I've known for a very long time that the only thing that Dungeoneers have over their head is a number representing their level. No name, no class, no affiliation, nothing like that; it's just a single statistic. That's all that the Dungeoneer system provides without us going out of our way to share our Dungeoneer cards. When people aren't even displaying equipment, you get only the vaguest impression of what people are capable of.

In the front room of this Indian restaurant, there were three people with levels less than 100. Although I was under stealth--granted, the Cloak was not a dedicated tool in that regard--and had slipped in the door without opening it myself, none of them had missed my entrance. The one in the back even had her neck craned around like she'd been looking another direction until I came in.

And, you know what? I wasn't terribly interested in being the one to cause a scene. If they wanted to fuck up their own restaurant, the hell did I care? I pushed at the skill, trying to use its bending effects even more strongly than I had been, and skipped through the front room towards the back without trying to engage any of them.

I mean, they deal in assassins, Merry muttered, also a little chagrined that this had taken me by surprise. Presumably they are prepared for any one of them to betray everyone or go on a rampage. Countering stealth is just step one.

None of the three made a move on me, but even I knew that they had doubtless raised an alarm and were told not to disrupt the business unless necessary. So when I ducked into a short hallway and the first exit was a kitchen, I paused only briefly to reassess. For all I knew, trouble was coming quick, and it might come from anywhere, including one of the three from the front room.

It's somewhere in the back of the building, Merry said. Need to know the layout.

So of course I flared the Cloak, spilling my power out into the world just to get more of a sense of what was around me. It had taken that function away from my Telekinetic Sense; Merry's perception skill didn't have the all-around-ness that I needed for something like determining the layout of a building.

That would doubtless have been easier if I'd gone for the roof. Man, hindsight.

The kitchen was long and narrow, with a door at the far end that definitely didn't lead outside. The next couple of doors were bathrooms, and there was a service door at the far end. On the other side of the service door were two people standing guard, and in the hallway beyond the cook's rear door was another person bumbling around with what was probably food.

I moved forward and took refuge in the bathroom instead of busting down either of the doors.

You're forgetting about the Dracula Cape, offered Merry, and I summoned it on me as soon as the thought crossed my mind, mentally thanking her. And also, remember I gave you that Class Feature to imbue summoned items with your skills.

I blinked. I'd gotten that... just in the Slenderman fight. I'm fucking terrible at this, aren't I? I whined to Merry, half-conscious of the fact that it was a whine, and half trying to make it a joke. It wasn't, though; I'd just put myself in a terrible position and I kept expecting that, like a Dungeon, I would just be carried along by my skill and my Skills.

The ceiling here is hollow, noted Merry without responding. Not enough room to crawl in, but with the Cloak...

Instead of jumping in immediately, we paused and tried to assess the structure of the building. The walls, in places, went all the way up; that separated the front from the back, but it would let us get to the other side of the service doorway without going through the door.

In the hallway outside, one of the three servers was walking calmly down the corridor, a long knife in her hand. Though she was well within range of the Cloak, I decided not to target her quite yet, and instead broke a ceiling tile and, gambling on a combination of factors I hadn't tested yet, imbued Dracula's cape with the Vampiric Cloak and used that to fling myself into the gap between cardboard ceiling tiles and industrial concrete ceiling.

The experience was surreal and terrifying, and I messed it up almost instantly.

Oh, don't get me wrong--it was working. The Vampiric Cloak was supposed to bend things to my will, to a certain extent; the heavy mental weight of the cloak was like a currency I could spend to bend the laws of nature (or the Dungeon), and this particular combination of factors was more or less lined up. Dracula's Cape was a one-off item designed specifically to boost the skill, and imbuing piece of fake cloth with the skill helped me hammer my will into reality and say "As long as this thing can pass, I can pass."

But I was also kind of scared, and I quickly discovered that this function of the Cloak requires me to keep moving. As long as I had momentum, I could maintain that fabrication, but I couldn't just hang out in a narrow crawlspace less than two feet high without poofing back into existence, so I poofed back into existence.

The drop ceiling was supported by cables, mostly, but there were also a bunch of small metal tresses up there, some supporting wires for power and internet and stuff. None of that was meant to hold up the weight of a person, and so I immediately tore through the shitty ceiling and fell back into the bathroom, landing with my crotch straight onto one of the stall dividers in the bathroom. That, too, ripped out of the wall, and I found myself... ah, momentarily distracted. So I was down on the floor a moment later, on top of and partly covered with a lot of fucking debris.

