第11章 Dungeon Break
He didn't dial the number.
His thumb hovered above the screen for three seconds. The red pop-up of the management panel flashed continuously on the left side of his vision. With each tick of the countdown, his thumb moved a millimeter closer to the dial button.
In the fourth second, he locked his phone.
Allen crouched back beside the diamond-shaped opening. He stuffed the business card and cardstock back into his hoodie pocket.
The mental table unfolded.
Option One: Call Robert Chen. Tell him the rat lairs are about to erupt. A-level investigators have the authority to activate GWA's emergency evacuation protocol. Citywide alert within ten minutes. Rapid response forces in place within half an hour. Residential areas safe. Problem solved.
The cost—Robert would ask him how he knew. "The dungeon eruption warning function is only perceptible to dungeon architects." Answering this question is tantamount to laying his cards on the table in front of an A-level GWA investigator. It's not a matter of trust. It's a matter of leverage. Allen currently has no bargaining power with GWA. An E+ level Awakened, possessing a globally unique hidden profession, is exposed to a government agency without any protection.
Three years ago, an S-level dungeon erupted. GWA's official report stated it was an "unforeseen natural disaster." His parents died in that eruption. The report didn't even release a list of victims.
To hand himself over to an agency unwilling to release the names of the victims.
No.
Option Two: Anonymous Alarm. Call GWA's public hotline using a public phone or a disposable number. "The Rat's Nest is about to erupt; please evacuate the Red Hook area immediately." GWA's public hotline receives over three hundred false alarms daily. An anonymous call, without level verification or identity verification, claims a D-level dungeon will erupt in a dozen hours—the operator will file it in a "pending verification" folder, waiting three days.
No.
Option Three.
Allen's finger slid across the management panel. He scrolled to the last page of the system function list—an area he'd never seen before.
A gray icon. Unlocked.
He tapped it. [Territory Expansion]
[Description: Dungeon Architects can consume BP to temporarily extend the "Administrator's Influence Range" of their dungeon to the surface. Within the extended range, the Architect has limited Administrator privileges—they cannot create new rooms, but can deploy temporary trap arrays on the surface and summon monsters from the dungeon to the surface for short-term summoning.]
[Unlock Conditions: BP balance ≥ 10,000 and Dungeon Level ≥ F+.]
[Current BP Balance: 16,750. Condition met.]
[Unlock? Y/N] Allen's thumb stopped at Y.
[Base Expansion Cost: 5,000 BP (coverage radius 500 meters)]
[Each additional 100 meters of radius: +2,000 BP]
[Temporary Trap Deployment: 300 BP/set]
[Surface Monster Summoning: 500 BP/monster (duration 60 minutes)] He calculated in his mind.
Warehouse to Rat Nest—2.3 kilometers. From the rat's lair to the Coffin Street residential area—approximately 800 meters. He doesn't need to cover the rat's lair itself. He needs to draw a line between the rat's lair and the residential area.
A cutoff line.
An 800-meter cutoff. Including depth. It needs to cover an extension with a radius of at least 1200 meters.
5000 base + 7 x 2000 = 19000 BP.
He only has 16750.
Two thousand two hundred and fifty short.
Allen opens the BP revenue estimate in the management panel. Currently, three groups of challengers are progressing through the dungeon. Estimated completion time—two hours. Estimated BP revenue—between 1800 and 2400.
Not stable enough.
He needs more people to enter the dungeon. Now.
Allen takes out his phone. DeepRift forum. He posts a second thread using the Architect_00 account.
Title: [Limited-Time Event] Clear the Brooklyn Warehouse Dungeon within the next 6 hours, reward: Quality x3.
The message contained only one line: "First come, first served." Sent.
Then he opened the invitation system. Ten daily slots. He used all seven remaining for the day—his target was the top seven most active independent adventurers in the client profile. The invitations were uniform: triple reward for clearing the dungeon. Valid for six hours.
All seven invitations were sent.
On the management panel, the three green dots inside the dungeon increased to five—two new groups of challengers entered through the warehouse's main entrance. The effect of a forum post.
Allen leaned back against the pillar. He closed his eyes.
Not resting. Drawing in his mind.
He had been to the location of the Rat's Nest. After the Cataclysm, the old industrial area of Red Hook District had become a densely populated dungeon area. In his first week there, he memorized the entrance locations of all known dungeons within a three-kilometer radius. Survival habits.
