In the time they had spent allowing Sophie to recover, some other groups had moved deeper into the city. They started seeing traces of that as they went, the plants and building showings traces of essence abilities having been used on them. They knew they weren’t far behind another group when they found monsters that had yet to dissolve into smoke.

“Can you loot them?” Sophie asked.

“Probably not,” Jason said, touching a finger to the dead monster.

This monster kill was not yours. You are unable to loot this monster.

“Nope,” Jason said. “It only lets me loot when the killer is me or someone in my party.”

“Does Neil’s ability have that restriction?”

“Not exactly, but the monster has to die inside his aura, so it works out about the same.”

“Should we veer off our straight line?” Sophie asked. “We aren’t going to get much training in if all the monsters we find are dead.”

“May as well,” Jason said. “So long as we’re going more or less the right way, it should be fine.”

The pair started finding their most effective tactical patterns as days passed and they encountered monsters almost hourly. It was mostly some variation on Sophie grabbing the monsters' attention while Jason moved in to flank. Sometimes she would lead them around, other times standing her ground or staging running fights through buildings.

Every day in the city was like weeks of monster hunting outside it, with both Jason and Sophie unrelenting in the hunt. For Sophie, it was a chance to grab at power, both the share with Belinda and to give herself freedom from anyone who tried to control her fate.

For Jason, it was the culmination of a long wait. He had been putting off advancement and getting more awakening stones in the anticipation of Emir's grand event. He was now determined to complete his power set with the best awakening stones he could find. If nothing else, he was determined to get the necrotic damage affliction that had been absent from his kit from the beginning. Rufus kept telling him it would come, but with each new awakening stone, it had remained elusive.

As the days passed, they also encountered other adventurers. None were people they knew well, if at all, but the Greenstone adventurers tended to recognise Jason, or at least his cloak. The encounters ranged from the friendly to the wary, with the foreign adventurers being especially careful.

From the brief interactions, Jason and Sophie realised the foreign adventurers were most wary of each other, with concern over rivals trying to remove the competition directly. Given that all the groups were now mixed, Jason and Sophie agreed that they were better off out of it and sticking together.

Each night, they would alternate meditating, sleeping and keeping watch. Sleep got the shortest shrift, as they both had effective stamina recovery powers that kept them powering forward through the day. Not to say that there weren't distractions in the downtime.

“What are you doing?” Sophie asked as she crawled, bleary-eyed, out of the aura tent.

“I've trying to teach Colin to spell,” Jason said. The leech collective was laid out in the shape of the word PLURB.

“I think he might be evil after all,” Jason said. “He only gets the rude words right.”

Their abilities improved rapidly. Just the first few days had seen almost every ability Jason had advancing at least a level. His lowest abilities, his conjured dagger and his execute power, advanced twice. Sophie’s abilities advanced even faster, having started off lower.

On the fifth day, they once again encountered an adventurer, but this one was dead. Sophie frowned as she crouched down to examine the body. He was a male leonid, much of his fur burned off in patches matching localised scorch marks on his clothes and skin.

“I've seen this before,” she said. “Bodies left like this.”

“A monster you’ve seen?”

“No,” she said. “A person. There’s an arena fighter they call fire fist. One essence, one ability, like me. You can guess what it is from the name. He liked to play with his opponents; take his time, killing them. This is what it looked like when he did.”

“You think someone did what I did, with you? Gave him the essences to become an adventurer?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “The last I saw of him was when I left him dangling from a cage by his broken arms. People aren’t inclined to lift up losers.”

“You never actually met Thadwick Mercer, did you? I see your point, though. Maybe it was a monster with fire powers.”

“I don’t think so,” Sophie said. “Enough adventurers are worried about people thinning out the competition that it’s likely a real concern. Also, I’m not sure this is an environment likely to produce fire monsters. Plus, I think this body has been stripped of magic items. The boots are gone and these clothes are under-armour padding. There isn’t any magic jewellery and no dimensional bag.”

“Fair points,” Jason said. “If he was a Greenstone adventurer, he might have just been poor. I don't think any of the Greenstone participants were leonids, though. They were all in the foreign group and the worst of them were equipped as well as the best local.”

“Whether a monster or a person did this,” Sophie said, “this man was most likely in a group. If his companions didn’t take him, they were either driven off or killed. We should look for more bodies.”

“You’re right,” Jason said. “Let’s hope we don’t find any.”

