The message arrived less than a half hour after they released their prisoners in the form of an arrow, one with a scroll tied to it. Not a standard delivery method, but they gathered around to unroll it and read it anyway.

1400, north entrance. You’ll have a twenty minute window where the guards are otherwise occupied and the on-site researchers will be centered at the far end of the building. Named monsters are in rooms C through F. I've contacted your webmaster in Oregon, she's ready to coordinate a wide mailing to our distribution list. Thank you for your cooperation.

"They know about Mom," Cassandra said grimly. "We need to get her out. If this guy can contact her, so can anyone else in their operation."

"Then that’s where we’ll go next." There were a few things in that area he needed to wrap up anyway, some of which were long overdue, before they moved on to hardcore preparation for the invasion. "Gordon? You've been awfully quiet, any opinions on the matter?"

“As far as I'm concerned, I'm in this thing until the end. It's crazy, but sometimes life is crazy. I'm done fighting my expectations of what should be. What is, is. We just do our best within those parameters."

"Good man. But that doesn't mean you have to wait around passively. If you have an idea, please share."

"I don't have any ideas."

"Well, on the off chance you ever do, don't hesitate to speak up."

Gordon shrugged. Levi wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign, or if he’d tipped back over into resignation, but now wasn’t the time to delve that particular depth.

1400 didn’t give them a lot of time to prepare since the research facility was about two hours away. Levi and a few of his faster minions could run on ahead, and very well may end up doing so, but given that at a minimum they had an ogre body to carry off, they would need Pierce at the very least.

With a little under an hour before they needed to leave, preparations were rapid and frenzied. Levi didn’t want to bring anyone more than necessary with them, in case it was a trap, but he also wanted to have everyone nearby in case it was a trap they could break from the outside.

Gordon and Peter wouldn’t have Revive off cooldown until afterward, which meant Levi would be able to revive a total of one minion.

He spent a few minutes sorting out people to accompany him (Cassandra, Irene, Skarm, Lash, and Crackle) and setting up contingencies in case things went badly.

Then they went over the map one last time before rushing off to their scheduled infiltration.

Everything was going too smoothly. Levi couldn't hide a low current of unease as they neared their destination. He detected multiple powerful people in the area, but none of them moved to intercept. They all went about their business inside, as though they had no idea they were being stalked. Those must be the researchers, staying to their end of the facility as promised.

The research facility wasn't anything like the open sprawling compound that surrounded the Beast dungeon. Instead it was a low blocky building looking more like an office building or school than anything.

Lash picked the lock on the gate in the fence, sliding it silently open with four tendrils while his others muffled the hinges to prevent squeaking.

The watchtowers were unguarded and empty; Becca teleported up to each to verify and confirmed the coast was clear.

The interior was very bland. Like a segmented warehouse. Even the dungeon had better architecture. There wasn't any other word for it but boring.

There was neither a lobby nor any signs to indicate what was where, only bland letters and numbers without explanation.

Levi waved a hand and Crackle split up, zipping ahead down the halls, while Lash started opening doors to peer inside.

“Stay focused,” Levi hissed. “Rooms C through F.”

Crackle started melting through the lock on room E, while Skarm ran over to the door opposite it and started sawing at it with his horn.

Lash poked his eye into the room he’d opened, 112, which turned out to contain filing cabinets.

“I told you there wasn’t anything in there.”

Lash, being the sort to double down on his mistakes rather than admit fault, immediately started opening drawers and pulling out papers, scanning them with exaggerated intensity.

“Do you even know how to read?” Levi shook his head and left him to it. They didn’t have time to argue at the moment. He hurried to where Crackle had gotten the first room open and moved on to the next.

The interior didn’t look much different from the filing cabinet room, a bland room but filled with cages of dead monsters.

These were gremlins and other similarly small creatures. Some were in advanced states of dissolution, their interior breaking down into a pale sludge just tinted with the color of their element, any semblance of anatomy dissolved together into a gelatinous goo.

It made him vaguely uncomfortable, seeing creatures in that midway state. Dungeons usually dissolved their monsters fairly quickly, over less than a minute, rather than after days or weeks.

Levi scanned them for anyone he recognized, locating Two immediately as one of the few who were still in their initial non-evolved state. He looked small and out of place among the more advanced gremlins.

Levi paused to look over the other evolutions, all of which were on display. Armored Gremlins were larger and bulkier compared to the base version or the more streamlined Flickering form Skarm had ended up with, with a slick shell oddly reminiscent of a frog crossed with a turtle. Dustclaw had a shimmer of orange around their claws and horn, almost like they had become manablades themselves.

Now that he saw them, he recognized them as the usual gremlins in Destruction dungeons in the level 20-50 range.

Out of curiosity, Levi attempted to tame one of the caged creatures, but it didn’t register as a valid target. Only Gremlin Two remained fully intact.

“Lash, I need you to– that’s not a hat! Focus.”

The soul-seeker sheepishly stopped stacking folders on top of his eye, bobbing innocently as they scattered to the floor around him.

“Take Two and get him to Pierce, then get back in here and open another door.”

Crackle had another door open by now, so Levi left Two to Lash’s care and hurried inside to check who else was present.

Stunner had been relegated to a puddle of sparkling goo which Levi at first thought was mana dissolution but upon closer inspection turned out to be the same watery substance of which the horse-monster was made. Just more condensed. Like it had deflated, doubled in on itself instead of remaining at full form. A dried out sponge, except water.

Analogy failed him, but he scooped up the blue semi-puddle that was Stunner and poured it into his bag.

There was no sign of Peter's slime. Levi wasn't surprised, since the closer a creature's form was to its raw mana substance in shape the faster it would break down. Even Stunner he was surprised to find still viable. After any more than a single day, even more than a few hours, something without much of a shape of its own wouldn't last.

Slayer wasn't present, but plenty of other creatures were. Levi was surprised by the number of named, tagged creatures who acted like they were wild and wanted to escape their cages.

He'd assumed that the named ones would have been tamed by someone in this facility, but either they tamed them and then released them, or their expectations for their minions were very strongly out of sync with their desires.

Looking around at the quantity of creatures and diversity of levels represented, Levi wished he could stay longer. Or perhaps carry everything away with him. It seemed the group had been capturing monsters to study for months.

He found Greg in a deeper vault, along with another ogre that was missing one arm and half its head. Greg was the obvious choice for use of Revive, since the ogre was the biggest and would be most difficult to drag out if still out of commission. Thankfully, the ogre hadn’t been shipped off anywhere weird, though he had been chained down despite being very much dead.

A useless gesture all around, since the moment Greg stopped being dead he tore the chains apart with contemptuous ease.