The entrance to the Rat's Nest was underground in the seventh storage station of the dock district. GWA had set up a ring of concrete roadblocks and surveillance cameras on the surface, and hung a yellow sign that read "Class D Dangerous Area." Guild teams usually take turns clearing it out.
From that entrance to the Coffin Street residential area, there are three blocks, an abandoned gas station, and half a block of open space.
Open space.
If the rat monsters swarm out, they will cross the open space and rush straight to the residential area. The movement speed of a D-rank rat monster—Allen checked the GWA's public database—is about four times the running speed of an average person. From the entrance to the residential area, it takes less than two minutes.
Two minutes. It would take GWA's rapid response forces at least forty minutes to reach the Red Hook District from the nearest Manhattan base.
Allen needs to create a death trap in that open space.
[Estimated time remaining for the outbreak: 13 hours and 12 minutes.]
Wait.
—Six hours.
The BP numbers on the management panel are jumping up and down.
The forum posts are having an effect beyond expectations. The news of triple rewards is spreading like wildfire among independent adventurers—DeepRift's Brooklyn section saw forty new discussion posts about the "Brooklyn Warehouse Dungeon Limited-Time Event" within two hours.
Eleven teams completed the challenge within six hours. Seven cleared it. Four were wiped out. The Mirror Knight's boss room became the biggest BP harvesting spot—a four-man team, all D-rank members, fought the Mirror Knight for a full twelve minutes before being completely wiped out, contributing 1400 BP.
Allen ran two more rounds in test mode, pushing his experience bar forward a bit. No level up. But each battle honed his understanding of monster behavior patterns—the Shadow Hound's charge animation was 0.8 seconds, the Gargoyle's weak points were its neck joints and the inside of its knees, and the Skeleton Swordmaster's combo rhythm was fast-fast-slow-fast.
These stats weren't on the System panel. They were in his muscle memory.
[Current BP Balance: 21,300] Enough.
The countdown on the management panel jumped to six hours and forty-one minutes.
Allen stood up. His knees didn't crack—he'd stood up and moved around every forty minutes for the past six hours. Maintaining his physical condition. He'd need it tonight.
He activated the Domain Expansion feature.
[Domain Expansion Unlocked.]
[Set Expansion Direction and Range—] Allen dragged a semi-transparent circular area onto the management panel. The center wasn't in the warehouse—he set it at the midpoint between the warehouse and the rat's nest. The radius was adjusted to 1200 meters.
The edge of the coverage area just touched the outer 30 meters of the rat's nest entrance and the eastern street of the Coffin Street residential area.
[Expansion Cost: 19,000 BP]
[Confirm Deployment? Y/N]
Y.
The number dropped from 21300 to 2300.
Six hours of accumulation. Cleared in a second.
On the management panel, a semi-transparent blue grid began to extend southwest from the direction of the warehouse. The speed was slow—approximately 50 meters per second, the entire process lasting over 40 seconds. The blue grid spread across streets, buildings, and open spaces, covering an area of nearly two square kilometers in the southwest corner of the Red Hook District.
A slight tremor came from the soles of Allen's feet. Not an earthquake—it was the energy network of the underground city extending, branching, and weaving into a net beneath the surface. The management panel switched to a completely new interface—the Domain View. A top-down perspective. Within the blue grid-covered area, the outlines of every street and building were presented as wireframes.
Allen drew a line in the open space between the rat's lair entrance and the residential area. East-west. Approximately 400 meters long.
[Trap Corridor Deployment Area Marked.] He began piling things along that line.
Fear Mist Launchers—Three sets, spaced 120 meters apart. Not the room-wide coverage of the dungeon, the surface version's range was reduced to a radius of 15 meters. But enough to slow down charging rats within the mist area for three to five seconds.
Spiked Ground Traps—Eight sets, buried beneath the soil layer in the open space. Trigger condition set to "Non-human life form stepping in." A D-rank rat weighs approximately 40 kilograms; the spikes' penetrating power is calculated based on D-rank defense. Not an instant kill, but it can reduce speed, reduce health, and interrupt charging formations.
Gargoyles—Allen flipped through the summon list. The monsters summoned on the surface could only be chosen from the blueprints already available in his dungeon. Gargoyles were the most durable option. Four F+ grade granite colossi. 500 BP each, 2000.
Six ghost wolves. 3000.
[Remaining BP: Zero.] Not close to zero. Zero. An integer. Not a single coin left.
Allen stared at that number for two seconds.
The trap corridor on the management panel was marked as a dotted line in the domain view. Blue dots representing gargoyles and ghost wolves were distributed on both sides of the corridor. The shape of the entire defensive line was an arc, the apex pointing towards the entrance of the rat's nest, the two ends converging towards the flanks of the residential area.
