The street was busy as many different peoples were moving loads back and forth. Boots stomping on the uneven ground. As all the onlookers kept their silence.

  Indeed, the day was quiet and hushed, with hardly anyone making a sound, save for the odd sob or gasp of horror.

  I was looking through the eyes of the Muller Saboteur. Watching the recovery teams bringing back body after body after body. All of whom had been mangled beyond recognition.

  Up until this point, there hadn’t really been any deaths for those exploring the Dungeon, as I’d taken care to make sure none of my units landed lethal blows. Even with the Spider-Dragon, my control over it had made sure all those it snatched out from helicopters floated down to the ground mostly unharmed.

  Now the bodies were stinking up the place. Both literally and metaphorically. As all the militiamen and women who saw them being carted out blanched and retreated a few steps. Death had not touched them because I had no reason to want them dead, but they had no way of knowing that. For all they knew, whatever killed the soldiers in front of them would still be out there. Still hungry.

  I let them make their attempts in regards to figuring out what had happened with all the different wounds on display and sent Muller back into the command tent.

  “This is a catastrophe!” The mayor roared in indignation. “How come no one saw this coming!? Huh!? How come no one thought to send more soldiers!?”

  Colonel Lander gave him a withering look. Mostly fueled by a great big load of indignation as to the sheer amount of hypocrisy on display.

  The mayor had, of course, been one of the loudest voices calling for Ryuji Hanamura to prove the files were true and for him and his so-called elite team to get rid of all the man-eating monsters scrambling below his feet.

  No doubt he hoped to get this mess over and done with as soon as possible so he could get back to dealing with boring meetings that started at 12pm and ran until 3pm.

  Now that those hopes had been dashed, the man seemed half a corpse in his own right. Eyes wide and searching for just about anything he could grab ahold of in order to dig himself out of the rather deep hole he’d dug for himself.

  It would have been frustrating, if Muller was a real person and not a glorified meat puppet. As things stood, I let the Saboteur stay silent as his hand brought up a phone borrowed from Colonel Lander. The recording app played back the man’s insistence on the operation and he somehow managed to blanche even further.

  “Gi-give me that!” He roared.

  Muller did not stop him from taking the phone, but also noted that the tent was most certainly being bugged by a bunch of different agencies and / or Colonel Lander himself.

  Lander shrugged instead of answering directly and brought out a map. Placing it on the table and spreading it out before him.

  “All right gentlemen, listen up.” He begun. “Given how the last operation went and the fact that it relied on Mr. Hanamura’s information… information that went directly against what Herr Muller stated earlier, I’m going to assume that he did not, in fact, know what he was doing. Actually, I’ll go one step further. I will not be relying on anything that imbecile said until I can get confirmation through our own sources.”

  Herr Muller nodded on my command and opened his mouth to speak.

  “The mission has not changed. More entrances will start popping up all around the city. More tunnels will need to be manned. More people need to start heading down in militia groups.”

  “Yeah right.” The Governor scoffed. She took out a small canteen and poured out the contents into a shot glass. Before then swallowing the amber liquid and throwing the glass into the floor where it shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “That right there is the morale of all the people that came over here looking for magic powers. Fool. You’ll have a better chance drinking from that glass than you will convincing your average Joe to risk his life and limbs fighting mutants in a murder hole after a bunch of soldiers got turned into Swiss cheese and bloody pulps of meat.”

  I looked at the debris and arched an eyebrow.

  “I’m not saying everyone will go down willy nilly, but a bunch will go down all the same. For the safety of their families in the city, if not for their desire to keep growing.”

  The Muller doll shrugged.

  “Say what you want, but the monsters will keep coming and the fact remains the ones in the surface, or close to the surface, are still safe to fight. Also, not to rub it in or anything, but I did tell you all this would happen. More than once.”

  Colonel Lander at least had the good sense to look ashamed. Though he did not allow himself to wallow in the feeling.

  “Enough already.” He said stiffly. “We have to figure out what to do about this situation moving forwards. No matter what else happens, the people of the city have to be defended.”

  He coughed into his hand.

  “We’ll start by bringing in more trucks through here, here and here. These trucks will carry in supplies and soldiers and leave with more and more refugees. I’ve already been in contact with FEMA and we have a few tent cities sprouting up on the farmland surrounding the city. The most vulnerable populations, like families with young children, will get hotel rooms in nearby cities and towns…”

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  “You shouldn’t be so quick to evacuate.” I spoke through the puppet. “At least keep the healthy adults you’ve got on hand and organize more militia parties.”

  “No need for that.” Colonel Lander rebutted. “We’ll be using proper soldiers from now on. Ours, as well as Nato peacekeeping troops and other qualified volunteers.”

  He paused to suck in a breath.

  “I will not risk the lives of civilians. Not now. Not unless it becomes absolutely necessary. This whole militia was a mistake.”

  “No one from the militia has died.” I pointed out. “Probably because they knew to stay close to the surface. And they weren’t completely high on the smell of their own farts.”

  Colonel Lander stared at the doll with cold, hard eyes.

  “You were stronger than all of them put together.” He declared.

  It wasn’t a question, but a statement he thought to be true.

  I nodded through the spy.

