Chương 64: Delusions of Diplomacy

The whole bunker went quiet. Everyone knew, on some instinctual level, that beyond that door lay something dangerous. Without that sort of supernatural sense of self-preservation, Rufus would have died ten times over. He watched the six-armed Custodian — the type of person who couldn't just survive a platoon-level ambush, but singlehandedly counterattack — go completely rigid, if only for a split second.

Immediately after, she sighed, and pulled the largest shotgun he'd ever seen out of a backpack that shouldn't have had the space to hold it. Calmly, she unloaded the gun, then reloaded it with fire-red shells, the heat of which he could feel from entire feet away.

"I'm going to go have a chat," she said, racking the shotgun with a ca-chunk.

"One way or the other, call for support." She disappeared around the corner. There was a bang, loud and heavy, that sent him on his feet in moments. Rufus shot Maya a knowing look. Her eyes flashed blue, activating her personal link to the antipersonnel turret embedded in the roof, training it on their position. If whatever came back in through that door wasn't the Custodian, then they were as good as dead anyway. The thought of going down fighting suddenly seemed less heroic and more vomit-inducing.

The Custodian returned, albeit noticeably agitated, and slumped on to the table. Her footsteps were so quiet. How could a woman as tall as that make so little sound? It was unnerving, even knowing she was on their side. For a moment they just sat there in silence. There was another ring of a doorbell.

"I hate wizards," she mumbled. +++ There was a second Fowl clone in front of the reinforced steel door, visible through the electronic peephole, standing at a more respectful distance than the corpse of the previous one. The corpse still had a smoldering hole in its chest. She had tried to cast a shield, but it turns out stepping within touching-distance was neither an action she expected, nor something she could defend against in time.

The danger went both ways; if she touched me I was likely to lose a limb, or more. But as a Custodian I was quicker, much much quicker. And I was pissed, too.

"Ready to have a civilized conversation?" the wizard asked, his voice carrying through solid concrete even while standing thirty feet away. He was talking through another clone, this one holding a staff while the previous one's hands were wrapped in prayer beads. What are the odds they all use different types of magic? I was naive; his box of tools is much deeper than mine.

"Depends," I said, hissing into the speaker that connected to a loudspeaker on the outside.

"You gonna gloat about how you're so great and superior that I should just curl up and die?"

"It wouldn't be out of character for you nor me," he said with a polite chuckle.

"You ruined my life."

"And you have inconvenienced mine. Let me be frank, Samantha: I have you in checkmate, no way out."

"Why should I trust a word that comes out of your mouth, Pactmaker? If that were true, you wouldn't be here talking to me," I countered, glancing at the corpse. Its features were slowly melting away. Hopefully the clones couldn't feel pain.

"The problem with you Custodians," Fowl started, "is that you treat all this like a game. Life or death chase, lethal combat, war, it's all just points and lives to you, risks and rewards. Someone has to organize those ambushes, or place that gigantic death robot in your path—""You aren't seriously insinuating that you can control the murderbots." I snorted.

"You monologuing at a distance is already telling me everything I need to know. Now that the attempts at killing me in body have failed, you're going for my mind? What, miffed that you can't cast any suggestions on me?"

"—which is to say you do not understand the effort that goes into learning a spell, or waging a war, or even the logistics of creating a functioning logistic chain for ice cream." He sighed.

"I don't blame you, I blame your education."

"Gee, I wonder who's getting in the way of that," I deadpanned.

"I am referencing your system. The incentives it is teaching day by day. In which country, state, order is murder rewarded?"

"I'd rather be rewarded to defend earth than not."

"But is that truly what the system is doing? If I really am a threat, then shouldn't obstructing my efforts reward you? Say, if the president of the United States had his finger hovering over the proverbial button to start a nuclear war, would killing him net you any soulcoins?"

"I… what are you getting at?"

"You aren't being rewarded for defeating the foes of mankind, you are extracting resources from their metaphysical bodies. The system gives you a cut and hoards the rest. To what end, who can say?" I opened my mouth, but didn't find a ready retort. The system, for all its benefits, didn't do much to incentivize learning how the source code of its structures worked. We weren't system engineers, we were users, and users only needed to interact with the interface, whatever shape that may take.

It didn't need us to study at the academy, it didn't need us to be experienced in the slightest before bestowing upon us power untold. All it needed were a set of conditions which I still barely understood.

