Two weeks passed. We took another job — the Lower Works, a lower mid tier dungeon on the city's eastern outskirts. Routine by our standards now, which was either a sign of how much we'd grown or how strange our standards had become. Tessa found the signature. Same as always. Same as every time.
The report went in. The response came back in three days. Smooth. Settled. Buried.
Hask said nothing when he read it. He just filed it with the others.
Two days after that, every janitor in the Guild Hall received the same notice: mandatory assembly, main hall, end of the week. Attendance required. No exceptions.
It was the first time I had seen the whole guild mobilized for anything that didn't involve a dungeon. I wasn't sure if that was reassuring or not.
On the day, I made my way down from the dormitory wearing my best jumpsuit — meaning the one where most of the stains weren't obvious.
Hask was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. "Walk with me."
No preamble. I fell into step beside him.
We passed the assembly hall doors without stopping. I noticed but said nothing. Hask steered us toward the corridor of windows overlooking one of the illusory courtyards, moving at the easy pace of two people going nowhere in particular. "Laugh at something."
I laughed. It probably sounded like I was in mild pain. Hask smiled anyway and clapped me on the shoulder, leaning in like he was sharing a punchline. "Sent Tessa's notes to a contact in the Scholar's Enclave. Someone I trust. The magic on those cores — it's not guild work. Not adventurers. Not scholars. No records anywhere. Ancient. Older than the Empire."
I kept smiling. It was getting harder.
"Whoever's doing this has government access that doesn't officially exist. Deep. High up."
He straightened, still grinning, gesturing at something through the window like he was pointing out a feature of the courtyard. "I want you knowing this so you can help me keep the others safe. That's all for now."
"Understood."
We stood there another moment, two colleagues admiring an illusory garden, before Hask turned us back toward the assembly hall. "Scry spells can't capture sound," he said, back to his normal voice. "Two minutes."
As we walked I put it together. The Guild Hall was protected against all but the most powerful scrying magic — the Handbook said so explicitly. If Hask was running counter-surveillance, the spell wasn't coming from outside.
It was coming from inside the hall.
And it had probably just ended because the assembly was starting.
I followed Hask through the doors with considerably more questions than I'd had two minutes ago.
The assembly hall was the largest room in the Guild Hall, and I had somehow never been in it until now. It was austere in the way that spaces designed for function rather than impression tend to be — rows of plain wooden chairs facing a raised platform, guild banners hanging from the walls in regulation gray and white, lighting that was bright enough to see by and no brighter. The ceiling was high. The acoustics were good. Someone had thought carefully about making sure everyone in the room could hear clearly.
It was almost full.
I had thought I knew the scale of the guild from my months here. I had been wrong. Janitors I'd never seen filled the rows around us — senior wardens with the weathered look of people who had been doing this for decades, regional foremen in slightly better jumpsuits than ours, administrators in the plain dark uniforms of people who worked behind desks. Even the receptionists, in their cleanly pressed pencil skirts and colorful ascots. The whole ecosystem of the guild in one room.
We found seats together somewhere in the middle. Unremarkable. Anonymous. Gray jumpsuits among gray jumpsuits.
I scanned the faces on the platform without being obvious about it. It was becoming a new old habit. I noted one person, at the back of the platform, clearly taking pains to be unobtrusive: someone in a dark blue robe, hood up, watching the crowd intently.
The administrator who took the podium was a tall, thin human man with silver-streaked hair and the practiced ease of someone who had given this particular speech before and expected to give it again. He smiled at the room with the specific warmth of someone who had learned that warmth was useful. "Thank you all for attending. I'll keep this brief."
He did not keep it brief.
"Dungeon activity across the Delvenmoor Empire remains stable. Our monitoring teams have logged minor fluctuations in several regions over the past quarter, all of which have been assessed and attributed to natural variation in respawn cycles. Nothing outside expected parameters."
A pause for effect.
"The Ebon Maw dungeon, following this year's successful cleaning and core reset — for which I'd like to extend formal commendations to the field team responsible —"
I watched Hask's jaw tighten.
"—has performed within normal parameters since reopening. Core readings are stable. The dungeon will be officially reopened for clearing and Elginarium mining within the next three to six months. The Empire thanks you."
Kael stared straight ahead. His expression was neutral, but I could see a vein bulging on his forehead.
