Lexie's failure was marked by the first tremor to hit the earth, radiating outwards by several feet. A rumble followed but it didn't sound like that of an earthquake. More like the growl of a monstrous creature awakening underneath.

Before Aiden and Lexie could react, or do much more than stare at each other panicked, the ground exploded.

Lexie screamed as the force of the blast flung her high into the air, the deafening sound punching through her eardrums. Her stomach flopped and her heart squeezed tight. She felt someone or something grab her and shield her from the bits of rubble that hit her in her flight. Lexie kept screaming and coughing as the dust filled her lungs.

She braced herself for a landing that never came. She just kept floating in the air as another more ferocious roar filled the air, this time slightly muffled but no less terrifying. When the dust finally cleared, Lexie opened her eyes and realized what was happening.

She was wrapped in a forcefield, not by her own doing.

Her father, bleeding from his forehead with dirt clinging to his hair, still held onto her with one hand. His other hand was extended out, connected to the shimmering forcefield around them that hung them a few feet in the air.

Lexie gaped.

She knew it!

At the same time, she didn't.

This whole time she'd suspected that he was working on breaking his tilling bands but she didn't know he had succeeded.

Or maybe he hadn't. She stared at his bands, which were still around his neck. They still had the crack that was roughly the same size as it had always been. The bands weren't glowing either.

He hadn't broken the bonds.

He was bypassing it somehow.

"Dad…"

Aiden turned to regard the flabbergasted look on her face. She drew her eyes down his body, noting the lack of shaking, the steady way he held onto the forcefield without struggle.

"How?"

He gave her a crooked smile, his eyes glowing with power. "Did you forget, honeybee? I'm a generational genius."

The roar interrupted them again, and Aiden levitated their forcefield until it was nearly as tall as the highest building in the vicinity. There, Lexie could see what was happening around them. Where they had stood now featured a giant crater, with cracks webbing from the hole. The explosion had also taken a chunk out of several of the adjoining buildings, some of which were no longer there.

Lexie focused on the hole and the first thing she noticed was a giant, hairy hand, resembling that of an orangutan. It had greyish, warty skin that ended in stubby fingers, hair, and moss growing between its knuckles and on its veiny forearms. The hand gripped the ground with enough strength to crush it.

Lexie watched in horror as it pulled a creature out of the depths.

It was…a troll.

Not like the small seven-foot ones that sometimes ran the underground book market. This beast was at least twenty feet tall, with a greyish, sinewy muscular frame, hulking over, tattered clothes strewn over its body. In one hand, it held a club. Its eyes were narrow black holes in its face, its nose slits, and teeth overgrown for its large mouth. Lexie's heart seized as it sniffed the air and swung its head from side to side, while it made huffing sounds.

Suddenly, it zeroed in on Lexie and Aiden hanging in the air.

It released another eardrum-splitting roar.

Aiden's hand shot forward and a pulse of energy hit the beast. It was only enough for it to stumble back as they soared away. From her vantage point, Lexie stared at the chaos that had ensued in the nearby streets. People were running out of shops, screaming, obviously terrified of the roar. In the distance, she could see the stadium finally being evacuated. Lexie wanted to be relieved but she knew it was too late.

What was worse, she saw more trollish hands emerging from the dungeon. It wasn't just one troll. It was multiple.

They were completely fucked.

Suddenly Aiden put her down. Once Lexie's feet touched the forcefield, she felt it move. Like a bubble becoming two, it shifted separating into two orbs, Lexie in one, Aiden in another.

"Dad," Lexie said and he shook his head.

"I need you to be safe," he said. "This forcefield will get you as far as possible. Use one of your teleportation orbs to get you to Capital City. Go straight to the Hero Association and tell them you need to speak with Dominik Vacek. Code 8849E."

"But you…"

"I'll be fine," he said. "I've faced trolls before."

"You're not at your full strength, are you?" Lexie had sort of figured out how Aiden was using magic. The crack in his tilling band hadn't widened which suggested that he'd never been trying to widen the crack. The band wasn't glowing either. So she surmised that Aiden had been instead learning to channel his magic through the crack, working on his control such that he could siphon mana through a tiny pathway, perhaps a single pathway in his body.

While that was an absolutely amazing feat, it also meant that he could use only a small portion of his mana at a time, and he couldn't do any complex magic. He wasn't the Archmage, right now. He was probably an A rank at most with a limited attack pattern. "You can only access a portion of your mana, right?"