JERRY!

The waiter barged in, and was completely boggled by what she saw, so I just immediately threw the cape back at the ceiling, dragging myself and a bunch of debris back up into the drop ceiling. I was vaguely aware that the two guards who'd been on the other side of the door were now coming to the bathroom to investigate, but that didn't really influence my decision to bust through the ceiling on the other side of the door and immediately careen off in the direction Merry sent me.

As it turned out, the target room's walls did not go all the way to the ceiling; it was not terribly reinforced, it was just a small office in the back. I sensed one person inside, and (though a bit panicked) forced myself into the ceiling from outside and then back down behind the only person in the room.

Who was, not terribly surprising, an old Asian or middle eastern man (again, I'm not completely up on how to tell them all apart) sitting behind a desk, surrounded by filing cabinets, safes, shelves full of things, and now, broken bits of ceiling tiles and drywall.

The old man's eyes widened, but he didn't stand up. He just looked, and I looked back. I realized extremely slowly exactly what I was looking at, as he just sat there, looking at me.

He didn't even have a level. He was some kind of mob accountant, not a hitman.

Jerry...

I threw the force of the Cloak at him, hoping to knock him out, and... well, I succeeded, and I don't think I killed him, but he ended up buried and bleeding in a chintzy metal shelving unit that was mostly full of paperwork. Then I turned and made sure the door was locked, though that wouldn't fucking help anything; it just made me feel better.

Shit, man.

I finally got a chance to look around in more detail, and stopped as soon as I did. Merry was using my senses to examine a locked metal cabinet nearby, and when I broke it open, I saw exactly what she'd been sensing.

Three rows full of human pet items; in total, 19 of them.

Without thinking, I grabbed each and threw it into my inventory, feeling sick as I did so. Each one, as it entered my inventory, suddenly added things to my hud--where by things, I also meant "people", as the system considered the two one and the same. None of those nineteen people worked in this building, and the only one who was close was Zoya, though four more were in the general area. According to the windows that popped up, some weren't even on the continent. Some were teenagers, for fuck's sake. And one of the items had a knife stuck in it--not a Dungeoneer item, just a regular, everyday god-fucking knife. I ripped it out without thinking and started to discard it, then also put it in my inventory just to be safe. I doubted that anyone could track me from that, but the fewer clues I left, the better.

I turned and stared at the fucking accountant, realizing as I did that they had probably chosen a non-Dungeoneer to guard the items as much as anything so that he couldn't actually use them. I wasn't 100% positive that having the dolls in my inventory transferred some kind of system ownership to me; Cassandra had shown distress when I handed her off to Louise, and she was just a boss item drop. In any case, the man had seen my face, and he might be the only one who'd gotten a good look at me.

You'll be bloodied, and everyone will know it.

I stopped, closing my eyes and listening to approaching footsteps from down the hall. Of course, she was right; from a certain point of view, I should probably heal the bastard to make sure he didn't die. But at the moment, all I really cared about was getting the hell out.

The sound of someone trying the handle on the door was all it took for me to leave the room the same way I came in, though this time I headed for the nearest fire exit instead of the front. It was locked and barred, but that didn't stop me. No alarm sounded even when the door went flying off its hinges.

Well, that's not true. It hit a car in the rear employee lot behind the strip mall, and that alarm went off.

I went back over top of the building, the Cloak serving just as well as telekinesis for that kind of movement, but immediately noticed a distinct lack of stealthed hovering helicopter over the parking lot. In fact, even when I flared Merry's perception skill, I struggled to locate the telltale sign of the Dungeoneer ability being used hanging in midair off to the southwest, over the chemical plant, and moving away.

Shit. "Zoya, on me." I dug into my inventory and pulled out both of her swords, not even half surprised that the assassin woman was able to leap to the top of the stripmall in a single bound. The woman, still under stealth, eyed the swords hungrily and took them as soon as I offered her the handles, the blades disappearing from normal sight as I Did. "As far as I'm concerned, you're free," I told the woman, "As are a bunch of other people. But--"

Two people jumped up onto the roof behind me, one under stealth and the other a massive, pudgy man holding what looked like a butcher's knife scaled up to three feet in length. His level wasn't impressive--only about 80, not too much above mine--but he had glowing armbands and a belt that looked like they were probably items well above his level.

