A Survivor's Guide to Planetary Apotheosis [Postapocalyptic Survival, LitRPG, and Dungeon]

Head down on the table, an unhealthy amount of food converting within his belly into metabolic energy his body desperately needed, Alexander Gerifalte swore again by all the gods above, below, and in between, that he hated this magic horseshit. Why was he being punished for preventing a dungeon from erupting right under their noses? How did the energies confined within the crystal on the precipice of its own little apotheosis know he had been the one to release them? By what rules had his little nexus of fuckery been targeted for their destination instead of the others standing no farther than he?

Moans of discomfort rose from his clenched jaws unwilling. His core hurt. It was the worst case of gas, indigestion, heart burn, and general bodily discomfort packaged together. With a little bow of ravenous hunger to go on top. His body knew he couldn't eat anymore. His brain knew he couldn't eat anymore. But that didn't mean shit to whoever was leaning on the gluttony switch. Normally self-composed, stolidly concentrated on getting his business taken care of, this little situation had to be put to rest or his focus was shot.

A presence at his side, thankfully, distracted him from his internal torments and he looked up at about crotch level upon Grace Miller, prompting his gaze to head on up, up, up until he finally reached her mildly concerned face.

"I like to think I keep my thumb on the pulse of the weird shit that goes on around here, but I'm going to need a second opinion on what the hell just happened." She stated, no nonsense tones indicating her level of 'over it' with regards to things generally.

"That crystal the Adventurers wrestled out from underneath those goddamn spiders was a goddamn baby dungeon core. It was trying to spawn a Rasatala dungeon under our feet. Is this place some kind of magic hotspot or something? Because it shouldn't have done that, that's way too much coincidence." Alexander answered, voice slightly muffled from his face still being mostly tucked into his arm, except for one misery laden eye meeting the deep blue of Grace's.

"We sited the Guild Hall on a hotspot, there was a dungeon core here once, its woven into the wards the runecarvers put around the joint. Then that crystal was a gestating dungeon core. Were those flashes of light it starting to jump start a new 'Contested Zone'?"

He nodded. Hard data was tough to come by, but when the Scroll said imminent, he was of a mind to take that as right damned now.

"And you just decided to chop it up, just like that?" She inquired, not quite certain what to think about his rather direct approach to the situation.

"Works on the big ones, I figured why not?" He replied.

"It never occurred to you that that much mana concentrated into one tiny little crystal might just fuckin blow us all to kingdom come?" She challenged.

He hadn't thought of that.

"Didn't think of that." Alexander murmured, wondering how likely it was that the spatial distortion, the mana flows spiraling to twist reality into a slice of Rasatala might have scattered them all over the place.

Then again, that wasn't how dungeons operated. Killing a dungeon invariably resulted in its magics being consumed by its killers. It was the rules. He could why and why not about it forever, but that's how it worked. Gaia spun and said not why.

"Didn't matter though, even if it killed us all, that's still better than a Rasatala dungeon core opening up right in the middle of New Chicago. It'd have killed thousands. Maybe tens of thousands." He added, conjuring up the worst-case scenarios that had raced in his subconscious that had forced his hand to the only act that he knew would prevent it.

Grace Miller froze at that statement. Considering.

"Okay," She allowed, "I can see where you're coming from. Didn't expect that kind of hero shit from you. You seemed to like living too much."

A burble from his guts made him look down into the small comfort of the crook of his elbow. Gods this sucked. Sucked so, so hard.

"It's a reflex, don't read anything into it. My arms move by themselves when it comes to killing dungeon stuff." Alexander muttered, slightly embarrassed by any mention of heroes.

He was a hunter of things. It's what motivated him, beside keeping his family safe, that and the desire to reverse the petrification of his parents. Everything else was just steps up that staircase.

"Uh huh." Captain Grace replied doubtful.

Running off to go stop two monsters, one of which had almost killed you a day ago, so they couldn't escape to wreak havoc another day, breaking down your own body to do it, but sure thing, no hero shit. Then again, Marvin and she had also faced the monster and they'd been absolutely chomping at the bit to take another swing at it, so maybe it's just how Adventurers were built. They lived to pick up the gauntlet.

"Well, it is what it is, I'm not gonna fault you for coming to that decision, last thing I need on my plate is a fresh piece of hell under my boots. On to the next item on my growing agenda, what gives?" She asked indicating the empty stew bowl and plate, bread crumbs and gravy smeared across its surface the only evidence of the vittles recently consumed.