"System, what is your purpose?" I whispered. [The security of all earthborne lifeforms, ensured through the sacrifice of non-earthborne lifeforms] Security. Not prosperity. Not even freedom. Security.

"System, how big is the cut you're taking from the soulcoins we earn?" [Variable, depending on too many factors to count. On average: 37. 78%] That explained all the round numbers. Why was every coral leaper worth exactly ten soulcoins, why every murderbot grunt exactly fifteen? People like round numbers, the universe doesn't. Ergo, they're really worth fourteen, or twenty-one, and the system skims off the top. Did all that go into maintenance and self-preservation? Or was making new Custodians just that expensive.

The slowly increasing threat to Earth should be making the system truckloads of coins, but Custodians weren't increasing in number proportionally to the threat. There would need to be a lot more than three Academies to train them all. What other projects was the system working on then? I closed my eyes.

"System, can you lie?" [Yes] Which, hey, wasn't the best answer, but given how the parts of the system that were a bit more emotional acted, this wasn't exactly surprising either. Maybe it was underreporting the cut it was taking. Maybe it was overreporting the number of active Custodians. Could anyone without system access truly keep track of all us Custodians, given that we weren't just changing what tools we used, but how our bodies looked and worked on the fly?

If I'd been a bit more suspicious of the system at the start, I'd have discovered this a long time before this tense standoff with a wizard. But did this change anything at all about what I needed to do? It just meant that the hole I needed to fill was bigger than expected, way bigger. A few minor aggrievements between wizards and Custodians, or werefolk and vampires, could actually have an outsized impact on the defense of all of earth.

"It is always nice to see a student expand their worldview," The Pactmaker said glibly.

"True magic, true freedom, comes only through sacrifice." Sacrifice. Of course.

"I'm an investment. I am worth a lot, magically speaking. Killing me would give you quite the magical check, wouldn't it? I can't be the first one either." I held my Lucky 7 tighter.

"How many people have you 'disappeared', Pactmaker?"

"Oh please, dimensional ripples have a far higher headcount than I could ever dare aspire to." Which wasn't denying my accusation, just placing his evil next to a bigger one. Maybe he thought it made him look better.

"And the system doesn't even care. Because you are Custodians, not people. Weapons, not humans. Friendly fire is expected. And beyond that, there is no inbuilt process that would allow the system to defend itself against a representative of the people that created it. The first mages who conceived of it were many things, but short sighted they were not. They left oh so many loopholes for me to exploit."

"Exploitation seems to be on your mind a lot." It was a weak riposte, I know. No doubt I knew exactly what was coming next.

"Has anyone below me died?" he asked.

"Have I truly risked anyone's lives among those that serve my cause? The clones are immortal, they are the frontline; the fae are not, but they are clever, and their workshop is safely sequestered away to ensure they can operate unburdened by interruptions. This is what I offer, a partnership wherein I am the brain, and you all are my limbs.

I think, you break, and together, we will rebuild the society" And indeed, he stretched his hand out, putting on the most genial of smiles as a contract appeared out of thin air.

"Join me, Samantha, and I will guarantee—""Nope."

"You haven't even listened to my—" I opened the bunker door and shot his shield. For all his talk about freedoms and mutual partnerships, he sure relied a lot on magically binding contracts. He gave no trust, and therefore why should I? The Pactmaker grimaced.

"Have it your way then. I was trying to be diplomatic."

"Given your methods."

"The world is at stake, and you're talking about morals. I thought you were more mature than this," he said calmly.

"You know this means war."

"You're allowed to surrender at any time," I shot back. He scoffed.

"At this point, your disadvantage is absolute. I hope you continue to make a lot of friends Samantha. A direct attack on a Custodian is oh so difficult after all." He turned into a bird and flew off, leaving me behind, fuming, and with an anxiety building that I couldn't quite place. A few minutes later, a Custodian in her low level 60s arrived on the scene, Fowl being long gone. I received quite the chewing out for calling her here uselessly.

"If I am ever called again only to find your position under assault by a sturdy gust, I will ensure my complaint reaches the top of command. Your stay will be extended by years, understood?"

"Yes'm." She didn't seem like a composed type, with a bald head full of scars and a mismatched set of organic and cybernetic eyes.

"We're stretched thin here, Custodian. Next time, stick him with some webs or something."

