erick was done here.

Erick closed the [Gate], but he switched to his sunform, with his Benevolence Domain, and sound returned. It remained quiet as Erick spoke, “She called me an adulterer when we first met, at my Particle Magic talks well over 12 years ago. Haven’t seen her until today. I had thought that time might have mellowed her a bit, but I see now that that was never going to be a possibility. Still, though! How odd, that she would start off her conversation with me like she did. Well she’s outside the door, and banging on it, too, as I’m sure a lot of you can already see. Anyway.” Erick got to the meat of the conversation, “I wish to have a private word with Regent Augustive, and my needs override all of yours because the crisis is already handled, and the dungeons will be active again shortly and giving out more gold than ever before to whoever can brave the Dark. The shelter from the storm is coming along, too, and various other good things are happening as they get to happening.” With a small dip of his head, he added, “I am terribly sorry for running roughshod all over you and your lawful and noble duties, but since this crisis is a lot bigger than just Storm’s Edge, I and other major powers will become involved in this moving forward. Now if you will excuse my impertinence, I need to have a private conversation with your Regent, as I have already said.” Erick looked to Augustive. “Would you be so kind as to grant a private audience?”

Augustive instantly declared, “The Regency recognizes the counsel of Wizard Flatt—”

“I would ask to stay,” interrupted a self-important nobleman, in a sky-blue and gold suit. According to the manasphere that Erick had been looking through as he had spoken, that particular noble had been berating others in the room before Tiza came in and took that duty from him. Erick disliked the man, and then disliked him even more, when the nobleman almost sneered, as he said, “We have a right to be here. You do not.”

The man had pulled back from that sneer just in time, too, as though he had realized halfway through who he was talking at.

Erick simply opened a [Gate] to the side, which led back to House Benevolence, on the other side of the Letri Ocean. He gestured to the room, asking, “Augustive?”

Augustive got up and walked right through the [Gate].

Erick and Poi followed, leaving the nobles and merchants and otherwise right where they were, back in that meeting room.

- - - -

In a nice little room that oversaw the Gate District of Candlepoint, Erick sat a very cooperative Augustive down in a chair on one side of a nice little table, while Erick sat down on the other side. To the left side of the room lay a small, yet full bar, complete with liquor on glowing shelves, adding a certain multicolor ambiance to that part of the room, while the rest of the room held natural light from the large windows. Poi began mixing drinks without needing to be asked.

Erick still thanked him, though.

Augustive was still collecting his thoughts while that happened. He probably had a great deal of them, since he had two tendrils of thoughts coming off of his head right now.

Poi set a lemon whiskey in front of Erick, and a sunset wine cooler in front of Augustive. For a moment, the Regent of Storm’s Edge looked askance at the drink, wondering if it was poisoned or not, but then he realized that of course it wasn’t poisoned. Erick would just execute him out of hand if he felt like it.

Erick had to speak out against that obvious thought, “I’m not going to kill you, or harm your kingdom, or even step in and take any power away from you at all.”

“Pardon me if I disbelieve that, after all these shows of power.” Augustive took the offered drink, took a sip, and then said, “You have a stranglehold on trade through the Gate Network, and I’m sure one of those ‘nobles’ back there has probably been feeding you information that would see me beheaded, if only to pour more gold into their already-full coffers.”

Erick smiled a little at that, and then he took a sip of his own drink. It was good; Poi made the best drinks. As Erick held his glass in his hands, he said to Augustive, “Your kingdom is flourishing. You’re doing well. I didn’t see any homeless people and even the thieving kids by the Gates all go to orphanages with nice, if meager meals, at the end of the day. The streets are clean. The dungeons were working for what you wanted them to do. Tourism is up, and people move freely everywhere they wish to move. Everbless is a bit of a concern to me, but that whole circumstance will shake out with time. This latest problem will pass as all storms pass, and though some buildings will fall and people will die, the kingdom will survive under your authority.” Erick said, “But you could use some help. How can I help you?”

