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The Overlord was dead.
This was, objectively, a victory.
Gregory Hood stood in what had been the eastern wing of the Blinding Light Guild's auxiliary command post, which was now a partially collapsed ruin with exposed rebar and smoke still rising from the upper floors, and looked at the word victory and found it had lost something.
"Report," he said.
The aide who had survived the assault read from her tablet in a voice that was working very hard to stay level. The Blinding Light had entered the engagement with four hundred and twelve hunters above Mythical rank. The Blinding Light had exited the engagement with two hundred and seventy-one hunters above Mythical rank. One hundred and forty-one hunters of Mythical rank or above had not exited the engagement at all.
Gregory listened to each name.
He said nothing.
When the list finished, he turned to the window where glass had once been and looked at the city. The emergency response teams were already in the streets. The Church was handling evacuation. His people who could still move were helping. His people who could not were being collected.
He pressed his thumb against the edge of a broken windowsill until he felt the glass cut.
The markings along his neck pulsed once, gold light steadying, then settling.
"Get out," he said.
The aide left.
. . .
Malvick Siven sat against the outer wall of what had been a loading bay, which at least had a roof, though most of one side was now open to the sky. His coat was ruined. The wound across his left shoulder had stopped bleeding approximately forty minutes ago, which meant the bone healing capsule was working, which was one thing that was working.
He counted again.
Five Major Generals. Mythical combat rank, all five of them, men he had worked with for years, men who had held borders and turned gate breaks that would have erased cities. Gone in three hours.
He opened a field kit and took out a basic restoration potion, the kind given to A-rank hunters on training exercises. He drank it without looking at what it was. His body would sort out the rest.
"That bone bastard," he said, to no one.
The Skeleton King's bone army had been the anchor of the engagement, but it had been the Overlord's own phase transitions that had cost him the Generals. The third phase had produced a pressure output that exceeded any field manual he had memorized, and field manuals at his level covered a great deal.
He took out a second potion.
Gregory appeared at the bay entrance. His coat was intact. His face was past the anger stage and into something colder.
Malvick waited.
"A hundred and forty-one," Gregory said.
"I know."
"I lost six of them in the secondary collapse. The structural failure was not in the projections."
"Nothing in the last four hours was in the projections," Malvick said. "Sit down, Gregory."
Gregory did not sit down. He walked to the far side of the bay and hit the wall with his open palm, which for Gregory Hood was approximately equivalent to another man screaming in a field. He stood there with his hand flat against the concrete for a moment.
"Fuck," he said.
Malvick drank the second potion.
Gregory turned around. "The bone bastard. Axel Krane. He was Mythical rank when I ran his file eighteen months ago. What he fought like today was not Mythical rank."
"He was augmented," Malvick said. "Something external. I have not seen that output from a skeletal frame before."
"He had help." Gregory's eyes had gone the flat gold they went when he was running causality analysis without the full invocation. "Someone is behind him. Someone with enough access to his biology to substantially alter his combat ceiling."
Malvick looked at him.
"I have a candidate," Gregory said.
"I know who your candidate is."
The bay was quiet for a moment.
"He is supposed to be dead," Malvick said.
"Things that are supposed to be dead have a history of disappointing me," Gregory said. He moved away from the wall. "I need to know if it was him. If Axel Krane was augmented by the same method I think he was, the signature will be in the bone structure. I need our medical division to examine whatever remains."
"There are no remains," Malvick said. "He walked out."
"Then I need the battlefield readings."
"Gregory." Malvick set down the empty potion and looked at him directly. "Sit down. We're both injured. We're both in debt to every person who is not getting up from this. The analysis can run in the morning."
"I do not want to wait until morning."
"I know you don't." Malvick's voice was flat and even. "Sit down anyway."
Gregory stood for three seconds. Then he sat, controlled, the kind of sitting that costs something.
Malvick pulled out a third potion, which he was beginning to resent, and offered it across the bay.
Gregory took it without comment.
"That fucking squint-eyed bastard," Gregory said, after a moment. "Lu Changcheng. He sent us that Overlord."
"We cannot prove that."
"I do not need to prove it. I know his file. I know how his mind works. That Overlord appeared in an Azareth gate break, which happens to share a resonance signature with a gate cluster known to be influenced by the Dao Guild's dimensional operations. We were already engaged with three A-class breaks in the western district. The timing was not an accident."
Malvick considered this. He did not disagree with any of it.
"If he sent that Overlord," Gregory said, quieter now, "and I go to him without sufficient evidence, he will be pleasant and cooperative. He will give me an explanation that is technically defensible, and I will be forced to accept it publicly while knowing exactly what he did."