"I'm…" Not a web-producing spider, not sure it would work through a shield, and also entirely out of my depth. I'm supposed to be fighting mimics and murderbots, not wizards.

"I'll keep 'em busy next time they show their faces, ma'am. +++ I sent a recording of the incident to LT. I was wearing recording glasses anywhere I went now. He seemed quite happy about it. I was born to be bait, it seems, shiny and irresistible. One thing both Fowl and the soldier Maya were right about: it was my fault that this threat was here. In my defense, Fowl would try to get me no matter where I went. I was the only witness to his crimes lucid enough to undermine his entire operation.

How he managed to even sink his hooks into so many people was still a mystery to me, but the facts stood, and they painted an ugly picture. I should be up there, I thought, staring in the direction of Red Hill Forward Base. Addy. Becca. Orianna. Everyone. The sky above scintillated like fractured glass and dunes stretched unto infinity.

A hundred or so feet to my right, the ground cut away, leading to an endless cliff that Rufus and Maya both insisted I should stay well away from if I didn't want to attract a kaiju. They appeared in the clouds below, at times great flat shadows, at times with webbed spines peaking out of the white fluffy mass. To the left was Fort Killjoy, and behind me was the enfilade, the direction from which hostile fire could be expected to come from. The bots had their own positions set up within two or three miles.

Supposedly, every day they emptied their amassed number of troops and sent them marching towards Hill 43. First they had to cross a no man's land, replete with craters and the odd bit of barbed wire or glinting chassis of a bot that wasn't worth recycling. Then they had to cross the minefield, which sort of melted into the no man's land in indistinct waves. New mines were airdropped on Saturday via artillery. There must have been thousands of mines of every type down there.

Tank traps were liberally strewn throughout, as were abandoned and burnt out transport vehicles used as cover for future assaults. Then, there was one final stretch before they were inside our trenches: the hill itself. Forty feet of cliff and crumbling sand, plus a bunker with hidden machineguns, and the giant Custodian turret. To date, Hill 43 had only been taken twice.

Both times the attackers had taken heavy losses, and both times counterattacks from Fort Killjoy through a series of connected tunnels had pushed the bots back out.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Joe Bandana said with a sigh.

"I could spend my entire life down here.

'Course, I could spend it anywhere else if I were ordered to. Good soldiers follow orders and all that. But still, look at it: the great magical waffle stack between worlds." I blinked.

"Waffle stack?" He nodded with solemn conviction.

"Yeah, the ground below, it's got layers. All of the sister worlds connect here, and bits and pieces fall inside The Cauldron. Some float fitfully, orbiting us like cats on a string, but most smoosh together in this big stack in the middle. We're on top of the stack right now. There in the distance, you can see the lines in the cliff face marking another strata, another layer. On second thought, it seems less like a stack of waffles, and more like one big tiramisu. A tiramisu filled with magic and kaiju."

"The tiramisu of terror." With a grunt, I readjusted the weight of various ammo bags, spare parts, and oils I was dragging up to a defilade along a line of jagged trenches. The trenches were barely visible under heaps of red sand. Everything had been bombed to hell and back, leaving few able and fewer willing to do regular maintenance. I was a Custodian though. The least I could do was expose myself to a little danger. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen.

Please report the violation. With my head bent low, I snuck along the filled trenchline, approaching a triangular peak of cliff, a small rise in the terrain behind which stood a tower bristling with weapons. It was easily twenty feet tall, and it stuck out of the terrain like a bullet casing on top of a sandy cake. Its outer armored plates were warped, ceramic layers cracked and scorched. Most of the weapons had sand collecting in their mechanisms. Over half of them didn't look to have been fired in years.

<<oil me>>"Yes, yes, one moment."

"Who the heck even built you?" <<custodian tinkertwink was my father>> <<i am the cup>> <<please fill me up>> I applied some oil and got another message. I hesitated before opening it up. What met me was a poorly synthesized moan.

"Alriiight, weird turret AI, check." Maybe it was just shellshocked. Which, honestly, was an odd thing to say about a machine. Then again, this was tinkerer technology juiced up with Custodian magic, so… maybe it wasn't just a machine anymore? Maya and Rufus trusted it not to shoot them at least. Still, I had my work cut out for myself. That's a lot of guns.