A single finger raised and the Venator bent his will on the roiling internal energies. An impulse, driven by intuition or instinct, or whatever, said that being too full of magical bullshit could be remedied by releasing some of the pent-up energy. A magical blowoff valve of sorts, to ease the pressure. He put that rough plan into action, wrapping himself in the dense shroud of entropic mana in a single huge expenditure of his powers, the way he'd done to the Slayer. He forgot, in his desperation to relieve the awful feeling inside himself, that his entire body weight was being supported by the table he leaned on and, when his magic dissolved the bonds between the wood fibers and it evaporated where he touched it, he fell through the table to pile onto the floor beneath.

Captain Miller scowled down at the Alexander shaped hole in what had been a very fine table and asked, sarcasm weighting her words, "Feel better now? Cause you still haven't answered my question."

Alexander sat up, relief at the sudden freedom from internal distress, and smiled at the blond giantess, "Ayuh! That did the trick. Thanks."

He opened his mouth to tell the waiting woman what she wanted to know, half to make it make sense to himself, and she held up a hand, stopping him.

"Wait! Might as well not have to repeat it, let's head back to the conference room. Captain Samantha is swamped, we're getting a flurry of reports from field teams, but she'll want to hear this. Also, you owe the guild a dining table. Now get your ass in gear and follow me, we weren't done with the debrief before you ran off." Was her hastily delivered injunction, and she departed, crimson cloak fluttering as long legs departed.

Over her shoulder, the beauty queen flashed, "And now that you're a fellow big eater, I'm expecting some groveling for the eating jokes, yeah?"

Damn. He had that coming, the irony gods had gotten him pretty good.

"Can't catch a break around here." He grumbled, picking himself and dusting dissolved table from his clothes, before tottering on still unsteady legs to follow the fast-moving Guildie Officer.

Captain Twin Sabers Samantha was seated at her place in the conference room, papers piled up around her as she had had her work brought to her, reports coming in hot from the fire line that had been sweeping the city. He'd only been gone for ten minutes, max, but things had gotten stirred up even more by the Adventurer party discovery. On his way through the doorway, he was almost bowled over by the four eyed Outsider Captain, Tosh Alexander thought his name might have been.

"Oh! Sorry about that cousin!" The slimly built Guildie Brass called, waving as the two eyes nearest Alexander rotated to focus on him, the other two staring ahead to keep track of where he was headed.

"Gotta get gone, you've rustled up some interesting stuff!" The red cloaked Outsider said, almost eager.

Absent the discomfort of the oversaturation of his core by the unfortunately incomplete metamorphosis that accompanies dungeon core subsummation, he was in a better head space to find out what was happening.

Twin aquamarine augers from the Guild Master drilled into him and she beckoned with a wave, her features softening somewhat as he approached. Grace Miller had leaned way over to whisper into her ear as he approached and stood to the side. It was odd seeing the usually in charge lady taking a back seat but he was getting a taste of the Guild operating on war footing and they were united behind a single will.

"Got the run down, Ranger Gerifalte. Seed core tried to feed on the juice running our wards and damned near opened a dungeon inside the Guild Hall. It was a good call to stop it. It's the after part that I'm worried about, what happened to you, why'd you run off like that?" Demanded the Peacekeeper commander.

"Not a hundred percent, I've never had anything like that happen." Alexander confessed, "But I heard the Gaia voice, only it was interrupted. I think the incomplete dungeon core hit me with its infusion, like they do when you terminate a mature one, but it was subthreshold, my body and core got pushed to the edge of tier three. When I took a peek at the Eximius, they both had a note called 'tier strain' in their Scrolls."

A bothered gnawing of his bottom lip preceded the next bit, he was guessing now, but this information was relevant to maybe answer a few questions regarding the behavior of their people eating neighbors.

"I think they've been feeding people's cores to the dungeon seed, the realm shard it was called in its Scroll. As a result, they were both on the edge of tier four, just like your guys thought. Only, they weren't letting themselves cross the threshold, I think it would have emptied all the mana they were storing to give to the dungeon core." Alexander narrated, putting together what pieces he had.

"Tier strain, it feels like your core is about to pop, and, when the warning popped in my Scroll, it said drastically increased caloric intake was part of that, like the body is being eroded by its own energy and has to metabolize faster to make up for it. When I say I had to eat or maybe die, I'm not joking. I'm hungry, even now, and I just ate enough for two of me normally. I'm just guessing now, but I think when we cut them off from being able to feed properly, they got desperate, got sidetracked from their original mission, didn't want to lead pursuit back to the nest. I think they were victims of success. What has me fucked up is that they were willing to die rather than tier up and lose the stored mana, that's not how dungeon spawn I've ever seen behave." The experienced dungeon hunter explained.

