Randidly stood in Selene’s restaurant, twisting in on himself over and over. Memories of witnessing Devick dragging away Duulys Ambar wove themselves together with the strange emptiness he saw in Fiona’s expression, now she had been restricted from reaching for her own image. He opened his mouth to describe what he had seen, believing that the process of hearing that would shake Fiona from her funk.

He saw those rust-colored stains creeping off of the chains onto the man’s skin.

Yet no words came. The conveyance of meaning, all Randidly wanted to accomplish, felt too weighty for his tongue to support. He just stood silently, everyone waiting for him to explain his lingering and heavy glance. Fiona made a few more plaintive attempts to activate her image, swearing and sweating, doing everything but shredding her connection to the Ascension Pact that blocked her. Tatiana looked at him with a knowing gaze, perhaps peering into his struggle or perhaps feeling his exhaustion.

In the end he closed his mouth and turned away. His heart folded in on itself. “Enjoy your dinner.”

Maybe it was because he knew that Fiona would definitely focus, but it would be a mental health borne of necessity that would disintegrate immediately when she accomplished her goal. Randidly had gone on similar crusades in the past, eventually facing a long-overdue bill for his mental state.

Maybe his silence was because he was so, so tired after the fights he had gone through to get here. Once again, his Nether reserves had been reduced to almost nothing.

Randidly opened a portal to the core of Kharon Academy’s Labyrinth with the Alchemist’s Passport. There, he sat down amongst the sigils of his foundation, his skin pressed against the cool stone, desperate to recover some semblance of his balance.

Even the Grey Creature felt listless. Randidly gratefully swirled his thoughts into a meditative trance and lost himself in the dark oblivion of recovery.

Then, much later, he began to dream.

Not once during this entire process did he consider heading to Zone 1 and stomping out the remnants of Fiona’s image; even if he hadn’t been the one to release such a powerful image amongst these people, the people of Expira could use some tempering.

And in terms of invasive images, Fiona’s focus of forcing someone to face their own taboos wasn’t so horrible.

Or, and much more important to the about-to-snooze Randidly, not so deadly.

*****

Through the speaker in his interface drone, Ghost allowed his vocal distortions to crackle for several long seconds as a display of displeasure before he finally answered the smug man in front of him. “...are you sure your facilities are prepared to handle these infected individuals? My drone gaolers are immune to the image-”

“Please, we understand the gravity of this terrorist threat,” The vaguely important officer flashed a smile at Ghost. A gleaming golden badge with some variation on Zone 1’s sigil sat prominently on his chest. The man was slightly overweight in a way that made Ghost’s human-interested mind suspect the man had dearly wished the System had arrived perhaps two years earlier, when he was younger and more good-looking. Before the mundanities of life had sucked away his spark of self-improvement. And this remnant husk was who Ghost had the pleasure of dealing with. “We will detain the infected individuals in a high-security location, of that you can be sure. But from here on, we won’t be needing any sort of outside consultancy.”

Ghost hummed, knowing simultaneously that he was the best choice to handle the problematic individuals still weeping and with their eyes tainted by mauve light, and also that this officious man would hear nothing of it. Rather than Zone 1 Interior or Exterior Defense, this particular specimen was a representative of West Providence Municipal security. The nonsensical separation of responsibilities, jurisdictions, and funding in Zone 1 felt like a recipe for another agency approaching Ghost later and complaining that they were the proper group to hand over the infect to.

Ghost had his drone nod slowly. Resisting now would accomplish nothing. “Fine, take them. Good luck.”

With a polite smile on his face, the officer nodded and turned away without acknowledging the genuine plea of the second sentence. He shouted a few loud orders to the loitering members of his unit and then began to approach the subdued group, thankfully wearing gloves at least, and apply their own routine restraints to them.

Ghost ran several statistical calculations as he watched their operating practices in securing these individuals. The squad brought around a large converted bus to convey the infected to another facility. Considering the resistance he had experienced, the most likely scenario was that this group from Municipal Security would be totally infected within twelve minutes and thirteen seconds.

Ghost clicked a panel next to his true body, starting a timer.

The fight to subdue the team in the first place had been brutal; almost half of Ghost’s prized and precious drone collection had been damaged in the process. Two of his prized Fire Bull Mark VII’s, a low to the ground metal ram that essentially possessed no weapons but core and stabilizing thrusters with an impressive kick, had been crushed personally by the squad leader dispatched by the Orchard. His knuckles possessed enough kinetic spunk to knock on the door of Randidly Ghosthound himself.