He didn't bother to make any demands or threats, just stalked forward, his long knife chopping forward experimentally as though it was eager to cut meat.

Somewhat ironically, I ended up pulling out the items that Vlad had given me in his gift basket; the pair of sunglasses, which I hadn't had reason to use, and the mundane, non-dungeoneer pistol. Under the circumstances, in case I hadn't been recognized, it felt like a bad idea to advertise that I was, like, the only Soulforged Dungeoneer within a thousand miles, not that the gun was an ideal solution to my problems.

I also was not particularly proficient in guns, but I checked the ammo and the safety, then leaped back from a wide slash of the knife.

"A gun, really?" The other man smirked at me. "You can empty that whole clip into me and you won't kill me."

"Hm." Even though the two men were obviously blooded Dungoneers themselves, I didn't really want to kill them and get in trouble with that myself. Instead, I send Zoya a message through the party interface. Not trying to kill them, I just needed a moment to think. We're going to run, probably through the chemical plant. Presumably the chopper had gone that way to avoid leading people back towards our place of origin, though whether they would actually pick us back up as promised or not was an open question.

Zoya had been squaring off against the other stealthed figure, which told me that both of them had perception as high as their stealth, or else something in particular to see through it. I didn't care how that worked, really, and I wasn't sure that I cared whether or not the assassin killed someone, either. Presumably these mob-owned Dungeoneers were not what anyone would call innocent.

The man with the butcher knife charged me, and instead of dodging or blocking I used my Cloak as telekinesis to grab the man by his neck and pin his feet to the ground, for a moment, then took my pistol and fired a bullet straight through his knee. I felt Assassination activate, and he flinched, but I was already moving past him, and in the last moments that I had a grip on him I threw him in the opposite direction.

I ended up charging straight towards the river, noting with some nervousness that two more people had piled out of the back door, one with an assault rifle and the other with a longbow. Under the circumstances, I wasn't sure which to be more afraid of, but I was kind of betting on the longbow. In either case, I frowned, repeating the trick I'd used with Zoya to give myself the appearance of walking on water as I leaped off the cliff and landed on the river.

I turned to provide covering fire, and noticed that Zoya had ripped the longbow out of its owner's hand and landed a nasty cut on the person's shoulder, and the one with the assault rifle was twisting around erratically, looking very clearly like a person who could not see through her Stealth. Zoya, in the interim, was charging for the riverbank, not coming right at me but clearing staying close.

Need help crossing, Zoya's voice came through the party interface. I aimed relatively close to the people chasing and fired a couple bullets to provide cover, but neither really slowed. I did note that the man with the butcher's knife was not chasing, which was all I had really wanted from that shot. When Zoya got close enough, I reached out with the cloak, grabbed her, and flung her to the other side of the river, then turned and continued running.

Then, as an afterthought, I pulled out Vlad's other gift--a grenade--and kept it in hand.

I made it to the other side of the river just as the man with the assault rifle got into a a braced position and opened fire. I hadn't taken the weapon for one that was accurate at these ranges, and certainly when he held the held the trigger, the resulting spray was not a real danger, but after a moment, he switched to single shots, and those were more trouble.

And unlike prison guards, or me, his bullets were Dungeoneer items with a real punch behind them.

Even so, he was no sniper, and Zoya and I both got onto the premises of the chemical plant quickly enough. I turned around, finding that two people were following, but under stealth, and yanked the pin on my grenade and threw it roughly where I expected them to be. It turned out that I underestimated the timer on the grenades, and so they had passed the bomb went it went off, but it still disrupted one's stealth.

As I followed Zoya onto the premises of a large, operational chemical plant, noting all the civilians in the area who could get hurt or who might remember my face, and thinking of cameras and volatile chemicals... I was starting to get the impression that I had made a big mistake. The people here were not stunt actors who would be jumping in front of green screens or explosions at a safe distance, and whatever consequences occurred would be very real.

I found it odd, then, that behind me, I sensed something powerful, and then again in the air ahead of me. It reminded me immediately of Harry's teleportation spell, but when I looked up, the man hanging in the air was not him. He did, however, have a similarly large spellbook hanging in the air in front of him, and a level above his head in the 190s.

When he gestured, four walls easily a hundred feet long and just as tall dropped from sky like knives from orbit, cutting off the obvious escape routes without smashing the buildings or tanks around me, though I had little doubt that they would have if he'd tried.

"You're going to regret making enemies of us," was all he said, as his spellbook started flipping to a new page.