The administrator shuffled his papers. "It has come to our attention that a number of field reports over the past several months have flagged anomalous mana readings in various dungeon cores across the region. The guild wants to be clear: we take these reports seriously. Each one has been reviewed by the appropriate oversight committee and assessed accordingly. Field teams are encouraged to continue reporting anything unusual through standard channels. Your observations matter."
He smiled again.
I glanced over at Tessa and Alara. Tessa also kept her features flat, but her knuckles were white as she gripped her notebook; Alara watched the figure in the blue robe. She didn't look angry, but something more complicated.
"There is no cause for alarm. The guild thanks its field teams for their continued diligence and professionalism. We are lucky to have you."
He set his papers down on the podium. "We'll now open the floor for questions."
An older Janitor, wearing the patch of a Senior Foreman on his jumpsuit, raised his hand. "The report on the Ebon Maw has indicated that the dungeon has grown significantly in size. New floors. New monsters. Far beyond normal dungeon shifting. Will the difficulty rank of the dungeon be upgraded to reflect this?"
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The administrator nodded. "Based on the report, we will be updating the classification of the dungeon from a Class Two to a Class Four."
There was a murmur throughout the crowd. Class Four was nearly the most dangerous ranking, Class Five being the worst. Those were "extreme" dungeons that only elite teams were assigned to. Regular premature respawns, the most dangerous of traps.
More or less what we had experienced in the Ebon Maw — except there, it was expected and handled accordingly. There were two of them. And they were almost exclusively cleared by Silver Fang.
"Are supply lines in place to provide the extra resources needed for regular cleanings of a new Class Four dungeon?"
"Arrangements have been made to accommodate the new status of the dungeon. We have partnered with Cairn and Coffer to ensure supply lines are secured."
The questioning continued along these lines for some time. Staffing levels, recruiting efforts, equipment updates; normal guild business.
There were no questions about the Boss respawn. No mention of the tampered cores directly. Nobody mentioned Arren Shadowflash.
If foremen had access to the reports, that meant one of two things: either no one except Hask was looking closely, or nobody was asking. I couldn't decide which was worse.
The team sat in extremely tense silence for the next forty-five minutes until the meeting adjourned early.
As we filed out with the crowd, I could see Tessa's mask starting to slip: a slight lip quiver. Her eyes were sad, her hands still gripping her notebook so tightly she might break it.
Kael was silent but looked openly furious.
Alara still had that complex look.
Hask was completely neutral as always.
We were eventually able to break off from the crowd flooding out of the chamber. We all looked to Hask for some sort of guidance. Some sort of hope. Something.
The foreman didn't have anything to give.
Tessa broke the silence. Her voice was quiet, but wavering. "Uncle Hask…we have the data. We've made the reports. Something is really, really wrong. Why are they ignoring it?"
Hask's calm facade cracked for a split second as he looked at her. For the briefest of moments, I saw a deep sadness; a frustration at not being able to comfort her.
Then the professionalism snapped back into place. "I don't know, Tessa. I'm sorry."
The halfling girl squeezed her eyes shut and I watched a single tear roll down her cheek.
I felt my heart break.
The foreman placed a hand on her shoulder. "Let's go get dinner. My treat."
We didn't argue. A drink, or seven, was very much in order.
Nobody had suggested The Final Yak. We had just walked, and that was where we ended up.
It was familiar in the way that places become familiar before you notice it happening — the specific creak of the door, the way the warmth hit you coming in from the night air, the smell of Trini's kitchen doing something excellent with whatever was left at the end of the day. The bar ran along the left wall, dark wood worn smooth and honest from years of elbows and mugs. Round tables filled the rest of the space, mismatched chairs that had clearly been replaced piecemeal over many years without anyone caring much about consistency.
Someone had tried to make the place feel intentional with lanterns hung at irregular intervals and a collection of old dungeon maps framed crookedly on the walls — faded, outdated, more decorative than useful. Somehow it worked anyway.
The crowd was the usual mix. Laborers. Off-duty guild members from various outfits. A couple of adventurers in the corner who weren't Silver Fang and weren't pretending to be. The kind of place where nobody looked at your jumpsuit.
I hadn't realized until recently how much that mattered.
We had a table. We always had the same table — corner, near the back, good sightlines to the door. I wasn't sure when that had become ours. It just had. The way things become yours without a formal arrangement, through nothing more than repeated presence and the unspoken agreement of the people who matter.