"Alright Moe, time to get into the guts of this thing and see what we can fix with duct tape and the power of internet tutorials." Over the course of the next six hours, Moe and I cleaned out barrels, refilled ammo, replaced clouded laser lenses, and went through just about every step of maintenance possible while Joe Bandana played lookout.

By the end, the turret wasn't any less warped and laser-scorched, but half of its guns were functional, and its internal stores of various lubricants, coolants, ammo boxes and missile racks were back to full. I even managed to get its old autocannon working again after ordering an entire replacement barrel. It cost me thirty soulcoins, but hey, it was worth it if this turret was meant to keep us alive.

"There. Good as new, mostly." <<diagnostics positive>> <<oil levels: murderlicious>> <<can I call you oil mommy? >>"I regret ever saying anything." I sighed.

"Hey, out of curiosity, if a wizard tries to kill me, would you defend me against them?" This time, it took some time to answer. The fan to its processors inside its structure spun up audibly. <<haha no>> <<I am a good gun with [0] friendly fire incidents over some 96321 service hours I am your friend this information is valid>>"You're saying he counts as a friendly?"

<<all humans are frens>> <<especially oily ones>> <<heart-emoji>> So even though I gave it some overdue maintenance, it wouldn't go against its basic code. Even a machine has stronger morals than I do. I already killed multiple Fowl clones with little to no warning after all. … am I a bad person? I sighed. Not something I wanted to dive into on my first day here. +++ The first disturbance happened in the middle of the night. It was at the tail end of my double shift, and I was feeling somewhat tired.

Looking through binoculars for hours on end, watching the wind whip red sand over red dunes and plants, which were coincidentally also red, was fine for the first hour, but it got boring quickly. I was quite tempted to open the sense-training tower game on my system interface to be doubly productive with my time, but resisted. This was my first day of being posted anywhere by LT, and I wasn't going to screw it up.

Unless of course LT somehow signed a contract with the pactmaker, who made him send me to the butt-end of nowhere on purpose. Not likely, but still… theoretically possible. The sound of artillery shells, or something comparable, hitting some miles to the east made me nervous. My trigger finger itched. I wanted to go out and do something, but that was dangerous.

The weather forecast on the military frequency projected a drone swarm to come sweeping in towards fort Killjoy from murderbot-held territory like a hurricane, and we were on the edge. No use getting some fresh air when you could accidentally catch a shuriken drone to the face. When the daily 7PM murderbot assault failed to materialize, that nervousness turned into foreboding. The Pactmaker was up to something. Idly, I started making notes on my interface. What do I know about the Pactmaker? Magic.

Making pacts, controls clones, turning people into dirt, illusions, animal shapeshifting, ice power. Ambitious. Connections with other famous wizards? Knows system secrets and loopholes. Lying ass bastard. Annoyingly, none of those were weaknesses. I leaned back, eyes staring holes in the ceiling.

"What's so special about me?"

"Any movement?" Rufus asked with a yawn before eyeing the coffee machine sitting right next to me, the one I'd bought on the system shop.

"Nope." I poured him a cup which he drank with a happy sigh.

"Ah the benefits of being bait. Watcha doodling?"

"Warplans."

"Neat. Thought that was more of a backline officer sorta job."

"I like to be prepared."

"Huh." He blinked blearily.

"Gimme five minutes to boot up and you can end your shift here." He waddled into the bathroom, and emerged a while later with a satisfied stretch. The way he lounged on any halfway even surface made me think of a cat. Like Foggy, just less interested in hunting small critters. Maya made up for that, always staring, squinting, completely focused on the task in front of her even when that task consisted of washing the plastic dishes or eating the self-reheating meal rations.

I had ordered them some snacks and sundries, immediately buying their loyalty with a bribe of chips and fresh fruit. Their enthusiasm was endearing. I'm getting attached to them already. Crap. If anything happened to these two soldiers, I wouldn't forgive myself. I already teared up whenever a Joe Bandana died. The half Joe that had lent me company afterwards was busy playing solitaire. Reluctantly, I found my way to the bunk room.

In a concrete-reinforced underground room, two wooden platforms were screwed to the wall on three of four sides, a thin sleeping mat on top. I snuggled into my sleeping bag and closed my eyes. Moments before I drifted to sleep, a loud siren shook me awake. I was in the main room of the bunker in moments. Maya and Rufus were there too, fully clothed since everyone slept in their combat fatigues here.

