The other members of Jason's team were conducting their own affairs prior to meeting up for their new contract. Neil went to church. Humphrey and Sophie followed Belinda to browse for items at the trade hall as Belinda's powers had become increasingly item-dependent at silver rank. Livaros was often an expensive market but had no shortage of quality goods.

Clive went with Farrah to look in on Travis, who had been holed up in the Magic Society ever since his development of the weapon that felled the Builder city. They were making sure that he wasn’t being subjected to the same exploitation that Clive had been put through when he was bronze rank.

The team met up at the Adventure Society campus, Jason arriving in one of his new outfits. This one was specifically designed for smart-casual adventuring, with a very pale blue suit, white shirt and a Panama-style hat. His shoes, pocket square and hatband all had flares of bolder blue with touches of orange, mirrored in his eyes.

“It’s too much,” Neil said.

“Says the man who dressed like his great aunt until Jason came along,” Belinda said.

“I like it,” Humphrey said. “I wish I could wear a cut like that. I don’t have the body shape.”

“Yeah,” Jason said, looking at Humphrey and his Middle-Eastern Superman appearance. “You’re really hard up.”

They walked across the busy campus grounds until they came to the marshalling yard where they needed to assemble for the contract. There were many of these gathering spots and this one was mostly surrounded by lawn except for the building on one side. They were not the first group to arrive and they wouldn’t be the last as they were one of six teams assigned to the expedition. The groups already present were shrouded by privacy screens, which was the norm. High-rankers had sensitive enough hearing that it was harder not to eavesdrop, so privacy screens were commonplace in Livaros. As with restraining auras, in a place where essence users gathered, like the Adventure Society campus, to not use them was considered rude. Only when silver-rankers were rare, as with the campus in Greenstone, were privacy screens largely unheard of.

Jason’s team likewise used their own screen, Humphrey having activated the high-quality device that he carried.

“It’s strange that they’re putting so many teams on this,” Humphrey said, looking around at the groups that arrived before them. “With the Adventure Society shorthanded, it seems a strange time to assign this many people to explore the fallen Builder cities. Surely that can wait until after the monster surge.”

“My guess would be they’re worried about something buried inside these cities,” Jason said. “It’s possible that some kind of threat survived the destruction and is waiting to pop out and wreak havoc.”

“What kind of threat?” Neil asked.

“Remember the Order of the Reaper’s astral space?” Clive asked. “How it turned out to have originally belonged to the Builder and been a city-shaped dimensional vessel designed for invasion? Sound like anything you’ve seen recently?”

“You’re saying it was like the cities that attacked Rimaros?” Humphrey asked.

“Actually, it was larger,” Clive said. “You remember how big that place was. If you think of all these cities appearing like a fleet of ships, I think what we saw was a flagship. It had a dozen of those world engineers; diamond-rank golems larger than most buildings. After what happened here, it gives a sense of what would have happened if we hadn’t stopped it. The Builder would have started his invasion three years early.”

“But we did stop it,” Neil said. “I mean, it was mostly you, Clive, but the rest of us were there and we need to tell people about that. Female people.”

“Neil,” Jason said, “you’re a silver-rank, elven adventurer who’s about sixty percent abdominal muscle. If you’re having trouble attracting women then your flirting techniques must be catastrophically bad. It’s not that hard. Keep your mouth closed, your shirt open and give it about one minute.”

“My flirting technique is just fine, thank you very much.”

The team all looked at him.

“What?” he asked.

Jason turned his gaze to a closed door in the nearby building.

“I’m going to go talk to Liara,” he told the others and headed in that direction, the invisible privacy screen making a faint hum as he left its coverage. As he drew close to the building, Princess Liara emerged through the door. The other teams present noted her appearance but Jason was the only one to approach. Liara tapped a brooch on her chest and an invisible privacy screen shrouded them. Unlike most, this one had a visible distortion effect.

“You noticed me,” she said to Jason.

“You let me,” he said. “You’re not that sloppy.”

A smile teased at her lips.

“I saw you talking about world engineers.”

“Eavesdropper. I thought Humphrey’s privacy screen was pretty good.”

“I read your lips.”

“Through a wall?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a little impressive, I guess.”

“Most people use invisible privacy screens so as to stand out less. They aren’t as secure as people think, which your new friend Estella could tell all about.”

“Are you keeping tabs on me, Princess?”

“Only to a degree. I can’t spare the kind of people who can follow you without you noticing. That quite aggravated Vesper, by the way.”

They shared a sad smile.

“I see you finally got that wardrobe change she wanted,” Liara said.

“Do you think she’d like it?”

“I do. She liked men in hats.”

Liara looked over at Jason’s team. Like the groups in the marshalling yard, they were watching Liara and Jason talk within the shimmering screen.

“You were right about why resources are being allocated to exploring the Builder city,” Liara said. “This expedition is going to the fallen city here while a branch further north is exploring the sunken city. The Sea of Storms has no shortage of adventurers specialised in underwater operations.”

“The advantage of an adventuring culture built around specialisation,” Jason acknowledged. “Always having the right people for the job. What about the city Dawn eliminated?”

“She was too thorough to warrant an operation,” Liara said. “We did have it checked out but it was fast. The whole area of desert is just glass now. The Magic Society is already putting up proposals for possible uses for the area.”

“No world engineers hiding away, then.”

“I was a little surprised to see your group mention world engineers.”

“Really? Hearing that from us shouldn’t be a surprise to someone who took a rummage through my file. Did you just skim read? You were slacking off, weren’t you?”

“I was not slacking off,” she said with an insincere glare as Jason chucked.

“Did some giant golem show up somewhere?” he asked. “Maybe pop out of a city that had supposedly been destroyed?”