Something about walking through that door — the warmth, the noise, the smell of Trini's cooking, the weight of the evening lifting by approximately half the moment the door swung shut behind us — made the assembly feel like it had happened somewhere else entirely. To someone else, almost. The Final Yak had a way of doing that. Of making the outside world seem like a problem for later.
Tessa noticed him first.
She always noticed everything first, but this time she noticed with a sound — a sharp intake of breath that preceded an explosion of pure halfling joy — and then she was already moving, weaving between tables with the particular agility of someone whose center of gravity was closer to the floor than most.
Behind the bar, polishing a mug with the unhurried confidence of someone returned to his rightful kingdom, stood the largest minotaur I had ever seen. Bigger than even Hulda. His fur was jet black and shiny, with a diamond shaped white patch on the bridge of his nose. Long shaggy hair covered his eyes. His biceps looked bigger than my head.
I simply stood in shock.
He saw Tessa coming and his whole face changed.
And then he saw Hask.
The mug went down on the bar. "VLOD!"
Before any of us had even noticed she was no longer with us, Tessa had leapt the bar and thrown herself at the minotaur.
He caught her — one massive bicep doing the work of both arms — with the ease of someone who had done this before and expected to do it again. "Tessa! There's my girl!"
His voice was booming but warm, the same quality as Hulda's. Something in my shoulders dropped that I hadn't realized was tense.
Tessa held on for a long moment before dropping back onto a bar stool, already talking. "I'm so glad you're back! How was Askar? Where did you go?! Oooo did you do any dungeons?! What kind of monsters did you fight?! Did you go to Stoneguard?! Oooo did you get me a souvenir?!"
Vlod laughed — a deep, genuine sound — and held up a hand. "Easy, Tessa. I had a lovely trip and stayed far away from dungeons, believe you me. Stories and souvenirs, I promise. We'll get there."
He looked past her.
Hask had stepped forward. He was watching Vlod with an expression I had never seen on him — open, unhurried, like a man who had just put something down that he'd been carrying for a while.
Vlod's whole face changed. "Hask Morian. You son of a bitch."
He leaned over the bar and clasped the foreman's arm. The two of them locked there — Vlod enormous even by minotaur standards, Hask compact and immovable — neither giving an inch. The muscles on both their arms did things that made me slightly concerned for the structural integrity of the bar.
It wasn't brief.
Vlod spoke first. "What's the matter? Been pushing too many mops lately?"
"Speak for yourself, you old mug jockey."
They held it another moment. Then they both laughed — deep belly laughs that drew looks from half the tavern. From Hask, the sound was so unfamiliar it took me a moment to identify it.
They broke the clasp.
Tessa, who had been watching with barely contained delight, finally exploded. "You know Vlod, Uncle Hask?!"
Vlod reached under the bar and produced a wooden mug of impressive size, gesturing with it broadly. "Of course I know him. We were adventuring buddies for thirty years."
Thirty years.
I sat with that for a moment. When did Hask retire? How many lives had he lived before this one? Was this — the jumpsuits, the depot, the mop — a cover, something to occupy a stretch of time before the next chapter? How many chapters had there been? Did he join the Merchant's Guild between them? The Silk Runners? Something with no name?
I suddenly understood Tessa a little better. "Wow," she breathed. "That's so cool."
Hask took a seat at the bar and ordered an ale without ceremony. "Vlod. Meet the rest of my team. Lorne Callister. Kael Lithwell. Alara Veyne."
Vlod's gaze moved across us. It lingered on me a beat longer than the others. His smile didn't change. "I already know young Kael."
He looked at Kael directly. "How are ya, pal?"
Kael, who had been quietly furious since the assembly, seemed to exhale slightly. His smile was tired but genuine. "Hey Vlod. Welcome back."
"The usual?"
"Yeah."
Vlod turned to Alara and me. "And you two! Trini tells me you've become a regular, Lorne. Glad you like the place."
"You have a good tavern, Mister Vlod."
"You stop that. Mister Vlod was my father."
He looked at Alara. She gave a small wave and said nothing. Vlod took this in stride. "Shy one. No problem. Nothing a good ale can't fix."
He turned to a keg that looked like only he could lift it and began to pour. "First round's on me."