Clearing the husks was systematic, and time-consuming. Frank didn’t rush at all, even though they were no match for him. There was no point in taking a risk to move slightly faster, in his estimation. Either the people downtown had stopped them or they hadn’t. Him making it over there slightly earlier would rarely factor in. He got the attention of another and backed away towards a place he’d already cleared. It screamed, drawing a few more over, but since they didn’t have the intelligence or coordination to move together, the gaggle of enemies arrived mostly one at a time.

That’d been the story so far. It was a clean extermination. On occasion, two or three would arrive at once. Frank would signal to Maria and Bill, who would then step forward and block the others from engaging Frank at the same time. Then he’d dispatch them one by one. It took over an hour to get the area around the grounds relatively husk free, at which point the three of them returned inside. Frank put together the supplies he’d need for his solo journey and then had his two companions grab packs of their own just in case they were separated and couldn’t return to safety immediately.

After briefing Michelle and Jerry on how to handle things while they were gone, Frank set out towards downtown, Maria and Bill in tow. As they moved, pillars of fire burst around them, each one signifying the death of a husk. It was still slow business. The numbers were getting denser as they travelled North, but by skirting West along the coast and staying away from the bridge Frank suspected they crossed, it remained something Frank could deal with.

“If we are hugging the coast anyways, why aren’t we just using the boats you stashed?” Maria asked, in between fights.

“Combat experience for you and Bill. These things are something you can reliably deal with,” Frank responded.

Maria frowned. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to train in the dungeon?”

Frank didn’t answer right away, instead signalling to both of them to stop. Those basic gestures he’d gone over with them while they were en route to Seattle had turned out to be very useful, and everyone had remembered them. Ahead, there was a burnt-out corpse lying in the road, motionless. No system message appeared. It was entirely mundane. Frank walked up to it and immediately knew it had been a real person. He could see the melted remains of jewelry on its charred limbs. It was too burnt up to really identify, though based on the size it wasn’t either of his companions.

Frank shook his head sadly. This was the first human corpse he’d come across since he returned. It was a shame.

He called out to his companions. “They caught someone. I’m going to move them indoors.”

Frank lifted it with one hand, carrying it over to the nearest building, a small detached home. Then he found some blankets and covered it, leaving it in the basement closet, where it was least likely to be found by animals. He returned outside to his companions, now downcast. He explained to Maria her early question, rather than address the body.

“It’s different outside. That’s why,” Frank told her. Maria’s gaze flickered over to the house Frank had entered.

They continued, mostly silent. Bill and Maria’s performance suffered in a way that made Frank consider sending them back, but in the end, he decided to keep them with him. It wasn’t an easy thing to deal with death. An actual body was something they had yet to see. No human had died in front of them, and they hadn’t stumbled across any who had fallen until now. The tutorial left no corpses. It wasn’t something they could be fully prepared for, even if circumstances had already hardened them far beyond their starting point.

Frank couldn’t give them the opportunity to falter here. His own experiences told him as much. He’d faltered when Vince died. If not for luck, that would have been the end of him. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about, but someone he recruited would die at some point. It was basically a given. Everyone who survived would need to cope with it after.

Eventually, they came in sight of a group of a dozen people guarding the road. Most of them held improvised spears, though a minority had real weapons. They saw Frank at the same time and immediately started shouting.

“Get over here quickly! Those things are still around!” A tinny male voice exclaimed.

Frank waved to them in response, acknowledging them, but didn’t speed up any. A minute later, his group arrived in front of the others.

“Man, you three are ice,” one of the group said, a short, fat man in his early twenties, wearing a t-shirt that wasn’t long enough. “Did you not run into those flaming things?” He asked Frank. Frank felt a little happy that someone hadn’t immediately assumed Bill was in charge until he realized that Bill’s expression was absolutely miserable. The guy probably just didn’t find him approachable.

“We fought our way over. Two of our companions were doing some stuff downtown when they got cut off by those husks,” Frank explained succinctly.

The man’s gaze flitted across the weapons the three of them were holding. “You didn’t just boat over?”

“Nope,” Frank replied. “We cleared a path here.”

A woman piped up. “Did you see anyone else on the way in?”

Frank considered how to respond, before deciding there wasn’t any point in overthinking. “No one living. One person too burnt up to identify,” he said, simply.

Her face fell, and she went silent. Frank turned back to the fat man. “Any chance you could send a message to…” Frank paused for a second to remember the man’s name. “Troy Fairson. Tell him Frank is looking for him.”

“Troy’s pretty busy right now,” the fat man said. “He’s third in command at the moment. I can send someone to send a message if you want to wait here and guard this spot with us.”