Liara nodded.

“That’s exactly what happened,” she confirmed. “There was a Builder city, less powerful than the ones here because it was in a lower magic zone. The local adventurers took it down but days later, three of world engineers emerged from the ruins.”

“Can diamond-rank golems even operate in a zone with lower magic?”

“It turns out that world engineers get their name from their impact on the world around them. The three of them together operated like a giant mana accumulator, drawing in, refining and redispersing the ambient magic to raise the local magical density. It only works because of the heightened magical saturation from the monster surge.”

“Meaning that they’re built specifically to operate when invading worlds,” Jason said. “The Builder sucks so much. So, their purpose is to prime a lower-magic area for attack from the Builder’s stronger forces?”

“It would seem so. We know that it has yet to deploy its full forces, as demonstrated by the city that appeared to attack Rimaros.”

"It must be a limited reserve, though, or he'd drop half a dozen of the things to make sure."

"Small mercies," Liara said. "We don't think that the cities brought down here have world engineers because they seem specialised for lower magic zones but we want to make sure we don't get any other surprises. We've confirmed that there are lingering Builder constructs in the ruin of the city, so there's a reasonable chance of something truly dangerous still being in there. Your friend's weapon was detonated in the depths of the city, though, so we're hoping it dealt with any hidden dangers buried deep in the ruins."

Even Jason’s powerful senses couldn’t read the emotions of gold-rank stealth specialist Liara, but her face revealed the anguish her aura did not.

“I’m sorry about Vesper,” Jason said softly. “She died as well as anyone could ask for. I liked her.”

“I’m sure,” Liara said with a sad smile.

“No, really,” Jason said. “I’ll take smart and sharp over nice and boring every day of the week.”

"She liked you too."

“She hated me.”

"That was somewhat the same thing with Vesper; she liked a fight. It was the unremarkable she couldn't stand."

“That’s pretty elitist.”

“You essentially just said the same thing,” Liara told him.

“Yeah, but I said it with charm.”

She gave him a flat look.

“No?” he asked.

“No.”

“I thought I was being charming.”

“Most men do, in my experience.”

Jason let out another chuckle as he looked around the marshalling yard.

“I should probably get back to my team. People are seeing us get chummy and I wouldn’t want them thinking I’m the teacher’s pet. At some point, we should talk about getting me in a room with the Purity prisoners, though.”

“They’re important prisoners, Mr Asano, not a festival attraction. I told you from the beginning that I will only use you if I think we can get something useful out of it.”

“Princess, I saw the results of whatever Purity is up to.”

“That does not make it your responsibility to resolve. You don’t have to be the one to solve every problem, Mr Asano.”

Jason blinked, slightly taken aback.

“I don’t, do I?” he realised. “That’s actually nice to hear. Really nice to hear. Um, good luck fighting evil, then. I’m going to go back to my team.”

“You do realise you’re here because we’re about to explore the ruins of a crashed flying city that is now an island full of ruins filled with constructs sent by an interdimensional invader against whom you specifically are best-suited to combat. An interdimensional invader that hates you personally and specifically.”

"That's quite a mouthful. At this point in my life, I save time and call that kind of thing a Tuesday."

“What’s a Tuesday?”

***

The island that was once a flying city sat close to the shores of Rimaros. It had already impacted shipping not just with its presence but its impact on water currents around the island. The surface of the city was relatively intact, despite having fallen from the sky after having a magical version of a nuclear weapon detonate deep within it. Relatively intact was not the same as fully intact, however, and there was no mistaking it for an ordinary ruined city.

As the group flew over the water towards it, the first thing they saw was that the flying city had not fallen into the water flat. It was laying at about a twenty-degree angle, putting all the buildings on a lean. Some had collapsed from a combination of this treatment and battle damage yet most remained standing, even those that were quite tall.

Each group had their own means to move across the water. Most moved individually on personal transport, like conjured clouds or construct creatures. Jason's team weren't using a Shade vehicle but were instead all inside Clive’s rune tortoise familiar, Onslow, as it flew through the air. As of silver rank, Onslow was able to expand his shell to the size of a room. It had no sides, the top and bottom portions of the shell completely separated. The top half of the shell was suspended over the bottom, held in place by magical winds that shrouded the shells and prevented air from rushing into the interior as they flew about. It even kept the inside pleasantly cool under the tropical sun.

As for Onslow himself, he oddly shrank as his shell expanded, taking on a more humanoid form until he looked like a child in the world's best ninja turtle cosplay. His head was much the same, while his front feet were now three-fingered hands. His shell was no longer on his body and Clive had purchased some children's clothes that he was now wearing. As Onslow's shell flew across the water with Jason and the team in it, the familiar happily sat sharing a large salad bowl with Clive.

“This is awesome,” Jason said. “It’s like being in a bioship.”

“This is a more secure vessel than what I can produce,” Shade said. “It has much greater structural integrity. Can Onslow access his elemental shell powers in this state?”

Onslow made a chirping noise, his mouth stuffed full of lettuce.

“Is that what a tortoise normally sounds like?” Jason asked.

“Does it matter?” Sophie asked, scratching Onslow behind the head. “He’s a good boy, inst he?”

Onslow happily chirped the affirmative.

“He can use his abilities,” Clive said. “This is his only available form, though, and while the speed is adequate for short distances, it’s not ideal for long-distance travel. He can keep up with airships that are slowing themselves down to avoid monster attention during a surge but that’s his limit. Also, no furniture.”

That aspect left the group either sitting on the warm, soft, leathery floor or standing, looking out at their destination. Fortunately, the floor was quite comfortable, although Jason was sitting in a cloud chair. As they drew closer to their destination the team all got up to watch the city grow larger in their vision as they approached.