A trapezoidal formation.
It wasn't Allen's invention. He had flipped through the diagram of the Battle of Cannae in his high school history textbook at least twenty times.
The difference was that Hannibal had 50,000 infantry. He had four gargoyles and six ghost wolves.
And himself.
Allen walked out of the parking lot entrance. It was already dark. A third of Brooklyn's streetlights were out—a severe shortage of maintenance personnel after the Cataclysm.
He walked southwest along Coffin Street. His sneakers crunched on the cracked pavement. His hoodie hood was pulled up, the brim pressing down to his eyebrows.
After twelve minutes, an open space appeared on his right.
During the day, this was where nearby residents walked their dogs. Now, only a few remaining streetlights cast dim yellow circles along the edge of the open space. The surface of the soil showed no abnormalities—traps were buried twenty centimeters underground, spikes ready to deploy.
Allen's Shadow Sense automatically activated in the darkness. No life forms within fifteen meters. Scattered lights and voices could be heard from the direction of the distant residential area.
He stood in the center of the open space for a moment.
The countdown on the management panel.
[Estimated time remaining for the outbreak: 1 hour and 3 minutes.] One hour.
Allen drew the E-grade short sword from his waist. A dungeon drop. Forty centimeters long. The hilt was wrapped in rough black bandages. He'd used it thirty times in test mode. He'd memorized the feel—the center of gravity was three centimeters forward, suitable for thrusting, not slashing.
He sheathed the short sword back into its buckle at his waist.
Wait.
—Zero o'clock.
It wasn't the countdown on the management panel that reached zero. The ground moved first.
The vibrations beneath Allen's feet were completely different from when the area expanded. That was a uniform, controlled, outward extension. This was a brutal, chaotic, upward impact.
The entire open space trembled. The lampposts emitted a metallic hum.
The management panel popped up its final red alert.
[Dungeon Break triggered. Target: NYC-BK-0447 "Rat's Nest". Monsters are emerging.] Allen turned to look southwest.
Six hundred meters away. In the direction of the seventh warehouse in the dock area. The ground cracked open.
Not just one crack—more than a dozen. The cracks radiated outwards from the warehouse foundation, a dark red light surging from their depths, turning the sky over half the city block a rusty hue.
Then came the sound.
Not a roar. Claws. The sound of hundreds, even thousands, of claws simultaneously scratching at the ground and walls. A dense, continuous, incessant scraping sound, climbing upwards from the cracks.
The first rat-like creature emerged from one of the cracks.
The management panel automatically labeled it—Class D Mutant Rat-like Creature. 1.2 meters long. Grayish-black fur. Abnormally swollen hind leg muscles. Its forepaws' nails were translucent bony protrusions, refracting cold light in the dark red crack light.
The second. The fifth. The twentieth.
Allen sensed changes in the density of life signals within his shadow perception range. Beyond a fifteen-meter radius, distant signal sources were growing exponentially.
The management panel began counting.
[Number of Rat Monsters Emerging: 47...68...94...] The numbers kept jumping.
The swarm of rat monsters didn't linger around the cracks. They started running as soon as they emerged from the ground. Direction—Northeast. Residential area.
Allen drew his short sword from his waist.
As the first group of rat monsters charged to the edge of the clearing, the Fear Mist launchers activated.
Three launch points released simultaneously. Grayish-white mist spewed from the cracks in the ground, rapidly spreading across the clearing. The first dozen or so rat monsters plunged into the mist—their running slowed within a second, their limbs stiffened, and three crashed into each other and fell to the ground.
The Fear Mist was much less effective against D-rank monsters than against humans. Slowing, not paralyzing. Three to five seconds.
That was enough.
The spike traps triggered the instant the rat monsters slowed. Eight sets of spikes shot out from the soil—the metal spikes pierced the abdomens and hind legs of the first four rat monsters. The screams weren't human-frequency—they were sharp, high-pitched howls, above the comfort zone of normal hearing.
Four gargoyles rose from their pre-set positions on either side of the clearing. They had remained buried in the mud. Their granite colossi, covered in mud and gravel, looked like ancient creatures crawling out of the earth in the crimson light of the day.
The gargoyles' AI was set to "hold the line." They didn't pursue. They stood at either end of the trap corridor, smashing every rat-monster that tried to flank them with their rocky fists.