  “You could have gone with them.” He said again. “You could have saved them.”

  “Me being there would not have saved them.” I spoke truthfully. “They were dead the second they thought themselves invincible. The whole reasoning as to why we should get as many people into the Dungeon at once is that nobody is invincible. No one is going to step up and be the unquestioned savior of humanity. No person can bear the burden or be trusted to save all the other people around them all the time. At some point, we as humans will have to get comfortable with the idea that some degree of violence is necessary in order to survive. The sooner the people get used to this new reality, the better. Because if they don’t then the corpses will really start piling up before any of us can blink. If not now, then when the predicted end comes along.”

  Lander cut me off.

  “Speaking of which, that information retrieved from the Robertsons…?”

  He didn’t elaborate, but his eyes asked the rest of the question well enough.

  “My motto is trust but verify.” I told him through Muller’s lips. “It should be yours too. Right now, we know Magic is real and that I can prove it by heling people. We know that the monsters will keep coming. We know they will get even more dangerous. We know humans can grow beyond their normal limits. So they will either get comfortable with fighting monsters or they’ll have to live with the possibility that this could happen to them too.”

  I made the Muller puppet get back and step away from the table.

  “At the very least, we can tell people the truth. Not like they don’t know it in any case. But we need to go out and tell them that these are their choices right now. Get strong or get bent.”

  Lander grumbled, but brought out the laptop to get in contact with the Pentagon.

  “Prioritize soldiers.” He was told. “Have them delving deeper and getting into fights more often. But don’t dissolve the militias.”

  The bald general brushed his whiskers. Staring at his peers.

  “We have confirmation that the effects of exposure aren’t negative in any case. Not the immediate ones. Carlyle Robertson has confirmed as much during that whole senate hearing last night. He’s looking at 30 to life if he doesn’t cooperate to the fullest extent he can so I’m inclined to believe him. That and we need to have a bigger pool of candidates to study this so-called Magic more closely. We might get people who can shoot fire out of their hands or we might get people who can cure Cancer for all we know.”

  “The food can already cure Cancer.” The mayor interrupted. Unhelpfully.

  “I was giving you an example, sir.” The general groaned with irritation. “Maybe we’ll get someone who can produce unlimited electricity instead. The point is we don’t know and the info we keep getting is incomplete as well as nonsensical. Share it more or less openly and only keep the volunteers who chose to stay after that, but do try to keep the militias running. We’ll start to dig deeper and deeper into the Dungeon. Slowly and carefully. With backup teams close behind at all times to dig people out of shifting passages. No more vanishings. Not on my watch.”

  Muller nodded. So did the others.

  The following day saw me opening more tunnels to the surface and widening the first floor to run the length of the entire city. Small corridors cris-crossing multiple times at varying elevations throughout the expanding maze.

  The massive complex grew so large that I decided to split the first floor into three distinct sections. All stacked atop one another and all increasing in difficulty as one descended through one of the only three passages connecting the last floor to the next.

  What used to be the second floor thus became the fourth and fifth respectively. While the old third became the sixth and the seventh. The flooded tunnels having been expanded so that the length of it ran far beyond the old borders of the city of Detroit. Dungeon walls greedily reaching out to swallow normal, mundane earth in order to twist it into yet more birthing places for my units. For my monsters.

  The old fourth then became the eight and the ninth. The swampy mud now congealing with even more surprises, as the hollow space became more and more filled with pillboxes and entrenched positions. Where my units would be able to overwhelm all the attackers that did not take note of the fact they weren’t welcome.

  More reporters arrived as well. Camera crews now saturating the crowds as men and women pushed against one another to discuss the graphic scenes captured by Jane Holland’s cameras. The equipment had remained running all this while and the things they captured inspired all manner of horrified reactions back on the surface.

  Yet the camera crews did not seem scared. Far from it in fact.

  Everyone Herr Muller and my other Saboteurs saw was full of greed and lust for glory. Their faces going from crocodile tears to giddy jubilation within seconds of the cameras being off and the feed going to somewhere else.

  A few had even gone so far as to descend a ways into the first floor. Making sure to travel horizontally instead of vertically at all crossroads and never straying further than a hundred or so metres into the journey.

  By the third day, that trend had inspired a series of Ourtube streamers. Coming down to the Dungeon alongside militia units and doing the bare minimum to not get kicked off their respective teams.

  It was all rather amusing to me, yet it did not matter in the end. The child and the girl agreed that they wanted as many people delving as possible and so that was what I was going to be doing. I certainly did not want to alienate them any further than I already had, lest I never get another chance to resurface. Though it was hard to tell whether that caution was itself borne from our current connection.

  By the fourth day, none of that mattered.

  The first few hundred delvers were now reaching a full 2 on a few of their stats. A sign of constant hard work up till now.

  A few soldiers were now arriving with Analyzers of their own, which told me that the old man had struck some kind of deal with the powers that be after all.

  But the most exciting news, was the new signatures trying to blend into the background of a busy street.

  Some of them were level 3. Some level 4. But none of them mattered. The only one who did, was the main target of my efforts.

  Whether motivated by the fungal infection or by the passing of his new patron, it did not matter.

  Casper had come to die.

  And I would be nothing if not obliging.