Every adventurer with a storage space or dimensional bag was carrying specialised caskets for storing corpses. The Adventure Society, in acknowledgement of the risks the iron-rankers faced, had placed a reward for anyone who retrieved the remains of the fallen. The reward had been high to incentivise the return of the dead but not so high as to incentivise murder for profit.

They found a second dead leonid out on the street and a third leonid, even worse for wear than the others, in a nearby building.

“This was definitely torture,” Sophie said as they crouched over the third corpse. “There aren’t any big burns like with the other body. Whoever did this took their time.”

“Look at bruising on the wrists and ankles,” Jason said. “They were tied up. The neck, too, but not as bad. Whatever was around it was padded. Like a suppression collar.”

He stood up, frowning and Sophie did the same.

“They took this man's powers, tied him up and then tortured him,” Jason said. “This wasn't just taking out the competition. Whoever did this wanted something. Information?”

“There’s no way to know what the foreign adventurers have going on between them,” Sophie said. “I know you like to get your head around things but don’t get distracted by something we don’t have enough information about. For all we know, it could just be sadists getting their thrills or some weird leonid hater.”

Jason nodded. “You’re right. This is an easy place to get away with blaming the deaths on misadventure.”

“So, what do we do?” Sophie asked.

“We put him in a casket,” Jason said, “then we see if there are any more before we keep going. It’s not like we weren’t being cautious already.”

“And if whoever did this tries to do it to us? Trying to capture them and lug them around why we finish the trials and take them back won’t work.”

“No, it won’t,” Jason said. “Rufus once told me that when you’re out on an adventure, sometimes all the justice you get is putting the other guy down. So, if we get attacked, we put them down. All the way down.”

“Good,” Sophie said. “I was a little worried you’d want to try some half-measure that would put us in danger.”

“No,” Jason said grimly. “We need to make sure that the danger is us.”

The giant lizard monster lunged at Humphrey, it’s huge jaws open wide. Humphrey opened his own mouth in turn, fire blasting from it into the monster’s gaping maw. It wasn’t critical damage to the bronze-rank monster but the flame licking the inside of its mouth made it flinch back and snap its mouth shut. This exposed the rest of its face and Humphrey stepped forward, swinging his most powerful special attack into the side of the monster’s head, cracking bone and bursting one huge eye.

It was the turning point in the fight, the rest of the group pouring attacks into the staggered monster until it fell.

“Impressive as expected, from Danielle Geller’s son,” Lowell said.

Lowell was one of the foreign adventurers and had the good fortune to have four of his six team members arrive on the same tower. Humphrey had joined them for the journey to the centre of the city where he could rejoin his own team but Lowell had other ideas.

“I know you have some affection for that team of locals you put together,” Lowell said, “but clearly you’re a good fit with us.”

“I’m quite happy with my current team,” Humphrey said coldly. His normal social graces were being steadily eroded by Lowell’s constant efforts at recruitment, which had moved from the oblique to the direct.

“I understand that,” Lowell said, “but to be frank, your time is wasted with the inferior team.”

“Agreed,” Humphrey snarled. “But I was separated from them by the archway, so I’ll have to make do.”

“Wait, what?” Lowell asked, his smarmy veneer cracking. “You think some grab-bag of provincials is better than us?”

“Actually,” Carly interjected, “he’s just running out of patience with you disrespecting his team. Sorry about Lowell, Humphrey. He’s a good guy but he has trouble seeing things from other people’s perspectives. He gets an idea in his head and it’s hard to dislodge.”

“Carly’s right,” Hampstead agreed. “If I was Geller, I’d have already dislodged your whole damn head, Lowell.”

“It’s fine,” Humphrey said. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Outside the astral space, Emir’s cloud palace was sitting on the lake. Rufus was with his parents, who were strongarming him into relaxing properly for the first time since Farrah died. They recruited Farrah’s parents just to make sure he had no recourse.

It was morning and they were taking tea with Emir and Constance, looking out over the lake and the picturesque towns and villages around it. The bright, lush greens of the shoreline were an appealingly stark contrast to the desert beyond. There were too many of the small communities to count, around a lake that was practically an inland sea.

“Sky Scar Lake,” Farrah’s mother, Amelia, mused. “I wonder where the name came from.”

“It’s a local legend,” Constance volunteered. “It’s said that people settled this land long ago but angered the gods, who struck them down. The force of the gods’ wrath withered the land, turning fertile ground into desert and producing the hole that became the lake as we see it today.”