Six ghost wolves dispersed. Their translucent, silver-grey bodies were almost invisible in the darkness. Their task was patrolling—sweeping away any stray individuals that slipped through the gaps in the trap corridor.
Allen stood in the middle of the line. A short sword gripped his right hand.
The first rat-monster charged at him through the slowing zone of the fear mist.
The hunting instinct activated. Three pale red markers appeared on the rat-monster's body—left side of the neck, lower edge of the abdomen, and hind leg joint. Weak points.
Allen used Shadowstep to dodge to the left of the rat-monster. His short sword aimed for its left neck.
It missed.
The blade tip grazed the rat-monster's neck fur, making a shallow cut. It didn't hit a vital spot.
The rat-monster's counterattack was 0.3 seconds faster than he anticipated—its forepaws swept across, bony claws slicing across his forearm. Stone Skin activated the instant it made contact. A gray, petrified layer covered the skin of his forearm; the claws struck it with a dull thud, not penetrating.
But the impact propelled him two steps. His sneakers left a trail in the mud.
This wasn't test mode.
The monsters in test mode wouldn't actually harm him. The AI's reactions followed a fixed pattern. He could die and start over.
There was no restart here.
A second rat-monster pounced from his right rear. Shadow Sense detected its movement the instant it entered a fifteen-meter radius—from his right rear, a jump of about 1.3 meters, landing at his shoulder and neck.
Allen didn't look back. He rolled half a circle forward. The rat-monster's claws grazed the back of his neck, its nails catching on the fabric of his hoodie hood and tearing a piece off.
He rolled to his feet. He changed his grip on the short sword—backhand. Blade facing outwards.
The first rat-monster charged again. This time, Allen didn't use Shadowstep. He waited. The red indicator of his hunting instinct flashed along the lower edge of the rat-monster's abdomen. Waiting for it to leap. Waiting for its abdomen to be exposed.
The rat-monster leaped.
Allen sidestepped. He thrust the short sword upwards with his backhand. The blade tip sliced into the rat-monster's lower abdomen, tearing twenty centimeters upwards along the inside of its ribs.
The rat-monster twisted in mid-air. It landed motionless.
Allen's breathing rate spiked from sixteen breaths per minute to twenty-eight. One. He killed one. The surge count on the management panel had jumped to over two hundred and thirty.
The second reload of the spike trap would take forty-five seconds. The Fear Mist Launcher has a 30-second cooldown. In these intervals, hordes of rats are charging across the open ground at a rate of five to eight per second.
Gargoyles are holding off most of them. Each punch from the four granite colossi can send a rat flying, but the D-rank rats' teeth leave cracks in the granite surface when they bite. The first gargoyle suffered structural damage to its left arm in the seventh minute.
The ghost wolves are more agile, but more fragile. Two of the six ghost wolves were lost in the eleventh minute—a D-rank rat's claw strike is enough to tear apart the energy body of an F+-rank ghost wolf.
Allen runs back and forth in the middle of the defensive line. His short sword fells the third, fourth, and fifth. His hunting instinct locks onto a target each time, a red cursor precisely marking the weak point. His accuracy gradually improves in actual combat from 40% with the first rat—by the fifth, he can hit the weak point with a single blow.
But his stamina is visibly depleting.
E+ rank. Constitution E. Fighting through a horde of D-rank monsters—every block, every dodge, every attack was draining his body. Stone Skin's cooldown was ten seconds, while the rat monsters' attack intervals were less than three seconds.
Fifteen minutes. Allen's left thigh was struck by a rat monster's tail. Not a claw strike—it was a sweeping swipe of its tail as a D-rank monster braced itself on its hind legs. The tail's force was less than the forelegs, but enough to throw him off balance.
He knelt on the muddy ground. His short sword was stuck in the ground for support.
On the management panel, the second gargoyle shattered. The rat monster horde was pouring in from the gap on the left flank.
The first scream came from the direction of Coffin Street. A residential area. Someone had seen the rat monsters.
Allen got up from the ground. His knees were covered in mud.
Then he heard another sound—not a rat's squeak, not a scream. It was the sound of metal cutting through flesh. Dense. Rapid. From his right rear.
A silver arc slashed out from the darkness.
The rat's head flew off its severed neck. Its body took two steps before collapsing.
Lina Walker burst from the alleyway. A crescent dagger twirled in her hands. Her black tactical vest was zipped all the way up. Her high-top boots bounced off the rat's corpse, completing a spinning slash in mid-air—the second rat's spine was severed in two by the crescent's curved blade.