Frank nodded, then turned to Bill and Maria. “We wait.”

“Anything we can do to help out in the meantime?” Bill asked. His voice had a hint of listlessness to it.

Frank had an idea immediately. ”We can move some of these cars over, make a barricade.”

One person was sent off to pass a message to Troy. Once Frank saw the messenger leave, he wasted no time, and with his two companions' help, started dragging vehicles and flipping them to form a barricade.

“I don’t know why they didn’t do this before,” Maria said, ten minutes later, after getting the cars into place.

“It’s a lot of work,” Frank replied. “How many side streets and paths are there in and out of downtown?”

The group standing guard had decided to help at first, but seeing Frank lift up a car and drag it by himself without much distress, didn’t bother. They wouldn’t get more than one ready before Frank had finished.

“What the hell have you all been eating?” Someone watching asked, disbelieving. Frank took the opportunity to hand them a copy of his primer.

After the road had been blocked off, Frank sat down on the road and waited. After half an hour, several people appeared on bicycles, Troy following behind the man who had gone to find him, along with two stone-faced men in uniform. Right behind them were Rina and Felix.

The party arriving dismounted a few feet in front of Frank and the others. Troy greeted him.

“Frank. Good to see you so soon,” Troy said warmly.

“Likewise,” Frank said. Since Troy had gone and preemptively brought Rina and Felix over, he meant it.

“Your friends were very helpful, by the way. There was some sort of leader with this attack. They handled it. I’ll let them give you the details. I’m sure you are busy, and frankly, so am I, so I’ll be turning back in a couple of minutes. Do you have a few moments before that, though?”

Frank nodded. “Sure.” He briefly said hi to Felix and Rina, who were both clearly extremely stressed out. He’d have to speak to them after he found out what Troy wanted.

Troy got right to the point after leading Frank just out of earshot of the others. “What exactly is going on right now? Do you know? Because this is not something that we can handle right now.”

“Probably a high-level field dungeon,” he replied. “The fire would have caused it to appear.”

“So they’ll keep coming?” Troy questioned.

“Yea, and given that these ones were stronger, and you mentioned a leader, they’ll keep getting stronger until they are dealt with,” Frank told him bluntly.

Troy took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair, sighing. “Do you have any idea how to deal with it?”

“Kill the boss, the dungeon disappears, nothing else appears,” Frank said.

“Is that even possible to do right now? The guy that needs to be defeated is the strongest one right? If not for Felix and Rina the strong one that appeared would have broken straight through and ransacked downtown,” Troy said.

“I’m going to go after it today,” Frank said.

“Your group is?” Troy asked.

“Just me. The others would probably die.”

“Well,” Troy said. “That was what I was leading in to. I wanted to float the idea of your people leading a strike team to deal with it if that was a possibility. The fact that you think everyone else would just die doesn’t give me confidence.”

“If I can’t succeed, then none of you probably can,” Frank told him honestly. It was clear that Troy had an idea that Frank was strong. How strong though, there was no way he could know unless he’d expended an Oracle.

“If I fail, you can try and send a group in there, but honestly, I’d suggest just fleeing,” Frank said.

“Any other options?” Troy asked.

“Go into a dungeon with a bunch of supplies, try and level up to give yourself a better chance. If you read what I wrote, you can spend about a month inside without issue, more if you keeping going deeper.”

“Would your odds of success increase if you had people with you?”

“Not really,” Frank said. “Isn’t much else to say on that. But I do have a question for you.”

Troy nodded. “Of course.”

“Is there a Tower of Wishing downtown?”

Troy’s eyes narrowed for a moment, before returning to a normal shape. “Yes.”

“If things are hopeless, you can give it a try,” Frank told him.

Troy nodded. “I’m curious how you figured all this out.”

Frank shrugged. “Just stumbled upon most of it.”

Troy thanked him and then took his leave, at which point Frank went over to Rina and Felix, who by then were standing with Bill and Maria.

“What happened?” Frank asked.

Felix took a deep breath. “Rina’s arm got cut off. If they hadn’t given us a potion to try and fix it, it’d be gone.”

Rina shivered when Felix mentioned it. Felix recounted the whole of the story to Frank and the others. They’d been set up at a table, talking to prospective recruits, gathering information, when the husks had come in a messy wave. They’d retreated hastily, dragging the people nearby along, linking up with a group of Provisos who’d moved towards the commotion. As a group, they’d been forced into an alleyway, which allowed Felix, Rina, and two of the Provisos to hold off the swarming husks by funnelling them into a chokepoint. They’d held things together stably, Felix taking the brunt of the effort and Rina backing him up, while the others helped as they were able. Then, a husk came, a head taller than the others, wielding a sword. It’d nearly overran them, immediately proving too much for Felix to handle. His practice of using his ice had come in clutch, turning what would have been a crippling strike into one that just knocked him aside by making a thick layer of it right where the blow would have struck. Rina had rushed forward to fill in the gap and stop it from taking advantage of Felix’s situation and had lost her arm in one exchange before Felix managed to right himself and stab it in the leg. With its mobility crippled, they managed to dispatch it without any further damage. Rina had managed to back away after taking that blow and then had been healed by someone while the fight was still ongoing.