He didn't respond to her. Instead, he told her, "I love you."

"Dad!"

That was the last word she uttered echoing against the bubble as her forcefield raced from him. She saw the city below her in chaos. She searched for her friends, but she was too far away to make out faces and individual bodies. It was just a tangle of terrified moving forms, rushing to get away.

While her father was fighting one of the trolls, shooting force fields and pulses of energy at it, three other trolls were barrelling down the street, in search of people to unleash their rage on. And they found them. Their shoulders broke through the concrete buildings as they assailed with their clubs swinging through the crowd, stomping on people, thrashing them out of the way and into walls, leaving destruction and death in their wake.

Lexie was nauseous watching.

She couldn't go to safety while people were dying below her.

She opened up her inventory as she saw two trolls stomping and swinging, barrelling into the stadium. Her breathing came out quick and shallow, her lungs frosted over. She saw a troll snatch someone up and punt them at a wall like they were a baseball. Another one got a club smashed on his head like it was whack-a-mole. The other troll swept his club, sending several bodies flying. Screams echoed. Lexie thought she heard the sound of bone shattering.

I'm going to throw up if I keep watching.

She tore her gaze away and tried to stay focused. She opened her inventory and scanned through the cards in her Party Planner deck. She needed to break out of this forcefield but she didn't have time to figure out a subtle way to do it. Blasting it open would do the trick, but <Let's Have a Blast> didn't have enough power. Nothing in her party planner deck did.

She would have to use her 'forbidden' deck.

Without stopping to think of the implications, she opened that deck. She picked <Windbreaker> and targeted the air outside the force field. As the air was sucked into a smaller forcefield, Lexie shifted around some of the pathways, turned up the buffer to the max, and once the time elapsed, she directed the rebound wind to explode on the forcefield holding Lexie. It blasted it open with a harsh hiss, and as Lexie fell, she activated Lightfoot. She landed and rolled over, close to the pier which was now filled with people fleeing the chaos.

Lexie ran in the opposite direction, toward the trolls.

Lightfoot gave her the speed she needed and as she approached the center, fear made her toes and fingers tingle. She was scared, terrified even. She wanted to scream and run away like everyone else was but she knew she had to save her energy. Even as the fear pulsed through her, she redirected it into adrenaline powering her forward.

She encountered one troll outside the cathedral, using its club to destroy surrounding buildings.

No one else was around except for the bodies on the ground and one figure Lexie found on the roof. Relief flooded her.

Xena.

She was standing on the roof of an adjoining building, with her hand out and a look of wide-eyed panic. She shot a zap of light to run off the troll. Or at least she tried. It didn't have enough strength to even catch the creature's notice seeing as how the troll was ignoring it, just wreaking havoc on everything and everyone it could find. Bodies were strewn about but Lexie tried not to look at it. She told herself they were all simply knocked out. Horrible lie, but it was easier to think like that than to accept the horrific reality of that many dead bodies.

Her attention shot to the ground anyway when she saw one of the bodies stirring, slowly at first until it saw the troll. Then it shot up screaming and scrambling up, to shift the layer of rubble on its trapped leg.

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That got the attention of the troll.

No.

Stay down, idiot!

It was too late.

Lexie reactivated <Lightfoot> and ran for him. The troll barrelled in from the opposite direction and the man was frozen, trembling. He stared at his incoming demise.

Hurry! Lexie told her feet. "Hurry."

"Lexie!" She heard Xena's heartbreaking scream but she didn't stop.

She reached there just a few seconds before the troll did, thrust up her hand, and activated <All Around Protection>. The shield was erected right in time but shattered under the troll's first blow. Lexie grabbed onto the stranger's free leg and also activated <Can't Touch This> which sent them soaring back as the troll gave chase.

It wasn't a clean escape. The man was dragged across the ground by forces he didn't understand and he wailed and flailed while he was at it, his body knocking into debris, sharp corners, and random objects. The troll was chasing them back toward the pier which would hopefully be fully empty by now, but Lexie didn't know what to do next. She didn't think she had a card powerful enough to blast the troll. She glanced around. Maybe she could use the environment to her benefit. If she could trick it into running into one of the buildings perhaps it might know the beast out.

It needed to be a sturdy building though, like the cathedral, which they were going in the opposite direction of.

Shit.

To slow the creature down, Lexie activated <True Windbreaker> dialing it up to the max. It only had minimal effect. She felt the drain on her mana and she knew that she shouldn't go much further or she would soon start tapping into her eldritch mana reserves.