Guts was behind her. The bandage on her left arm was gone—not because the wound had healed, but because there hadn't been time to tend to it. Her right hand gripped an iron pipe. Not the one she'd picked up outside the warehouse last time. Longer. Thicker. Welded.
The other two D-rank members of the Gray Ravens followed behind Guts. One carried a shield, the other a bow.
Four people.
Lina landed on something—she glanced down.
There were glowing cracks in the ground. Blue-white. They shone from the cracks in the soil, extending into the distance along some geometric pattern.
Her steps faltered.
Patterns. She'd seen them before. On the walls of the corridor in that F-rank dungeon. The same blue and white. The same geometric arrangement.
A ghost wolf darted past to her left. Its translucent, silver-gray body left a trail of cold light in the darkness of the clearing.
Lina's crescent dagger was halfway raised.
The ghost wolf didn't attack her. It circled around her and pounced on a rat-monster that was scurrying past on its flank. Silver teeth bit into the rat-monster's nape, and the two bodies tumbled and fell into a mud pit.
"These traps…" Lina spun around. The clearing was covered in glowing patterns. Gargoyles were smashing rat-monsters at both ends of the defensive line. Ghost wolves were patrolling.
"These monsters—they're from THAT dungeon."
Her voice was low. Not to anyone. It was forced out of her throat by the gears meshing in her brain.
"How is this possible?!" A D-rank rat-monster charged through a gap in the gargoyles' defensive line. He charged straight at Lina from behind.
Allen shouted from ten meters away.
"Left! Three seconds! Flank!" Lina's body moved before the voice even reached her—a C-rank assassin's reaction didn't require a three-second window of prediction. But her turn was perfectly timed. The crescent dagger slashed horizontally from left to right. The rat monster's forepaw and half its forearm flew off together.
She turned around.
Allen stood ten meters away. Hood pulled down. Mud smeared half his face. A short sword gripped his right hand. A tear in his left thigh of his jeans left a pale bloodstain seeping through the fabric.
An E+ rank assassin had been fighting a D-rank monster horde for almost twenty minutes. Still alive.
"They'll flank from the left in three seconds—how do you know?"
Allen didn't answer the question. Because five more rat monsters charged at him simultaneously.
For the next forty minutes, Allen had no time to think about anything else.
He and the Gray Raven team stood back-to-back, guarding the gap in the middle of the defensive line. Lina and Gus were responsible for direct fire—the combination of a C-rank assassin and a D-rank warrior was more than enough to handle a single D-rank rat monster. Allen was in charge of prediction.
"The next wave of eight, arriving in six seconds. Two will go behind the gargoyles on the right flank."
Lina stopped questioning him after hearing his prediction for the third time. Every single one was accurate. Timing, number, direction. This hooded man's understanding of the rat monsters' behavior patterns couldn't be explained by mere "experience."
It was designer-level understanding.
The third gargoyle shattered at the forty-first minute. The fourth's right leg was broken, kneeling in the mud, continuing to pound with its remaining left fist. Only two ghost wolves remained.
The rate of rat monster emergence began to decrease at the fiftieth minute. The count on the management panel stopped at three hundred and seventy-seven. Two hundred and forty-six had been eliminated. The remaining seventy-one were scattered across open areas and surrounding blocks.
More voices came from the direction of Coffin Street. Not residents—but Awakened Ones. The outbreak warning on the forum had spread. A dozen or so low-level independent adventurers surged in from all directions. They formed loose squads, ambushing scattered rat-like monsters on the outskirts of the block.
Allen's stamina completely dried up in the fifty-fifth minute. His legs went weak. His grip on his short sword faltered—his hands were covered in a sticky mixture of sweat and blood. He'd lost track of Stone Skin's cooldown time.
The last gargoyle shattered into rubble.
Allen's knees gave way. He knelt on one knee in the mud. His short sword stuck in the ground for support. The exact same posture as Wayne had taken in the Mirror Knight's room last night.
Irony.
The sound of engines came from afar. Many vehicles. From the northeast. From Manhattan.
The GWA Rapid Reaction Force's signature white armored vehicles turned into the intersection of Coffin Street. Blue flashing lights on the roofs spun. Six vehicles. The doors of the first two sprang open before they even came to a complete stop.
Fully armed Awakened Ones jumped out of the vehicles. White tactical uniforms. The GWA eagle insignia. Lowest rank, C.
The leader was a woman. Short hair. A silver communications earring in her left ear. Two stars on her uniform epaulettes—Deputy Commander of the GWA Rapid Reaction Force.
Claire DuPont.