Captain Turing tapped the pen held in her hand against her forehead and compared that information to her own experiences with the things that crawled from the dungeons. Malignant cankers, most of them, hostile, aggressive, almost frenzied in their need to kill and eat anything sapient that they could. That included the Otherkin refugees, so far as her reports had confirmed. But nowhere had selflessness been a part of that, they had functioned as if competing with each other to be the one that fed the most. There had to be reasons for that. Could it be that they fed on human cores the way humans fed on dungeons? They taking the little bites while humans grew in large leaps upon the clearing of a realm's magic heart?

She continued her tapping.

All except for the hive mind or overlord types. Some dungeons had sentient bosses, and those used the dungeon spawn as their own minions, commanding, controlling, directing them. Perhaps then, these Eximius as they were called, were not independent actors. Perhaps they were merely very competent agents of another will. Obviously, the answer was connected to Rasatala, the realm from which they originated. Unfortunately, relatively little data was at hand with regards to that place. None of it pointed to anything good.

"And you believe that these demon spiders, they were feeding a dungeon seed. That might explain why there was a third monster, hidden, one that did not appear to leave the nest, and a score of hatchling monsters tasked with guarding it." She said, phrasing it as an implied question.

"That's my best guess, Captain. I don't have data to tell you anything more than that. Those monsters tried very, very hard to lose me in the wild, and they also gave it their best shot to end my pursuit while taking a large number of victims, which doesn't match their old pattern of slow, methodical hunting, of wearing their victim's cover to avoid notice. Rapid growth, insatiable hunger from tier strain, with the almost ready to expand dungeon core thrown in, and the heavy guard, I don't know what else makes sense." Alexander conjectured, hoping somebody was able to assemble the puzzle pieces he'd been picking up along the way these fifty days gone.

"Grace? You've got a good head on your shoulders, how do you see it?" Captain Turing requested.

Grace Miller shrugged, "Fuck if I know." She answered immediately, adding with more authority, "But I also don't believe in coincidences, or that we're so lucky that there's only one nest. These jerkwads were smart. Too smart to put all their eggs in one basket. Maybe New Chicago was their first choice feeding ground for opening that dungeon, but I'd bet my sword they had other options. Hell, given how sneaky these pricks have been, who's to say that some of the settlements West and South, ones that didn't have a Ranger Gerifalte over there to ruin the racket, or Peacekeepers to make them play nice, aren't infested. What are the odds these things aren't playing the same game elsewhere?"

Captain Turing nodded along, following her junior officer's logic, "Then you think they're pulling the old okie dokie on some of the smaller settlements? Why aren't we hearing from them about a mess of their neighbors gone missing then, like Concord did?"

Another shrug, and the Oread said, having bent most of her mind to this mystery since the advent of their strange visitor and the unusual missive for help from Governor Bastian days prior, "Maybe because there's less to eat, they appear to need at least tier two. Normals won't work, they don't have a core, and it stands to reason, given how over-tuned the fuckers were, that they were more inclined to go after tier threes, more efficient that way. Not as many of those in the outer settlements, the New Chicago Adventurers try to scout up talent and we recruit heavy too from all those places. Maybe because they can't feed as quickly anywhere else. Harder to disappear a dozen people a year in a place that only has a couple hundred to begin with, compared to around here, where a couple hundred go missing every year, to say nothing about Otherkin, who stay pretty tight lipped. Out in the smaller settlements, if it were me, they'd go real, real slow. No hurry, they already took six years to get this far, no reason to rush if there's nothing nipping at their heels."

More tapping of the pen and Alexander was glad again that smarter people than he was were putting their noodles on the problem.

"Alright," Decided the Peacekeeper Guild Master, "I think we have the score, at least enough of the picture to get the Loremasters a running start. Hand them a problem too vague, something too broad to tackle and you could lose one for weeks while they narrow it down. I'll draft up the request, I had it half written anyway, this just adds to what we knew."

The pen pointed toward Alexander now, "You and Captain Pruitt carry on as you were," Ordered Captain Samantha Two Sabers, "It's probably thanks to the pair of you that the Infiltrator didn't take our borrowed rook here off the board straight away. Nothing like a knight and bishop to keep the position locked down. Time for the queen to hit the field, I'm going to take Henry and Yu and we're going to lead three squads to clean the surrounding settlements. I'll leave it to Tosh to keep all four eyes on the house while I'm gone. Between him, Siddiqa, and Mason, not to mention you and Marvin, that's five red cloaks holding the fort, five more sweeping the city, Molly's going to keep the outsourced Adventurer parties going to shield the outer city and farms, and we three are going town to town to see what's lurking around."

Alexander and his escort were summarily dismissed at pen point and he was led away as documents with orders born by sprinting Guildies flew to their destinations at all speed. Away from the imposing force that was the Guild Master, Alexander felt like he could breathe easier.