Augustive stared at Erick, thinking, his mouth in a little frown as he held his red drink in one hand. He swished the drink a little. He thought. He asked, “You’re not going to execute me for crimes against souls? With the Aroidos?”

“No. You did what you had to do, using the magics available to you, in order to produce a monster-trap that worked well enough. I’m rather certain that Vanya is on the case with that now, though, so if you leave it to her, then everything should work out well. I’ll probably be taking the Aroidos off of your hands and [Reincarnation]ing them in order to solve their long-standing soul-degradation issue, and the thornier social issue you have created. Probably going to give the blood ooze, Oozy, a new body, too.” Erick casually asked, “So who is he, anyway? She? They? I’m not sure.”

Augustive kept his stare on Erick, trying to figure out his game.

Everyone who never met Erick always tried to ‘figure out Erick’s game’, and since Erick had purposefully never dealt with Storm’s Edge, Augustive was experiencing that familiar phenomenon for the first time. Most of the world had dealt with Erick in one way or another by now, though, and while a bunch of places hated him because he would butt into their problems just like he had done with Storm’s Edge, if the problem was large enough, a lot of places loved him, too. Augustive had likely heard all of those stories.

He was trying to decide which ones were true.

Erick let him think for a little while longer, sipping his drink as he waited.

Augustive began, “The problem is myriad, and has been compounded recently with the understanding that, until now, everyone knew you would stay away from Storm’s Edge, to honor Sininindi’s request that you not visit Everbless. But even before that, we’ve had strong-headed people in Storm’s Edge for as long as the Regency has existed, and even before that, with the Sea Kingdoms, where they wrestled with pirates both legal and not. I don’t have much power as the Regent, Wizard Flatt, so I am thankful that you allowed us to have this conversation so far away from all those opportunists back there.”

“Please, since you are another head of state, you can call me Erick.”

Augustive’s shoulder relaxed the barest fraction. “Then I will do so… Erick.” And then he relaxed a little bit more, and said, “Oozy is a— was what remained of the old king of Storm’s Edge, back 275 years ago, when the Shades turned him into that. My ancestors locked him in a real dungeon in the bottom of the castle, feeding him and tending to him, for he was always partially cognizant. In the last fifty years he had even begun to talk and Aroido… Aroido grew up talking to him. He’s the one who really brought Oozy back to sapience. Frydrika, rest her soul in the sea, bonded with my cousin over Oozy, back when they were both just kids reaching their maturity. They all grew up together, with Oozy coming back to himself more and more… And then the Dungeons came along, and Oozy was fully a person by that time, and Aroido, Frydrika, and Oozy all worked together to tackle the problem I gave them; to make a repro that could truly hold the dungeons against all subterfuge and… Various other issues. We had a lot of problems over the years, Erick.” Augustive said, “And they managed to make their Experiment work. They put all of their power, Force, Blood, and Soul, into a repro that could truly defend the dungeons, and who I could also call on to use his [Force Domain] against problems of the Regency.

“And then their Experiment went insane and killed them all,” Augustive said with half a sigh. “The rest… I assume you must have already seen it. My people tell me that you went into and came out of Seafoam Manor.”

Erick nodded. “I have seen more than enough. Thank you for telling me the full story. Will Oozy want to become king again if I were to [Reincarnation] him?”

Augustive smiled and chuckled. “Gods no. You think anyone actually wants this job? Even the nobles who want more power understand that if they took this job they’d have less power and they’d get yelled at all day long. Ha!”

“So then we need to reorganize your governing, and probably add some people between you and your people, so you don’t have to deal with everything yourself.” Erick asked, “How would you like me to help with that?”

Augustive paled a little bit at the surety in Erick’s voice. “… You’re not joking.”

“I am not joking.”

Augustive said, “… I need to think for a minute.”

Erick put up a [Hasted Shelter] around the room. “A minute is an hour, so take your time.”

Augustive chuckled again, before going silent in thought.