Her boots pounded the dirt in the clearing. One step. Two steps.
She stopped.
She looked down at the ground.
The glowing cracks were still there—the residual energy from the expanding domain hadn't completely dissipated. Blue and white geometric lines stretched from her feet into the distance, dividing the clearing into a precise grid.
Gargoyle debris lay scattered at both ends of the defensive line. The lingering energy of the ghost wolves slowly dissipated in the air, leaving behind silvery-gray dust. The metal spikes of the spiked traps protruded halfway from the dirt, adorned with rat-like fur and blood.
Claire DuPont crouched.
Her right hand touched a glowing pattern. Her fingertip lingered on the light for three seconds.
She stood up. He turned to the communications officer behind him.
"This is… dungeon-type defense deployment." The officer's hand paused on the walkie-talkie.
"This isn't a spillover effect from the natural dungeon. Someone—" Claire's gaze shifted from the patterns on the ground to the gargoyle's rubble, then to the luminous dust left by the vanishing ghost wolf.
"Someone deployed the dungeon's power to the surface."
"Who did this?" No one answered.
Allen began his retreat the moment Claire DuPont's armored vehicle appeared at the street corner. His kneeling position lasted less than two seconds. He pulled his short sword from the dirt and tucked it back into his belt. He stood up. He headed towards the alley to the north.
Three steps. A rat-monster's corpse blocked his path. As he went around it, the wound on his left leg twitched, causing his gait to falter.
The hood was still on his head. But the right side of the hood—the tear the rat-monster had made earlier—flipped open the moment he ducked around the corpse.
Wind. The March night wind swept in from the north alleyway, lifting the tattered hood over his head.
His right cheek was exposed to the streetlamp. Half a face. The right half of his thin-rimmed glasses reflected the yellow light of the streetlamp.
Lina stood twenty meters away.
She had just slain the last scattered rat-like creature near the residential area. The blood on her crescent dagger was still fresh. She turned to return to the open space to regroup—the GWA armored vehicles had arrived.
Her gaze swept across the north alleyway.
A silhouette. Hood half-open. Streetlamp. Glasses.
Lina's feet froze.
The crescent dagger slid half an inch from her right hand. Not a slip—it was the uncontrollable twitch of her fingers suddenly tightening and loosening.
Allen had already entered the alley. His figure disappeared into the darkness between the two buildings.
Lina stood there. The rat-like creature's blood dripped from the tip of the crescent blade. One drop. Two drops. The blue and white cracks on the ground.
"Wait…" Her voice didn't carry. Too soft. Swallowed by the engine noise of the GWA armored vehicle and the noise of the communications channel.
She stared at the entrance to the alley.
Hood. Glasses. That gait—a slight limp in her left leg. Not an old injury. It was tonight's.
And the young man waiting for her by the parking lot's emergency exit, wearing a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, who called himself "Class F"—
"Is that…" The alley was empty. The yellow light from the streetlights was swallowed up by the darkness after reaching three meters.
—GWA New York Headquarters. The same night.
Robert Chen stood in front of the large screen in the command center. On the screen was live footage transmitted from the scene by Claire DuPont—the blue and white cracks on the open ground, close-up scans of the gargoyle remains, energy spectrum analysis of the trap metal.
His hands were in his suit pockets. The left cuff button was still half a turn tighter than the right.
Claire's voice came through the communication channel.
"Energy sample analysis complete. The energy signatures of these trap patterns and surface summons—a 100% match to the core energy signature of the Brooklyn Warehouse Underground City NYC-BK-UNLISTED." Robert pulled his right hand out of his pocket. His index and middle fingers tapped lightly twice on the metal frame of the large screen.
"So." A dozen analysts were working at their terminals in the command center. No one looked up. But the keyboard clicks collectively decreased by two decibels.
"You CAN deploy dungeon assets in the real world." His fingers withdrew from the screen frame. On the screen, Claire's lens was scanning the silver-gray dust left behind by a vanishing ghost wolf.
"You're not just a dungeon maker." Robert turned and walked to his workstation. A document lay open on the desk. The cover was a standard GWA template. The classification label was red. S-class investigation target.
He picked up the pen on the desk and wrote two words in the "Target Code" column on the document cover.
The Architect.
The pen nib paused on the paper for a second. Ink swelled to a small dot at the end of the "t".
Robert put the pen down.
"You're a dungeon weapon." On the screen, Claire DuPont crouched in the center of the open space, her fingers touching the last lingering blue-white crack. The crack flickered twice beneath her fingertips.
It went out.