Time passed at a languid pace, since I was actively being prevented from returning to the north, there was little that truly demanded my attention. As a result, I spent more time with my family; that first dungeon run was far from the last, with Uncle Wolf making sporadic appearances as work allowed. The monsters, it seemed, never slept, and the dungeons waited for no one, which kept him too busy to attend every dungeon run. The Banner, as it turned out, was quite appreciative of the way my family had been claiming nearly every dungeon that showed up within a few hours' drive. Taking all of those dungeons for ourselves was lightening the Banner's load considerably, as they were still suffering under the additional load caused by the situation up north, and now the increased surveillance on the Vish and their activities worldwide.

  The family was quickly growing formidable, which alleviated many worries. Both my own and the rest of the family. It had been a worry since I had come back that someone would get it in their head that coming to snatch my family members was a good idea. Once upon a time, there would have been little anyone could have done to stop it.

  That was no longer the case.

  There were few left that had the capability of taking my family without a significant fight. Absconding with a single member of my family was no longer a simple task, let alone if they happened to be together. The family had enough power to dog-pile almost any single combatant, I was comfortably certain of that.

  There was little sense in breathing down their necks while they were growing more and more capable with each passing day. They didn't need it, and I certainly had better things to do.

  Soon enough, my break came to an end. That was how I found myself on a helicopter buzzing low over the northern landscape of endless white. Once again, I was back in the north, this time farther afield from Yellowknife, far enough that the Banner had offered up a chopper to assist in travelling around the area rather than deal with ground-based vehicles. I glanced around the cabin at the people accompanying me. David and Uncle Wolf hadn't wanted to let me come back to the north after only a week, but they had conceded when I offered to take Victor's team with me. It was a small enough concession that kept them, if not happy, at least relatively satisfied. I was both surprised and not, that Victor hadn't filled in the absence left by Matt yet. Surprised that the Banner hadn't forced an addition on them to round out the team. A healer or some other support type would work well with Victor's highly offensive team.

  I'd wondered if it was a sign of loyalty, or simply stubbornness on Victor's part, to run the already lopsided team one person short. The man didn't talk about it, and the rest of the squad followed his lead. They'd welcomed me aboard much the same as they had previously when we had worked together more regularly. There had been many of the same greetings shared by soldiers who'd been apart for a time and, through action, happy to see their far-flung comrades still lived. Healthy and whole.

  "We've got our work cut out for us," Victor grunted over the intercom headset we all wore. "You set a pretty punishing schedule here, Aiden."

  "There's work to do, I like getting paid, and I like getting stronger." Looking over to Victor, I just shrugged with a grin, "They've kept me out of this long enough; I only got one dungeon in before they dragged me back home."

  Victor's grin widened, exposing a bit of the wildness that had emerged since the incident. Apparently, the whole team had been crushing dungeons as if each one personally owed them a debt of violence. "Damn right," he said. "Just don't make us look too slow, yeah?"

  "Wouldn't dream of it," I replied, and the chopper bucked as we punched through a crosswind. Beside me, Sofia barely blinked at the turbulence while a deep thump and steady stream of curses came from Dave farther down the cabin.

  “What?”

  The whole crew smirked at the man while he rubbed the back of his head, noting the small dent in the metal panel behind him. Being sturdy didn't mean getting your head whacked didn't sting a little.

  “Two minute ETA.” The pilot’s voice announced over the intercom. The announcement brought conversation to an end as we all settled in for the coming fight.

  Moments later, we piled out of the chopper and into the dungeon, thankfully the pilot had set us down almost on top of the entrance. We were still on the clock they way we always were with the dungeons, but it was nearly so dire a timer as it had been the last time I had been up north. We could afford to take our time clearing out each of the dungeons. Well, take our time according to my own standards, apparently not Victor's.

  We were greeted by the familiar grey stone of the dungeon entrance chamber. It still struck me as strange that no matter how many dungeons I entered, the entrance was almost always the same. Blank grey stone walls, magical blue flame torches. It rarely changed from my own experience and from all the records the Banner had. It was something of a point of study for some of the intellectuals across the magical factions. To my knowledge, no one knew exactly why the starting chambers were always so similar, no matter where in the world the dungeon formed.

  Victor and his squad fanned out, boots tapping rhythmically on the stone, the rhythm only interrupted by Dave’s near-constant muttering. I hung back for a moment, letting them take the lead while I raked the room with [All-Seeing Eye] and let my senses ride shotgun. The air was thick with mana, not as bad as my last trip north but more than it should have been; it clung to every surface like a film of oil, and underneath it all was a restless, buzzing undercurrent that made my skin itch.

  Mana density’s up since last time. I pinged Vipera, watching the way a stray ripple of blue energy kinked around her scales as she slithered across the floor towards the chamber exit.

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  Oh, I noticed. These dungeons are denser now. I’d expect some oddities past the first chamber or two.

  Vipera's hunches were not to be ignored lightly, so I watched the others closely as we cleared the opening room with methodical violence. Standard goblin infestation, if at a higher level than usual, nothing that even tickled the team's collective paranoia. Alex and Victor took point, moving with steady, sure steps and unmitigated violence. These monsters were in the high level twenties, but in the end, they were still just goblins. Small, green and humanoid, devoid of the tools and weapons that were the main advantage of humanoids. That wasn't to say that they couldn't be dangerous in the right circumstances, but they lacked the threat factors that many monsters had inherently.