“There are elements of truth to that,” Emir said. “There were indeed people who settled here long ago and they were struck down. By the churches, rather than the gods themselves, but still. Of course, the desert and the lake were already here, when this all happened.”

“I’d love to visit some more of those villages,” Amelia said. “The ones nearby have been quite delightful. It would be nice to see some not quite so thrown into a tizzy by the sudden appearance of a giant, floating palace at their doorstep.”

“You wouldn’t know it,” Rufus’ father Gabriel said, “but there is actually a less grandiose form of the palace. I’d bet Emir hasn’t used it since our adventuring days, though, back when we made him use it.”

“I’m hosting a grand event,” Emir said. “It requires grandeur.”

“Emir, you think putting on socks requires grandeur,” Gabriel said.

“That’s because I have exceptional socks,” Emir said. “It’s not my fault you don’t treat your feet with the care they deserve.”

One of Emir’s staff came in, whispering something to Constance, who frowned.

“Can I borrow Rufus for a moment?” she asked. She and Rufus were soon walking through the cloud palace together.

“What is it?” Rufus asked.

“Adric Dorgan is here,” she said.

“In person?”

“Yes.”

“He must have found something, to come in person.”

Constance led Rufus to a receiving room where Dorgan was waiting. She left the two men together and departed.

“Dorgan,” Rufus said as they sat. “I take it from your personal presence that you have something.”

“Yes and no,” Dorgan said. “Partly I came because I didn’t think they’d let any of my people through the door. I’ve been doing as you asked and I’ve definitely turned things up. I keep running into strange dead ends, however.”

“Strange how?”

“Someone is hiding things. Someone with the kind of power and influence that I would normally jump back from like a scalded snake. Even I know what’s at stake here, though, so I kept digging.”

“And?”

“And I started losing people. Someone is disappearing any of my people that touch on certain areas and they clearly don’t fear reprisal. I’m not going to keep sending people to their deaths.”

“That’s fair,” Rufus said. “So, what have you managed to get?”

“I have a lot of pieces that don’t quite fit,” Dorgan said. “Private shipping expeditions with way too much secrecy. Bribes in amounts that boggle the mind. Whole companies set up, doing one quiet job and then closing down again, all to hide whoever was really behind the deals. If you look at it all together, it very nearly adds up to something.”

“You came out here for a reason,” Rufus said. “What do you need from me?”

“I need someone to ask the questions I can’t,” Dorgan said. “To poke the dark corners my people keep vanishing into.”

“Anything more specific?”

“Whoever is covering this thing up on the top end is powerful and influential,” Dorgan said. “More than the local powers can manage because they have foreign influence and no small amount of it. I can’t go looking harder than I have into who they are. If you can find that out for me, then I can maybe put all the parts into place. I can’t look in the dark corners, but if I know who they are, I can follow their open activities. I have enough of the shady stuff that if I know what legitimate activities to watch, I think I can bring you something you need.”

Rufus took a long, slow breath, his eyes glued to Dorgan’s face.

“I might know who you’re talking about,” Rufus said. “Nothing is confirmed, however, and telling you would be no small thing. This is information that is still very restricted and we’re keeping it that way until we have some proof. We haven’t even shared our suspicions with the Adventure Society, yet.”

Dorgan got to his feet, Rufus doing the same.

“Well, when you get around to telling people, you come see me,” Dorgan said. He took a paper folder from his jacket and handed it to Rufus.

“This is everything my people were able to find, with some observations from me about what various bits of it could mean. Until that information you’re sitting on gets a little less restricted, this is as much as I can do for you. Just to be clear, I'm not saying I won't help. I'm saying I can't.”

Rufus was leafing through the notes as Dorgan spoke. He looked up at the crime lord, giving him an assessing gaze.

“Please wait here,” Rufus said. “I’ll have some refreshments sent in while I talk to some people.”

Rufus left and when he returned, Dorgan was enjoying tea and scones.

“Dorgan,” Rufus said, without preamble. “I’m going to tell you something and you are going to do your very best in all your dealings to obfuscate the fact that I did.”

“Alright,” Dorgan said warily, putting down his teacup and getting up from his chair.

“You said you needed to know what influential power was hiding things.”

“That’s right.”

Rufus visibly steeled himself, taking a long pause before speaking again.

“Church of Purity,” he said quietly.

Dorgan’s eyes grew wider and wider as the implications of what Rufus had said settled in. He ran his hands through his hair and started pacing back and forth before he stopped and turned back to Rufus.

“What kind of madness have you dragged me into?”