"Whoo, she's intense." He commented.

Grace smirked at that description of the top gun, "Damn right. But that's why we're the best. Now, since you can barely walk, let's go rescue Marvin from his old lady's clutches, I figure we ought to make our resident alchemist Horace happy and see if you can be useful there, since he put in a request the other day."

Alarm etched itself across his features.

"You, uh, think that's a good idea? I mean, you know. Husband, wife, two near misses back to back, that sort of thing? I dunno, Captain. Captain Pruitt, he might be, er, out of uniform." Alexander whispered, not voicing directly his near certainty that Captain Marvin Pruitt would try to encase them both in ice if they attempted to pry him from his partner.

It was the calmest ones that, when they snapped, they came completely unglued.

"It'll be fine, I've known Marvin a long time. He's chill." Captain Grace asserted with confidence.

Ten minutes later, both of them sat next to the kitchen hearths beneath blankets, ice melting from their hair and clothes, shivering at the slow to let go bitterness of cryomancy.

"C-Can't believe that b-bastard ice popped us." Muttered Captain Grace, yet again, still slightly in shock.

Alexander opened his mouth to get in his 'Told you so's' but a fierce narrowed glare his way forced a tactical withdrawal from that plan, and he said, lamely, but diplomatically, "Oh y-yeah, you know, t-totally uncalled for. Cold snapping two people j-just for walking in the door, that w-was way out of line."

Not that Alexander was entertaining any notions of exacting revenge. Captain Marvin Pruitt had warned his junior officer quite explicitly. Specifically, the man had said, "Miller, you open that curtain, I'm gonna show you the back of old man winter's hand."

Grace Miller, misinterpreting that statement as more of Marvin's dry humor was caught mid-sentence, coming through the curtain, "C'mon Marv, can the jokes, we got wor-" and then the old cryomancer nailed her, and Alexander got pelted by a miniature blizzard as collateral damage. More damaging than the mild frostbite though was probably the sight of caramel cheeks pumping up and down, just before his face was full of sleet. He could have done without that sight being burned into his retinas forever.

"He's mine, bitches! You lot find somewhere else to play for a while." Had come Sergeant Diane's breathless jeer from behind the curtain, to put a nail in the coffin of Captain Pruitt going anywhere.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Now, here they sat letting the heat of the fire drive away the last of the frigid magic that had bathed them so briefly. A cup of coffee helped. The caffeine also helped dull the insistent pangs of hunger that refused to completely subside. As much as he liked playing with alchemy, he was honestly kind of glad to be sitting around doing nothing. Normally that would have been a terrible punishment, but he was just about over this day completely. Had it really been this morning that they'd come across the horror show of Mary and her squad being dismembered? Holy fuck what a day.

"What gets me, i-is there's no way she c-could have done much more than l-lay there, that antitoxin doesn't even work that f-fast to neutralize the paralysis. Th-There's a joke in there somewhere about ice and d-dead fish, I just can't p-put it together." Alexander contributed, which earned him another stink eye from Captain Grace.

"W-What?!" the young hunter from Falcon's Rest objected, "That's funny, I d-don't care who you are."

He'd be damned if he wouldn't try to find the humor in just about anything right now, if only to take his mind off his stomach.

"F-Fine!" Grace admitted, seeing where the shivering dark-haired hunter was coming from, but she wasn't going to lower herself to sleazy jokes about her senior officer's sex life. Yet.

"And I g-guess I owe you an ap-apology, you did try to warn m-me. I just didn't think they'd be, you know, r-right there in the clinic. F-Figured it was more Marv cuddling and whatnot. You th-think you know a fucker, and he puts a deep freeze on you for int-terupting some gross expired p-people banging." The platinum blond Oread apologized, accepting her role in their being here, teeth chattering.

Another ten minutes or so, by the wax of the candles dripping from their candelabra, and the shivering subsided. The Marid cryomancer packed a whollop when he wasn't totally caught flat footed. Damn spiders had gotten off lucky.

Standing, Captain Miller rose to her full stature, flinging out her cloak and discarding the wool blanket, about ninety percent dried off from the snowmelt that had soaked her blouse and hair. Break time's over, Alexander figured, and he rose to join her, getting a good stretch in while he did, and a jawbreaker of a yawn to boot.

He plucked thoughtlessly at the wool lint that clung to the spider thread still sticking to his overshirt, worrying the fabric to no avail. Nothing was separating the monster silk from the fibers of the shirt.

"Welp! Want to go see this alchemist of yours?" Alexander offered.

