“Have you seen Axle?” she demanded.

I shook my head, standing from the comfortable chair. Axle had made our first sale of Sleem, but after that, I couldn’t track him. The Fumble-Bees sprang to mind, and I made a mental note to get that thing up and running again.

My phone was out and in my hand in an instant. I asked the floating bald head on the plastic screen for Axle, but he shook his head after trying to connect me.

“Not answering,” the psychic deity informed me. Jada grumbled something about having already tried that, but I turned away and focused on the phone.

“Can you tell me why?”

The deity’s voice rang in my head, while his lips remained a thin line. “Due to the language of my contract with BuyMort, I am unable to provide any specific information on incapacitated affiliate members, or the nature of their incapacity, if it derives from capture.”

The deity raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged before he muttered, “Oops.” The phone went blank in my hands, and my blood ran cold.

Jada’s jaw dropped. She was staring at the phone in my hand. He must have been in her head as well as mine.

The implications of what the trapped deity had said were clear. Why he was helping me at all, on the other hand, was unclear. I discarded that line of thought. Axle had been incapacitated, by getting captured.

Who had captured him seemed obvious once I thought for a moment. I had told Taytrinn that Quadrum wanted my people to avoid the underground area. They must have captured him when he went to make the Sleem sale, while the rest of us slept.

I should have made him take hobbs with him. Or remembered the lie I had told Taytrinn.

My hands clenched and unclenched as I thought about the Knowle in the grips of the black widow Taytrinn. How it was my stupid fuck-up that put him in harm’s way, again. I had just killed Mr. Sada for far less, and I started to shake in rage as I stood and thought about it.

“Fuck it,” I said, turning and running upstairs. I pulled my helmet back on, grabbed the rest of my gear, and hopped off the second floor balcony again.

“Molls, I’m sorry to ask, but can you baby-sit Cube for me please?”

She nodded and rearranged her blanket. “Of course. I’ll call for a hobb to relieve me when one is available.”

“Thank you! Oh, uhh, be careful. I think he eats meat. Among other things,” I said. She smiled and nodded.

With Cube seen to, I turned back to Jada.

“The delves have him. You want to come kill em with me?” I asked, one arm extended.

The seven foot tall hyena-woman rumbled deep in her throat. Her eyes dilated, and she gripped my arm with her huge paw.

As soon as I stormed out of my own drive-way, Doofus grunted from Phyllis’s porch, and got up to follow me. He caught up while I was waiting for the gate to be opened.

“No Doof,” I growled. “We’re going to go do something bad.”

The huge dog looked at me intently but stopped at the gate. He sniffed the air behind me, extending his head and peering at me intently.

“You’re a good dog, Doofus.” I jogged away with Jada as the gate opened.

As we jogged down the hallway-road to the mansion’s lot, I texted Rayna. “Never mind the raid. Doing it myself now, they took Axle. Secure the underground and shoot any delves you see.”

She responded almost immediately. “K.”

When Jada shoved the gates to the mansion open, the area looked completely different. The house was gone entirely, down to the bricks in the basement walls. A depression in the ground remained, along with the hatch, and a short section of tunnel that vanished underneath the driveway.

The empty pool was on the other side of the depression, and a line of bicycles were parked to the side. Aside from that, and the Tesla, nothing remained.

Sure was easy to cover up murder when nobody cared about it.

I snarled inside my helmet and pushed aside the thought, stomping toward the metal hatch. Jada followed.

There wasn’t really a plan of action that I was pursuing, just a vague sense of rage and loss. I didn’t know Axle very well yet, but he was part of my affiliate, and had helped me immeasurably already.

There was no way Silken Sands could afford to lose him, and I was pretty sure Jada might kill me if he died.

The thought slowed me before I could smash in the metal hatch.

I reached for the hatch and hesitated again, drawing a confused look from Jada. She was drooling, and had a light foam building up in the corner of her bared fangs. As eager to get to killing as I was, but a thought had stopped me. There wasn’t even any way for me to know how many delves Jada and I were up against.

Afflqwst popped up and saved me again, offering a detailed explanation of my situation.

Quest - Hostile forces have captured your operations manager to use as a hostage in an upcoming attack on your affiliate. Respond.

REQUIREMENTS:

Locate operations manager. (incomplete) Rescue operations manager. (incomplete) (Optional) Ensure physical safety of operations manager during rescue. (incomplete) (Optional) Eliminate hostile affiliate. 42/42 alive. (Incomplete)

REWARD – BuyMort credit rating upgrade recommendation. Recommendation based on performance.

I nodded as I read through the quest. These delves were just monsters, to be cleared out of my basement. Nothing I hadn’t done before.