"The hell is that? An air raid siren?" I asked.

"We don't have a siren," Maya noted.

"And if we did, it wouldn't sound like that."

"God, it's annoying, and loud," Rufus grumped.

"Where the hell is it coming from?"

"From outside," I yelled. Joe Bandana #1 nodded once.

"I'll get it."

"You don't have legs." We looked around for the damn source. It took four hours of gruelling search, but eventually Rico found it. The pixie returned through the first machine gun's embrasure with a pebble in tow. The moment he entered, the sound turned painfully loud.

"WHY THE FUCK IS THAT PEBBLE SO LOUD?" Rufus yelled.

"MAGIC. WHAT DO WE DO WITH IT?" I yelled back.

"CHUCK IT OFF THE INFINITY CLIFF!" So Rico did, chucking it off the cliff that disappeared into clouds below. There was movement. Something big disturbed the clouds, only revealing a fin when it delved further down again. It was as large as my outstretched fist, a trick of perspective. How many miles away was that? Two? Four?

"God, that was annoying," I said, rubbing my forehead. Rufus nodded.

"Yeah. Talk about psychological warfare."

"I'm going back to bed," I said with a yawn.

"Wake me if there is anything—" Another sound pierced my abused ear-drum like a pike. This time the cry of an army of apes trying to outscream each other erupted from a different place outside. I rubbed my face with all six hands.

"I just want to sleep. This is so annoying." Rufus whinced.

"Hey, at least it's not an underground murderbot assault." +++ The assault came later that morning. I had already found the solution to having random rocks suddenly do a very realistic imitation of what a fighter jet taking off sounded like: it was ear buds. Very magical, very expensive earbuds. Three pairs. Ten soulcoins each. [Soulcoins: 371->340] Defeating the ambush had netted me a solid 200 coins, repairs on the turret had cost me thirty, then another thirty now as a price for sleep.

But if I had to throw expensive solutions at every simple problem a wizard could conjure, I was likely to end up broke before Fowl ran out of tricks. I was sitting in the common room, expanding my elaborate and devious plans, when suddenly Rufus, who'd been nodding off in his chair, suddenly burst onto his feet.

"Enemy attack!" he yelled.

"Wait, what? How'd you know?" His radio hadn't said a word. In fact, none of our radios had sent a word in a while.

"Crap, are we being jammed?"

"No — I mean yes, that too. Bots always jam before a major assault. It's not us being jammed, it's Fort Killjoy; we're just getting some interference. But it's not that, it's hard to explain…" I stared at him. He never took his helmet off. What if… With a quick flourish, I unbuckled the thing and swiped it and the bandana beneath off his head. There was an orb on his forehead, a bright, almost neon green. And it too had a slit like an eye, which immediately began observing me.

"The fuck!?" he yelped.

"I, uh, sorry. That thing, uh, is not a parasite, right?"

"It is not," he said, angrily grabbing his headcovers back and putting them on his head.

"I don't care if you're a Custodian or God's own fucking angel, that was not cool. Shit girl, do you think me hiding it means I want to show it off?"

"No, I mean, er, sorry. I… have a friend. Similar condition." He paused. I had his attention.

"When did you get this?"

"Few weeks after I entered this place," he muttered.

"It's somewhat common among troops and support personnel. Forehead gems, odd eyes, skin discoloration—""Eyes!?"

"Our doctors say it's harmless." Clem never came to The Cauldron, or so I'd like to hope. She wasn't exactly military or support personnel, more just a contractor that regularly sold niche utility items to militaries worldwide. I couldn't completely discount that it was some sort of disease, parasite, or mutation picked up from somewhere, but I had no way to prove it either. And yet. And yet. I had odd eyes too. I could see past illusions and invisibility, and ghosts might as well be tangible for me.

I was odd, even by Custodian standards. And I had also not come to the Cauldron before awakening my ability. What was the connection there?

"Any family history with forehead growths?"

"No. Dad and Mom were entirely normal." He paused.

"I know my dad's dad wasn't quite normal. Went in for experimental treatment of PTSD after 'nam, came back a wholly different person. Disappeared shortly after. Same with the grandma on the maternal side, though she was treated for severe depression after, not PTSD." A latent inheritance? If so, whatever causes the forehead growths is a recessive gene. It needs the same unexpressed gene from both parents. But… that isn't all, is it?