"Yes," Malvick said.
"I want to go to Qintara and tear his building off its foundation."
"I know."
"Malvick. He cost me a hundred and forty-one people."
"I know." Malvick's voice was quiet. "He cost me five. I am aware of the number." He leaned back against the wall. "Go there now and you hand him everything. You go in injured, without complete evidence, with a clear emotional motive. He deflects you in front of witnesses. Then he writes the report about how the Divine Hierophant showed up at his guild and made threats." He looked at Gregory. "Calm down. Recover. We write the full report on our losses, calculate the precise operational cost, and file a formal demand for compensation through the Advent of Humanity council. Make him put his name on a response. In writing."
Gregory was quiet.
"After that doctor died, nothing has gone right," he said. The anger was still there but it had shifted shape, settled into something colder. "He is cursing us. I do not believe in curses, but I am beginning to develop an appreciation for the concept."
Malvick said nothing to this, because there was nothing useful to say to it, and he had learned long ago that nothing useful to say meant nothing should be said.
He offered a fourth potion. Gregory waved it off.
They sat in the ruined loading bay while the city outside processed what had happened to it, and neither of them said anything else for a while.
. . .
The report arrived on Lu Changcheng's desk three days later with the seal of the Advent of Humanity Organization pressed into the cover, which meant it had been formally lodged with the international body and was now a matter of record rather than a bilateral complaint.
He set it on the table in the meeting room.
Lucy, Chu Xinghe, and Ren were present. Lu Changcheng pushed the report to the center of the table and looked at the wall behind it rather than at any of them.
Lucy picked it up. She read the cover. She set it back down. She looked at Lu Changcheng.
"Guildmaster," she said. "I have a question."
"Go ahead."
"Were you dropped as a child?"
"Lucy."
"I ask," she said, "because you had an Apocalypse-class Overlord in Qintara's airspace. And rather than redirect it into a gate dimension, or send it into the open ocean, or deposit it in a forest somewhere where it could fight trees and boulders indefinitely until its mana expired, you elected." She looked at the report. "To send it to Victoria."
"The Dao Guild did not officially."
"Guildmaster. I am not asking officially. I am asking as the person who now has to read through a formal international compensation demand because we sent an Overlord to a city where it killed a hundred and forty-six people, destroyed an auxiliary guild structure, and apparently cost a Legendary-rank hunter a hundred and forty-one of his people." She put her hand flat on the report. "Victoria. Where Gregory Hood lives. You sent an Apocalypse-class entity to Gregory Hood's city."
The meeting room was quiet.
"To be fair," Ren said. "If the Overlord was going to be sent anywhere, sending it to a country with two Legendary-rank hunters present was the rational choice. Anywhere else and it kills everyone and keeps going." He turned to Lu Changcheng. "You had information that both Hood and Malvick Siven would be in the country that day, didn't you? Given that context, routing it toward the highest available combat capacity was actually sound operational thinking."
Lu Changcheng looked at Ren.
Ren looked back at him with the composed expression he deployed when he had just said something helpful and was waiting for it to be appreciated.
Lu Changcheng had, over the course of their acquaintance, developed several reliable indicators for when Ren was doing something that would require him to be corrected later. One of them was this expression. Another was the fact that the Overlord had not appeared in Qintara's airspace by coincidence. Another was that the timing of Lu Changcheng's conversation with a certain contact three weeks ago had produced a very specific piece of intelligence about Legendary-rank hunter locations in Victoria.
He had made a decision with that intelligence.
He was not going to discuss that decision in this room.
"File the response," he said. "Standard diplomatic language. Acknowledge receipt. Express condolences for lives lost on both sides. Indicate that the Dao Guild is prepared to discuss the matter through appropriate channels."
"And the compensation demand?" Lucy said.
"We discuss it through appropriate channels."
Chu Xinghe, who had been reading the report during this exchange with the focused attention of someone adding columns, looked up. "The figure they're requesting is substantial."
"I know what the figure is."
"It is very substantial."
"I know."
The meeting room was quiet again.
"Brother Lu," Ren said. "I think you made the right call."
Lu Changcheng looked at him.
"Thank you, Ren," he said.
He picked up the report.
He looked at Ren one more time. Ren's expression had not changed. The composed mask, the ten tentacles folded neatly, entirely at ease, available for further input.
Lu Changcheng thought, with some clarity, about what it would feel like to take that smooth white oval and introduce it to the corner of the table at high velocity.
He did not do this.
He walked out.