Grace knuckled the corner of her eye and yawned in response to Alexander's and said, with a touch of hesitation before she did, "Yeah, let's go see Horace. Maybe that weird set of crafting traits will come in handy, since you can't do field duty and my orders are making sure nothing creeps up behind you with a knife. All that running today and I didn't get to lift my sword not a single time in anger."

A fist that would have been almost dainty if not for its size struck a palm with a sound like a bat hitting a ham and Captain Miller gave voice to a common refrain from Alexander's years spent under lock and key, unable to haunt the Green outside the city walls, "This blows! I want to fucking stab something right now."

"Not it!" Alexander cried with a raised hand, a reflex born of living with a battle nut Amazon warrior who wasn't above using a surprise sparring match with her husband as a means of blowing off steam, if he proved slower than the third of their troika.

"Do I even want to know?" Asked Captain Miller, regarding the immediacy of that trained response.

"Probably not." He answered, reddening slightly in his olive cheeks while he lowered his arm slowly.

"So weird. Let's go." And, with that, they were marching along toward an innocuous door that actually opened up into a stone staircase that spiralled downward.

Cool dry stone, seamless, without mortar or joint, meaning stone mage crafted, surrounded them and torches burned not with wax but with firestones, charged with mana and without producing smoke, just heat, light, and flickering red-orange flame. They descended two flights of stair and exited through an arched entryway into a set of gridlike corridors.

"I shouldn't have to say this out loud," Grace began utterly serious, "But you'll not speak of this level or anything you see here to anybody that isn't wearing a red cloak, and in confidence, got it?"

"But of course, Senorita bonita!" Alexander readily agreed.

A grunt from the Guildie Officer took that for assent and they proceeded to march, or rather, her to march and he to hobble along as best he could, until they reached a sturdy ironbound oak door with a clear glass window, reinforced by wrought iron bars. Into this Captain Miller looked, then delivered three echoing blows to the door.

"A moment!" Came the reply, muffled heavily by the thickness of walls and door.

Several latches and a heavy deadbolt were undone and the six inch thick door, moving easily on perfectly mounted hinges despite its weight, swung inward to reveal a simulacrum of Saki's lab. White stone tile floors, some of the tiles scorched or pitted, a few particularly disfigured ones stacked against a far wall, exquisite glassware in a host of sizes and shapes hung in their place upon pegboard walls and shelves. Large sinks set into black chemtop benches, probably salvaged from the wreckages of labs that had once been active in the city, were piped with copper.

The knobs were missing from one such sink, preventing it from being used and the reason for its decommission was clear: ragged holes eaten through the copper pipe where some material had been attempted to be disposed of and had objected strenuously. Other than that, fume hoods, Bunsen burners, distillation apparatus, and bellows operated manual vacuums, it was a professional job, and he missed being Saki's assistant suddenly. They did good work together, work that helped everybody in Falcon's Rest.

Even the mix of sterile cleaners and the slightly acrid notes of acids were familiar.

Standing in full protective gear, gloves, apron, goggles, was the man who had run off with joy holding a vial of Eximius poison harvested from Alexander's wound. He seemed confused as to why they were there.

"What gives, Captain? You never come down here. Oh! I see you still have that spider bait tied to your belt. Do you mind if I borrow him? Wonderful stuff we pulled out of his side, I'd eat dirt for a mile to get one of those spiders to milk. And that thread! Wonderful, nasty stuff! Adhesive is incredible at binding to organic polymers, it hasn't responded to anything I've tried as a solvent yet. The thread is distinctly metallic but optically almost totally clear, absolutely amazing." Yammered the chemist faster than Alexander was prepared to follow.

Grace Miller squeezed the bridge of her nose, eyes closed against the headache that dealing with Alchemist Horace always gave her.

She deliberately only answered the first question, ignoring the rest of the thought vomit the man always hurled her way, "I'm here because you requisitioned the presence of our guest when he was free. Well, as of this afternoon, he's got a few hours free. Make best use of that time, we've got a semi-crisis topside and Ranger Alexander has been putting in long hours."

"What's my safety word?" Alexander asked, and got a roll of blue eyes in return.

Organic chemists were crazy, everybody knew that. You never worked with one without having an exit strategy. Saki's Boomsticks were just one piece of evidence to that effect. Their manufacture had cost him most of the hair on his body, a change of clothes and her a fair portion of her marvelous crimson skin, along with shrapnel, on several occasions. Horace was worse, not just a chemist, but he had more than dabbled in theoretical physics since the Pulse had left him alone, and badly burned in an alkali metal fire when all the safety equipment failed in his research lab, as Alexander would learn in the next little bit.