I don't know enough about Clem's grandparents to make a connection, and I never met mine. And even if I could, two cases is not a statistically significant amount. Two hundred cases, maybe. I… was either some sort of alien hybrid, or the result of wizards trying to make supersoldiers. Those were the two theories Clem and Doctor Hua Tuo put forward. If there were more, I was unaware of them. And honestly, neither of them made me feel any better about who I was or was supposed to be. Soldier, or outsider?

That still leaves the question: why is this a common occurrence for normal people in The Cauldron? What is different here compared to earth? I shook my head to get back on topic.

"So you can sense danger before it arrives?"

"A little bit. It's like an animal in my head, screaming at me until I either remove myself from danger, or the danger arrives." So we were under attack either way. Finally, a chance to earn some points. I stepped up, weapons and backpack at hand while looking through the front slits. There, far in the distance, came a whirring sound. There was a single speck of metal in the air. One drone, shaped like a shuriken. It rose to over two hundred feet above our bunker.

Then it stopped spinning, rapidly gaining speed and using its outer blades to stabilize its flight. I shot a Prickler burst at it, hitting it right at the center. It hit the bunker with a thud. [You have destroyed: Shuriken Drone x1. Bounty: 3 Soulcoins] [Soulcoins: 340->343]"Was… was that it?" I asked. Rufus nodded. Damn. That damn pactmaker. No clue how he did it, but he diverted the bots' attention away from the bunker, he had to have.

He was going to starve me of the two things I could use to outscale his threat: experience points, and soulcoins.

"Hey, small assaults mean less work," Rufus said.

"No need to look angry."

"I'm not angry. Just annoyed." Dammit LT, was your plan just to sit me down here and hope for a miracle to happen? At least launch a counterattack or something. Gimme a sign, a signal, anything. … what if he doesn't care about me? I'm just a low level Custodian by comparison, one trailing a train of baggage and problems. Maybe he thought 'She's gonna cause issues, better put her where the fallout can't reach anything important'.

I couldn't tell, and by the time the frontline stopped being jammed, people in Fort Killjoy were too tired to indulge in my curiosity. They didn't have the answers either. So I sent him a direct message via the interface, and got this absolute treat: <<Hold out Custodian. You're pinning a valuable enemy asset. >>"Oh you bet I am. I'm pinning him so hard." Maya looked up from her cot.

"Phrasing." Then she continued burying her face into the pillow like a murderbot drill vehicle. There was a rumbling sounding from beneath us. Yep, those were murderbots casually digging tunnels under our front line. The standing doctrine was not to send vulnerable soldiers and valuable Custodians to flush them out. Tunnel fighting was not a good idea when the enemy didn't need to breathe, didn't need light to see, and could choose when and where to make tunnels at their leisure.

Instead, the solution was to wait until they had assembled a notable amount of troops and supplies in one cave, then collapse it on top of them. This led to some shaky topology, and the odd fort that had to be abandoned, but it was countered by territorial gains the Custodians made aboveground. I was not invited to any offensive action of course. If I died, then the pactmaker would be free to direct his attention elsewhere. I was halfway between the waking and sleeping world when suddenly Maya shrieked.

She jumped off her cot, looked around before running off into the common room, quickly shedding clothes. The clothes were alive with insects. Thousands and thousands of small critters inexplicably drawn to our sleeping spots. She had welts and bumps here and there where they had bitten or stung her, or just released their acid onto bare skin. They bit and stung me too. It barely registered. Even for a human, this avenue of attack probably wasn't lethal. It wasn't unsolvable either.

But it was terrible for morale and for our sleep schedule.

"You're supposed to be a spider, do something!"

"I'm trying! I don't eat bugs!"

"Then what do you eat!?"

"Mostly coffee!" +++ Seven days. Seven days of torture. Seven days of hell. Fowl was an inventive bastard, an opinion which I held until the plague of locusts. The hack was just going through the big man in the sky's textbook, implicitly placing himself as a divine punishment and divine authority over this part of the land. And thus, for his hubris, he was going to be struck by lightning. Not. If only he could show his ugly mug. Our food smelled rotten, even though it was perfectly fine.