She didn't want to have to do that, but she may not have a choice. Not if she wanted to live.

As <Can't Touch This> elapsed, Lexie activated <All-Around Protection> again. The troll broke the shield as quickly as it appeared but the good thing was that the creature wasn't fast, or not faster than her numerous shields anyway, so it gave her time to think of an attack.

Right before she could, the troll, with its club raised in the air, flinched like something hit it from behind. It slowly turned around and Lexie got a glimpse of Xena standing there with her hand glowing and extended, looking scared out of her mind.

She shot another explosion of light, but it seemed to merely irritate the creature. It bellowed again and was about to charge at Xena, but Lexie yelled and hit it with <True Windbreaker> again.

This time, it got the creature to go down to its knee and his head snapped back to Lexie. It charged at her and as the monstrous creature was almost upon her, Lexie prepared to use another card, even if it tapped into her Eldritch mana.

She was saved when a fire erupted from the ground and engulfed the creature. It screamed and smelled like burning flesh. It swung its bat still in agony, fending off a phantom attack and failing before it dropped to the ground and rolled as the fire got more and more intense.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Torin Firebringer emerging from behind an alley.

"Run!" he yelled and they didn't need him to tell them twice. The man Lexie had been holding onto pushed her away and scrambled to his feet, dashing as fast as he could toward the pier. Lexie and Xena followed Torin, leaving the angry bellows of the troll behind them.

They ran through a network of alleys and stopped only when they were about to reach the front of the stadium.

"You two shouldn't be here," Torin said, not sounding as out of breath as the other two.

"Neither should you." Xena bent over to hold her knees, heaving. "Where are the adult [Heroes]?"

"Busy. This isn't the only attack that's happening, probably," Torin said. "I tried to contact my mom but I couldn't. System communication is shut down."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean someone is using a jammer. It must have just activated when the dungeon spawned."

Shit. Lexie opened her system and realized she couldn't make calls or texts either. She glanced at Xena. "Dewie?"

"He's safe," she said. "When you told us to get help, I gave him my last orb and it got him out of here. He'll tell someone what's going on."

"We should–" Torin was interrupted when out of nowhere a projectile flew by their vision and slammed into a wall. It took Lexie a second to realize that the projectile had been a human body. As a troll came running into view, the three peeked out in time to see Conrad getting on his feet and laughing. His eyes were narrowed, veins popping out of his head and though he laughed, rage simmered in his reddening face.

Conrad launched himself at the troll again and as it swung his cudgel, he leaped off it and came right up the creature's face, landing a blow right in his eye.

Its head snapped back only a little, but it straightened again. It swung for Conrad, but Conrad's reflexes had him hopping to avoid it and he punched it in the face again. Torin held out his hand and took a breath, but he soon put it down. He shook his head. "He's too close. He'll get caught in the blast."

Lexie yelled, "Conrad, back off."

Conrad didn't appear to hear them, because he was still attempting to fist fight the troll. Lexie activated <Return To Sender> and <Can't Touch This> using the forcefield effect to shield Conrad and drag him away from the troll.

"Do it," she ordered Torin and he did immediately. He held out both hands, closed his eyes, and breathed out. A fireball instantly sprouted around the screaming troll engulfing it.

"There was one more troll in this direction," Lexie said as Torin held the fire in two places, and Conrad searched around him for what had happened. "Where is he?"

"I think I saw it running in that direction." Xena pointed. "Last I checked a few AFC fighters were taking it on, but I don't know how they're faring."

"We should go there, help them," Lexie said but just as they were about to she felt it again. Another tug.

No. It can't be.

What the hell?

Another unstable dungeon was spawning?

***

Monty stared at the man sitting across from him stonily eating lunch. They were both depleted. All [Heroes] were on duty and they'd been working the whole day, transporting to city after city for random crimes. It had been like that the whole week, starting slowly at the beginning but ramping up with time, until today when it was like they couldn't catch a break.

Now he was sitting in a random city whose name he didn't even know, cradling his sub and watching as Silas methodically ate a ham sandwich. This whole thing bugged Monty.

Even now, when they were swamped, Vacek still insisted that Monty stick by Silas. Even after Monty's weekly reports exposed that Silas was acting as usual, Vacek didn't budge on this order.

Monty knew Vacek was paranoid, but not to this level. He wouldn't have him on this case unless he truly knew something was wrong.