"Nothing too outrageous, Alexander, let's just swap some recipes or techniques, rather than have the two of you trying to distill that poison into something that turns into Scarecrow's fear powder or some stupid damned thing." Captain Grace suggested.

Three hours later, forearms clasped in a binding agreement, Alexander had made a rather substantial sale of Direbee honey in precise dosages, whose mind-altering properties frequently helped creative sorts discover new ideas or hidden connections in their arts when properly applied. It was similar to the claims of many artists and engineers that a joint or bump of cocaine was just the thing to get the problem-solving juices flowing.

In return for the Direbee honey and the Alexander-Saki method for refining magic stones, Alchemist Horace would send a shipment containing a case of Peacekeeper Panacea, a recipe for an impressive alchemical treatment for leather and textiles that radically improved their toughness and imperviousness to water, and Horace's own method of using ultrasonics and forced mana passed through systems of lenses made of carved dungeon spawn core crystals to concentrate to a focal point that had applications in achieving greater mana purity than the solutions based method he and Saki were using.

In all, a productive chat. Horace was good people, for a lunatic.

"I hadn't expected a scientist from the assassin of Falcon's Rest. Honestly, they're wasting your talents. You should be in a lab, assisting the research teams, not poking monsters and oath breakers to death. We could kill a lot more of them if we figure out how to whip up some dungeon specific Sarin." Horace was saying.

"Yeah, well, you know, there's always bigger fish. The guys on the research tide of the team are too good, they don't need me underfoot, I'm an applications guy. Besides, nobody else I've met has entropic magic to kill the meaner dungeon spawn so that's my job. I'll pass that idea to search for antinodes to mana types though, there might be somebody with the right background, or who gets the magic side of this better, that can find a way to neutralize specific dungeon spawn Arcana using that nifty set of lenses you've been playing with, if we can ratchet up the output." Alexander returned.

"Aether optics and manafluid dynamics are the new hotness, I'm gonna write the book on it." Boasted the madman and Alexander found he believed him.

"Yeah, well, it's been great you two, but we're overdue for sack time. You too, Horace, you look like you haven't slept in a bit, that's an order." Commanded the Oread, who'd passed the time reading from a paper back kept in her back pocket, one that appeared far too small in her hands.

"Oooohhh," Moaned the dejected scientist, "But look at my blackboard! Can't you see it? I'm this close," said the goggled man holding his finger and thumb an eighth inch apart, his pristinely bald head shining under the steady glow of aetherlights, "to having a model for separating manaflows. There's a way to use Gaian gem species as a prism, I know there is! Like silicon dioxide in various geometries can separate light into its bands, there's an analogue for mana and I'm almost there!"

Like a parent with a child that didn't want to go to bed, Captain Miller herded man out with them, his lived in coat appearing, smelling too, not to have been changed in a couple of days.

"I promise Horace, I'll have the corpses of those dungeon spawn hauled down here straight away. You can harvest whatever you can, you have a whole two days before the Phoenix sun burns the bodies up." She bargained, finally getting him to accede to being led from the research department hidden below the Guild Hall.

One of the oddities of Gaia, dungeon spawn that were killed and left didn't rot. Rather, under the third dawn's light, they evaporated. Whatever otherworldly forces held them together faded under Sol's glare that day, when Gaia's mana refreshed her children and herself. Parts of the beasts removed from the corpses though didn't vanish, mostly retained their properties so long as they were processed in some manner, either soaking in alcohol, or chilled water, or salted, or submerged in oil, or whatever. The exception, mostly, was blood, the blood lost most of its potency if it wasn't used before a Phoenix sun, which dictated sometimes the timing of a dungeon raid or a major assault, if it was known that the targets had body parts or fluids of particular use to humanity. Dragons and vampires were exceptions to the exceptions, outliers in this behavior, retaining their potency almost indefinitely. Some suggested that was because they weren't strictly speaking foreign to Gaia, that they were reverse pilgrims having originated upon Earth and departed for distant shores at some point in the planet's history. He had no comment for those sorts of wild speculations.

Horace took the bait. Thusly mollified, the chemist went peacefully with them up the stairs and wondered off toward the smell of food, probably having forgotten to eat at any point in his prolonged mania for learning. Hunger gnawed within Alexander too, but he knew it was a side effect of the tier strain, he'd eaten more today than he had some weeks this past month chasing monstrous serial killers. It was all in his head, which didn't make it any easier to ignore.

"Hokay, I think I'm due to rack out too." The hunter said, looking forward to taking weight off his legs, which had not stopped their hurting since rising from his nap.

"Same. I'll see you tomorrow, Alexander Storm Crow." Grace called, waving while she covered a yawn.

"Ahuh, look to the west for my coming." He returned, trading a Tolkien for a Tolkien.