Eventually, Augustive spoke of the plight of Storm’s Edge, where a handful of different councils oversaw the running of the city, and each of them tried to override the other all the time, with hardly any respect between any of them at all. There were only two facts that made the whole of Storm’s Edge tenable. Firstly, the largest, most powerful council was made up of the Priests and Sailors, and they were on the side of the Regency; they formed the power base of everyone else, though the merchants and the nobles were the ones that everyone usually listened to, since money was the true king of the world. And secondly, the Regency had the weight of centuries backing it up.

“But even the weight of history is one good propaganda campaign away from falling apart,” Augustive said, “The Tidecaller line has broken at least 8 times between when the Shades killed the last king, and now. My grandfather married into the house, bringing his son, my father, into the Tidecallers. I’m not technically a Tidecaller at all, except by my grandfather’s marriage to my grandmother.” He heavily added, “That little fact has led to many problems with the noble council. Mainly from the Stormsons and their never-ending quest to be the power-behind-the-regent.”

Erick hadn’t heard anything about the Maryols yet, and how they were in Regency custody, but Jarod and Glariol and Nero were likely far, far down on Augustive’s list of concerns. Erick would get to them eventually; it wouldn’t do to leave nice people as collateral damage from ‘Soltic’ and ‘Vanya’s’ visit to Storm’s Edge.

Poi refilled their drinks.

And the Regent talked with the Wizard for a while about everything wrong with the Regent’s kingdom.

Eventually, Erick introduced Augustive to Mox Dawnsider, his Overseer of the Exterior, saying, “Mox is a very capable woman, and I think you and her might already have something of a history, unless I am mistaken.”

Augustive smiled a little as he said to Mox, “I believe you were headed out to kill Hullbreaker last time I saw you, and now you’re working for a Wizard.”

Mox easily said, “I certainly can’t knock the perks of the job.”

Augustive chuckled. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but you are looking quite lovely.”

As Mox gave a diplomatic smile that was perhaps too much to be simply diplomatic, Erick decided to step back, saying, “You can contact me any time you have an emergency, Augustive, but, like you, I am a rather busy man, so you’ll probably be working with my Overseer of the Exterior most of the time, or at least someone in her office. If you two would be amenable to setting that up, then afterward I can take you back with me when I go back to Storm’s Edge.”

Augustive assumed his metaphorical mantle of Regent, as he said, “We would be amenable to this arrangement. It was wonderful to speak with you, Wizard Flatt.”

“And you as well, Regent Tidewalker.”

Mox gestured to the door. “If you would follow me, please, Regent.”

The Regent and the Overseer left together.

When they were gone, Erick turned to Poi, and said, “Looking back on it, I expected Mox to be married with kids by now, but she’s kinda married to the job. But maybe Mox hasn’t actually found anyone yet, because she likes them older than the 30-somethings I have running around here?”

Poi chuckled. “Could be. Could be.”

Erick hummed, then said, “On a more serious note: What did you think of Augustive as a Regent?”

“You work as a power base because you have actual power, and you know how to use soft power when needed. Augustive Tidewalker is politically savvy in all the ways a noble can be, which is why he has survived all these years in the political storm that is Storm’s Edge, but he has no actual power to fall back upon. So when you offered real power, he seized the opportunity.” Poi said, “Everything he has done in his entire career has followed that sort of path, which is why Storm’s Edge is as fractious as it is, with too many powers all vying for control of their own spheres of influence. So the question then becomes, what sort of sphere of influence are you looking to gain out of Storm’s Edge?”

“I just want the dungeon to work.”

Poi nodded. “Mox and the Office of the Exterior already have a lot of experience with dungeons; even before your supposed [Onward], they were overseeing the normal, Elemental Essence dungeons and also Benevolence Tower. I’ll make sure that’s where House Benevolence focuses their efforts.” Poi asked, “But speaking of [Onward], and Benevolence… Do you think we’re in another Fateful situation Like with the Worldly Path? Now that you’re ‘back’?”

Erick chuckled, but that didn’t last long. With a sigh, he said, “Gods I hope not.”