So far though, Monty had learned nothing.

He could sense everyone else in here easily. Emotions were heightened in this restaurant, fear being the most dominant, followed by relief, anger, and unsurprisingly love. There was just something about surviving a near-death experience that made people remember everyone and everything they'd ever loved.

Monty and Silas had just foiled an armed robbery in this restaurant and the owners and customers were pretty grateful. Grateful enough to offer them really bad soggy sandwiches Monty was too polite to turn down and Silas was eating without complaint.

Monty couldn't believe that so much crime was happening in such a short time through a series of unrelated circumstances. Before this, everything had been relatively quiet for months. It all felt so convenient, so strange. But he couldn't pin down why it was happening.

Maybe someone else could have found the pattern, someone like Lucy Frank. But Lucy's Hero Log was marked as unavailable for months which meant she was probably being used for something top secret. So they lost the best predictor they had.

Vacek needed to recall the [Heroes] on the other planets and he had but Monty feared it was too late.

Yet, amidst the madness, Vacek hadn't forgotten Silas.

"Find out what he knows," he'd said at their last meeting. Not find out if he knows anything but what he knows. Likely, Vacek knew something already. He just wanted Monty to confirm a hunch.

Which was hard to do given that all he could sense from Silas was similar to what he was currently feeling; tiredness, annoyance, disgust.

Maybe I can coax him into a conversation to discover more.

"Tough day, huh?" Monty tried.

Silas cut him a look and this time, he couldn't manage a scowl. It showed how at the end of his rope he was. Good. When people were tired and angry they tended to be less careful, and more honest. Monty continued.

"Vacek says we should have reinforcements soon," he said. "We should have had them already but you know how he is–" Monty instantly paused as he saw something change in Silas' psyche.

What was that?

After everything went back to normal, Monty tried it again, saying, "I mean, we're getting overrun here and I just know the press is going to eat us alive in the coming weeks. But Vacek has some of our strongest [Heroes] on other planets. I keep telling him not to do that. Earth needs [Heroes] more than anywhere else. It's like he makes these decisions that don't make sense and we have to deal with the consequences in the press."

There it was.

It happened again a flair of bright red that retreated into a duller color. It wasn't just the anger symbolized by the intense bloody rouge he emanated. It was also the fact the red had been tinged with a bright pink shade.

That was the color of self-satisfaction.

Silas had been satisfied by what Monty had said. Why? Because he was criticizing Vacek? Or because Silas felt the same way?

The more concerning part was how the color had changed that quickly. It wasn't a human reaction. Yes, some emotions could change in the blink of an eye, like from fear to relief when you were startled, but emotions that strong didn't usually change so fast.

Even an elite pathway expert would struggle to pull back the pink that fast and Silas wouldn't use that method to hide his emotions. If he wanted to hide something, he would shield it from the beginning instead, being an impenetrable wall. He would stop the emotions at the root and refuse to show anything at all. Is that what he'd been attempting to do? Was he worse at it because he was tired?

"What?" Silas finally asked when Monty had stared at him too long.

"Nothing." Yet Monty couldn't let it go.

That little slip-up, the blood red and the pink, filled his mind. It wasn't a human response, no matter how he sliced it. It was more like a machine that had been programmed to give a certain response to a prompt. It had made a mistake and was adjusting quickly, but not quickly enough now that it had been overworked and overheated.

They'd had a crazy day. Monty was tired. But he had to know.

Monty swallowed as the tasteless bread in his mouth turned even more bitter. He didn't want to do it. He really really didn't want to do this. Apart from the fact that he absolutely abhorred the act, if he did it and Vacek's intuition was off, then Monty was screwed because Silas would come down on him with the full hammer of the law, not to mention kick his ass six ways to Sunday.

But if there was a chance Vacek was right if something was going on with Silas...

They had to know.

I trust Vacek.

Even as his fingers clenched into fists Monty repeated the fact. I trust Vacek.

Ok. Good.

Bile rose in his throat as he contemplated how to do it. The ugly feeling swelled within. He pictured his father's eyes, staring at him, cackling wildly as he dragged Monty out of his hiding place underneath his bed, forcing him into the room with screaming people, whispering to his son, "If I'm a monster, you're a monster too."

Monty lurched forward suddenly and grabbed Silas' hand. Silas' eyes flared to meet his and Monty plunged into their depths. That was it. Within seconds, Monty invaded his mind through the pathways, heading down all the paths.

In just a little time, he found the hidden door.

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