There were mosquito nets in front of every opening to the outside, protecting from the cloud of insects that perpetually buzzed around the bunker from morning till midnight. I bought them on the system shop for a couple soulcoins. Together with the noise-cancelling headphones that doubled as short-range walkie-talkies, life should have been manageable. But Maya was burning up due to a fever. Her limbs were swollen, wet pustules forming around each of the insect bites. It was like an allergic reaction, but worse.

Some of these insects were venomous, and since they were uncatalogued by science, the only way to prevent her from an immediate death was buying the universal antidote for 300 Soulcoins. A medical evacuation was impossible. Previous experiments with helicopter pilots in The Cauldron led to a lot of shot down or disappeared helicopters and as many if not more dead pilots. If the chaotic winds didn't get them, anti-air fire, drone strikes, or sudden magical discombobulation would.

Even for Custodians, flight was only possible while hugging the ground. Hence the network of tunnels. A network which had collapsed overnight. An unlucky missile hit the side of the plateau this part of the frontline was built on, causing a massive landslide. Truffles, enraged at his work of months being undone in a day, was furiously redigging a connection to Fort Killjoy, but as it stood there was no way out of this base.

Between all the antihistamines, food, water, ammunition, and the universal antidote, I was running on fumes. [Soulcoins: 11]"I need to kill something," I muttered. Rufus gave me an odd look. He shuffled a few inches further back on his chair.

"I don't blame you for our crappy situation." He bit his lip.

"Okay, no, fuck it. I do. This is all your fault. If you weren't here, all the three of us would have to deal with are lackluster murderbot assaults and slightly crappy rations. Instead we got the ten friggin plagues of Egypt!""'M sorry."

"Oh, I bet you are. Real sorry you dragged us into your mess. I bet HQ is sorry too that their little bait trick isn't working. I'm starting to think they don't even care about dealing with one small itsy bitsy wizard. Let him annoy the frontline a bit, he'll run into a high level Custodian or a SAM and blow himself up soon enough."

"I'm not a comparable high level threat."

"Surface-to-air missile. It's an acronym." He sighed and tossed his head back to stare at the ceiling.

"God, I miss the time when he only turned our water into blood."

"It was an illusion," I said, "Didn't even get it right."

"Oh? How'd you figure?"

"Taste." He paused, then scooted his chair a few inches further away. Any more and he was going to leave the room. <<LT to H-43. Med-evac underway via Killjoy. ETA: 30 min>> I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally. One less thing to worry about. Something dribbled onto my face. I looked up.

The entire ceiling was bulging out, stone turning a different shade of gray, almost brown and smelling of humus as it crumbled— I stumbled backwards as the ceiling plus the integrated antipersonnel turret turned into a couple tons of loamy dirt, dirt which crashed down and filled out half the bunker's common room in seconds. Rufus was squished against the far wall, up to the hip in humus. Then came the insects. Swarms and swarms of hundreds of the damn buggers surged through the hole in the ceiling.

I didn't have a flamethrower, nor was it reasonable to buy a portable shield-dome device to encompass the entire bunker. But a Custodian always adapted. System, buy me a — pbthh! — insect repellant candle! [Insect-annihilating candle: Have you ever wandered the fae jungle and wondered why you're always feeling so anemic? Have you ever camped in the open, only to find yourself being sucked dry by a swarm of Ekkulac Plomes? Well no longer, for this candle will prevent any and all insect attacks in a ten meter radius, guaranteed. Candles last one hour, to be disposed of as a biohazard thereafter. Soulcoins: 10] [Soulcoins: 11->1] [Delivery time: 3min 4sec] I stumbled through the onslaught of bugs that failed to penetrate my skin, grabbed Rufus, and led him through to the bedroom past a series of anti-mosquito nets.

With half a metric ton of insect swarm on our heels, the nets only managed to slow them down before they were gnawed to bits. Fowl had to be controlling them directly for them to be this aggressive.

"Grab her," I yelled, pointing at a barely lucid Maya.

"And then what?" he yelled back.

"The hatch to Truffles' tunnels is right back where we came from! It's under a ton of dirt! We're screwed!" Not if I could help it.

"My backpack, now."

"What?"

"INSIDE!" I grabbed the cybernetically enhanced woman and stuffed her into my backpack, then urged for Rufus to follow, brushing off any errant bugs I could that were still stuck to his fatigues. If I follow them through, nobody will be guarding the bunker. So, once Rufus was through, I zipped the damn thing up and, well… Time to close my eyes and hold my breath.