With that they parted. Into the loaned apartment he shambled. After a minute of trying to pull boots off his swollen feet and ankles, he abandoned that project as fruitless, turned, then plunged face first into bed, knowing nothing more until well past dawn.

When he managed to drag himself groggily to waking, unhappy about losing the fading edges of a dream of home, he realized that he'd risen on his own. Nobody yelling, nobody banging on the door to his loaned chambers, just a nice, peaceful morning in bed. If he needed reminder about the previous day's events, he got one immediately in the form of legs so stiff they refused to obey his orders to bend or move from his position reclining in a facedown sprawl. He had to leverage himself around with his arms to roll over. Achieving a sitting position, legs outstretched, took more effort than he cared to acknowledge. Next in line, hammering at the edges of his awareness was the intense hunger of yesterday evening.

"I wanna go home." Alexander chanted to his room, knowing that prayer accomplished nothing, the gods above, below, and in between rarely gave sign that they were anything but indifferent observers.

Magic was real though, so he figured it was worth a shot every now and then. Not today though, he was still in New Chicago. Day fifty-one. These dungeon spawn were burning his ass. A whole wide world, mostly empty of folk, couldn't they fuck off to somewhere he didn't feel obligated to intervene, or where nobody lived to hire him to dispose of them? Can't we all just get along? An image of Mary and her crew flashed behind his eyes and his will set. Nope. No we can't, and, furthermore, it's them that's got to go.

"Speaking of going, am I going anywhere like this?" Alexander addressed the starkly efficient décor of the room, not expecting an answer.

Determined silence from the sturdy walls of the cathedral cubby didn't disappoint him in this regard. Need to ingest calories, a pressure on his insides, particularly in that place behind his heart where lived the black box that was a Matriculated human's core, its aetheric interface with Gaia's magical substance, much as his lungs were the interface with her atmosphere, had him worried. Recalling the somewhat poorly planned tactic from yesterday, the Entropic Venator called his powers, conjuring a spitefully shimmering orb of chaos flame. The extra juice from the not quite complete dungeon core made that task noticeably less strenuous. He could usually manage about twenty of these before he was tapped out.

Above a cupped palm, the dance of entropic fire with its grey scale, eye twisting tongues kept him occupied. It was his oldest weapon against the monsters, a familiar friend. With this he'd slain Yetis, oversized cougars that hadn't roamed the Appalachians around his home in a hundred years and more, dire wolves, zombies, you name it. In all that time, he hadn't given his powers much of his time, he used them, like he used a peening hammer, but he didn't understand them. How did his core manufacture entropy? It seemed counterintuitive, paradoxical.

Alexander fed the flame from his reserves and watched the orb grow only marginally, while the flicker of its jets grew livelier. The more energy he fed it, the heavier it became, a metaphysical weight, not a mundane one. Glad Grace Miller wasn't around to chide him for doing the sort of thing he'd been criticizing her for, he ran a finger through the witchfire. Nothing. No heat, no cold, like it wasn't there, as if this were all a grand delusion. He was immune to his own powers. Just to be certain, Alexander picked up the remains of his cloak and dribbled the clean-cut edge into the chaos and watched it shrivel, discolor, and then start to fall apart, threads snapping as he watched, unraveling into dusty fragments that charred and became smoke.

It was real then, as it always had been. Unless none of this was real, and he'd never woken up from crashing his trainer plane on the tarmac all those years ago. He didn't really believe that anymore, but sometimes a man couldn't help but wonder. When nightmares are running around you, doing nightmare things to people within your sight, it was tempting to believe yourself still asleep sometimes.

"It's real, alright," Alexander confided to his room, "Just like all the folk who died yesterday. Folk I couldn't save, no matter how hard I tried. I have to live with that, like I have to live with the rest."

Steel in his voice, Alexander uttered his refrain for this new life, a mantra against the bizarre and the tragic, "Save what can be saved, make things better, move forward, grieve for what gets lost on the way. Walk the Path."

He sat there, lay, more like, and poured mana into the chaos bolt, channeling it to sustain the piece of entropy that didn't want to exist as much as it didn't want what it touched to exist. When the pressure inside his chest eased, he allowed it to fade away.

That problem was solved.

Onto the next, he was gross. Life in the Green could be gritty, but Alexander preferred to be clean. From the spliced together pack that he'd left at the foot of the bed, he withdrew his casual clothes. No running around today, no armor needed. Off his soiled coat, and a few minutes fiddling with buckles to shed the scale hauberk, vambrace, shin guards, and remove the quiver from his belt. Then, he pulled the near equally filthy undershirt over his head, that to lay haphazard in the floor, with coat and armor. Next, the boots. It almost came to cutting the laces, but not quite, and he wrestled those off abused feet, to join the shirt and coat and protectives pile. Pants last, since that meant peeling them off protesting shanks. A pain sweat on his brow had wimpled up by the time he finished that task and lay, naked on the coverlet.