  Spell fire arced overhead from Sofia's staff, carrying magical devastation into the ranks of the goblins as we advanced down the long stone hallway that led out of the entrance chamber. She'd improved significantly since the last time I had seen her in action. It seemed she had also taken one of my early suggestions to heart; I could see various runes lighting up on her staff as she fired off spells. Yet there was no sense of her mana levels dropping at all. The amount of firepower she could put out without touching her own reserves was impressive.

  Lurking behind Victor and Alex, I carved through any goblins that slipped past the pair of vanguards with ease. My blade work had improved significantly ever since I had picked up [Dagger Mastery], and I had been able to settle in and get some actual weapons training in during my enforced break from Banner work. The result was the beginnings of a transformation in how I wielded my weapon. Nothing was set in stone yet, but I was beginning to develop a style all my own, one that would work for me that I could refine over the years with every lesson learned.

  For all that we were carving through the dungeon with relative ease, there was an undercurrent here. One that tickled something in the back of my mind. There had been too many experiences lately that had set off a similar gut feeling for me to be able to place this particular feeling of unease. It was hauntingly familiar, but also out of place, like being half a beat behind the rhythm of a song you could only half remember. It was just a little off.

  We pushed on, and more monster types joined the battle as we moved deeper. The waves of goblins were replaced by hobgoblins, armed and armoured like fighters wielding swords and shields. The goblins that remained now rode large wolves into battle against us; the massive quadrupeds added a lot of mass and forced us to answer their charges or be plowed under by the weight alone.

  We didn’t lack answers for these issues.

  A quick [Edge Glare] from me or a handful of magical projectiles from Sofia were more than enough to blunt any lupine charge directed at us. Thankfully, my eyes were long since healed after the damage they had been forced to take during my original northern sojourn; if anything, they were sturdier now than they'd been previously. As if when they had regenerated and grown back, they had come back stronger, better able to endure the magical demands I placed on them.

  We continued on, mowing down every threat that came near, chamber after chamber. There was little variation between the more open caverns and the stony hallways as we continued. I could sense that the others were growing stronger as we moved deeper, however. That was why I had picked this dungeon to start with, after all, it was the weakest of the ones I intended to hit on our first pass. It would help get Victor and his team up to scratch before we moved on to the dungeons that would help me advance.

  We cleared the next three chambers in grim, methodical fashion. There was a rhythm to it now—advance, kill, scavenge, repeat—and for all that the dungeon was supposedly more dangerous than previous cycles, I found myself almost on autopilot. It was too easy. The team was firing on all cylinders, even Dave, who had been the weak link last time, held his own and even scored a couple of memorable kills. He was advancing in level more rapidly than anyone, thanks to having the lowest initial starting point.

  The smoothness unsettled me as much as anything else as we made our way. I couldn't help but check on everyone between bouts, looking for cracks in the armour or the team dynamic. Perhaps I was projecting my own unease, but every few minutes I'd catch a flicker of tension in the way Victor's jaw clenched, or the quick darting of Sofia's eyes back over her shoulder. Even Alex, who was usually the last word in stoic, had started glancing at the walls like he expected them to close in on us.

  The aura of the place wasn't right. Maybe it was the constant, oppressive mana density, or the fact that every so often I'd look at the walls and see a pattern that wasn't there—a slickness to the stone, or a set of grooves that looked less like architectural features and more like bite marks.

  Like teeth.

  Yet I would glare at the surroundings with [All-Seeing Eye] and find nothing, scour every crack and crevice with my aura senses.

  Nothing.

  It set my teeth on edge.

  The deeper we pressed, the more the sensation crowded in on me. By the time we reached the boss chamber, it was a full-blown malaise—a sense of being watched by something that didn’t so much have eyes as it did a taste for secrets and a hunger for new names. Whispers hushed in fear through the dark of the night. I’d felt it before, a half remembered dream. Hunger. Deep and ugly. Hollow.

  When we finally entered the boss chamber, it took me by surprise—not because of its strength, but because of its form. [All-Seeing Eye] had led me to expect some mutated, hybridized horror much like the one I had rescued Victor and the squad from previously; instead, it was a perfectly ordinary orc. Larger than average to be sure, more than worthy of the chieftain name, it's System description claimed it to be, dressed in a mismatched collection of chain mail and fur, wielding a large, heavy mace. It grunted as it lurched at us, but even the sound was something of a letdown.

  Victor and Alex battered it down in a few exchanges while Sofia and Dave supported them from the backline. The gong rang, the fat lady sang, that was all she wrote. The dungeon boss fell and dissolved when I looted its rapidly cooling corpse. The loot was just as unimpressive as the monster had been.

  Finishing the boss would have been the last thing to do in this dungeon, were it not for the entrance to another chamber at the back of the boss room that beckoned us onward. To be certain that we were truly done here. Once again, Victor and Alex took point as we moved through a somewhat narrow crevice leading to the next chamber. It was just barely wide enough for Victor and Alex to proceed shoulder to shoulder and have enough room to fight. The path cut a hard right, leaving a blind corner, as the duo in the lead passed it. I heard their combined gasp and gripped my dagger in preparation for battle.

  Battle is not what was waiting around the bend.

  Lying on the ground in the center of a stony cavern was a person, naked as the day they were born. Not even an ounce of body hair on their naked form.

  Lying in the middle of the chamber was Matt Thorne.