Afflqwst had given me valuable intel, likely gained by linking to Axle’s BuyMort account and eavesdropping. I knew he was alive, and I knew the delves were keeping him that way for the moment. That was enough.

“There’s forty-two of them, Jada. Are you ready for those odds?” I asked.

She growled and gripped her heavy mace. “Is that all?”

“We stay in stealth as long as we can. You on board with that?” I asked, one hand on the hatch.

“Just get me in front of them.”

I nodded, and we carefully and quietly removed the hatch from the basement tunnel. It was significantly easier with my newly enhanced strength, which had increased again during the night.

The heavy metal hatch, which had required two hobbs to lift up and down, was feather light to me. Jada didn’t even help, she just stood guard. I could feel a growing strength in my lower limbs as well, and suspected new colonies were forming on my legs, to enable more power blow abilities from them.

Should make kicking down doors easier.

My helmet lit up the hallways around me as I stalked silently through them, Jada at my side. At the midpoint intersection, I noticed movement in the ceiling above me and purposefully ignored it. The stealthy elf had hidden himself away in the broken ceiling vent the Sleem had destroyed the other day.

Jada didn’t look up either, but she sniffed the air and emitted a very faint, low growl.

It made sense, really. There was plenty of room for the sneaky elf to peek out and see the room below, the entire area was recessed and hidden from even enhanced vision. My helmet tracked his movement and pointed him out, or I would never have known where he was.

I stopped directly underneath the hole in the ceiling and nodded. “It’s okay, I know,” I said. Then I jumped directly up.

My legs were stronger than I was used to, and my helmet cracked into the concrete ceiling. I grabbed the dark elf by his shock white hair before he could react and dragged him out of the hole in the ceiling with me.

I landed on both feet. He slapped into the concrete in a belly-flop, driving the breath from his lungs.

Before he could recover enough to do more than gasp like a fish dragged from the water, I grabbed him by one foot, took a few quick steps toward the hangar, and hurled his entire body into the dark of the cavernous room.

Jada snarled in surprise. Her eyes glinted in the dark, and she followed the movement away.

A full count of three-Mississippi later, I heard a wet thud as the elf landed, and Jada’s ears twitched. My increased strength impressed me, the sound had come from roughly the same elevation he was at when he took off.

Instead of checking on the body, I just glanced at my quest on the app.

Quest - Hostile forces have captured your operations manager to use as a hostage in an upcoming attack on your affiliate. Respond.

REQUIREMENTS:

Locate operations manager. (incomplete) Rescue operations manager. (incomplete) (Optional) Ensure physical safety of operations manager during rescue. (incomplete) (Optional) Eliminate hostile affiliate. 41/42 alive. (Incomplete)

REWARD – BuyMort credit rating upgrade recommendation. Recommendation based on performance.

Very useful indeed. The app let me cheat, giving me access to BuyMort information.

We started jogging, being careful not to make too much noise. But now that one of them was dead, it was only a matter of time before his boss Taytrinn noticed his absence. After descending the stairs into the hangar, I jogged in the direction of the Sleem farm.

Tiny though our Sleem farming operation was, it was a good point of reference for me, as it was set up directly in front of the hidden tunnel’s door. I hoped they didn’t know about it, but even if they did, it would spit me out in the middle of their area, which was better than trying to assault the front.

My hope was that we could find Axle before they killed him. Get in fast, then deal with whatever happens after we save him.

I hadn’t known Taytrinn, the lady of this house of delves, for very long. But I knew enough. She was arrogant. Cruel. Hot tempered. Sure of herself. Used to getting her way in all things, and not at all used to the sensation of loss.

If she’d killed Axle I was going to tear her apart. The same thing was pretty likely to happen to her if she hadn’t, but I still held out hope for my new friend. As we silently stalked down the empty hidden tunnel behind the Sleem farm, I stared hard at the opposite wall.

The hidden door was sealed by a heavy wheel, and when we arrived I stopped to look at the room. Everything was exactly as I had left it, down to the stained concrete that had been beneath the corpses. I guess their blood had been part of the flooring long enough that BuyMort didn’t gather it when it took the mummified bodies.

I spun the wheel easily, wincing at the muted clunk of moving metal parts in the wall. Then I pushed it lightly, sliding open a corner big enough to peer through. All I could see was a patch of piled rags in the corner, next to a small metal bottle and an etched silver bowl.

“It won’t speak yet, but our lady suspects a sizable force of combat hobbs,” a deep voice said in the near distance. Sharp boot-steps sounded, two sets. It sounded like they were in the hallway outside.

Jada hunkered down behind me and growled faintly, her ears flat against her head. The mace was gripped tightly in her paw.

It was about time to act.