Nude was better than filthy though, a bucket of water with a brush in it for personal hygiene was next to the wash basin, just a few feet away. Time to get his scrub on, the gurgle from pining guts be damned. That objective would require getting out of bed, however, a question for which he was not certain he had an answer. Beside it, another pressing need: he had to pee. Both quests completed, if only he could get to the wash basin and toilet, both located across the small apartment's interior.

"Here goes nothing, Alexander, meet floor." He predicted, and shuffled his legs off the bed to hang, feet touching the warm wood.

Slow, careful, he increased the amount of weight he let rest on the soles of his feet. Muscles complained as they took the load, but it was an even hurt, nothing sharp that indicated failure, so he kept going. A smile crept across his face as the effort was rewarded, this might just be fine.

*DHUM* *DHUM* *DHUM*

Three resounding blows against his wood door broke the tentative balance he'd achieved and the left leg buckled, as it had when the spider webbed him, sending him down to the floorboards, cursing.

"IT'S HALF PAST NINE, YOU GOING TO SLEEP ALL DAY?!" Came the too loud feminine roar of Captain Miller, who was forgetting to moderate her volume in her giddy rush to scatter the house of cards he'd been building.

"Gonna get her," Alexander vowed, massaging his left knee and the rebellious ligaments there, "To the moon Alice."

To his growing horror, he realized the door was opening and in strode the Peacekeeper a breakfast tray covered by a hand towel balanced one hand. She froze midstride, absorbing the sight of Alexander sprawled at the side of the bed clutching at his leg in the buff.

"Oh! Ooohh! Mmmm, that's unfortunate." Captain Miller deadpanned, trying to restrain a boisterous donkey laugh.

"You gonna paint me a freakin portrait over there, or, you know, give a guy some privacy?!" Alexander demanded.

She made a very deliberate study of him and said, "It's avant-garde, certainly, but I think there's an audience. Yes, indeed, I think I could find some buyers."

Then she was smiling smugly and withdrew, slowly, the door softly clicking shut as she pulled it closed.

"You need any help, you let Captain Miller know. I think I could find a couple of helpers to dress you." She called from outside, not bothering to hide her enjoyment of his delicate condition.

"In your dreams!" He shouted through the door.

"This is sexual harassment. I'm being harassed. Maybe I'm cunning, maybe I'm even pretty, but I didn't ask for this kind of treatment." The young patriarch of Clan Gerifalte complained, while pulling himself up the side of the bed, using it to steady himself on his feet.

It was payback for the previous afternoon, he was getting his comeuppance for the eyeful he'd gotten. Well, joke's on her! Now she knew what she couldn't have, that was Alexander Gerifalte's true victory! He crowed to himself while easing to the bathroom to complete his obeisance to the porcelain throne. Then a quick scrub to remove the worst offending mud and grime of the battle the day before.

Dressing was a process, but he completed it relatively quickly, before he deigned to open the door on his oppressor.

"I brought breakfast." She said, still smirking.

"It might have gotten a little cool while you dressed, you want I should carry you to the kitchens for something fresh?" The Guildie Officer snarked.

Thin lipped he, suddenly, he returned her smirk with one of his own, before he poured cold water on her, "Thanks, mom, but I'll manage."

Scowling, she shoved the tray at him, and shuddered, "Wow, that's gross. You made it gross. Jeez, a girl can't have a little fun around here."

"And don't forget it, you hooligan." Alexander told the Guildie Officer, and took the tray into his room, sat it on his small table and sat in the chair to tuck in.

Hah! Don't try to out creep a social deviant! He preened. She wouldn't last an hour in the workshop with George and the boys, where shop talk got real strange, since it was just him talking to a bunch of steam driven power tools.

Another shudder that shook her bun and Captain Grace side-eyed him, joining him in the room, before deciding that he was, in fact, going to extend his lead if she kept pushing from this direction.

"Fine! Eat up, we're on oversight of combat training today, since you can't move, and I need to hit something. Marvin will join us this afternoon, when his old lady is done with those miserable old bones."

Training sounded fun. After polishing up his close combat skills on some murderous demon spiders he figured he could give some pointers to these Guildies, who had never had the honor, the privilege, of Benjamin Grisham's Adventurer Preparation Program. Frankly, the super soldier's instruction made the School of Hard Knocks a past time for invalids and children.

First though, he addressed the tray of lukewarm food before him. It was glorious.