Felix called it luck that they’d survived, but Frank didn’t think so. The only lucky thing was that there’d been a health potion on hand and they’d used it to reattach her arm quickly enough. That’d been in his expanded document. The fight, from Felix’s recounting, had gone as well as could be expected. They’d found a choke point, defended it, and held their nerve. When faced with a powerful foe, they’d acted decisively. There were two points that stuck out. Felix had moved to cripple it, which was a strategy Frank preferred himself. It wasn’t something he’d been able to demonstrate to Felix, there had not been any opponents strong enough to justify it, unlike in that first dungeon. It showed good instincts.

Rina rushing into melee combat when she was still pretty abysmal with the sword was not ideal, but the simple fact her first reaction had been to decisively move to help him was more than he expected of her. His mind flitted briefly to what Jerry had said, before refocusing on the current situation.

Frank immediately identified a mistake on his part. They had extra health potions. He should have had each group take one with them. He finished considering what he’d heard and turned to Rina and Felix.

“I think you both acted appropriately,” Frank said. Objectively, if they’d just booked it they’d have been safer, but he wasn’t about to harangue them for not leaving others to die. He'd done the same thing once already. “You should get back to the castle and rest.”

“You make it sound like you won’t be coming?” Felix asked.

“Time to deal with this thing before it gets out of hand,” Frank told him. Rina stared straight at him, expressionless, for a moment, before looking down.

Frank decided he’d lead the others back along the path they came. The unexpected presence of a powerful unit like that made him decide it’d be best not to leave things to chance. If another one like that stumbled across them as they returned, someone might die if it went wrong. He took them rapidly down the mostly empty streets he’d just cleared. There were still more husks streaming in, but it was much easier going on the way back. Then, Frank grabbed a canoe and boated back to downtown. By the time he arrived, it was afternoon. He carried his craft across from the bayside on the West, to the lake on the East, and after doing a final check of his things, set out across it towards danger.

The canoe across happened without incident. Frank arrived at a little private dock that stood in front of the burnt ruins around him, its undamaged state in stark juxtaposition with the devastation around him. Black spears jutting upwards were all that remained of trees destroyed. The homes and other buildings that dotted the shoreline were nothing more than ruins.

Everything was covered in a layer of blackened ash. The desolation spread into the distance as far as he could see. There was no point in wasting any time, so Frank set out through it, his boots kicking up ash as he went. There was a lot of searching to do, to try and find signs of where the field dungeon was. He’d already considered what to look for, beyond the obvious sign of increasing strength and number of enemies he presumed he’d see. It’d be fire and heat.

Husks appeared occasionally, as Frank travelled at a jog through streets, heading inland. They were not common, supporting what he’d suspected, that they surged out when they reached a certain number, then replenished over the next few days. In fact, so far, there were fewer husks in the ruins of Bellevue than there had been across the bridge in Seattle.

Nothing had survived the fire. Not a single building was anything more than a burnt shell. No trees, telephone poles, or even cars remained in an undestroyed state. The level of destruction was so total that it didn’t seem like something that could have occurred from a simple, mundane fire. Everywhere Frank looked, everywhere he travelled, it was simply devastation.

Frank searched by cutting back and forth across the suburb. He began by heading to the Northern edge of the destruction, then crisscrossed his way south, looking for his objective. It took hours, crisscrossing back and forth before he ran into something that indicated where he needed to go.

Burnt Husk of a Warrior(Level 5)

Frank approached it cautiously. It looked similar to other husks, but it held a sword in its hand and was slightly taller. Upon Frank identifying it, it attacked.

Frank took a defensive stance, letting it approach him. He wanted to see its attributes more thoroughly. The creature moved quickly, but not with the reckless abandon the simpler husks did. As it neared Frank, it assumed a proper posture and lead in with a stab, testing him. Frank took it on his shield, letting it slide away, and made a compact swipe with his mace to force it back. It was fast, but unless it was hiding something, not fast enough that Frank couldn’t deal with it. Frank tested it out for about a minute before he felt like he had a good grasp of what it could do, then batted its sword aside with his shield and caved its head in.