Infected by some foreign image the man might be, but his own image appeared to function without issue. His thunderous stomps shook the ground, destabilizing the footing of Ghost’s drones, keeping his weaker squadmates from being overwhelmed by the humming and swarming drone formations.

After about an hour of harrying, some shift happened in the image; a connection had been abruptly cut that had been the backbone of their resistance. The sharp teamwork with which they had been coping with Ghost’s offensive previously abruptly vanished. Each individual still frantically fought to escape and spread the mental infection, but they were suddenly monsters of instinct. They assisted each other if they noticed a fellow being attacked, but they could be corralled and distracted.

Within five minutes of this unconscious communication vanishing, Ghost had battered them all to the ground and sprayed them all with a quick-drying carbon-polymer gel. He had needed to reapply the gel several times to the squad leader, whose physical Stats allowed him to essentially twitch at a high enough speed to melt his way out, but the rest were thoroughly stuck. Their images flared balefully above their heads, but couldn’t damage the darksteel variant polymer enough to free themselves.

Ghost provided the reagents, observing as the grey, blob-like coverall was replaced by mundane handcuffs and manatech restraints. The infected were strangely docile, still with tear ducts working overtime, as they were led into trucks and brought away. Ghost mobilized a squadron of observation drones to glide above the truck amongst cloud cover, keeping them high enough in the stratosphere to avoid Zone 1’s radar detection net.

The afternoon yawned and sank into the fuzzy blue light of evening, the first hints of darkness beginning to form along the horizon. The infected arrived at a squat jail with no specialty equipment installed to handle unusual criminals. Ghost was disappointed, but not surprised. The timer next to him continued to tick. The only annoyance was a Manatech lining in the walls, which activated to prevent easy peering into the building. His observational gliders circled above for a few minutes before turning back to his home base.

Not to be deterred, Ghost dispatched a subterranean tunneler drone to sit beneath the facility. It wouldn’t give him any vision, but the fine-tuned sensors could detect footsteps and impacts broadcast down through the heavy concrete foundations.

Which was why, as about half of the infected had been unloaded from the truck and placed into holding cells, Ghost noticed a sudden series of impacts at the end of the prison where the original prisoners had been stored.

While the West Providence two security officers walked back from delivering the eleventh prisoner and retrieving the twelfth, one of the staff within the prison made one of the many possible mistakes that Ghost had calculated earlier. Perhaps he or she had wandered too close to the cells, perhaps they had leaned in to take a closer look at the strange mauve light of these individuals, or perhaps they simply wished to inflict corporal punishment on the uppity members of an Orchard Special Forces Squad.

In the end, by the time the twelfth prisoner was being uncuffed and led back down the few steps of the truck, the infected employee had gotten to two of his colleagues and released half of the imprisoned fellows similarly gripped by madness. So when the guards opened the door, they were swiftly overpowered by a surge of flailing limbs.

Ghost checked the time. Fourteen minutes; apparently, his calculations needed more honing.

Once distracted, the infected forgot about their still imprisoned compatriots, instead opting to wander toward other buildings to spread that mauve light. Ghost made a noise of displeasure as he activated the distress beacon, sending the details of the problem to the world council.

Time to see how well this unified rule of law can bind us in the face of the threat, Ghost mused.

*****

“Here’s the required body, still alive as requested,” Devick said cheerily as she shoved Duulys Ambar onto the ground in front of the flickering and blurry candle of Elhume’s body. Her eyes flicked around, curious despite her best efforts not to appear like too much of a snoop. She traced the thick and dense lines of Engravings at height of arcane capability that made her head spin. “Is there anything else?”

At Elhume’s confusing direction, Devick had gone through a secret passage of the Nexus Ways and emerged into a shadowy and unstable realm that lay within the Nexus itself. The strange area was filled with raw lines of sizzling and unfinished Engraving. Even stranger, when powerful individuals moved through the Nexus, they released a wake that could be detected here. Devick’s senses worked over time, trying to capture the peculiar frequency of Elhume’s private sanctum.

“Yes,” Elhume’s answer sent flutters through her heart, but Devick tried not to let it show. Since Randidly insisted on being independent, she had to distract herself from tracking the guy down and dragging him back to her party. A task from Elhume was the perfect diversion.

Although if he doesn’t come to my party… Devick’s mood soured instantly as this small possibility wormed its way into her mind. Rust-colored madness seeped out of her twitching fingers. That precious fucking Vulpis Squad you left training on that stupid hunk of rock-

“How many souls can you bind together at once?” For a few seconds, Elhume’s face came into a much closer focus than Devick had ever seen it before. His bony features were screwed up into such a wicked snarl of obsession that Devick couldn’t help but smile.