Irene finished packing up the last of the treasures from the scattered pile, mentally cataloguing which she'd give to who and what they'd keep.

Levi would retain all the crafting supplies, she'd hold on to most of the healing elixirs, Peter would get first pick of the armors. The rest, they could divide between the other escapees if any of them indicated a desire to keep fighting and leveling. Which, she suspected, a good number of them would.

This whole incident had proven beyond a doubt that the world wouldn't just let them stay at home and pretend things were normal. They'd stepped into a new world of power and danger, one that would come for them sooner or later regardless of their state of preparedness.

While she never would have wanted something like this to happen, it was something she could use. Their time had not been wasted while Levi was off leveling and collecting new monsters for their armies. She'd spoken to hundreds if not thousands of people, across countless towns and cities, from every walk of life, and in the process garnered a growing understanding of how to approach various situations with the best chance of persuasion.

And right now, they had a golden opportunity. She'd seen it, walking among the other prisoners as they waited, felt it in the glances and murmurs of respect that followed Levi any time he was around. (Even if some of those glances were decidedly presumptuous.)

This whole situation, horrific as it had been, was a perfect chance to divide those who had what it took to keep fighting from those who would crumble under the pressure and want nothing more to do with any of it.

Once she finished packing everything away, she headed out of the treasure room and back into the first floor's boss room. The monster bodies had disappeared for the most part, but the human ones lay scattered about where they'd fallen. Twisted, broken, bloodied. She had to swallow back bile. This was a battlefield. Not her first, not her last. She couldn't let this get to her.

Still, it was hard to force herself forward. Harder still to pick up the scattered weapons and shields, some still held in lifeless hands, or sticky with cooling blood.

Irene laughed quietly to herself. Shoving a dead man's weapons into a bag that could store anything weightlessly. What had her life come to that this felt normal?

She was almost finished when she caught sight of something familiar, a patch of darkness out of place in this particular dungeon.

"Becca!"

Irene ran over, jumping two of the rifts and hopping down to a lower level of the multi-tiered maze to reach the rift cat's side.

She was quite dead and a bit worse for wear, but at least she hadn't been unbound completely and absorbed into the dungeon. Irene had to surge stamina to lift the huge cat, but she managed it. It took another ten minutes to drag, carry, and shove her into the treasure room, but Irene wasn't willing to take chances. She would have taken her all the way outside of the dungeon entirely if not for Levi's warning to stay inside for at least fifteen minutes. His exit would be causing enough chaos for a while yet that it wouldn't be safe to peek out.

"I'm glad you're still in one piece," she told the dead cat, then headed back out to finish looting the battlefield.

She hadn't gone more than a few steps before a voice broke through the silence.

"Hey, is someone alive up there?" came a hopeful voice. "I could use some help."

Irene hurried over to the edge and peered down. The smell hit her first, stronger here, emanating from the thick twisted webs strung between the cliffs.

Below, a man lay thoroughly tangled in the webs.

His initial smile at seeing someone come to the rescue faded when his eyes met hers. "Wait, I don't recognize you. What's going on?" There was a note of panic in his voice now.

"We're staging a mass breakout, at the moment. Are you going to try to stop us?"

"No, of course not. I-- I don't care, if you'll get me out of this web before the monsters start respawning, I'll do whatever you say."

"Then you'd be fine with answering some questions, to buy your freedom?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know. Just get me out of here."

"Then how about you start by telling me where my sister is."

"Sister? I don't know anything about you." The man below twisted, trying to get a clear view. She now saw that a thick strand of webbing lay across his face, heavily obstructing his vision.

"Cassandra Jackson."

"Ohhh... her..."

"So you do know her?"

"She wasn't very cooperative. Everyone knows about her."

Yep. That sounded like Cas.

"Was she being held somewhere separate?" Irene demanded.

"Not at first. Then Commander Saunders took her off somewhere. Everyone was speculating about it. I think he's escalating her interrogation since she seemed to be the ringleader."

Irene definitely didn't like the sound of that.

"Where did he take her?"

"Somewhere. We weren't given the details."

"Any guesses?" Irene's voice was cold.

"It could have been to one of the other facilities, but I don't know which one if so."

Irene's heart sank, the cold anger she felt at Cas's continued imprisonment growing heavier as she imagined more places like this.

"How many other facilities, and where are they?"

Her anger must have seeped into her tone, because the man audibly hesitated, stumbling over his words. "I don't know, I haven't been to all of them, and the ones I have-- I wasn't-- we weren't given maps or anything..."

"If there were maps, where would they be?"

"The commander's office? It's in the building on the opposite side of the practice field. With the steps."

She nodded, though given the explosive violent nature of Levi's planned exit, she doubted there'd be much in the way of organization left outside. "How many facilities have you visited?"

"Three aside from this one. But those ones are smaller, this is the only one with overnight lodging and everything. The others are more focused."

"Focused on?" If he said 'prisoner containment' she wasn't sure she'd be able to continue speaking.

Thankfully, that wasn't necessary. "Leveling. This was the main production and storage facility."

"Production?"

"Armor, mostly. The Destruction element is less useful anywhere but here, while the Beast abilities are universally valuable."

Irene paused for a minute, considering the information. He wouldn't be particularly useful for the specific things she wanted to know. She needed to find Cas, but apart from that...

"How often do you go out kidnapping people?"

"We're not--" he started, then cut himself off as he seemed to remember his precarious position at present. "I... it's not like that, we don't..."

"Oh? Then what do you call storming into a freaking convention and dragging children away from their parents? Locking up teens in a solitary cell for weeks?"

"Your group was a special case," he protested. "You were making waves, being loud. We don't do that normally."

"There were plenty of people in those cells who I didn't recognize. So clearly you were."

"Individuals who were causing problems, yes, but you make it sound like we go around grabbing anyone we can find. We don't!"

Yep. She needed to walk away right now before she did something she'd regret.

"Wait, where are you going? Don't leave me here! You promised you'd get me out if I answered your questions! What if something respawns?"

Irene didn't stop walking. "Then you'll be no worse off than those individuals who were causing problems, will you?"

She stepped through the portal up to the next floor, leaving the webbed man behind. They could decide what to do with him later. And if something ate him in the meanwhile, she refused to feel any guilt over it.