Its presence demonstrated that he was finally on the right track, so Frank started exploring more thoroughly from where he found it. Instead of crossing back and forth, he started sweeping out in a half-circle from where his new start point, ignoring the area behind him he’d already been through. Soon enough, he started seeing more higher-level husks. The first real threat he faced was only level five, but it forced him to make a quick reaction.

Something caught the corner of his eye, streaking towards him, and he only just barely got his shield in the way to block it. It was an arrow. Frank’s eyes immediately locked on to the direction it came from, and he saw a silhouette in the distance, holding a bow, already getting another arrow ready. At that distance, there was no prompt from the system.

Frank didn’t take his eyes off his enemy. He carefully backed away, trying to find cover, ready to block the next shot aimed at him. It came after a few seconds, and once again, Frank’s reflexes were up to the task, and he deflected it away. He took that moment to glance around. Behind him, to the left and right, he saw two husks approaching, both with weapons in hand. Frank acted as soon as he saw them. Immediately, he used a burst of his magic to launch himself towards the nearest one, in the process dodging the next arrow aimed at him. His movement took him fifteen feet from where he was, and he managed to simultaneously turn himself to face that foe directly.

It was another Husk of a Warrior, wielding a sword. Frank didn’t give it any opportunities. He closed the last few steps between them and swung out. As he did so, he used his kinetics to speed up his mace mid-swing. His wrist groaned at the stress that caused, but the sudden change in velocity was beyond the husk’s ability to react to. It didn’t get its sword out in time, and the mace crashed into its shoulder, driving it to its knees. Frank didn’t finish it off.

Instead, he darted away, out of the path of another arrow, and then moved towards the other husk that had tried to ambush him. Once more, he used magic to end things immediately, so that he wouldn’t end up standing still. He swung out early, before the husk and he were in range of each other, and then slid himself forward so the blow connected. Again, this was outside of what his opponent could react to. The impact of Frank’s mace with the husk’s head put an end to it.

A tower of flame burst up behind him as he made his move to close in on the archer. Each of his steps, augmented by kinetic energy, propelled him forward at an inhuman speed, zig-zagging towards the distant archer. It fired off three shots from the time Frank turned to it until he was upon it. It could do nothing to defend itself once Frank got in range, and fell without further struggle to his weapon.

Frank went back for the one he’d crippled, dispatching it effortlessly, and resumed his search. He knew he was getting closer, but the attempted ambush just then raised some doubts in him. The most dangerous thing you could face was something intelligent. That was what made the skinwalkers so dangerous. The one impersonating Sasha’s husband had not only perfectly disguised itself, but had used Sasha’s medical needs to indirectly sabotage the situation in Redstone. Not that Frank expected that kind of cunning, but if his current foes were capable of even simple plans that complicated things immensely.

Even as he scouted through the burnt-out remnants of the suburb, second thoughts floated around. A single husk came into view as he stepped around a wall, and without hesitating, Frank stepped forward and smashed it before it could react. It died instantly, collapsing, then igniting, leaving only an oily scorch march when it disappeared. Frank stopped, then, for a moment, using the wall as cover so he could rest. It had been the remains of a house, probably one of the first ones in the area, given that he was leaning against the remains of a brick exterior.

Frank tried to clear his mind, and focus on the task before him. He realized, as he leaned, what the issue was. He knew he was a worrier, that he got lost in his own head when given the time. But when he was actually doing something, he could push that aside. What was getting him, he figured out, was that he was about to take a fight he’d normally avoid. Outside of when this all began and he’d literally been thrown into a series of deathmatches, had he ever taken a bad fight since he returned? Only impulsively, before he’d understood how returning had changed him. Risk was one thing, but Frank had felt, pretty much since then, that he was in full control. Every time he fought, he’d fought with the confidence that he would come out on top if he didn’t make a mistake. It was manageable. But he could already tell this would be different.

He wished he still had a team at his back. But his new companions weren’t ready. He’d have to be at their back, probably for a long time. No one he’d met so far would be any help here, except maybe Felix. That was a rough thought. He didn’t think the risk to Felix was worth it. He might help a little, but more likely he’d just die, and he was the only other person with access to magic that Frank knew of.

He was walking into an uncertain situation, without the confidence that he’d be able to win, and that’s what had him off. If he kept going, there’d come a point where the outcome was no longer something he could control. If he didn’t go, then Seattle would probably just be destroyed. He could leave, try and make it to Portland or Vancouver or even California. They might be in better situations. They might not. He realized that the uncertainty was what was eating at him. Without the heaps of Stability he once had, little things mattered more.

There was nothing to do but accept that he felt that way and put it aside. He needed to focus. Frank was here because the other options were worse. No other reason. He stood back up straight and continued on.