"What the hell is going on out here?"

Terry Saunders exited the interview holding to a scene of absolute chaos. A dozen of his men lay strewn across the ground where they'd fallen, some kind of electric ghost horse wreaking havoc on their usually clean formation.

Judging by the analysis tags most of them still possessed, they had been knocked out instead of killed, but that was beside the point. Terry had only been given as many as he had in order to keep order and maintain the dungeon, the training of their weaker members, and the safe containment of far too many people with far too much power to be safely held anywhere else.

And a single ghost horse was enough to shatter all their discipline? All their powerful, upgraded equipment, all their months of training, and they were taken down by one horse.

No one answered his demand for an explanation, as their attention was fully focused on tracking the unpredictable creature and trying to bring it down.

Terry had no patience remaining. After the way his night had been going so far, he was not in the mood for any of this.

Drawing his manabow from its sheath, he focused on his target as he drew his hand back slowly. Orange light coalesced from the air, forming a broad-tipped bolt. It began fuzzy but grew clearer and clearer in definition as he held the shot and wound his power tighter around it.

Enforce. Precision. Guidance.

The attack grew, drawing in more and more of his mana and stamina. Terry tracked the rampaging creature with his bow, falling into that pure focus state where everything else seemed to fade to insignificance.

Then something flickered in the periphery of his vision, a sudden motion he would ordinarily have discounted, had it not been immediately followed by one of his agents' health tags dropping to zero and vanishing. He swung around, refocusing instinctively, gaze zeroing in on the tiny green creature with a glowing dagger who'd just beheaded Agent 221.

He fired. For a moment, he was in two places at once; standing in one place and observing, while also rushing forward at impossible speed, pushing himself faster as he raced after the creature who'd hurt his men. The gremlin bared its teeth and sprang away, and Terry swerved to match. The creature's eyes flickered in surprise, then the moment ended.

Terry's arrow twisted in midair, driving through the gremlin's skull. It twitched in feeble resistance, but Terry had already fired a second, more mundane shot, dropping its health below its ability to maintain stability. It collapsed, but he fired three more times until he'd exhausted his mana entirely just to be sure. Named creatures had a habit of causing unexpected problems.

By the time he returned his attention to the ghost horse, it had already been dealt with, collapsed into a sparking puddle on the ground. Finally.

Terry felt a headache building behind his eye. First the most bizarrely unsettling interrogation, now this. Whatever this was. What happened here? How did that get in? What even was it? He stowed away his bow, striding across the compound toward the epicenter of the madness. Three of his men were dead, another four either unconscious or just rousing from their shocked state of uselessness.

"Ren, report!" Terry shouted across the yard to the nearest group leader. He'd long since learned that it's better to ask an individual for answers than a group, if you want to avoid the awkward shuffling and glancing around at one another to see who'd speak up first.

Ren, standing with the group who'd taken down the horse, snapped to attention and trotted over. "I didn't see much, sir. Heard shouting, the fight was already underway when I arrived. Got my team together, took the monster down. New type, never seen anything like it before."

"Shouting from where?"

Ren gestured toward the barracks, and they walked over to investigate. It took only minutes to discover the damage was even worse than Terry had initially feared. The horse creature had taken out nearly half of their on-site enforcement in under ten minutes. Only stunning most of them, thankfully, and many were beginning to rouse now. The gremlin was the cause of the much bigger problem. It had followed after to take advantage of his unconscious people's vulnerabilities, and killed at least eight of them before Terry had stopped it.

"Search everywhere," Terry growled. "I want to know where these came from and how they got in. And I want that horse converted. Do we have any tamers on site?"

He didn't see any Tamer tags among those assembled, but that wasn't surprising. It wasn't a very popular class. Aside from being difficult to obtain, it was slow to level and relied on creatures inherently less flexible and intelligent than their human counterparts. Only the crafting classes were less useful in a fight. At least medics could contribute somehow, and scouts weren't a vulnerability. Whereas if a tamer was dropped, their monsters would inevitably become a liability to the group instead of a benefit. There was no reason to bring a tamer with you into a fight. Even escorting one along to tame a new monster was risky. Much better to keep the tamers outside of conflict and drag the monsters out to them.

Ren stuttered. "I... don't know, sir. None in my squad. I could ask--"

Terry waved him to silence. He should have known better than to ask Ren something like that. "You're in charge of the investigation into this incident. Remember, I want to know how they got in, if there are more of them, and how to stop it happening again. Dismissed."

Ren was a decent enough squad leader, but he tended to be fairly rigid in his thinking. Not the best at handling the unexpected. Terry scanned the area for anyone a bit more knowledgeable, and spotted the island of order in the surrounding chaos at once.

"Barton! Any tamers on site?"

"Jenkins is in the crafting room," Barton reported, jogging over. "303 is out with group 4, due back any day now. Any other tamers are stationed elsewhere."

Terry scowled around at the chaos. "Will we have enough to pull Jenkins out?"

Barton considered the group, then shook his head. "I don't think so, sir. We need twenty for a proper clear, and that would leave the compound unguarded. We lost two of our group leaders in this attack and without them to coordinate, it would be too risky to try a standard clear. I'd suggest a cycle run."

Terry shook his head. "Too slow. Where's the nearest tamer stationed?"

Barton hesitated. "I'd have to check the records, sir. I believe 190 over in D11 has a tamer secondary, but I can't be sure she's on location right now."

Terry considered a moment, but only a moment. His night was a bust at this point whatever happened. At least if he could salvage something from this debacle, he might not lose his command. "Prep me a plane and load the named monsters. And the ranger in questioning. I'll request backup from D11 while I'm there. Tell everyone morning clear is canceled. Focus on reinforcing our perimeter. Find out how they got in and seal it so it won't happen again."

"Yes sir. But, the dungeon, if we don't clear it, the prisoners--"

"If we try to clear it, we risk losing even more. As long as they don't try anything, they'll probably be fine. It's one day."

Barton's grimace made it clear he disagreed with the decision, but he knew better than to argue. "Understood. Your plane will be ready in twenty minutes."

"Make it fifteen. We don't have time to waste."

Barton's grimace twitched, but he only nodded. "Fifteen it is."